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Sunday Painting: Art, the Web and the Global Information Society
David Briers Keeping you posted, Artists Newsletter December 1995 Mr Watson, please come here. I want you! On March 10, 1876 Alexander Graham Bell split some acid on his trousers and with the immortal words, "Mr Watson, please come here. I want you!" launched us into another era. The notion of concurrent information space, and its corresponding escape from time, has been developing ever since. Information space has been the great symbolic achievement of our era. As artists, how do we come to terms with this? Where is the interface for the audience of our work and for us as artists, with information technology and this global information society? The World Wide Web is for an increasing number of artists, becoming this interface, and they are beginning to engage, in some of the specific areas that networks embrace. Other forms of unmediated art networks have existed for a number of years. Mail Art is a decentralised, information exchange system that like the WWW works outside of the mainstream art gallery and art publishing framework. Artists in those parts of the world, such as the Eastern Block and a number of Latin American countries where self-expression and traditional communication was difficult, were especially keen to embrace this particular network form. In 1968 Fluxus artist Robert Filiou, along with his friend George Brecht, introduced the idea of the Fête Permanente, or Eternal Network. Filiou, a lateral thinker who once sent out invitations for a gallery contained entirely in his hat, spoke of artists already being part of a wider network. One going on around them constantly, in all parts of the world, including alternative performances such as "...private parties, weddings, divorces, lawcourts, funerals, factory work, trips around towns in buses, anti-Vietnam manifestations, bars, churches, etc...". As art networks, especially on the Internet, develop can we retain the sense of cultural chaos inherent in this type of system? The idea of lateral thinking as espoused by Edward De Bono, is relevant in it's definition of process. Because we see no objective end-point it's all too easy to stop at or wallow in the freedom and chaos. But then we can't move forward to what is an effective re-synthesis and all too often we end up with the merely facile. Excepting one or two minor wanderings the eye has always been the dominant sense in art. We need to fundamentally re-appraise our approach to information space, though the term space itself suggests volume, and think again about the value of the graphical or image based interface to our conceptual understanding. The central issue is our understanding of the notion of a global information society. William Martin gives this definition of an information based rather than industrial based society: ...a society in which the quality of life, as well as prospects for social change and economic development, depend increasingly upon information and its exploitation. In such a society, living standards, patterns of work and leisure, the education systems and the marketplace are all influenced markedly by advances in information and knowledge. This is evidenced by the increasing array of information-intensive products and services, communicated through a wide range of media, many of them electronic in nature.1 Art has to some degree always been regarded as elitist. This can be seen in the disdain with which some people regard community-based art, regarding it as a low-brow form. But we need to ensure that we don't take one of the potentially great advantages, the democratization of the WWW through unmediated access for all, and simply swap one form of cultural elitism, for the alienation of an underclass of information poor. Many things now happen primarily or exclusively in information space. Entire industries such as banking, tax, social security, vehicle registration, credit cards and medical information are, in their primary state, purely conceptual. Even our wars are moving in this direction. As currently being played out in the media space of our TV's, newspapers and on the Internet, the gulf war part II is part smart weapon, part dis or mis-information. The notion of attack or defence becomes more a matter of the destabilisation of this information/media space. The cold war played on hot links. The key to dealing with or approaching art information space on the WWW, isn't that we have reached a level of technological sophistication that allows us to make pretty pictures, but how integral it has become in our everyday life, and the uses to which it is put. There is no one type of art that is representative or typical of the art made for or shown via the WWW. We can however, group the artists that use the web at the moment into two main groups, those that want an on-line catalogue or gallery and those that try to create some form of mildly interactive image/sound/text. But is the WWW as a medium, really any use to artists? Can we move beyond the glossy brochure approach to this new technology? Ooh look, I click on this bit and a different picture appears. Golly. We aren't using the WWW to promote ART, but to promote a particular notion of art, one which is grounded in traditional visual art practice. Look at the pretty pictures, see how they move, and hark, is that a sound effect I hear before me? We accept and are promoting the digital equivalent of Sunday painting. All very pleasant and inoffensive, and very bland, and very yawnsome. Très mediocre. We might think we are being adventurous by adding interactivity into our work but we are merely reinforcing the entrenched patterns. Image - music - text. We should not just be looking at the changing technology but at a fundamental shift away from previous modes of creativity. What we are doing is as Edward De Bono says"...for mostly the new information is explained by the old theory and fashioned to support that theory." Sects which assemble on mountain tops or predicted days of doom to await the end of the world do not come down on the morrow shaken in their ideas, but with a renewed faith in the mercifulness of the almighty. New information which could lead to the destruction of an old idea is readily incorporated into it instead, for the more information that can be accommodated, the sounder the idea becomes.2 Just because something or some way of working, or thinking, about how we approach art in this electronic age, the era of information space, is currently accepted, doesn't mean that it's right. New idea's and new technology demand new concepts, and not some warmed over rehash designed to make us feel rather smug about how clever we are being.
Global Trends Let's for a moment consider the wider picture and look at art as part of a global perspective on the future. Demographic crisis: the current world population of over five billion could reach beyond 10 billion by the mid-2lst century. As this population growth will occur in the developing world, which lacks the resources to cope with it, there is the prospect of famines, wars and uncontrolled mass migration from the poorer countries to the richer ones. Environmental challenges: drastic ecological damage resulting from the pressures of population and economic activity on the world's natural resources, and the spectre of global warming which threatens major climatic change, forced relocation of habitats and radical shifts in the nature and location of economic activity. Biotechnology: where the ability of scientists to engage in genetic engineering raises ethical, health, environmental and economic questions of truly fundamental proportions. In the agricultural sector, for example, while biotechnology holds out the promise of new seeds, new crops and the potential to eradicate food shortages, it also threatens the livelihoods of farmers in both rich and poor countries through the in vitro cultivation of crops which, in many cases, form the mainstay of national economies. North-South tensions: where the combined impact of imbalances in population growth and resource levels, the increasing technology gap between rich and poor countries, and the role of western multinational corporations could seriously exacerbate existing tensions between North and South.3 In isolation, the nature of an information society means little, especially when gauged against the significance of the global trends mentioned above. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like"
patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be
represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeroes, then what kind of
creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would be up one
level at least-an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human
lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name-its complete dossier
might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world... It is important that we keep as the central issue the question; how we as artists deal with our Information Society? How we 'see' art is changing, consequently how do we deal with art systems that are routed in new technology but have no visual, audible or tactile dimension. In the same way that information exhibits none of these things until we interface with it. How do we construct new people, new identities not for ourselves but to examine our relationship with this new world? Artist models have traditionally been defined in charcoal or clay but what happens when we define people with information, preference settings and credit scoring? How do we make sense of information in this raw form? What is the proper use for this information? Much as the revisionist histories tell us, Kings and Queens aren't the only ones that leave trails that we can follow. Electronic information is now our social portraiture. If we were to examine the nature of the information gathering society we would find our one true achievement, the use to which we put this vast information space, Junk Mail. We don't control this virtual information space, but we can manipulate it, perhaps in a similar way that artists and others have previously played media pranks, and attempted to control and manipulate the media space occupied by TV and print. Is this the next version of Gulf War Syndrome? The future cannot simply recreating the present in virtual 3D space; asking the same questions in the secure knowledge that we already know what the answers will be (what its always been with knobs on). We need to find new ways of engaging with art, technology and information, ways of finding and engaging with today's focal points. As an artist what excites me is not simply recreating old ways and means but looking for the perfect expression in any given medium. In an earlier paper Digital Image Enhancement and Manipulation, questions are raised, examining the nature of information, initially visual, and how we equate information with the notions of fact and truth. This expanded through other forms of information relating to fact, evidence, interpretation and truth, including a look at the interpretative nature of systems we are led to believe are based on incontrovertible truth, such as fingerprinting or DNA analysis. This resulted in a series of pseudo enhanced photographic images that examined the nature of visual information and truth through recognition. The questions asked were not about the nature of 'truth', it was assumed such a thing exists, and in a form that we can relate to, but is truth an adequate term of reference for information? Are there other 'better' questions that we should be examining to achieve our artistic aims? The information revolution has massively increased our capacity to structure and share information, yet it is still framed first and foremost as technological rather than cultural in nature. In it's standard definition data has no meaning unless current and accurate, yet it's entry into information space is generally handed down to low paid clerical workers with no particular incentive to get things right. In this paradigm everything hinges on their accuracy. I believe the debate has moved on. Information no longer holds value intrinsic to itself, but has increasing value as a pointer or link to other information. This idea, raised by David Weinberger in his article The Ecstatic Document, goes on to say that the expert is not the person with the most facts but the one with the ability to discover how things relate. This seems to be following on from Edward de Bono's assertion that "Meaning is not something that lies within an object but a description of the way the object affects the mind, the way it fits in a pattern of thought." For this accuracy and truth hold no sway. The WWW in it's current form is already dying or evolving, and like the dinosaurs all those millennia ago the writing is on the wall. If the browser is the current window into information space, then Microsoft with it's policy of incorporation, and Sun with the likes of Java, a technology that already runs without a browser, have declared it's days numbered. In his novel Idoru, William Gibson describes the Cyberspace of DatAmerica, a repository for all data, all traces of our electronic patterns no matter how mundane, and thinks that there might be a larger perspective. He wonders if in this information there might be a way of getting to "some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within grey shoals of information." As artists we need to explore the notion of what we can know from the information we connect with. What can the information we generate tell us about ourselves? Is there 'some other kind of truth'? Can we track people in a way that helps us bring to bear new ways of understanding, from their electronic traces? What kind of field craft do we need to learn to track these footprints? What kind of Art can we generate from making new links, new relationships and new ways of knowing? References
Bibliography Books Journals On-line © 1998 David Topping |
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| Contact mail@davidtopping.net David Topping 20 Hazel Walk Caerleon South Wales NP18 3SE United Kingdom |
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| Last updated 08 August, 2000 |
