A Medium

"We become what we behold....We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."
-Marshall McLuhan

While watching the 1944 version of Jane Eyre the other night, my thoughts wandered from old movies to new media. The film opens with a literal image of the cover of Charlotte Bronte's book. The novel/movie's title is quickly replaced by views of pages inscribed with the film's credits, followed by a voice-over that sets the scene. In breathtakingly quick succession the formulaic opening of this movie conflates the history of the modern, narrative media: novel, silent film, radio, and sound-film. I was reminded of the theoretical donne that no medium disappears; the function of every old medium is simply taken up by a new medium as its developmental point of departure. (And sometimes there is not even much development: Consider, for instance, how little separates the "reading" of the news on radio and television.)

Closer to home, I was also reminded of TalkBack! A Forum for Critical Discourse the on-line art "journal" that I founded last year and edit. I increasingly wonder about the nature of this hypertext-based "site" "on" the World Wide Web. The orgy of quote marks in the previous sentences signifies my discomfort with the problematic use of old labels and metaphors to deal with new media and forms. Why the territorial and spatial metaphors of a "site" "on" the Internet if not to stake out an ideological turf that corresponds to the ownership of actual, physical property? Likewise for the media-construction of the Net as anarchic frontier, rather than the repressive gulag it has so quickly become. So before "we become what we behold," we exist in a world generated by language. (Let me note, in passing, that this dangerous media-construction of the Net as an anarchic frontier helped enable an unprecedented assault in late-1995 and early-1996 on Net-based communications, which criminalized content often legal in print and broadcast media. Given that the network is both unitary and international, what's criminalized in China, Singapore, the US and Germany is essentially off-limits everywhere.)

The problem with language isn't simply ideological, though. It also reflects the ubiquitous tendency to look at new phenomena through old eyes. As Peter Lyman, the librarian of the University of California at Berkeley, recently told a New York Times reporter: "We alway talk about new technology using old vocabulary. 'Electronic publishing,' 'digital library,' 'information highway': To our grandchildren these terms will sound as peculiar as 'horseless carriage.' "

What's at stake in such designations? Almost everything--at least at the outset of new technologies. The CD-Rom medium, for example, has been largely comandeered by book publishers, instead of video-game or other entertainment producers. The result? An enterprise virtually still-born. Blinkered by paradigms of book-production, distribution, and author-publisher relationships that have almost nothing to do with making a CD-Rom, book publishers have been unable to establish the CD-Rom as a commercially viable medium. In fact, their publishing project requires an entirely different model that reflects the collaborative realities of multi-media production, a modus operandi familiar to denizens of the entertainment- and performing-arts worlds, rather than the book- or visual-art realms. This paradigm shift is slowly beginning to take hold, but four years (and countless projects, many by artists) have been lost in the interim. The medium may not be the (only) message, but to ignore it is to place yourself in peril.

What about "publishing" a "journal" of "art criticism" on-line? Is thinking about the Internet also inappropriately couched in the linguistic models of publishing? Yes and no, although the situation hardly parallels that of multimedia. Bear in mind that in the beginning, the Internet was the word. This medium consisted primarily of text from its US- Defense-Department-inspired inception in 1969 until Tim Berner Lee's creation of the hypertext-based World Wide Web in 1990. (The Web's success wasn't really insured until the National Center for Supercomputing Application released software to navigate--or browse--it in 1993.). In some ways, it's remarkable how much art has been posted on the Net, given that sophisticated sound- and image- (or hypermedia) technologies are only now being developed and/or becoming widespread.

The hypertext medium on which the Web is based offers a number of features that distinguish it from the linear model of the print-medium. These include the ability to quickly and efficiently search materials or data bases, to open multiple windows on a screen, and to create links. Many commentators--myself included--regard the (interactive) link as the essential characteristic of the medium. Online publishers have tentatively begun to explore the creation of links, but rarely to exploit the communications-potential of interactivity created by these links. (More on this subject later.) Instead, links are frequently used to cross reference or illustrate material. But just as a periodical-reader may be temporarily diverted from the linearity of a text by an image--especially in an art publication--so, too, will the on-line reader be diverted from a seamless, linear read.

Does this non-linearity contradict the essential quality of the essay itself--a form predicated on persuasion, on the (linear) argument? (When it comes to fiction, the branching hypernovel demonstrates the plausibility of offering the reader multiple paths though the works--as does multi-narrator, multi-viewpoint writing by novelists like William Faulkner, whose works long pre-date the advent of digital media.) Of course the demands of linear writing have always haunted the process of translation necessary to evoke, analyze and criticize in language a work of art. Although in some ways recent art increasingly utilizes language-related strategies (especially neo-conceptual- and media art), such works also accentuate the distinctions between art and writing as very different forms of knowledge.

Such tensions also surface in terms of reception. Essay reading and installation-viewing, for instance, are totally different activities. The site-specific-installation viewer takes in numerous sights in an unprogrammed sequence. These sights often comprise more than views of objects: the objects are also likely to be complemented by sound or projections, all created for a specific historical or autobiographical context central to the meaning of the installation. On the Net, works by such hybridizing, neo-conceptual and media artists currently predominate.

A Publication

"Internet is an open space where the difference between 'art' and 'not art' has become blurred as never before in XX century. That's why there are so few 'artists' in this space....What is WWW art? Is it public art? Advertising? More data noise? Does it have anything to do with galleries and critics? Do we want it? WWWArt Medal. We give it to web-pages that were created not as art works but gave us definite 'art' feeling."
-Alexei Shulgin

TalkBack!: A Forum for Critical Discourse arose from my conviction that on-line art was being ignored by the art world. In mid-1995, I presented the idea to Susan Hoeltzel and Douglas Davis, co-directors of the City University of New York's Center for Long Distance Art and Culture, who enthusiastically endorsed it. Although little funding has been available, the center has offered me invaluable technical support and server space. The first "issue" went on-line last December.

What was I thinking of? One of TalkBack!'s stated mandates was to cover on-line art because such art, having no commercial rationale, was not being covered by the "trade" publications. (The flurry of attention in early 1996 represents an interest in novelty more than a commitment to a new, non-commercial form.) Nor are there many cross-over journals dealing with digital or even media art in the ever-more-balkanized art world(s). (In this regard, on-line art resembles the ghetto realms of public art or graffiti.) I also wanted to cover social issues because such coverage suits my sensibility as a non-formalist critic, journalist, and censorship-chronicler. If I had any models in mind, it was the tradition of the early-20th-century "little magazine," publications such as Arthur Cravan's Maintenant, Wyndam Lewis' Blast!, or Marcel Duchamp's Blind Man. These journals showcased art and critical essays and functioned as the fulcrum of dialogue among small circles of committed readers. But at the same time, I felt that the "forum" in TalkBack!'s title encouraged both interactivity and an investigation of the new, on-line form itself.

The first issue was devoted to the archive-as-artwork. (If you were reading on-line, you'd click HERE to see TalkBack!, instead of reading my description.) In brief, it encompassed in-depth examinations of artworks (Muntadas' File Room, Cati Laporte's Almanac of Disasters, and graffiti on-line) as well as meditations about on-line publishing paradigms and the nature of the library, past and future. Other regular departments complemented the features (or "Centerpieces") section: manifestos ("The Beef"); a guide to on-line art sites and zines ("Out There"); commentary about shows and trends, as well as interviews with William Gibson and Susan Sontag, among others ("Scene & Heard"); previews of on-line, public-art-projects ("The Buzz"); artworks ("The Gallery"); AIDS-related images by artists such as Barbara Kruger and Glenn Ligon and opportunities for petitioning policy-makers ("AIDS Memorial"); an ongoing chronicle of the cyber-machinations of governments, corporations and social "milestones" such as the establishment of the first on-line Girl Scout troop (the "Online Timeline"), and a bulletin board ("Talk back to TalkBack!")

As I reflected on this debut issue, it struck me as a hybrid, like so much art on the net. In attempting to fill voids in available information--as well as commentary--I'd created everything from a consumer guide ("Out There") to a data base (the "Online Timeline.") I was happy to do so. But I was worried that fairly lengthy pieces about individual artworks seemed slightly flat and even out of place--reflecting, as Shulgin, a Moscow photographer and web-site operator, put it, the "blurred," art/non-art status of Net art. Put another way, the traditional focus on individual artworks seems a matter of focusing on details when the larger panorama itself urgently requires explication. This larger panorama is on-line culture. It has become increasingly apparent to me that on-line art exists as part of a cyberculture fast becoming the premier site of conflict for the actual, physical culture or RL (real life.) As Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, suggested to me, "The Net dramatizes, concretizes, makes it more urgent to confront what's true [in RL] anyway."

Issue #2--being completed as I write this--partly reflects that shift. Its theme is identity. This concern is playfully evoked with increasing frequency, as in the New Yorker cartoon showing one dog telling another that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," or in a story I recently heard poet Ann Lauterbach tell about a five-year-old who spells his name D-A-V-I-D-ENTER. But we all know that humor is often a wake-up call alerting us to serious, sometimes divisive, social issues. While TalkBack! #2 hardly abandons on-line art--it features articles about Stelarc, cyber-exhibitions, curatorial practices, and an examination of the on-line art market--it also contains interviews with cybertheorists Sherry Turkle and Sandy Stone, an investigation of on-line anonymity and complex works of on-line art about identity. One happy likelihood is that it will appeal to a wider range of readers interested in cyberculture than did issue #1.

It also features two large sections that would seem incongruous (or even impossible) in an off-line or print, magazine- or journal-context. One is the exhibition catalog for the Fashion Moda exhibition seen this past winter at the Lehman College Art Gallery, the location of the Center for Long Distance Art College. The show examined the historic Bronx alternative space that pioneered graffiti and hip-hop, in the process raising complex issues about urban identity and artworld appropriation of street content--and content producers.

The second is the Appropriated Corpse. A play on the Surrealist parlor game, the Exquisite Corpse, this modified, digital version invites site visitors to download images by nearly two dozen artists, modify those images, and e-mail them back for (possible) on-line exhibition. The Appropriated Corpse is an experiment in interactivity, which at least raises the crucial question of what might constitute meaningful (on-line) interactivity in a medium that encourage interactivity and a culture of couch-potatoes that simultaneously discourages it. Is this a bold experiment in interactivity or a banal gesture? It's unclear to me how this open-ended project will turn out or even what criteria of evaluation--beyond that of offering participants genuine choices--are appropriate to it. In part, this depends on the response the project generates. More than simply the status of a work of art is blurred by the Internet.

An Inquiry

"Now the world is ready to jump into cyberspace. Whether the rich, interactive marketplace that has created--and been created by--800 service [free phone calls for consumers] will translate to the online environment is largely up to people like all of us [telecommunications executives.]"
-Robert Allen, Chief Executive Offer, AT&T

"Ultimately we have to decide whether we are no more than an economy sharing a common currency in which the primary social glue binding us together is the business transactions we do with one another, or if we are still a society in that we have special obligations to one another as citizens."
-Robert Reich, US Secretary of Labor

Anyone whose spent much time on-line realizes that the development of new forms of interactivity is what ultimately will distinguish on-line communication from what's come before. As Jane Veeder--a computer graphics artist and director of the Digital Cinema Laboratory at San Francisco State University--succinctly noted: "Everyone understands that digital culture means interacting with everything. " Veeder's formulation raises--and begs--the key questions: What kind(s) of interactivity will that be? And whose interests will be served?

As I write this in spring 1996, contradictory signals about the commercial colonization of the Internet are appearing in the financial pages. Well-positioned software developers and service providers are having a field day--witness the explosive stock offering of the search engine, Yahoo, for instance--while some of the luster has apparently worn off the Internet for non-cyber, commercial concerns. Expensive web sites currently offer few prospects of short-term financial gain, at least not until the perception of secure credit-card-billing is widespread. (This is imminent.) Web site designers, in turn, are unable to charge the high prices their services commanded just last year. But even a temporary lull in the gold-rush mentality enveloping commercial development of the Net offers at least a moment to reflect on the past two years' trends.

During those years, corporations wasted no time pioneering new, often insidious methods of on-line interactivity-cum-advertising. Among the most revealing are cereal-maker's web programming directed at children. Logging on to sites "hosted" by entertaining animated characters, unwitting (and underage) consumers innocently supply requested information about themselves, including e-mail addresses on their families' accounts. The results? Personalized e-mail greetings, gifts (cyber-games and the like), and a barrage of product-related materials.

This use of e-mail as advertising-medium reminds us that the Internet is not only a Web-ed creature. The World Wide Web is fast becoming the shopping mall of the Internet. Ongoing, interactive communication is better achieved through non-single-direction or push media, that is, less broadcast-like, Internet mediums. (As with television, you still have to choose to visit a web-site.) The more duo-directional, interactive media include bulletin board services with their ongoing postings, real-time conversation in MUDs and MOOs, and e-mail, a highly efficient, low-cost means of transmission. On-line afficionados are familiar with the so-call "list-serv," the subscribable, often free, e-mail-delivered postings devoted to a particular subject. Subscribers to such lists--and there are a few about art--receive a daily stream of messages to their electronic mailboxes. The trend is a constant flow of information. It's easy to empathize with a recent message from Armin Medosch, a fellow list-subscriber: "Today I deleted 500 e-mails," he wrote. "And that made me happy."

How do we slow down this information flow? And how does this relate to publishing an on-line journal? One difference between on- and off-line publishing is that publishing designations like "daily," "weekly," and "quarterly," make little sense in a medium that allows for constant up-dating and obviates former vexations like paper costs and other print-medium considerations. But as a part-time editor with limited financial resources to pay writers, I am unable to commission more (or more frequently postable) content for TalkBack!. Far more important, however, is the cybercultural context in which this publication appears. (The Net, after all, is a social system.) Varied content-producers need to assert their visions of this radically decentralized medium or be content with those of commercializers like AT&T's Robert Allen, or an international class of politicians and apparatchiks intent on regulating on-line information or mandating its commercialization under trade agreements like NAFTA. Despite buzzwords like virtual community--the recent ubiquity of the term is a sure sign of its scarcity--an audience of consumers does not a community make.

Robert Reich aptly defines community as citizenly obligation. (The number of people whose lives have been saved in medical emergencies because they were on-line at the moment of a heart attack or stroke is already legion.) As an editor, however, I am interested in the creation of an intellectual community that might transcend the notion of an audience of site-visitors. How can one distinguish between them? Although it's not difficult to track the number of accesses or "hits" to a site, a "visit" may only consist of a ten-second scan of the available material. (Unfortunately these numbers are fetishized by site-operators in search of advertising.) Insightful feedback is another matter entirely. A few dozen postings to TalkBack!'s bulletin board (or to my e-mail) of the "great site"-variety are simultaneously heartening for their support and disappointing for their lack of criticality. When it comes to reader response, I'm not certain the situation has changed much since Duchamp et al published their little magazines.

A Post-Script

"The Web as we know it today is dead. It's dead in 2 ways: because it's going to mutate into something else very quickly and be unrecognizable within 12 months, and, secondly, it's dead because all it's got on it is dead information....It's a big information mausoleum."
-Futurist Paul Saffo

As an historian in an (amnesiac) American culture, I'm delighted with the capacity of the Web as archive or "information mausoleum." What this means is that the first issue of TalkBack! remains accessible to site-visitors at the click of a mouse after the second issue has appeared. Quickly finding an audience for new books or magazines is a daunting and expensive proposition. On-line publishing is more forgiving; it allows a publication to slowly reach an audience through word-of-mouth and publicity.

Saffo's remarks reflect a familiar kind of extremism; a fashionable and contrary nihilism. The claims of both supporters and detractors of on-line publishing are grossly overstated. Although it's clear that on-line (and desktop) publishing offer expanded possibilities, the effects of new telecommunications technologies on reading and writing are anything but clear. Wired's editor Kevin Kelly may claim that "at this point in history, most of the evolution of language, most of the richness in language, is happening in this [cyber]space that we are creating," but I have yet to see it, apart from a tendency for on-line "writing" to mimic the informality of spoken communication. Likewise for the conventional wisdom that few people have the patience to read long essays on the screen. This supposition is nothing but an intuited prejudice unsupported by any data. Many people I know download on-line essays and articles, then read them off-screen. In any case, such worries seem beside the point at a moment when print publications like Artforum are part of the trend toward tiny articles supplemented with big pictures.

When it comes to art on the Net, something more radical than the nature of reading is up for grabs. The abject unsuitability of the on-line media for doing more with conventional-format paintings and sculptures than reproducing images of them is striking. The Internet tends to call into question the traditional identity of artmakers as a group. Susan Farrell, the creator of the Art Crimes web-site, recently e-mailed me a message thanking me for TalkBack!'s coverage of her international archive of graffiti photos and noted that "I know nothing about art; I leave that to the art experts." Similarly, the creation of web-sites about popular culture by non-artists offers the same deadpan, hommage-cum-deconstruction visible in art installations. (A generation ago, the criticality of late-modern/early-postmodern conceptual- or media artists might have offered a perceivable distinction, but no longer.) How this will be resolved--if it is resolvable--is unclear right now. As novelist Robert Cover has observed about the rush toward judgement of the new, hypernovel form, "It took 150 years to get from Gutenberg to Don Quixote."