Introduction

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.... We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.

Paul Valéry

Living at the end of the twentieth century in new conditions produced by the electronic era, artists confront a revised cultural and technological context. The purpose of this book is to examine the relationship between technological development and aesthetic change. It views the cultural crisis of the present postindustrial age as parallel to the wrenching cultural, aesthetic and social crisis brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

Fundamental to the understanding of the impact of technological media on society as a whole, as well as on perception and the fine arts, is the work of Walter Benjamin. He brought into a key position in critical discourse awareness of the relationship between art and technology. He argued that widespread integrated changes in technological conditions can affect the collective consciousness and trigger important changes in cultural development. His essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," (1936) is a significant assessment of the pivotal role played by photographic technologies (first as catalyst, then as instrument for change) in twentieth century art.

Benjamin was the first to study mass culture as a focus of philosophic analysis. In "Author as Producer" Benjamin anticipated the current crisis of identity, and the loss of moral authority of the author/artist. His interdisciplinary thinking anticipated the interwoven, layered structuring of associations and observations that has come to be understood as the postmodern. It is clear from his writing, particularly the "Arcades Project," that, while Benjamin understood the potentially positive influence of technology on art and on culture, he was also aware of the major losses created by what he called the loss of "aura," that sense of uniqueness and primal consciousness that attaches to a singular work of art and that is lost in reproduction. Whether consciously or subconsciously the independence and the deep integrity of his thinking led him to move philosophy beyond what Adorno called the "frozen wasteland of abstraction" to a-concrete engagement with historical concerns and images. This entailed endless examination of the forces that formulate culture. His work is still alive for us today as a medium for "fertilizing the present."

Figure 2. George Méliès, Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902,:Film Still (Museum of Modern Art /Film Stills Archive, New York)

His work has influenced contemporary cultural critics and theorists including Roland Barthes, Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. In addition, aspects of his thought have deeply affected a generation of writers such as John Berger, Raymond Williams, Geoffrey Hartman, Celeste Olalquiaga, and Brian Wallis. His writings are included in important collections of postmodern essays such as "Art After Modernism Rethinking Representation" (ed. Brian Wallis) and "Video Culture" (ed. John Hanhardt), among many others. Several of his essays serve as benchmarks for today's generation of students of the social sciences and the arts.

Cultural studies, which have gone beyond Benjamin to provide the most illuminating commentary on current representation issues vis-a-vis mass media and technological conditions, come from several sources Baudrillard on simulacra, simulation, and the hyperreal; Barthes and Foucault on intertextuality and interactivity; Derrida and the feminist movement on deconstruction. These theoretical understandings, which further those of Benjamin, are useful tools for probing and exploring art in its relationship to technology. This is so, especially now that it can be demonstrated that some of these theoretical concepts closely correspond to the structure and functioning of electronic media tools themselves.

I have written this book out of a need to explore the impact of electronic media on representation and on our culture as a whole, and, in the process, to extend the theories of Benjamin. Photography and cinematography created what Benjamin called "a shattering of tradition," a crisis in representation without fundamentally shifting the Western paradigm of art. However, digital simulation has finally shattered the paradigm of representation we have been operating under since the Renaissance. We are now, in many ways, living in a new world.

In this book I am using a definition of representation which refers to a system of iconography which contains both the perceptual and the aesthetic when related to art and has conventions of both tool and medium inscribed in it. At different moments of history, it changes relative to a paradigm which contains within it the unified framing of agreed upon assumptions that shape the understanding of what art is in a particular time period. Images or objects artists construct are not just simple responses to individual experience. They are always ordered, coded, and styled according to conventions which develop out of the practice of each medium with its tools and process, whether the medium is a traditional one such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, or an electronic one such as video or computer. Artists' vision and artists' responses to the world are dominated by the conditions and consciousness of a particular time period.

The invention of the camera (Chapter 1) changed the nature of representation in drastic ways. Photographic images depend on the variable gaze of the camera eye. Photographs are inseparable from time passing and from the specific placement of visual reality. Cinematography provides the possibility of multiple viewpoints. The camera moves, rises, falls, distances objects, moves in close to themcoordinating all angles of view in a complex juxtaposition of images moving in time. Film (and video) offer a deepening of perception, for they permit analysis of different points of view and they extend comprehension beyond our immediate understanding by revealing much as did the microscope and the telescope in the Renaissance entirely new structures of a subject beyond those available to the naked eye alone.

The modern period, most often described as the period between the end of the Enlightenment (corresponding to the end of the eighteenth century) and the middle of the twentieth century, has been described from a variety of positions.

Figure 3. National Aeronautics and Space Adminisration (NASA), Astronaut David Scott Plants American Flag on the Moon, July 26, 1971 These two images reflect powerful changes in our awareness. Meliess 1902 fantasy film about the moon landing evokes "man on the moon" mythologiesgreen cheese and all the cliches still embedded in our vocabularies about the moon. The 1971 reality of the moon landing, as seen internationally on living-room television screens, created a major generation gap between adults who saw it as proof of the impossible come true, and their young children, who saw it as just an everyday event on TV. For the children, it was the basis of the expectations of their age. Today's generation witnessed the 1988 scaling of Mt. Everest via a miniaturized TV camera so small it could be placed in the headgear of one of the climbers.

In the use Walter Benjamin made of the term, "modernism" referred to a diverse historical period which evolved in the conditions and context of the Machine Age. New forms of representation such as photography and cinematography contributed to a new consciousness and to more modern ways of seeing which reflected the idealism of a faith in progress through technological progress.

Benjamin pointed out, however, that the discovery of photographic technologies from 1850 onward essentially undermined the existing function of art, not only because photography and photomechanical reproduction could provide visual reportage, but because it threatened the "aura" and value of the original, the handmade object that relied on the specialized skills of the artist. He understood that once a camera records images or events unique to a particular place and time, a disruption of privacy takes place. Its uniqueness is destroyed. A loss of its original magic, spirit, the unique is evaluated and defined as an object whose value depends upon its rarity and status as gauged by the price it fetches on the market. But because the value of a work of art is thought to have a value greater than a commercial one, it can be explained only in terms of "holy objects'' objects which are first and foremost evidence of their own survival. The past in which they originated is studied in order to validate them. Once the work is seen in many different contexts, e.g., reproduced in different forms such as a postage stamp or as a billboard, its meaning changes. It begins to mean something else and fragments into new sets of fresh associations.

Photography is not simply a visual medium but is also a photo-mechanical tool, a means of reproducing endless copies from a single original, an aspect that Benjamin acknowledged as the major factor affecting art in its relation to the age of mechanical reproduction. The copying processes of photography undermined the aura of the original and its value in the marketplace. Thus, it threatened the existing foundations of the art establishment which were based on hand skills, reflecting the genius of the artist. Photographic reproduction and the cinema raised social questions about the artist's role, about the audience for art, about art as communication rather than art as object, and thus brought into focus the social function of art. Because of its threat to the art object and the issues it raised in its association with Machine Age copying processes, as well as its challenge to established canons and institutions of art, photography's full development as a medium for art and its acceptance as a viable fine art form were suppressed until the beginning of the postmodern period.

Rather than using photography directly as a medium for their work, painters were moved from a preoccupation with forms of illusion and realism toward attitudes that led to abstraction and formalism. Many artists used photography indirectly as a tool or reference or aid in their drawing and painting activities only in the privacy of their studios. However, many were influenced by the aesthetic aspects of the new form of representation. The works of Manet and Degas reflect the influence of photographic imaging in the flatness of the pictorial space and in the unexpected and informal composition associated with photographic instantaneity.

Three avant-garde strains developed in reaction to the Machine Age (Chapter 2). Although both movements used photography and technology, they took different routes. On the one hand, the Daddaists and Surrealists developed strategies to use machine parts and photomontage as a means of commenting on the alienating influence of rampant industrialization and the commercialization of mainstream art. On the other, the Constructivists and Futurists extolled the aesthetics of photographic reproduction, seeing hope in the machine age for a new kind of culture. They used photo-mechanical technology to extend and distribute their work. Paradoxically, the Cubists, whose painting aesthetic was deeply influenced by the visual experiments of Marey's chronophotography, did not use photography directly. Similarly, although the Bauhaus used machines to manufacture their work, they created an aesthetic of pure form.

By the thirties, the term "Modernism', came to refer to a special institutionalized movement, an aesthetic understanding of art shaped by the systematic critical writings of Clement Greenberg in essays he published between the 1930s and 1960s. Greenberg argued that art practice conformed to immaculate, linear laws of progression that were verifiable and objective. He favored an understanding of art as pure form, a stance that excluded any literary or theatrical references or descriptions and shut out the real world as subject matter.

Mainstream Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture, were countered by an avant-garde that centered around the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and the Pop movement. While the European avant-garde was more political in its opposition to the status quo and to technological conditions, the American Pop movement was avant-garde in its adoption of industrial technologies for making its work. When Andy Warhol began silk-screening photo images directly onto his canvasses, Pop artists began the appropriation of mass culture, photomechani


Figure 4. Fritz Lang. Metropolis, 1926, Film Still. Lang constructs a terrifying image of a twenty-first century totalitarian society dominated by technology. Here, he is shown on set shooting a scene from Metropolis, his last major silent film, where the mad scientist Rotwang reveals "The False Maria" robot he has createdthe personification of technology used for evil persuasive purposes. (Museum of Modem Art/Film Stills Archive, New York)

cally reproducing images directly into the field of painting. In so doing, they bypassed dealing with the social implications of photography raised by Benjamin. Although many photographers such as Stieglitz and Steichen asserted photography as a fine art medium, it was not until after its reproductive technology was brought directly into the field of painting by Pop artists, more than one hundred years after its invention, that it was accepted into the canon as a fine art medium like any other.

Figure 5. Andy Warhol, Thirty Are Better than One, 1963. Silkscreen on canvas, 110~/" x 82,<~. Warhol creates an "original" constructed of thirty copies of the origmal. His appropriation of the most famous cultural icon of all time is a comment on the power of reproductive media to promote celebrity. (Photo Nathan Rabin)

Postmodernism (Chapter 3) is a shift to an essentially far broader territory in which the suppression of social and cultural influence is no longer possible. The defining moment in the visual arts, when the shift to Postmodernism began, was the late fifties when architectural forms of representation began to be radically revised away from pure formalist tendencies towards a more "vernacular" style. The aloofness of the steel curtain walls with their purity and rationality seemed at odds with the times. New technological conditions, including electronic communication networks such as TV had deeply invaded private space creating a new kind of cultural infrastructure. Postindustrial capitalism based on electronic technologies under development from the fifties and sixties, ushered in a new kind of "information society," a "society of the spectacle."

Avant-garde movements in the sixties and seventies moved in opposition to the still-dominant modernist aesthetic, toward an expanded dematerialized view of art, for example, Earth Art, Fluxus, Performance, Conceptual Art, and work that incorporated the new electronic media tools, especially video and the computer. The incorporation of mass culture and photography into the fine arts by the Pop Movement, in tandem with the use in the arts of new forms of electronic representation marks the moment of a major crisis for representation.

Ironically, once photography was accepted into the fine arts canon, all the issues denied for so long under the rubric of modernism became the very focus, the very means of deconstructing modernism. The deconstruction of the fine arts canon began through widespread use of the tools of critical theory, whose influence emerged in the seventies. Of particular importance were the issues brought out earlier by Walter Benjamin (about aura, identity, the copy and the original, death of the author, originality, and genius); along with poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. This process of deconstruction particularly by feminists, raised consciousness regarding the marginalization of certain artists not only because of gender, but because of race or class. Artists began to use theoretical issues as the very subject matter of their work.

In the arts, electronic media such as video and the computer challenge older modes of representation. New media have created postmodern conditions and have changed the way art itself is viewed. Culturally, it is characterized by major change. From the concept of a single Eurocentric cultural stream dominated by white male privilege to one which recognizes diverse identities and voices interacting in a complex web of ideological and behaviorist associations. It is further characterized by the impact of mediated images on perception; by deconstruction of the major canons and narratives that have up to now formed Western thought; and by the development of a visual culture, transmitted by electronic technologies which have consciousness transforming-capacity, superseding one that relied mainly on the word.

Video was welcomed as a powerful new form of representationa time/space medium capable of broadcast and transmission of images and sound over long distances. It was welcomed by a diverse range of artists from many fields, (Chapter 4). At first, it was rooted in formal modernist concerns. As its technology evolved, it began to converge with TV and film. Although different from them, it also became a consciousness-transforming form of representation. It has now become part of an expanded multimedia territory where it is combined with the interactive capabilities of the computer, as in CD-ROM production, virtual reality, and interactive installation works. It is also used as a means for capturing moving images to connect to the Internet.

The digital simulation capabilities of the computer create a break with the paradigm of representation we have followed since the Renaissance. The computer has the capability of combining sound, text, and image within a single database. Images no longer reside in the visual field but in the database of the computer (Chapter 5). To see an image, the information about the image's structure of lights and darks must be called up for display. The image is thus an information structure which has no physical presence in the real world. Not only is it a dematerialized image, but it is also one that can be destabilized and constantly invaded, changed, and manipulated by a viewer interactively through software commands. This possibility for intervention and interaction challenges notions of a discrete work of art, one that is authored by the artist alone. An interactive work is one that uses branching systems and networks for creating connective links and nodes. The artist who decides to work with technology now assumes a different role in relationship to creating work, one similar to a systems designer, and the work takes on a different route in relationship to the viewer who participates in the works ultimate unfolding and meaning.

George Landow, in his Hypertext The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology demonstrates that, in the computer, we have an actual, functional convergence of technology with critical theory. The computer's very technological structure illustrates the theories of Benjamin, Foucault, and Barthes, all of whom pointed to what Barthes would name "the death of the author." The death happens immaterially and interactively, via the computer's operating system.

By the eighties, the growing crisis in representation brought about deep changes in both theory and practice. The pervasiveness of media technologies in modern society creates a new set of questions which call for new theories of the relation between language, behavior and belief, and between material reality and its cultural representation. Baudrillard speaks about the veritable bombardment of images and signs as causing an inward collapse of meaning where "reality is entirely constructed through forms of mass-media feedback where values are determined by consumer demand." Is there any absolute knowledge when there is no longer an authentic message; when there is only the absolute dominion of information as digitized memory storage banks? The constant melting down of forms causes a kind of "hyperreality" a loss of meaning as a result of the neutralization of difference and of opposition, which dissolves all claims to universal truth.

Figure 6. Paul Hosefros, Gauguin and His Flatterers, June 25, 1988. Photograph, New York Times This Gauguin painting destined for sale to the public has its value increased by being shown on the front page of the New York; Times. Copies of the original newspaper (sold for a few cents) show how copies of the original painting (sold for a few dollars) are here being compared to the original (sold for a few million). The right to reproduce this photographic copy (of the copies and the original) was purchased by the author of this book, for $100 to reproduce an agreed upon number of copies of the original.

Unprecedented forms of communication are occurring as a result of global interactive computer communications on the World Wide Web, (Chapter 6). Artists are now creating works for the Internet as interactive communication. The effect of technology is to expand the possibility for cultural growth and exchange. Fueled by market concerns, its evolution is breathtakingly fast. It is creating major social and cultural upheavals comparable to the social and cultural dislocation of the early Machine Age. Questions surface that still have no concrete answers. How will artists function in the new cyber environment? What role will art play in the evolving architecture of the electronic landscape? What kinds of cultural institutions will there be? What kinds of education will artists need?

Surveys offer the occasion for discovering crossover connections. This book is meant as an overview of the interrelationship between our technologized cultural conditions and artists' response to them. One of the goals of the book is to show how periods of major technological change transform consciousness, forcing a re-definition of representation and a disruption of the criteria used for evaluating it.

Inasmuch as any survey inevitably suffers from exclusions and from serious compression of the major critical and historical issues, this book is meant to function as a framework for discussion about the relationship between technology, representation, and perceptual and aesthetic change. I have written it out of my concerns as a contemporary artist aware of the gap in understanding in the relationship between art and technology. Since writing the book ten years ago, much has become clearer and much has shifted in my perception of technological change because of the rapidity of unfolding developments and their significance for the visual arts, particularly in the area of interactivity, and of virtual reality, and in the field of interactive telecommunications and the World Wide Web. In revising and updating it due to these major changes, I am addressing these new areas. Most of al1, I wish to deepen the debate. Like many artists, I was excited by the promise of the new media. I am stil1 engaged with them, but I cannot say that I do so without a great awareness of their dangerous social and cultural implications. I am also aware that the book is dealing with current issues and with technologies that rapidly become obsolete. My concern in writing it is to create the ground for future discussion about the relationship between art and technology.

Although this book does not attempt to break new ground, I have become aware of the need it fills for students who may be technologically adept but who do not understand the underlying issues. The book is also intended for art professionals including teachers of art history, critics, writers, artists, and for anyone interested in situating questions about the art of our time and the direction it is taking.

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