TELEMATIC EMBRACE:
Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness
By Roy Ascott
Edited and with an essay by Edward A. Shanken
The University of California Press; 427 pages; $44.95
In the early 1960s,
with the end of the Cold War still decades ahead, the Department
of
Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency began to envision a computerized
communications network in which discrete packets of information could be sent
by numerous paths, ending up at the same terminals at the same time. So that,
in the event of a nuclear attack, with its massive physical and electromagnetic
disruption, vital messages could still get through. Around this time, too, Roy
Ascott, a young English artist and teacher with a knack for writing theory was
preparing his first major essay, "The
Construction of Chance." Although the "telematics" he was beginning
to
sketch also consisted of "computer-mediated communication networking between
geographically dispersed individuals and institutions," it wasn’t predicated
on nuclear war, but on avoiding such catastrophic failures in communication in
the first
place. His premise was that, although art "works without practical power,
(it) is responsible to a considerable extent for the direction in which society
moves." This
is not the art of the marketplace, which is concerned "with appearance,
with the look
of things, with surface reality," but with "the democratization of
meaning (and) the democratization of communications, that is to say a shared
participation in the
creation and ownership of reality."
Ascott’s visionary path began with his study of cybernetics pioneer
Norbert Wiener, paleontologist/theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who envisioned
the "noosphere," "the engendering and subsequent development
of all stages of
the mind, this grand phenomenon," and the artist Marcel Duchamp, whose "The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or Large Glass (1915-1923)" engenders
the
qualities and complexities of Ascott’s reflective mind. As his work as a
media artist and his theoretical writing are concomitant, into this heady mix
he stirred chance
operations based on the Chinese "I Ching: Book of Changes," and investigations
into practices such as Behavioral Art. But it is his experiences with shamans
of the Mato
Grosso, with whom he ingested the entheogenic ("searching for the God within")
drug, ayahuasca, that sets him apart, because, as he so beautifully states
it, "The shaman is the one who ‘cares’ for consciousness," and
has a "profound empathy of mutual attraction, ‘love, if you will.’" Thus,
the concept of embracing telematics.
In Brazil, Ascott experienced consciousness at ground level. Here the artist’s
vision of reciprocity between hi-technology and deep insight began to focus
a sharp pedagogical
mind ("All art is, in some sense didactic: every artist is, in some way,
setting out
to instruct.") that doesn’t shy away from visceral insights ("It
can feel
not just like an extension of mind, but like an extension of the body…"),
along with conceiving neologisms, such as cyberbotony, telenoetics, and cyberception,
that
ironically yoke and extend body, mind, technology, spirituality, and earth.
When the Internet is discussed
in the popular media, it is almost always about "dot.coms," scams, pornography, or government plans for
snooping and regulation.. Rarely mentioned is the international network
of thousands of artists and writers who are developing a digital-based
aesthetics that will shape the body of human culture during this century.
Maybe they haven’t yet realized the scope and importance of the
movement. Or, perhaps, most critics, who were brought up on books and
material art, feel intimidated by the technology, and will leave it to
the next generation to figure out. While, forty years ago Roy Ascott
was already interested in telecommunications as an art, exemplified by
his one-man show at the Molton Gallery in London, in which he presented,
in the words of Edward A. Shanken, who wrote a superb 88-page introduction
to
Ascott’s place in contemporary art history for this book, "a system
of
interrelated feedback loops linking various conceptual ideas." Telematics,
as Shanken
writes, "provides a context for interactive aesthetic encounters and facilitates
artistic collaborations among globally dispersed individuals." What is valued
is
bandwidth, shuttle points, clock speed, storage capacity, "and the systematic
relationship between artist, artwork, and audience as part of a social network
of
communication."
At a time when libraries stacked
with mass-marketed books on the Internet, the
twenty-eight essays and projects collected in "Telematic Embrace," many
of which have never been readily available in print before, are a welcome contribution,
both to academic and general discourse. Presently, Ascott, an Adjunct Professor
in the Department of Design/Media Arts at UCLA, and Director of the Centre for
Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, at the University of Wales College,
along with his successful career as
a media artist, is exploring the "post-biological culture," in which "the
moist materialization of art…will integrate symbolically with our own biology," healing
the narrow individualist and nationalistic concerns that are plaguing our planet
with endless cycles of hunger, epidemics, and war. "Intelligence is spreading
everywhere," he writes with emblematic optimism, "leaking out of our
brains and
spilling into our homes, our tools, our vehicles…"
(Published in slightly shorter version.)
© San Francisco Chronicle 2003