The rapidity
with which this new art form has gained institutional acceptance and tacit
recognition as 'art' is remarkable,2
particularly given the constituent contradictions posed by Cyberart to
the traditional values ascribed to art. It is not made clear at the exhibition
exactly how Cyberart has been reconciled to the established canons of art,
and its inclusion is not indicative of a universal critical acceptance
of Cyberart. A methodology is needed to deal both with Cyberart and traditional
art, which in turn provokes the need to reassess our fundamental methods
of conceiving art and to develop a new ideological relationship with art.
Media theorist Marshall
McLuhan reprioritised form above content in his Understanding Media
of 1964. This emphasis upon the form of the medium provides a methodology
to engage with traditional and cyber forms of art simultaneously. I will
approach Cyberart by considering it in terms of the relationship that it
engenders between the medium and the body, and how this contrasts to art
which has preceded it. For this purpose, medium will be understood as an
intervening substance, and an agency for transmitting or communicating
information3
which is, furthermore, a cultural communication device incorporating the
elements of time, space, and sensory perception. In this way, the body
will be seen as something ideologically constructed by nature of the ideals
that are inscribed upon it.4
McLuhan claims that
the medium is the message. By invoking this claim in the situation where
the medium is a machine, the examination of Cyberart in terms of the medium/body
relationship provokes a consideration of the enmeshment of man and machine.5
The integration of these two elements has been facilitated by a number
of factors, particularly that in the electric age as a consequence of the
increased speed of the medium it is now possible for media to keep pace
with the body, and there is the new potential for the art medium to engage
a wider spectrum of the viewers' sensual experiences. While Walter Benjamin
had considered this sensual experience of film, with Cyberart there has
been an evolution from a hot, mechanised art medium to a cold, automated
medium that has been accompanied by a change to a non-rational mode of
organisation that permits a new commensurability with the intuitive manner
in which the human brain alone can function.6
There has also been a withering of the "aura" (to borrow Benjamin's term)
surrounding art which allows a greater possibility for the conveyance of
the body with media. However, while the medium here is machine, and while
these factors all engender an internalisation and enmeshment of man and
machine, Cyberart operates to preserve the authority of man over machine.
Man is prevented from ultimately being posited as Cyborg, or a mere automaton,
as Cyberart functions precisely by engaging and preserving the faculty
that asserts the ascendancy of man over machine, that of creativity, imagination,
and originality.
To understand Cyberart's
balance between medium and body, it is useful to trace Cyberart against
previous art forms to consider the changing emphases in the relationship
between the form of the medium and the content of the medium.
Pre-Renaissance
art was primarily concerned with conveying narrative, particularly in
religious art. Sacral art sought to communicate with the "illiterate"
population, and this had little concern for the medium of art. This
disregard for the medium developed into an elaborate denial of the medium
under the perspectival system of spatial organisation that Alberti developed
in 1435. As this view remained unchallenged in mainstream Western art
for the following centuries, the illusory three-dimensional representation
solely of the visual sensation rendered the art medium transparent and
enforced the distancing and incommunicability of the viewer. As McLuhan
noted, the 'content' of the art medium here was another medium,7
which distracted our attention from the original medium. While twentieth-century
Cubism later revoked this denial of the medium and opened up the possibility
for art to elicit sensations beyond the visual,8
the development of the Modernist abstraction of the New York School
in the 1950s went to the contrasting extreme of demanding a purity of
medium such that content was eliminated.9
In the previous decade, however, Cyberart has established a balance
between medium and content such that there is a pervading awareness
of the medium, and also an exploration of the content of the internet
medium. While Post-object performance art had grappled with the medium-content
balance in the 1970s,10
Cyberart succeeds where it failed because of its constituent ability
to be global, contemporaneous, interactive and perpetuating. The retention
of the awareness of its medium permits Cyberart to develop the relationship
between the medium and the body, creating the potential for Cyberart
to operate as a whole-body, multisensual extension of man.
Illustration of
this and examples of how the internet medium of electronic communication
is explored can be seen in the works featured in the internet category
of the Whitney 2000 Biennial, (http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/2kb_fs.html.)11
Sampling Broadway, by Annette Weintraub12
is an example of a work in which the artist has examined the full range
of possibilities available in this cyber medium to create an evocation
of place, with a result which is significantly denser and more compelling
than has been previously possible. While a painted image may perhaps
only capture a single, isolated view, locked into a particular moment
and time,13
Sampling Broadway constitutes a virtual tour that allows viewers
to actively negotiate their passage through five Broadway locations
such as 'pandemonium', 'hegemony' and 'respite' by drawing upon live
video footage, text, voice-over narration and audio clips of street
noise. This creates an experience that simultaneously appeals to a variety
of senses and, unlike traditional art, (which is a finite, structured
experience), cyberart is a living, contemporaneous experience, which
commences, evolves and concludes in direct response to the physical
involvement of viewers at their computer screen. Rather than representing
Broadway at the moment when the artist was involved with the work, (much
as a painted portrait takes a snapshot only of one visual representation
at the single moment the artist and subject were unified), this work
provides a real-time experience in which the content breathes in unison
with the viewer. Instead of a single location, a fluid transition between
five disparate arenas is possible in this environment. In this context,
both the ritual function of art which Benjamin discussed, and the art
medium itself are that of communication. Here there is a compulsion
for the viewer to become physically involved with the work of art, and
with the corresponding withering of the aura surrounding the artwork,
the viewer is no longer discouraged from becoming involved with the
work of art. This allows the final elimination of any distance intervening
between the two.14
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1
http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/2kb_fs.html
2 Cyberart is barely a decade old,
whereas video art had existed for twenty years before it received such
recognition.
3 Definitions 3-4, Collins Concise
English Dictionary.
4 Gerstner, D.A., Film 301, 2000,
Lecture 12 'Gender and the Re-Writing of Media Practices'
5 McLuhan argued for a promotion of
form above content in Part I of Understanding Media, and then
used Part II to apply this to a broad range of media, ranging from print,
to radio, photography, games, telephonic and movies. However, as McLuhan
did not extend this thesis of 'the medium is the message' beyond advertising
and photography to a consideration of art, I will do this here. This
idea of media as an extension of man was also raised by Andy Warhol,
who talked of having an 'affair' with television, and 'marrying' his
tape recorder Andy Warhol Philosophy p.26.
6 Several theorists, such as Hugo
Munsterberg, made similar claims about film in 1916.
7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media (MIT Press, 1964), p.8. With the example for religious art,
the content is speech, or the representation of the spoken word of God.
8 For example, this allowed the possibility
for Surrealism to explore the world of the mind rather than the physical
world, or Futurism to explore the relationship between machinery, movement
and speed in the machine age.
9 Of course such scholars as Anna
Chaves and Michael Leja argue that the 'content' is not eliminated from
these works.
10 Post-object art attacked the
primacy of the art-object, the commodification and elitism of art, and
the monetary and ideological concerns which are associated with this.
The emphasis was instead upon a return to a conceptual basis of art.
By instead utilising a performance medium. Post-object art intended
to achieve a more democratic art which invited viewer participation,
and which removed any sense of elitism. However the extreme nature which
characterised this art often shocked, alienated, and created psychological
discomfort for the viewers, as was the case with New Zealand examples
such as Crucifixion Performance by Andrew Drummond (1979), and
Peter Roach's Suspension Piece (1978). In addition to this alienating
nature, this art was also limited by its localised, and impermanent
nature, which are all problems which Cyberart has overcome.
11 I will restrict my examination
of Cyberart here to the works selected for the Biennial. The proliferation
of Cyberart on the internet is vast, and the definitions are broad.
www.lastplace.com offers 72 definitions
of Cyberart, (most of which emphasise ideas of communication and shared
community), and an exploration of what, precisely, constitutes Cyberart
is beyond the scope of this exercise. The Whitney selections are taken
as representative of the current mode of Cyberart as these have been
selected by a respected institution and posited as art alongside what
examples of what is traditionally perceived as art. The re-evaluation
of the idea of the 'work of art' in the cyber-context which I make here
will subsequently provoke questions as to the exact definition of Cyberart,
and whether, for example, www.ruckus.com
constitutes a work of art.
12 http://www.turbulence.org/Works/broadway/index.html
13 This is a characteristic of perspectival
organisation.
14 The idea of distancing the common
person from art was manifested by bourgeoisie ideas of art and elitism.
However as Cyberart is mediated by computers, the use of which for many
is now an everyday activity, the viewer is more comfortable engaging
with the art, and more likely to experience Cyberart in the home or
office, instead of in a more intimidating, elitist environment such
as a museum. The greater comfort interacting with the art contributes
also to the reduction of distance between the viewer and the art.
