And, with Kant, we might assume how a skeptical rather than positivist approach could bring the whole problem of what inheres to “digital art” to new fertile epistemic terrain, so that any possibility of a definition could best be approached through analysis of some misperceptions and problem assumptions — let us examine some popular claims, perhaps the principal of these being that “digital media art is entirely new.” At first, this claim seems too self-evident for critical interrogation, but how does it reconcile with the fact that problems of expression, viewing, experiencing, and being have predated every medium of aesthetic expression? That the medium appears new, then, must be reconciled with what is being put through it in the form of new work, work whose problems like those of any other art, come to the artistic process as antecendents of a medium, not as results of it. In another, perhaps less cavalier claim which we could term under reductionist relativism, digital media art is seen as but one kind of thinking or viewing among many possible perceptual practices. What complicates this claim is the underlying premise of the medium itself, whose operation constitutes one kind of singularity — of form — while itself being wrapped in (and producing) an uncountably sweeping perceptual variety of expressive and interpretive encounters. Naturally, then, we might propose the logical opposite of this latter claim, concluding therefore that that digital media art is medium-specific or medium-centric. Perhaps this would seem feasible because it is more central, more constant to questions of the medium and of the art within it. If, after all, we take as our point of departure the nature of the digital medium, how unconnected can any notion of art within it be? The flaw in this tempting position is that art is not and never has been defined in a medium-specific way. It has been exemplified by media like sculpture or oil on canvas, but never credibly defined through, within, or by implication, because of them. Those are precisely the kinds of reductive claims that have proved most dated, most ideological, most axiomatically inflexible in light of new art — with the passage of time, Clement Greenberg’s arguments increasingly appear as the newest installment in the many histories of outmoded classifications of aesthetic production. For digital media art — again, however defined — issues that transcend medium cannot be considered secondary; an artist may appear to create because of the digital medium, but cannot create only because of it, and this begs the problem of what lies outside this implied “not only”, since it ties what is digital to what compels artistic creation in every other form or medium.

In fact, this “not only” is already woven into the crisis of reception that contemporary art confronted when its own mediumhood began to explode out from under conventional forms. While subtle, the departure of contemporary sculpture from the rubric of its modern legacy did not come with the advantage that the contemporary sculptural reading could be extended to new forms in space. Instead, a decidedly modernist — not to say Romantic — sensibility has to this day prevailed as a centerpiece of sculptural interpretation. It is as if, ornithologically speaking, the modern pelican were still seen as the reptilian pterosaur from which it emerged. If the universe of art evolves through media transitions like the animal kingdom evolves through genetic ones, the extinction of any specific form says nothing about the question of life itself, which for art is the ontological question. And so, to read Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc with a modernist or Romantic eye is to constrain contemporary sculpture to a prehistoric reading. It is not an object that interested Serra, but a process of viewing, a phenomenological commitment of physical order, something that has taken the place of aesthetic convention, for which reason he could assert that

The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer’s movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.

Need we really state that this articulation, one in which position in projected space becomes the experience of the work, is completely alien to nineteenth century sculpture? Yet I draw on the example of Tilted Arc as a case, one to which I frequently return, of the troubling triumph of spectatorship over engagement, of the primordial over the postmodern, that has persisted in popular thought, perhaps with the ironic twist  — given the forced destruction of Tiltec Arc — that it is the new rather than the archaic that has now been made extinct. If the viewer of the 1980’s (not so long ago, is it) could not engage with Tilted Arc as legitimate art, how can the present user universe be brought to engage with digital media as equally legitimate? It is in each of these cases — and in other new media –  not a spectorial aesthetic, but an engagement aesthetic that defines the new.  And so it is to a detailed critique of the engagement aesthetic that I will turn next.

The schematization you see here is a speculation on the move from mechanism to reception that some electronic works have been fostering.

For some time now, I’ve been looking at the problem of what seems like anything like a distinguishing ontology for digital media art and literature. It seems grandiosely Romantic, and not a little naïve, to expect that from such a proclamation an objective set of markers might emerge such that our feeling for a contingent abstraction like the aesthetic and literary through the electronic can articulate distinctly from artistic impulses, processes, and products in supports that are not electronically mediated. This question extends the inquiry of aesthetic ontology that new expressive traditions ask themselves from time to time. As a case of art – that is, as aesthetic material – film’s own ontological ground was explored by a long procession of deep thinking compressed into less than seven decades, to include the writings of Sigfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, Stanley Cavell, Susan Sontag, Irving Singer, and rather less cogently, André Bazin and Slavoj Žižek. By invoking the name of ontology it ought to be clear, then, that I am referring to theory, not criticism; Kracauer is theory; Pauline Kael is criticism. Theory’s importance can be gauged by its influence on criticism; criticism’s importance lies in its effect on the public, to whom it addresses itself. Theory’s audience is different; it listens and speaks to the broadest swath of history. Criticism is more constrained to (and by) specific works and topical trends. Criticism cannot address areas that are central to philosophy but which theory can graze because of its connection to the structural foundations of the philosophical.

To further clarify terms here, critique is philosophy, as we know from the title of many a great treatise, while criticism is the hovering over a critique without the stance of a rigorous framework. One of these post-critical concerns is the question of ontology. Reminding ourselves in the twentieth century of a much older lineage of inquiry, we know – perhaps most recently from Heidegger – that ontology is not theory, it is an interrogation of essence. Framing the question of new media art and literature as an interrogation of this kind impels us to think in less ideologically constrained terms, and while ideas of an “essence” may be both naïve and elusive, the notion of process seems much closer to what we might be seeking. For if we imagine anything like a “discipline” of digital aesthetics and poetics at this historical moment, we are soon caught by the care with which electronically mediated creative expression has been chronicled both as process and as result. In digital art, the result, as a visual product, has been the materia prima, whereas in electronic literature, it is the process that has enjoyed greater exposition in monographs, blogs, journals, conferences, groups, and organizations like this one, so that its discursive space is filled as much by objects of expression as by writerly documents of its functionality.

It is the latter of these lines of effort that has enabled electronic literature to begin its successful path toward legitimization within the academy. Some of the humanities have become digital humanities by – perhaps  temporarily – coming to the engineering paradigm and looking empirically at what comprises mechanisms for organizing memes of principally linguistic expression. In varying degrees, the aesthetization of these mechanisms has reflected the language of information systems and has not avoided showing the computational character of works of electronic literature. That books have emerged with titles like Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines suggests that the discourse of industry has become embedded into that of poetics, aesthetics, and creative expression. This synthesis of tongues is largely responsible for our ability as critics to speak of textual fluidity and poetic process in an objective manner unlike ever before, and has bestowed a degree of stability to concepts and observations that a discipline needs. Freud followed the same pattern in the establishment of psychoanalysis, adopting metaphors like “pressure” and “sublimation” from the language of mechanical engineering for a new poetics of subconscious motivation.

I am of course not claiming that electronic art and literature harbor scientific ambitions, but rather that they now reflect a structural foundation that was lacking before major contributions to the idea of an aesthetic or poetic framework emerged, even while computational explanations of poiesis were there from the beginning. Responding to a need for objective discussion of texts and games, Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext in the late 1990’s exerted the same formalist impact on digital theory that Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism had on literary theory half a century earlier. Such was Frye’s objectivist call that not until almost ten years later, with Barthes’s idea of the writerly text, Derrida’s deconstruction and Iser’s work on reader-response does attention turn back again to complex phenomenologies of literary reception, away from the objectivist centrality of structural relations as functional constituents of a literary work.

From Exposition

I mention all of this so as to acknowledge this return from mechanism to subjectivism as the central experience of the text in this discussion. However, is isn’t human subjectivism that I want to discuss here, but rather that of the text or art machine, so the discussion is not about a full return, but rather a helical recurrence, a flyover, based neither on structural/medium nor reader-reception terms, but on those of a third path, unique to electronic art and literature, which come into view when we can feel a work escaping its own expressive plane in favor of a recursive observation of its own process, that is, in what we might imagine a mirror phenomenology. What is the demonstrable evidence of this subjectivity? It is the work’s aesthetic when it operates in tension with its own frame, its own Dasein, its being-there present to us as an automatic apparatus but one that is powered by a move toward the transcendence its own framed representation, exposing reflective qualities that resemble those of human engagement itself, which they prompt.

Interested in suggesting something beyond language, beyond representation, I am invoking the impression of a mirror so as speak of the being of a particular genus in some very familiar examples of electronic art and literature. So the process in question is not presentation but rather the escape from presentation, where trajectories or acts of perception, understood as a line traced from the object to the viewer, open out onto something different, where the work additionally behaves as its own viewer or reader. That is, the work assumes and performs the position of its Other, the vantage that we have historically occupied.

In order to effect this move, the work of art or literature must transcend the conventional conditions of its own medium as a structure of exhibition – that is, the conditions of mere presentation that I encapsulate with the first Exposition state in the opening diagram. To operate while suggesting a sense of itself, it would bring us to contemplate how it could be effecting something of its own contemplation. But why the transcendence of its own medium-hood? In order to operate to show, to illustrate, to demonstrate and to convey its own reading, a work must invert the structure provided by its medium so as to become a passive listener, reader, or beholder, and in so doing, is no longer operating through an original transmissive function, it is refuting that function by becoming the Other, the target of itself.

Perhaps we could say that such mirroring exists here in a limited form of Lacan’s view of the child’s first consciousness of individuation. There, the specular image, the image spéculaire, refers both to the simultaneous appearance of the body on a reflective surface and to the reflective act that the child experiences in seeing this second image, this “little other”. The mirroring act gradually extends from something limited to a physical medium to what is performed by humans interacting with the child, where the child can see his or her actions mirrored in those of the adult in gestural play. By implication, we can take Lacan’s argument to imply a further milestone in the development of social cognition as the exactitude of this interaction gives way to looser forms of dialogue and relationship, enabling the child to move from the expectation of strict reflection to one of unrestricted response as the primary means of engagement with the world. This amplification of the mirror process is what permits, without overwhelming confusion, the emergence of behavior outside of the expectation frame of the habitus, the environment as an always-there arrangement of phenomena. That is, with the appearance of the Other, the regularities of the observable field begin to perform differently but have not yet become understood as entirely self-aware or self-observing, the Other is still an other, and the notion of a projection whose source is what is doing the looking is not yet established, even though a rustle of deviance in the framework of the image is already evident. This is the realm of reality as the performative apparatus and in electronic textuality, it is that to which the poem For All Seasons conforms.

Transgression : Mueller’s For All Seasons,

A case of this transcendence is the secondary use of letters and words as nontextual objects, thus denying their literary function as tokens of language, as we see in Andreas Mueller’s familiar For All Seasons, where a quartet of prose pages establishes, by way of exposition, some memory embedded in the author’s experience during each season of the year. In each case, the linguistic system becomes subject to breakdown, the electronic medium showing its characteristic dynamism in allowing the text’s words to be participants in a transcendence from language and escape from the structure of textual reading, out into a figurative evocation of the recalled memory in question.

Figure 1. Andreas Mueller, For All Seasons. Software.

But is playful rupture in this text’s formal transcendence – no doubt a literary purist might balk at this flouting of print’s function – the sum of what we experience in For All Seasons? After all, it ends – as concept and process – as it began: as a case of transcendence, as an inverting departure from nullified image within a formal text to nullified text within a formal image, yet one without return or resolution using those same terms of form, image, or space. The escape from one form into the emergence of another is articulated through the mimetic suggestibility of natural forces at work – fish gliding through streams, the pull of gravity on falling snow, and the turbulent vortices of windstorms – and in their modification of our reading from a poetic to aesthetic one, and our relationship to the text from a lexical to a visual one. So although textuality recedes and imagery emerges, the transition is purely surface-level and retinal, if clever. The integrity of the narrative is reinforced by this translation of form because the electronic medium is equidistant from either form, text or image. Its intimacy is only with the modality of dynamic change and translation. But that very closeness to processes of alteration is what allows us to imagine it as a medium for reflection, for altering the position of the instrument itself from something invisible or transparent to something self-indicative. And in fact, for something closer to post-transcendental reflection on the work, we don’t have to resort to electronic media at all. We can imagine two examples, one each from the world of postmodern visual and the postmodern literary.

Transgression : Decollage and Humument

Reflection, always an act of turning-about, is especially evident in the arsenal of conceptual artists, who since Duchamp’s physical ninety-degree turn of non-art objects into new poses have taken materials out of their original contexts of expression and repositioned them so as to interrogate how they contribute to a kind of Cultural Invisible. Finding new basic material not in visual art’s readymade but in the already-made of advertising, Jacques Villeglé has for five decades spoken through disruption by assembling new visual conversations out of elements once employed as tokens in that space.

Figure 2. Jacques Villegle, Carrefour Sylvia Montfort – Picasso, 1973. décollage mounted on canvas.

Wrenching poster chunks from their wall sites throughout Paris and fighting – or perhaps colluding – with the adhesive that fixed them into place, Villeglé’s reconfigured shards are subsequently reorchestrated into new visual orders entirely distinct from those of their origins. That messages of material consumption now speak as elements of aesthetic production suggests that reflective media are always appropriative. And while the scenes of playful reuse set the conceptual tone of these works, the ghost of culture industry hovers persistently over them. It is a tension between the original, as intended perceptual and the new, as inverted conceptual, so that, echoing with hypnotic reference to the world from which they were torn; these shards are hostages of reference between that and that other no less constructed world of conceptual art. The same approach appears in the classic and all-too-well known re-text A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Tom Phillips’s usurpation of an original text, rendered essentially inconsequential if not by history, then by his conversion of it into a palimpsest, is an example of the secondary discourse of de-literature. The book’s pages, each defaced, or re-faced, in a unique way, foster a new reading through a selection of words that does not conform to the text’s conventional order.

Figure 3. Tom Phillips, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Page 210, Tetrad Press Edition, 1970[-75]

The transcendence in evidence in Villeglé and Phillips is marked by an indisputable escape from the work’s original structure, where dissimulation inverts into revelation, not only of the second reading enforced by the new field of legibility created on each page, but more widely as the system of denial of the base text in which one identity yields to a new set of relations comprising both another text and another textual practice. This comes nearer to the mirror phenomenology of which I am speaking, but by nonetheless lacking evidence of its own self-observation, cannot be said to converge back onto the reflexive.

Reflexivity: Industrial Wall Panels and The Readers Project

In fact, the move is nontrivial. Works that appear to behave with mirror-like reflexivity cannot simply choose to do so, they must first establish themselves with the same attention to structure that static representative works possess. This foundation, which conveys a kind of propositional logic or order as a first step, is necessary as a basis for the subsequent refutation through which the work exercises any perceptible transcendence, what I call an impulse to freedom from the strictures not of its form but its function as a representative object, as named by the second stage here. This transcendence is often the final destination for much electronic art and literature; it finds its ontological fulfillment in the breakdown of the order, logic, or structure that was first exposed. But only when the work makes itself part of the solipsistic process of its own being can it express as icon and index simultaneously.

Figure 4. Andrew Neumann, Quartet, 2005. Panel, solid state video, LCD screen, and electronics.

Here we enter the world of Andrew Neumann, for example, in whose series of Industrial Wall Panels there hangs an unsettling symmetry of perception locked in the structured of work that allows us to see observe it observing itself and showing us both its presentation and representation in a single field of view. We might moreover observe that the process of self-observation is a transparent mark or index into its own logic and flow of operation. This is crucial to the notion of a machine-level subjectivity; we must see it having a feeling for itself as an organism.

Neumann’s panels capture the reflexive potential in sculpture. For a case of reflexivity in electronic literature that is equally centrifugal, there is the compound plurality of autonomous textual readings known as The Readers Project. Horizontally landscaped across two pages with ample margins, this work appears at first sight to operate as a conventional text for a conventional reading. Soon, however, notice is taken of the fact that the text, already in sublimated grey against its white backdrop, is itself is some flux, it isn’t moving but it isn’t stable. We might notice that between the plane of its presentation and that of our viewerly observation is an intermediate layer or process that affects this transparency. What is being altered is evidence of what is being performed; as the work exists principally not to present texts but to present readings, and offers us both.

Figure 5. John Cayley and Daniel Howe, The Readers Project (screen capture).

The chromatic shapes that traverse over the text are readers – machines which like human readers, possess specific behaviors aligned around the selection of words that conforms to an order of meaning. What The Readers Project documents is the distance between the method of reading and that of meaning-making that for us is one and the same. But the distinction is worth contemplating, for lexical scanning is dependent only on the regular presence of text, but to make meaning, a departure from that foundation is necessary, and this is the basis of all subjective reading. What The Readers Project makes strange is what is to us so familiar, and this strangeness, with its aesthetic logic is based on the fact that each of the readers here, shown in its own color, operates according to its own trajectory, the rules of which are unique to each.

Following the acrostic tradition explored by Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, and other explorers of structural transgression through axial reordering, the first reader, a Mesostic, selects words for reading when these possess a letter comprising a pre-intended word. The reader wants to predetermine what it reads by creating words from letters cutting across other words, as shown in the highlighted uppercase element. Seen separately, the reader is a selection system intended to reflect the creation of a word not in any of the words it reads, and therefore its notion of “reading” refers rather to concordance, a process of revealing word patterns constructed perpendicularly to actual texts.

Figure 6. The Readers Project, partial view of a mesostic reading.
The vertical word “READING” is found across lines of text and
is marked by capitalization within the horizontal text body.

This is not the only reading process; there are two others. There is a nearest-neighbor reader whose proclivity is to move toward the right and front, selecting words that fit any natural language trigram found to be frequently present in Google search retrievals performed in real time. This process, associative at a local level, is led by a Markov chain of terms capable of being “distracted” by lexical encounters with any term’s leading neighbor. The product of this reading resembles a meandering search for the “correct phrase” that is common experience to all speakers and writers.

Figure 7. The Readers Project, partial view of a nearest-neighbor reading.

A third reader moves in the opposite, perhaps entirely counterintuitive direction – left and up, holding in memory the last two words it has read and seeking phrasal connections with any of its neighbors that may contains such term collocations. This reflects an entirely stream-of-consciousness reading against the conventions of Western text, exercised directionally but by implication in an ontological way against the narratival offers of text’s continuities.

Figure 8. The Readers Project, partial view of a collocation reading.

If earlier on J. Hillis Miller read deconstruction as “not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air”[i] it was perhaps fitting to use this very dismantling as the basis for reflexivity in a word that reads itself, posing the question not of what a text is, but what it can be when the medium realizes its own subjectivity. This domain of subjectivity is vastly broader and more influential than might be imagined, it is evident in horizons, like Wittgenstein’s early logic, far from the world of thought as structured centrally by individual perception, That is, at first, and because it emerges from the most acerbic corner of modern analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: has something to say about formal logic, which is to say, the denial of subjective readings. Except, of course, that his movements within the structure of logic are entirely from within that body, not from the removed position of logic’s pedigree of declarative otherness. So when he observes that “The internal relation which orders a series is equivalent to the operation by which one term arises from another” (5.23) he describes not action from the margins but from the core of motivation, which is to say, the possibility of acquaintance with conditions of truth from within, where the order exists not as form but as cause of form, cause of meaning. And that is a phenomenological compression that likewise comprises the truth conditions of text as a world of propositions and of image pictures, even if they mutually appear to cancel one another out.

One culprit of this inconsistency is the duality of implication that associates in the name of form; it appears as simultaneously as a noun, to characterize the phenomenal appearance of a genre — as in poetic form — and synonymously as an adjective — the formal properties of the sculptural. These uses seem homologous, identical, equated with each other in the semantic intent to which they address themselves. And the terminological ubiquity of these words suggests that we have found in them something both sweepingly abstract and comforting in their adequacy as signifiers that connect author with reader in commonly shared meaning. We might have learned by now that terms with these features, abstraction and comfort of reference, are like the word “God”, ubiquitous not because everyone understands them equally but, rather the opposite, because they are taken in entirely idiosyncratic, subjective, personal, individualized, and therefore unequal ways, such that the philosophical distinction between sense and reference that we take as beginning with Gottlob Frege is relevant to these misunderstandings.

One salient example of the asymmetry of expression between sense and reference as consequential to form came up in a recent discussion I had with one of my second-year MFA students about the structure of her sculptural work. In this Digital+Media department, all students are exploring the synthesis of new media — not necessarily digital — and a more traditional medium of the visual arts, such as sculpture, film, photography, and other two dimensional protocols. My student’s work, involving the use of a chemically denatured conflux of tear gas and pepper spray — two weaponized gases typically used in the social extreme of the “political demonstration”, that moment of engagement,  beyond the orderly one of the “rally”, when an otherwise conforming public becomes agitated into the role of “demonstrators” and police, too, become polarized into the mode of military response signified by their black uniforms, shields, masks, and riot gear. In the context of the student’s project, the problem was how to use this gaseous transformation in a statement that would also physically involve the work’s viewer. Her principal idea was to create a booth that the visitor would enter, but beyond that, no other possibilities suggested themselves. I made several suggestions, responding to the need for closing the phenomenological gap of between the two very disparate worlds of a political confrontation on one hand and the anesthetized confines of a gallery setting on the other. But to the artist, these all seemed too obvious, perhaps too didactic, and perhaps they were, so after two hours of visual hypothesis, we adjourned without resolution. The problem here lay in how the polemical force of the medium — its natural use makes sense only in a law enforcement context — could not be brought into association, could not be referenced from within the gallery’s very abstracted world of demonstration. The work is one whose form, as it stood, overflowed with sense but was devoid of reference. And for the potential in a work of art’s aesthetic contemplation to become one of sublime transformation, both some feeling of sense and of reference must be experienced, however inchoately. The abyss that threatened the integrity of this work, the condition that maintained in a contingent and still-disintegrated (non-integrated) state was decided entirely by the form of the work. For perhaps the installation, as a traversable glass box, was too formally indeterminate to permit the sense-reference gap to be closed through any line of associative inference.

But this is not the same as asserting that the sense and reference of a work must point to the same discursive space. To be sure, this distance is already an unavoidable byproduct of the interpretive ambiguity that we regularly encounter — to hear of the name of Duchamp as a canonical instance of reference, for example, is to open dialogue to several new senses, to include the country and zeitgeist of the artist; the man and the prominence of his family; and the origins of conceptual expression in art. But Duchamp intuitively grasped the sense-reference problem almost too well, for the readymade makes exactly the case I am speaking of, namely, something in whose aesthetic ontology, reference undermines, refutes, and contradicts sense. By extension, that which has been called ‘technoculture’ participates in this sense-reference dissonance, for which reason it has been called “Anti-Aesthetic”, as we know from arguments presented by Habermas, Baudrillard, Jameson, Krauss and others in Hal Foster’s eponymous book. Nor was this condition one of confusion only for popular culture — the enlightened aficionado, too, was now lost at sea in this procession of divergent signifiers, so that Habermas, in Foster’s work, would observe that “Bourgeois art had two expectations of the audiences. On the one hand, the layman who enjoyed art should educate himself to become an expert. On the other hand, he should also behave as a competent consumer who uses art and relates aesthetic experiences to his own life problems. This second, and seemingly harmless, manner of experiencing art has lost its radical implications exactly because it had a confused relation to the attitude of being an expert and a professional.”

That neither expectation has blossomed from the potential to the real has led some  (albeit in varying degrees of satisfaction) — Arthur Danto, Donald Kuspit, Suzi Gablik — to read the postmodern condition as synonymous with an end of art, in a post-dialectical reprise of Hegel’s argument three centuries earlier. This rupture is of course, only the break of sense from reference transposed to a larger scope, for sense here is history itself, and reference, of course, is its anchored optic in the world of art, whose conventions, once sacrosanct, have been superseded by a turn from the past, so that the “present”, the “anti-aesthetic”, and the “ahistorical” mean equally.

Varieties of Form as Categorical Signifier

While to the visual arts historian, the two centuries that have marked that gradual dissolution of painting’s compositional tradition, most frequently chronicled as the abandonment of figuration and subsequent embrace of impressionist, abstract, and contemporary directions may seem a notably sudden period of aesthetic revolution, we know that a more temporally compressed and ubiquitously evident schism around the question of form has been, in roughly half that time, come much further. I am speaking about both the radicalization of literature and poetry as paroxystically free forms in the noun sense and by dramatic opposition, the formal retention of that manifested marking of the word on the page that is the concern of typography, where form operates entirely as an adjective.

What, in the past twenty years, have been doubtlessly very inspiring discussions on the fanciful flight of textual organization and structure in digital media, specifically how speculations about how the literary has become mechanized through new experiences for reading rooted in the earliest hypertext systems and extending out to the most contemporary projects, has scarcely been been tempered by the equally dramatic contrast, one which we must now read as refusal, of typography’s immobility from essentially the same formal concerns that print has adopted since Gutenberg’s time, and even long before that. For in this case, the marvel that was movable type relied on the mechanical galley; its flexible frame could operate as a press plate only by the process of compression on two axes of force, even though the consequence of only one of those has been contemplated by formal criticism and expressive freedom. The more famous of these forces is, of course, the vertical compression of the press’s inked platen onto the paper, resulting in the printed page that has given us the basis for all distributed knowledge prior to the dominance of the electronic network. Since in print, this compression produces the impression, it therefore produces the content. Much less frequently discussed is the other, a lateral compression, under which the page elements were assembled into a single place by squeezing them together into the galley proof, tightened with vice grips into a rectangular enclosure and then positioned under the press for subsequent inking and vertical compression.

That textuality became in every sense a system, not merely for the organization of elements in place but for keeping such elements, as social entities would be in the polis, in a state of order, is evident from the exalted status that the printed word was allowed to occupy in the architectural and sculptural domains, where it was to be placed above everything foundational like columns and plinths and below the most privileged entities of consideration, like deities and leaders. The column of Trajan in Rome operates as a testament not merely to an emperor but to the function of text as the medium for logical historicism of the emperors’ two victories in the epic campaigns against the Dacians, mirrored in the process of writing itself — all documented on a frieze that, rather than appearing traditionally in the middle as a singular layer supporting the cornice, is instead a full scroll of text over 600 feet in length in bas relief that rotates spirally upward to culminate at the pedestal where the sculptural portrait of Trajan proper could be said to begin. There is but one view of Trajan at the top but twenty-three rotations of the historical text; this work is both about the status of one mortal and the memorializing power of the word. Modern typeface designations, including the Italic, Antiqua, and Roman, confirm how the typographic roots of two millenia remain within contemporary textual conventions, even if many were reconfigured, reformed, if you like, with the cursiva humanistica of the Renaissance. To be sure, that the field of typography has not moved far from its historical fidelity to this past — the flare at the end of a letter terminal that is known as the serif comes to us from ancient Rome, with today’s principal decisions being whether it should be Adnate (flowing with curvature from its connecting element) or Abrupt — or from its fealty to conservatively geometrical order as visual organization is a problem we shall consider below.

Trajan's Column, Rome

Speaking conceptually of the second compression in the mechanical production of text, it would have been fair to call the typesetter a sculptor, since in the medium of molten metals both employed exactly the same process. This would not surprise anyone who understood Gutenberg’s vocation as a goldsmith, a commercial sculptor. In the same way as the sculptor, creating typically in bronze, would have employed an empty cast, injecting or pouring into it the hot metallic medium to harden and materialize into the form of the final work, the typesetter injects molten type metal into a type mold that becomes the inkable plate, the block, in the printing industry. This block, whether used for pouring and manufacture of a hot plate, or composited manually into galleys, as was the practice much earlier, is what I am pointing to in the more obscure but no less influential compression, because whether as a matrix for the pourable plate, or as an ad hoc galley set, the elemental form of text as we continue to see today in its symmetrical organization is an accident of process rather than a nod to optimal readership. In the principal system for mechanical typesetting, the Linotype, sorts — letters and symbols, spacers, and slugs — are selected from a storage unit and dropped into place to create lines of type. As the writer must select from the words of a language, the typesetter, too, executes a retrieval task for composing text, the galley being the stage where the lateral compression happens; it is not the birth of the page, but rather its structure as a matrix.

Compositor Robert Evans assembling a type galley. Courtesy of James Wilkes, Ltd. Wolverhampton, UK

Why we have not separated the printed composition’s rectilinear organization as (once) determined by the physical constraints of the galley’s frame from the conceptual, aesthetic organization of the page is perhaps due to the lingering, if retrograde, connection not to printing but to typography that this latter profession maintains to that simplifying archetype. The lingering traditionalism of typographic form is almost too evident in Hans Rudolf Bosshard’s recent and lavishly detailed The Typographic Grid, in which gridded page elements restrict, and reflect the tenets of page design in a manner that could almost be confused for a study in kind of window and edifice facade modularity whose deformations would be the product of hypercontemporary architectural studios like from the OMA back to modernist ones like that of Mies van der Rohe.

Hans Rudolf Bosshhard, The Typographic Grid

Hans Rudolf Bosshhard, The Typographic Grid

Hans Rudolf Bosshhard, The Typographic Grid

In this company too, is Willi Kunz’s Grid Systems in Graphic Design/Raster Systeme Fur Die Visuele Gestaltung, in which text is often rendered into window-like frames conflating its symbolic literacy to the constraint of simple form.

Willi Kunz, Grid Systems in Graphic Design/Raster Systeme Fur Die Visuele Gestaltung

As these examples only begin to illustrate, the predominance of geometrically primitivistic visual organization in which type, which is to say text in print, has remained subsumed, has needed an aesthetic outlet for the stultification of its reductionist organizing principles. Kunz’s work can be read, both literally and phenomenally, as the overlay of a presumably interesting visual form over a more constrained textual one. And if we remove text altogether, many design books have no issue with treating the first of these two elements autonomously, suggesting a visual aesthetic entirely of its own making, almost like the proverbial problem set in any visual studio course, the study is one of form as organization, not as literature, as Kimberly Elam’s Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type implies — text has been greeked out altogether to grey blocks — a practice that is de rigueur in graphic design books, and which, by arguing for structure as entirely distinct from the content it is supposed to nurture, again returns us to an incomplete aesthetic of sense without reference.

Kimberly Elam, Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type

Where and how in the logic of design deliberations, it remains to be asked, does this breakdown, this schism, this unquestioned rupture between visual form and literary form take place? And how does the textual revert back to the rectilinear constraints of the galley proof when that structure has become so superseded by the freedom that visual form in design is formulating? Wolfgang Weingart’s My Way to Typography shows an illustrative example. Telling of his early interest in the letter M, Weingart focused on the formal properties of this letter to those gradually intense deconstructive levels that begin to see it more as a symbol, and then as a glyph, than as a textual component as it is distilled away from its literary context.

Wolfgang Weingart, My Way to Typography, p. 234

In a sequence of diagrams redolent with the kind of open enthusiasm that we know from children’s wonder in playing with letters, Weingart performs a chain of inchoate contortions on a circus of M’s whose acrobatic stretches morph from the typographic into something like a Futurist poster study.

Wolfgang Weingart, My Way to Typography, p. 235

And yet, once played out to near-Dadaist proportion, the deformations of the letter collapse, inexplicably, back down into symmetric primitives, for even the addition of a third dimension in Weingart’s adoption of the letter study into a modular cube makes evident the seeming immutability of typography’s need to return to the ordered simplicity of a matrix or a grid.

Wolfgang Weingart, My Way to Typography, p. 236

From across the table of contents, the newspaper galley, the book index, and significantly distinct contexts, the presence of the word is bound to the substantive notion of form as an object with definite, limited, and regular boundaries. Excepting the fringes of poetic experimentation, there exists no literary genre in the West  whose textual organization has successfully escaped this constraint.  Not surprisingly, then, electronic literature’s extension on that history has directed itself on the adjectival version of form – forms for reading, which is to say, form as process descriptive of a particular post-literary encounter. And that encounter depends on mechanisms that undermine and negate the linearity of the gridded reading, a problem that shall be explored in the next post.

This is not a typical post, but as I’m sitting in my balcony writing, I hear this roar – not too unusual for the area, given that Back Bay is one of Boston’s most frequented helicopter zones. But living in Cambridge, so near to MIT has significant advantages; in addition to the views of downtown Boston, MIT is the site of many unusual visits by all manner of equipment. Today it was a Marine Corps Osprey, which flew 250 feet over my head in a banked turn for a landing approach at MIT’s field and a demonstration.

On the photograph I show below, the white bubble in the field is the cover for a full-size racquetball court, which provides some proportion of the aircraft’s size, tip to tip, its width being nearly 85 feet. Its tilt rotor design looked simultaneously powerful and fragile, and since there is no stabilization power in the rear of the airframe, one wonders how it avoids tipping over something that has happened several catastrophic times. From what I could see, the solution seems to be to move the craft, which is much larger than a normal helicopter, incredibly slowly during landing maneuvers. With its disproportionally enormous blades, one challenge in the design of the Osprey centered on evading the critical vortex ring state, in which the air forced out from under the blades is perpetually sucked back around to the top, resulting in zero lift. The short cut was to keep the craft moving forward slightly as it landed, thus using mostly “clean air” with each cycle, since high descents with low airspeed were found to be the major cause of airlift loss disasters and thus the Osprey is not very good for stationary hover.

Osprey landing at MIT field (click for larger image)

Click above for a close up of its subsequent takeoff. The seemingly slow blades are a scan line phenomenon, but the silence immediately after the craft takes off is earnestly uncanny. As mentioned before, in its need to minimize vortex ring state, the Osprey does not execute true vertical takeoff, but banks forward imperceptibly and moves ahead ten feet during ascent.

Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Once Walter Benjamin’s thinking became the canonical portal between the worlds of what could be called post-Romantic modernism and postmodernism’s romance with the dual destiny of technology as both creative medium and aesthetic object, his position in theories of new media art seemed suddenly embraced in the most universalistic and unproblematic way possible. By and by, scholarship came to acknowledge that all of his major writings from 1919 to 1931[1] culminate in the essay from which I take the epigram above, one which has been read as a kind of Biblical ontology of electronic media in relation to artistic production. And by extension, this essay consequently locates Benjamin at the ubiquitous beginning of all major discussions of visual interpretation in the age, after his own, of electronic, not just mechanical, reproduction. How can one argue, for example, against the propitiating presence that accompanies the primal act of artmaking, a force that, in its archaic form, conjoined for Benjamin soul and work into the ontological singularity, the aesthetic event horizon, the nucleus of creativity’s very power of transformation signaled by and caught within the emanation of its aura?

One might imagine that Benjamin was, of course, not endorsing art in any universal sense; that he was, instead, ostensibly evoking the fearsome rise of its primal desecration by the incursion of machinery into what cannot be produced by and contained within it. In that sense alone, but sufficiently it seems, his most famous essay staked not so much a position on the role of technology than a logic, ultimately reducible to the axiomatic inequality that creative production is nullified by technical reproduction. I provide the adverb here, “ultimately”, in reference to Benjamin’s allegiance to Marxism and its teleology, pointing as it does, to that polemical time machine called social forces that churn conflict into transformation, coalescing like an alchemical solve et coagula on the way to its final post-historical cadence: an endless moment of fulfilled ideals, of purity of knowledge, and of utopian existence in a classless society.

Despite this eternal culmination, it is perhaps ironic that the post-historical reach of Marxist imagination that inspires Benjamin here relies on reasoning of a specifically temporal kind. The retrospective character of this logic, introduced in the second section of this 1935 essay, advances the most fraught assumption of the whole argument, namely, that the temporal separation between the creation of a work and the moment of its reception – not the advent or manner of its reproducibility – provides the principal basis for its aesthetic legitimacy, and conversely. Thus, works re-created (which is to say, created anew) in the present are ineligible for the status of true art – notice here how he subtly but intractably ties temporality to aesthetic legitimacy: “[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.” This past, therefore, is forever accommodated as indispensable constituent of the work’s aesthetic presence, of its arthood, so that the only logically admissible proxy for the contemporary existence of the work is through the Geist-like spirit addressed by its aura, the numinous moment of the work’s creation – although by this, Benjamin meant a special kind of creation in whose specific conditions production and reproduction are mutually exclusive. Whatever else can be read from this essay, the possibility of simultaneous creation and reproduction of art are not allowable to Benjamin, and so, new media scholarship, incorporating his thinking whole cloth, has unwittingly absorbed those very assumptions.

We could see how Benjamin would not wish to assert this enmity of creation and reproduction with bluntness. Rather, he would want to allow the argument to unfold gradually – gradually enough that it seems to turn on originality, not temporality. Thus he opens the second paragraph of that second section, with seeming consistency, by telling us that “[t]he presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity”. And this originality is not the ontologically unconditional originality that we might imagine as the initial moment of creation in every artistic work. Rather, as with elsewhere in Benjamin, it is a qualified and rather specific kind of originality that excludes any possible creation except by manual or organic means, so that “[t]he whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility”. Again, it is worth reminding ourselves that the machinery is not, in this historical argument, the cause of any de-legitimization of art, it is rather the temporal distance between creation to experience, so that when the “cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room”, the aura of its creative moment is also left behind, separating the artistic essence from the audience’s sense, a supersensible creative effort from its reductive sensory reproduction.

Thus are production and reproduction portrayed in this most dialectical antithesis, the work of art, anchored in a singular time and place of creation, is torn from that past by processes that impart only its appearance, not its soul. And to accept this account of art in the contemporary moment of technology’s integration with all manner of social process is to read it not as an early critique of technologically mediated art but as its final epitaph. All art that undergoes reproduction, we are led to infer, loses the ineffable legitimacy that originality, which is to say, creation in a past moment of time, bestows. Unquestioned in this argument is the fact that art is not temporally contingent, only the art work may be. And so, in this lost distinction, Benjamin’s essay might have been correct on every account if by dint of a change of title we could more precisely accept the constraints that it claims, namely that two arguments – the fact of technological production and the principle of legitimacy in art are in postmodernity as together now as they appeared to be separate in his day, so that today, we might better speak of the work of art in the age of reproduction mechanisms, which is to say the work of algorithms.

And so what is the currency of reproduction in this age of art? When in the early 1970’s Alan Sondheim wrote of the pluralism of the art of that decade,[2] and when Dick Higgins wrote of the same regarding a decade earlier,[3] the foundation was laid for a moment in which aesthetic production would make evident its new, multitudinous route to the same outcome in a distributed work of art. Pluralism, from that time, has evolved into a profusion of media and practices resisting the labels that art criticism could make so apparent in previous chapters of its own history. Today, there is no prevalence of an abstract expressionism, a pop art, an op art, an agitprop, or a minimalism, there is rather the numerosity of methods and media, of departures from the idea of a single work born of a single moment out toward an expansive one involving compound art born in an emergent manner, in several ways, with multiple inputs and forces, in what might best be called a distributed moment.

These developments, while fascinating, have not surprised anyone who may have witnessed the displacement and evolution of singular narratives out to a range of media forms and practices in the last twenty years. This rise of the transmedia narrative, first broached in the context of popular culture’s wresting from the monolithic hand of the entertainment industry its most prized – that is, profitable – stories, is not only a new form of pluralism, it represents the moment on every level where production and reproduction, the unique and distributed, the momentary and the evolutionary, contribute equally in the power of the creative act that was for Benjamin located in mysterious and transcendental source, one that conflated the idea of art’s origins with the original in art.

And so it seems relevant to regard this distributed moment that is the transmedial voice in electronic art as a turning point from Benjamin, read, as I have said, for the most part with uncritical acceptance. To be sure, while the essay’s reception, as reverence, may be historically justified, my argument is with its relevance as a statement on the contemporary state of affairs connecting technical reproduction and the work of art. And so, the response I present to the aura is not one of either acceptance of it as it stood in 1935 or denial of it with dismissive apathy, but rather to take it elsewhere, using it to interrogate where the aesthetics of the transmedial work of art stands in relation to its possibility as a distributed moment, one not sourced in the mystical union of a single time and place, but rather one whose aura is pluralistically felt and realized.

This distribution, in the occasion of media technology’s own use in the service of diffusion and mobility, is one that the cell phone addresses. And correspondingly, this is the formulation that Golan Levin addresses with insistence on the varieties of engagement that each of his installations evokes. A case of this dispersal, simultaneous in time, derives from the live idea of a symphonic concert that Benjamin would have found utterly legitimate. In Dialtones, A Telesymphony[4] an audience gathers in a performance hall to enjoy the orchestration of musical instruments performing musically – no deviation in this arrangement from the normal conditions of a chamber work in a recital hall anywhere in the world. The absence of musical instruments, however, would rightly raise questions about what kind of performance one is in for, and, as Benjamin would have questioned, the origin or source from which the work presumably emanates. In fact, the site of performance lies partly in the audience, whose mobile phones were configured, prior to the performance, with specific ringtones, each subsequently able to play a component of the composition, so that in the simultaneous aggregate, any melody or harmonic chorus can be produced by the stage performers – now in their role as conductors. These stage conductors manipulate systems that dial the programmed phones in synchrony, orchestrating the work into life through a transmedial simultaneity that has many points of origin.[5]

Figure 1. Golan Levin, Dialtones, A Telesymphony, 2001.
Detail, pre-performance cell phone ringtone programming [“instruments tuning?”].

Figure 2. Golan Levin, Dialtones, A Telesymphony, 2001. Installation View. Image courtesy of the artist.

Since the distribution of the moment, a provocation that we might read in various ways, may reflect the multiplicity of activities in the service of a single work of art, it captures several permutations of the pluralism to which I referred earlier. In one form, as Levin’s work explored, the moment is temporally integrated with the artistic performance for whose genesis the coordinated participation of numerous media devices and persons must congregate. If the inverse variation is also feasible, Christian Nold’s series of Emotion Maps addresses it.[6] Deployed in several metropolitan centers, the work’s algorithm remains the same, while the realization is one of continual uniqueness. In the Paris Emotion Map, for example, Nold engages a group of residents who agree to wander the city’s 11th arrondissement. In this, participants wear a bio mapping system that continuously records emotional arousal, time, and geographical location in the city. At the conclusion of their peripatetic meandering, the wanderers annotate experiences associated with their most salient affective responses, and these become commemorated into a document, an existential palimpsest, where collective experience, distended over the period of several weeks, is unified into a narrative work whose authorship is the transmedial summation of media and moments.

Figure 3. East Paris Emotion Map, 2008, Christian Nold. Poster

Figure 4. East Paris Emotion Map, 2008, Christian Nold. Annotation detail.

But how far in spacetime would the transmedial moment – the poignant experience collectively felt but uniformly rendered through an array of media forms – extend? What is evident is that the extension and degrees of freedom of the transmedial moment exists in direct proportion to the complexity of the organizing algorithm. Can the immediacy of presence be sufficiently distended in time as to be indistinguishable from absence? More to the point, can a transmedial work of art speak with the future? The extension of present to those in other places is not a particularly difficult or rare phenomenon, and early examples of distributed media art were motivated by the principle of sustained dialogue as a function of spatial location. Stephen Wilson’s The Telepresent is one example. A small box designed from low grade materials, it was an early excursus into the then-novel notion of sending images from wherever it was throughout the Web, something that Steve Mann replicated in scores of provocative “broadcasts” of his real-time experiences in conversation – and sometimes disagreement – with people and places as he moved around urban space.

Figure 5. The Telepresent, 1997, Stephen Wilson.
Box with radio electronics. Image courtesy of the artist.

In these cases, since the account produced by the work was transmitted to a dispersed audience, the aesthetic moment was spatially interspersed while simultaneously retaining its temporal immediacy as real-time portraiture. But in the same manner as the spatial can be extended, the temporal can as well, and speaking to posterity is the function of another kind of time machine. The minimalist aesthetic that frames Caleb Larsen’s box, facetiously titled A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, is nothing if not a Benjaminian contradiction. For while the apparent physical solipsism of the black cube reflects a disdainfully selfish resistance against interaction to any present visitor, user, or owner of the work, it is perhaps because inside the box sits an Arduino chipset programmed to do something approaching what any gallery curator could dream for: art that sells itself.[7] With its persistent internet connection – one wire is all that can be seen to emanate from the cube – the nondescript Plexiglas box pings a server to decide whether the work is to be put up for sale, and if so, its embedded system launches and manages an auction of itself on eBay. Clearly, in this turn on conceptual transmediality, its physical presence – static, silent, monochromatic, and symmetrically without narrative – is the most trivial element of the work. Looking exactly like so many plastic cubes, the work’s material objecthood in fact points to the least present dimension of  its being. Operating exclusively in the vitreous spaces of the Web, the work’s dialogue is precisely with everyone who does not possess it, so that the triad of its ultimate presence, meaning, and value are determined only through the algorithm’s prolonged zeal for the transmedial indexicality signaled by its out of body experiences.

Figure 6. Caleb Larsen, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, 2009. Perpetual online auction, internet connection, custom programming and hardware, acrylic cube. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 7. Caleb Larsen, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, 2009.
Online auction status.

Responding to the undignifying and indecorous commoditization of art, Larsen’s work embodies more than an ironic riff on the idea of art collecting as wealth building; it is a conceptual move whereby an aesthetic rationale for the work’s own exchange value becomes its only function. In this compression, its aesthetic manifestation is now indistinguishable from its need for conveying that function through the act of reproduction, given that it must interminably represent itself to an indeterminate external world as, by seeking its highest resale price, it does what has never been done before: the artwork chooses its owner, rather than vice versa. And it is this irreducibility’s antiphony to Benjamin’s sense of the “actual” work of art that marks the final point of incommensurability between two worlds of art – the modern and what has come after – from which we must henceforth look back, I think, sensing the precipice of an irreconcilable turn. That is, since Benjamin’s line in the sand asserts that “[t]he situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.”, we see how his guiding conception – the regulative principle dissociating this “actual” moment of the original work from its reproduction – is not merely inimical to the transmedial, simultaneous, distributed moment of this kind of art, but that for Benjamin it detracts from what is most fundamental to the work: its presence. And this presence is not merely one of interaction, but also of transfer – both determined by the algorithm, since the contractual obligations of each owner stipulate that Larsen’s work must be given to the next winning bidder, who continues its provenance.

Two examples, one from the world of live performance and another from that of documentary film, and an overly brief and structural view of an electronic medium — the computer game — should round out this discussion of the transmedial in the sense that I am intending, namely as an extension of its original concept of narrative distributed through media forms that can best express its episodic nature in components, with no single medium possessing the entire tale. As is perhaps by now persistently obvious, the specific dialect of the notion that I am putting forward relates to the distribution less of narrative, as in a fable or known story of the sort we know in commercial form – from Mario Brothers to Star Wars – than of the experiential salience of shared meaning. The story collectively produced in these examples, therefore, is never a wholly fictive one; it is rather one that recruits significant elements of the contemporary voice that an audience brings, and as such, has only one aspect of preconception that we might call ‘story’, that which is its structure. The work as story and distributed moment appears less as the franchise of the corporate story-product than as a mirror of action whose audience participates in an aesthetic contract by co-opting the work’s own structure and speaking back to it. And because of this, the notion of an audience is itself constructed by the transmedial work of art. And by construction, I point specifically to that component of the work that directs it, acting as the moral imperative of the work – as it has always been in social history in any case – the normative principle that is the algorithm, as William Uricchio has made evident on numerous occasions.

That the algorithm serves at the core of the transmedial work of art is demonstrated in the example of Texterritory,[8] a work that fuses nonlinear story, partially deterministic and partially aleatory, requiring the audience as a pluralistic collective  to direct the actions of a Hamlet-like stage character, immersed – not to say, paralyzed – as she is in confronting several moral dilemmas. Disguising its radically transmedial nature through the approachability of lighthearted romantic comedy, the stage protagonist, “Grace Campbell”, is a legal secretary whose anxious insecurities become nearly insurmountable as she awaits the visit of a long-anticipated romantic suitor. The work’s title alludes to the sketchy way in which the two had met – in a dark club several weeks before – and without an intervening opportunity for personal time together, the territory of the acquaintance, such as it is, has been explored through the margins of text messages – “texting out their territory”. But the fictional premise of the work – text messaging between Grace and her friend – is realized in an extradiegetic way by the audience itself, which is prompted to vote on the each successive course of action that comprises the play.

Figure 8. Sheron Wray and Fleeta Siegel, Texterritory v.2.3, 2008. Event announcement, London.

The distributed moment is less the simple one where the collective determines the next move for the lone fictive character of the work, but rather it is one where the timing of action is ever the dependent variable, the partnership in collaboration on actions – sometimes clearly taken by the character, while at others, directed by the audience – is a reflection of the work which relies solely on a kind of reproduction of signal in order to produce its aura, and by so doing, becomes rhapsodic.

Figure 9. Sheron Wray and Fleeta Siegel, Texterritory v.2.3, 2008. Performance view.

Figure 10. , Sheron Wray and Fleeta Siegel, Texterritory v.2.32008. Algorithm of the work.

The logic of transmedia’s distributed moment is not so alien to another form around which I suppose I’ve been circling here – the computer game. To be sure, sufficiently has been written on how the structure of game dynamics depends on a distributed temporality, which is the only way to reconcile the opposing views of many narratologists, who find that any predetermined narrative structure in a game is a nontrivial constituent of the larger narrative tradition that print epitomizes versus the view of the ludologists, who find in the freedom between predetermined waypoints in an interactive story precisely the evidence of non-narrative, perhaps aligning with an aesthetic akin to the second law of thermodynamics, except that in place of the entropy that physical science sees as accreting in an isolated system in disequilibrium, the ludological enterprise finds increased indeterminacy and variety the more one plays the same game.  Stephen Dinehart’s model of user experience paths, for example, clearly illustrates the oscillation between static moments separated by periods of free interaction within the game environment. Corresponding to their distinct natures, Dinehart terms these two primary spaces the cinematic sequences – namely “choke points .. that all playes must pass through in order to advance” (73) versus the gameplay space which is less determined by specific behavior.

Figure 11. Viewer/User/Player Experience paths (Dinehart, 2009)

If this map precisely explains the structure of Texterritory v.2.3, which is decidedly not in the medium of the computer game, it is because Dinehart’s diagram operates meta-algorithmically, as something that visualizes not only the electronic game logic that every player finds instinctively familiar but also one that indicates precisely the macro level anatomy of the larger enfoldment of transmedial activity, that being that a story, as is universally understood, is never wholly located or comprised within a single work, device or expressive form, but rather distributes itself through a culturally variegated range of specific media and expressive practices. Its structural oscillation, as mirrored in the diagrammatic argument that Dinehart presents, reflects the brittleness or fluidity of each medium or form of agency through which the work navigates. And while it might be feasible to read in this diagram something that argues the essence, as it were, of transmediality as a creative principle, that inference alone would be fallacious, or at least deficient. To be sure, the duality evident between here the predetermined and the freeform seems compelling on several levels: we see, after all, an inspiring continuum between tyranny and freedom, or more to the point, the dialectic that confronts innovative thinking when creative latitude must negotiate structural constraints. And we cannot deny that this is precisely the measure of artistic success in other creative genres; in musical composition, for example, Bach’s melodic perfection in the highly restrictive fugue form, in his canons, and two- and three-part inventions, cannot be summarized except in those very terms.  But the fugue is only partly determined by its structure, and by structure I mean what there is, what we can see or hear. Rather, the musical work is determined by something prior to what there is, for prior to any structure is the rule set that determines the range of its final possibilities, however distinct each instance of the form might be from another. And this rule set, which is much harder to express with the visual conciseness of Dinehart’s diagram, is the algorithm itself.

If it seems that the compression in time between the moment of original creation and that of reception has today not detracted from the legitimacy of the work of art, I do not want to conclude by implying that this post-Benjamin situation is due strictly to digital technology. My argument about the new work of art’s collective aura is not meant to suggest a reliance state of the art in any form. The artwork’s new condition, moving from a moment of originality that was seen as the aura out to a distributed moment, is determined by the structure of the work of art – that is, its underlying algorithm, returning to William Uricchio’s thinking here – not because the work exists before the algorithm, but because the algorithm exists before the work. The procedural, not the structual or medium-specific, has become the ontological foundation of the aesthetic, through a new orchestral nature and function. Thus can we see in the works I have discussed both a dispersal and a unification of time and space, of creation and reception, of event and of place. And as fits the necessarily pluralistic treatment of place, I think of one final example entirely outside the realm of digital technology.

Place, as the site for the transmedial expression of algorithm of meaning, brings to mind, particularly in connection to a city as rich as Berlin, Richard Kostelanetz’s film, A Berlin Lost. Actually a set of films around a single story — making it imprecise to imagine one specific core in the story — Kostelanetz produced the six films that bear the same name, each visually the same but each also recorded in a different language and with different narratives. In each work, we are taken through Weissensee, the Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin, where much of what we are shown no longer exists. The medium of the film’s text, if we could speak metaphorically of anything like a script, comes to us through the visual construal of placemarkers, including the gravestones that Kostelanetz’s eye seems less to visit than to probe. Their inscriptions reflect connections through time and place that weave the fabric of Berlin’s story as a cultural reserve, albeit not through images alone. For each of the six versions of A Berlin Lost, while visually identical, comprises entirely different soundtracks in English, German, French, Swedish, Spanish, and Hebrew; each comprising a distinct procession of ex-Berliners reflecting, in their own tongue and given to us without subtitles, on the time passages that accompanied life in the city’s great period, the eight decades prior to 1940. This makes, I think, amply evident how transmedial narrative, in questioning the form of its own appearance, constructs and frames a dispatch but reclaims the possibility of its truth by separating what constitutes it from any single medium by its link to and emergence from its kinship to an algorithmic order that completes the aura’s distributed moment.

Cambridge, April 2010

[2] Alan Sondheim, ed., Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977).

[3] Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia,” in Dé-Coll/Age (Décollage) * 6, ed. Wolf Vostell (Frankfurt/New York: Typos Verlag/Something Else Press, 1967).

[4] Golan Levin, Dialtones, a Telesymphony (Linz: http://flong.com/projects/telesymphony/, 2001).

[5] It might be clear that the term I have been employing as thematic descriptor, as when speaking of transmedial experience, is not exactly the one that has been used in initial documents regarding this phenomenon (as in “transmedia storytelling”). The philological change implies a modal variation that reads the original idea in a specifically aesthetic direction, staying with the formalism of distributed narrative which it documents without following the implications for consumer-oriented commercial media. Thus a transmedial reading regards the first of the following two sentences as more conceptually fertile than the second: “In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best-so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption.”Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling: Moving Characters from Books to Films to Video Games Can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling.,” Technology Review January 15, 2003.

[6] Christian Nold, East Paris Emotion Map (Paris: http://www.paris.emotionmap.net/info.htm, 2008).

[7] For updates on the box’s autonomous auction price, see http://atooltodeceiveandslaughter.com/.

[8] Cf. http://textterritory.com.

Bibliography

Higgins, Dick. “Statement on Intermedia.” In Dé-Coll/Age (Décollage) * 6, edited by Wolf Vostell. Frankfurt/New York: Typos Verlag/Something Else Press, 1967.

Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling: Moving Characters from Books to Films to Video Games Can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling.” Technology Review January 15, 2003.

Levin, Golan. Dialtones, a Telesymphony. Linz: http://flong.com/projects/telesymphony/, 2001.

Nold, Christian. East Paris Emotion Map. Paris: http://www.paris.emotionmap.net/info.htm, 2008.

Sondheim, Alan, ed. Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977.

Francisco J. Ricardo

If nothing fully encompasses what we might mean by the use of the term “cyberculture”, then it is not because the term is vacuous but rather pluralistic, particularly as its ground is the same terrain as social process itself.^[1].  Cyberculture, in other words, is no longer distinct from what is implicit to culture in the framework of post-industrial society. With technology as its supramedium, “cyberculture” is the contemporary and transpicuous paraphrase of what the term, revolving around a new industrial model in the late 19th century, “culture” implied to Ferdinand Tönnies. His role in modern sociology, centering on the idea of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, is of particular significance as marker for the turning point at which cyberculture diverges most dramatically from prior cultural architectures. Sensing something beyond the constrictions of positivist thinking, Tönnies felt the distance denoted between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as precisely what, by 1887, the publication year of the book whose title announces these two terms, appeared to presage major adhesions for social groupings in modern society. In the pole indexed by the Gemeinschaft, commonly translated as community, lies the conceptual inventory of subjective and intrinsic motivations for collective assembly and bonding, while, opposing this specific vitality, Gesellschaft, “society”, denotes the much more instrumental type of gathering that familiarly attends to ad hoc aims: paid labour, civic responsibility, and motives of capital. Cyberculture’s primary challenge to theory turns on the refutation of this boundary, and, consequently, the merging of community and society, dispassionately or otherwise, into a single historical event. But as these poles derive from entirely divergent impulses, they reconcile with singular experience only by the strategy of overlay that signals the contemporary structuration of desire and its expressions through the standard lens and language of existing media, which replace geographical location as the principal condition for assembly, intersubjectivity, and assent. Since this overlay of realms, of expression and media, is motorised by a continual codification of the terms of each domain through waves of technological innovation and obsolescence that permeate contemporary actions, sensibilities, and disciplines, we might look to any of these for an example of this codification through the anxiety that arises from the stylised manufacture of the archaic and the destruction of memory.

It is thus to the extent that culture’s ample retinue of actions are incrementally recoded into the collimation called cyberculture—as a course through what follows the age called modernism—that we might expect to view sweeping acts of convergence reflected on any number of historical examples. These illustrate something like the regularities and patterns of the new casting aside the old in the incessant feast that is this pattern of innovation and obsolescence. We might, because of the persistence of cyberculture’s incipient reconfigurations—often deployed through new technology—easily locate in any major moment within twentieth century historiography markers of the passing of one age and, simultaneously, glints of the one in advent. And so, there is, not entirely surprisingly, one inconspicuous occasion, from a time that we might call the intellectual prehistory of contemporary art, when a succinctly worded letter inscribes a moment in the dialogue between two worlds in the person of two artists, each a sovereign of his own medium:

Dear Stieglitz__
Even a few words I don’t feel like writing.
You know exactly what I think about photography
I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else
will make photography unbearable__
There we are.
Affectueusement,
Marcel Duchamp^[2]

Dating from 1922, this letter, resonating in the uncharted freshness of photography’s early conceptual age, is a pithy riposte to Alfred Stieglitz, who, nurturing concerns about posterity, had stirred Marcel Duchamp in previous correspondence by posing a more transcendental question, “Can a photograph have the significance of art?” It would be neither the first nor the last time that questions would hover at the interface between the historical dawn of a medium and an atemporal, universalizing category, something on the order of absolute status, or to choose Stieglitz’s more personal term, significance. What makes the question permanently relevant is the premise, summarily anticipated by Stieglitz, that the standing of any medium will not merely relate to contemporary concerns and their practical necessity, but additionally occupies a manifest place in time from which scholars may construct social, scientific, and cultural retrospectives – which is to say, construct histories and world views. Equally relevant to the contemporary media arts today is that, what in 1922 is asked about photography, a medium without, at that time, a developed place or canon in art, is what is being similarly asked now about the computer game. Since, for Stieglitz, it is not the medium’s continued existence that was in question—this was already assumed by his escalating level of commercial production and breadth of photographic work—the tightness of the embrace, measured via heightened social status, of technology’s relationship to a society’s arts need a new line of explanation.

It is in this manner, by asking about the place that the photographic medium, to choose one kind of medium, will, as a novel venue for artistic production, to choose one kind of production, occupy in the order of culture that Stieglitz presages differential legitimacies that were addressed again, almost two decades later in the galleys of an essay that itself became a defining moment in art criticism. The article is, of course, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Clement Greenberg’s judgment and oppositional ideology pitting the definably avant-garde, championed as guardian of a society’s aesthetic standards, against the inescapably complement, in the category of kitsch, decried as the unconditional response to impulses of consumer haste and taste. Enumerating four expressive examples, a poem by T. S. Eliot, a Tin Pan Alley song, a painting by Georges Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover, Greenberg assembles a cultural quartet whose individual elements are “on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society.” In this broadside, etching as it does the presumable boundaries of high art, he finds that, beyond their shared contemporaneity, nothing of cultural consequence actually links them. To be sure, they are expressive tokens from entirely non-contiguous strata of culture, Greenberg’s critical fulcrum. But in these examples there is something more specific to the question of medium and genre than the context-free expression of cultural positions as arguably high or low. That a modern poem, a parlour song, a Cubist painting, and a magazine illustration identify how distinct genres tie to distinct media is what principally puts the question, for us, in the postmodern frame, in a state of contemporary suspense, and has repositioned Greenberg as something of an archaeo-rhetorical relic, if a fiery one. For today, culture’s significant expressive distinctions cut not across genres alone, but also across the specific media that encapsulate them. And operating with special relevance on the plane of the cybercultural, this synthesis is not so much framed as encoded. So while, ironically, Greenberg’s criteria later came to hinge on a ready sense of medium, it is there that challenges against him proved most withering to his undignified transformation from master critic to “worm-eaten colossus”^[3]. As art discovered mechanisation, Greenberg’s contractile optical notions of medium, seen against its new modes of actual execution, were overpowered by new media frenetically co-fusing toward bastardisation and able to account for the ubiquitous role of appropriation and remediation in art today

It is this persevering theme’s vital essence—reductive purity—that divides modernist sensibility from its subsequent condition in the postmodern encounter, and which Caroline Jones posits as Greenberg’s major ideological vector^[4]. Concern above all else with the narrowest exercise of the expressive strength of a medium is, for Greenberg, the vital modernist principle. The application of the sensory refinement that each medium best supports is the aim: in the case of painting, the interpretive inflection is best received and expressed by means of the flatness of the form; for sculpture, it is the rotational affordance of one’s gaze in three dimensions that produces and transcends the rustle of narrative in the object. Through this interpretive specialisation, the production conditions of each medium could be used to critique the medium itself; paintings that use, evoke, or transcend the backdrop of the level plane are in conversation with the conditions of the flatness of their native medium, and thus, for Greenberg, will definably self-identify with the aesthetic traditions of modernism. The legendary proclamation, Greenberg’s most oft-quoted mantra, was unequivocal: “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”, and reveals with the passage of time an assumption of stability and transparency of medium that is so unimaginable today that one can look to Greenberg’s own examples as sites of contradiction vis-à-vis the evolving concerns of new media. On one hand, Greenberg erects high art as specifically medium-derived:

Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.^[5]

Immediately we might remember, however, that several expressive genres, chief among them that of collage, distort the material and aesthetic integrity of the medium as defined by Greenberg’s prohibitive art panorama. We might consider collage as not-painting, but it is not sculpture, either; its coarse, uneven tatters, cementations of more than immediate expression, announce the commanding plan of bastard form, and thus the cacophony of a staunch anti-formalism. As neither painting nor sculpture, collage could be inaugurated as the first new art medium of 20^th century sensibility. The difficulties for Greenberg in approaching this medium point to the persistence of the modernist optic in attempting to frame media that have already entered new paradigmatic space. His Collage essay, focusing on pasted paper, formation of shapes, and interlocking silhouettes, in short, issues of material support and the mounting of elements so physically central to collage, all but ignores the expressive force of that practice as a hard-edged support whose exploration in subsequent political uses underscores the necessary relationship of medium to message that became a cybercultural credo. That Greenberg’s Collage essay, which remains still too under-explored, was to be read through an obliviously formal lens is evident from the resolve with which the word “flatness”, mentioned twenty-four times, characterizes it.

But by 1959, the year that the essay was last revised, collage’s initial play with the newspaper cutout had expanded to include photographs, print matter, and other kinds of graphic material, material whose innate textuality presented just the opportunity that many artists had been awaiting: the literal quality of words permuted visually into a new, hybridised message. So, where Joan Miró had painted or drawn similar suggestively textual works and otherwise merged text and image by illustrating the stanzas of Tristan Tzara, René Char and other poets, the collagists had assembled theirs entirely from pre-existing elements. No longer a form based on original composition, collage was the first of many composite practices—something gradually less framed but increasingly encoded. And when the photograph joins the textual composition, the expressive language of the collage, now as photomontage, becomes dimensionally expanded such that it becomes impossible to overlook the sensory impact favoured by John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch. To evaluate flatness in their own collages, whose message is transfused with stilted, often anti-propagandistic context, is to favour form against its content and to ignore the essential utility of structure as expression, a balance that defines postmodernism’s production of art and meaning and returns us to the process of encoding as principle of industrial objects’ translation out of culture and into cyberculture. For the composite image produced by the collage is an enunciative literalisation, a recoding in a different scope, of practice of the composite diagnostic profile which the psychoanalyst merges out of disparate observations on the patient, and of the evidence for social portraiture which the anthropologist adduces from fieldnotes on the ethnographic stay, and which the social scientist correlates from observational data. From the orderly fittings of modular architecture down to the interlaced patterns of the crossword puzzle, nothing appears created whole cloth; everything is instead assembled from prefabricated elements, programmed into a phrasal, composite whole^[6].

Collage’s entrance into authentic practice, just one of the theoretical inversions that recodes the previously autonomous state of art into something indistinguishably embraced with its mechanism, typifies developments predating but advancing toward the concerns of contemporary art, art in which what divides medium from content no longer matters. This is the blur maintaining that the logic of judgment informing the first half of the previous century can plausibly read in reverse today; Greenberg’s ideas on kitsch, at the level of content, re-evolve as today’s avant-garde at the level of technology. Here, encoded technologically, is what could pass for a cursory account of the typical simulation programmed in virtual game space:

Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.^[7]

Nor did this inversion erupt all at once. The intervening four decades between Greenberg’s homily on form and Baudrillard’s landmark inauguration of postmodern critique, Simulation and Simulacra, would seem to trace a line directly from ideas about the purity of medium to that of complete and vacant derivation, based on the traffic and interchange of signs, a substitution whose performance begins as sensory artifice and culminates as a set of codes proxying for reality itself, as we shall see.

But too easily positing Greenberg as the modernist weathervane in a postmodern cataclysm misses the more complex problems of the art-medium, indeed message-medium, agglomeration of cyberculture in general, outside any disciplinary context. For however inexactly his thinking was termed “formalist”, which is to say, assuming the existence of something like pure universals, and however we might admit of the indissoluble union of medium and production, there is nonetheless, suggestively below the superficial, one major distinction that has emerged, even as others have dissolved. It turns on the problem of individual identity, forged in relation to time and labour as a function of the basic product to be realised. However executed, and whether so for art, manufacture, or information, personal effort interfaces with a long chain of technological supports that shape the gradual output in relation to the complexity of the interaction, the unit of analysis for technology’s formulaic conditions of engagement. Technology’s manifestations, therefore, however extruded, printed, or structured, conform to a perpetual level of exactitude, similitude, and standardisation that is increasingly precise, and decreasingly personal. The archetypal creation of cyberculture, like a collage, is explicitly synthetic, assembled, yet increasingly uniform. This last adjective suggests how post-industrial process points toward thoroughly formalist results. As product or content are historically immediate and of their time whereas form, formalism, and uniformity are abstract and timeless, which is to say, unrealised, we locate ontological tensions underlying the production of cyberculture. For the term cyberculture itself evokes the union of something abstract and timeless – the sense of culture – with something embedded, time-based, and historically contextualised – the cyber-stratum, the present moment of technology’s interleaving within societal function, and with a clear preference for being encoded, the worlds of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft encapsulated as a single word, a summary formulation. That cybercultural thinking is in essence formal is evident in the arresting immediacy with which pervasive encounters with technology in social, professional, personal, and artistic acts impose logical structure, instrumental thinking, and stimulus-response behaviour. Since such logic, thinking, and behaviour are conditioned early, at the point of interface design, they precede many possibilities for creative latitude at the individual level, imposing constraints of experience whose processing does not entirely originate within the user alone. The presence of design and interaction intrudes on expressive freedom with presupposing inferences that guide, limit, and accompany real-time reasoning with an array of predetermined tasks that the interface performs in producing whatever solution or feedback the given technology generates. As if to underscore a major formalist divide, the major thinking in fact occurs at great temporal remove prior to that which happens in real-time use, such that the design, manufacture, and functionality of an automated teller machine exceedingly dwarfs the mental commitment required to use it.

The same holds for cybercultural experiences like viewing films, chatting via mobile phones, or piloting airplanes. Time and labour have been divided, with the medium presenting much of the problem’s solution already elaborated, leaving little of what executes in the present to its calculation in the here and now. It is by following its idiosyncratic impression of historical progress that technology increasingly alters this balance; to define cyberculture is to witness a further skewing of one particular asymmetry that follows the simultaneous and mutually exclusive aims of increasing complexity of construction on one end in order to augment ease of use on the other. To be sure, the human record provides no other model of collective existence in which social artefacts and affordances are divided so radically, save that which takes root in the rise of technology for organic tasks, let us say farming and transportation – technologies whose own horizons have advanced so far as to merit their own histories. But in those early deployments, the only factor subject to transformation is the labour of a task; the identity of the user remains integral to its pre-technological history; even today, the farmer is no less a farmer because he uses a mechanised tractor rather than a manual hoe. This continuation of role-person is maintained precisely because in the narrowness of the task provided, the technology does none of the actual thinking involved in the work. Thinking is at that stage still exogenous to labour, the latter being the only objective of the technological intervention. But once the horizon of technological possibility on the dimension of labour is largely conquered, the remaining challenges, now cognitive, become fertile ground for a parallel incursion.

It is in the 20th century when, confronted by military circumstances, that governments launch into major initiatives for technological performance in the cognitive rather than manual realm alone: to design anticipatory intelligence into field artillery, to decrypt enemy communications, and to calculate the procurement of materiel to large-scale operations, among other marvels of intellectual execution, these and countless other objectives are attempts at consolidating intelligence into code. For these unprecedented tasks, new varieties of professionals surface; those whose language of specialty is that of formal, uniform, formulaic, formalistic interaction: information workers, knowledge engineers, scientists, researchers. Accompanying machine-assisted cognition is humans’ surrender to technology, and with it, the terms that characterize thinking: terms that can only be approached allegorically as the semblance of identity.

In the sphere of relations comprising the cybercultural, two strands exhibit particularly extensive levels of growth. The first appears through an insistent translation of social and communicative signs from one context onto another. Given that any cyberculture’s foundations are technological, more enduring values, those connected to a personal sense of being, must derive from activities that traffic within them – art and religion provide examples for such recodification. Problematically rooted in pre-modern and early modernist references, symbols and messages of these expressive dimensions have transmuted through the rational analytic gaze of technological means and media and pressed into service in postmodern frames of expression. The allure of old world obscurities is exposed and questioned anew through the gridlike circumstances of a standard model pulsing to the pace of electronic language. Meaning once richly construed through organic, intimate, and localised connection to production–the tilling of land, the tending of livestock, securing a mode of subsistence that is not distinct from the place of existence–is now derived from the widespread and exact manipulation of tools designed to reduce time and space.

But there is another sense in which it makes sense to look at the bridge between Stieglitz, standing as the last pre-modernist of the developed image, insisting that photographs “look like photographs”, and Duchamp, the first conceptual artist, for whom purity of form was anathema, as portal to the concerns of cybercultural signification, layered and multiply codifying. For to the extent that signs with variable meaning populate the cybercultural interface (now that there is no longer an unproblematic modernist landscape), identity, activity, and presence are all brought into focus through the measure of another benchmark crucial to these two artists, though for opposing reasons: that of the image. Here, in the emblem of the image, of imaginal construction, of imaginary virtuality, of the basis for the process of the interface, cybercultural mediation is defined, encapsulated. The image is more than an object, it is a verb, a reagent for representation, and thereby, also for reception. In this, and long before Guy Debord translates the connotational susceptibility of the image to its unmitigated collective commodification as spectacle, Stieglitz’s viewfinder charts a range of imagery that relates intimately to human experience without artifice, either retrograde (informed by painterly façade) or postmodern (supporting cynical second readings)^[8]. For Stieglitz, in a manner never possible for Greenberg, the image culminates as the source of reflection that Bergson pursues, while for Duchamp, as for Debord, the image serves as the target for merely probing what it is not.  Duchamp points that absence back to art’s repressive retinal obsessions, while Debord, refracting Walter Benjamin’s elegy for an erstwhile aura, assumes that some iconic enzyme motors a primal code of order historically functioning through progressively autonomous art whose very independence now paradoxically threatens it^[9].

The progressive degradation of ceremonial image into serviceable spectacle that Debord’s Society of the Spectacle relates is, of course, too extensive for explication through the exclusively visual. But, however intractable within the constraints of modernism’s value system of commodity exchange, only art has effectively assimilated all the contradictory tendrils that modernism’s social, economic, and epistemic crises has spawned. It has accomplished this multiple adoption by the exchange of one kind of defining structure for another: the transmutation of form into mode. Old distinctions of knowledge, culture, and social stratification, wholly indispensable until the Victorian era, encounter abrupt and sustained challenges in the 20^th century, which in fact undermines the stability and merits of category. Intimations of categorical collapse first take root in the intermingling problematisation of form and concept; montage, collage, bricolage, a steady profusion of appropriations, synergies and syntheses construct a model of experience that denies the separateness of observation and context. As the established impressions of form become incrementally replaced by acts of transformation centering on the interpermeation of conceptual constructs, epistemic and expressive emphasis accrues to the manner of construction, which shifts what we might call the enunciative rationale of disciplines toward new conventions of doing, that is, toward new modes of perception that transcend formal opacities.

In prevailing over the individuality of form, this preference for the modal, comprised within the larger overlay to which I alluded earlier, registers in several directions, of which two interest us here. These might be called transhistorical and transformal. While in disciplinary appearance, history is framed as a paradigm of continuity such that the idea of “human history” is phrased as a single object, it is in contemporary thinking that historical moments assume incommensurable separateness from each other, and this separateness is marked by distinctions not in time but in cultural thinking. Hence the Victorian era authenticates as historically distinct from the Edwardian, although temporally these periods are of course directly continuous, and it makes sense to assume that it is by an overlap of cultural markers such as this that we might locate that I mean by transhistorical. Restating Tönnies, Debord’s anchorless Gesellschaft longs for the vital sufficiency of a bygone Gemeinschaft, an autonomy of historical moments that wants cybercultural resolution in the overlay, the simultaneity of two ages sharing signs at a temporal junction. Philosophy and art were the first to document this overlay, with Rousseau’s virtuous ‘noble savage’ and Gauguin’s entrée to primitivism, but most authoritatively later in the early Picasso, through the same modern lens that, in its own temporally continuous but seemingly disjunctive moment, also spawned Cubism. In the analytic Gesellschaft of Great War-era Europe, the intuitive spirit of preliterate art, evoking the Gemeinschaft’s numinous significance, marks the first codification of a transhistorical overlay.

So it is too that an untainted, non-linguistic, perceptual probity connects Stieglitz to the projects of several of his philosophical contemporaries; inarguably to Whitehead and Wittgenstein, and not least to Henri Bergson. It was the latter’s approach to intuitive process, no doubt a counter to quasi-Enlightenment precise rationalities, that, from the outset, could have supplied a vade mecum to Stieglitz’s photography^[10].  This non-rational palpability, that only a transformative escape from the logos of discourse restores essential meaning, has remained vibrant and persistent in art’s transhistorical explorations, mapping a field of unanswered questions extending across a range of contemporary work. It was, for example, in 2003 that Mark Alice Durant and Jane Marsching curated The Blur of the Otherworldly (also co-editing the eponymous book⁵), an exhibition examining the numinous through the contemporary speculum. Surveying religious and extra-sensory imagery through postmodern, principally photographic expression, Durant and Marsching fittingly locate this overlay at the margins of perception that still stir us toward a temporal Other-time:

Henri Bergson has described an image as something that exists halfway between a representation and the thing itself. It is not just a lifeless sign, yet it is not quite life. The image lives at the threshold, standing between us and the abstractions we use to represent ourselves. The image is a window, a doorway, a passage between the flesh of our existence and the cluttered forest of signs we have invented to communicate our inchoate selves. Before photography: words, etchings, pottery shards, carvings in stone, the artifacts left by our ancestors, the concrete pieces of a puzzle with which we attempt to reconstruct their lives.^[11]

Rapt between transhistorical horns and consequentially yearning for conciliatory unison, Durant’s intones an Everyman lament, a cybercultural sequel to the soul-searching of Joyce’s Ulysses/Bloom:

I desire otherworldly experiences, yet I want proof. Humans are programmed with these sometimes-contradictory impulses. By definition, having proof means that otherworldly experiences are brought into the concrete world of clarity and legibility. But when this happens they are in danger of losing their mystery and power to make us wonder. Much of human culture is a result of this ongoing struggle between our empirical demands and the need for an open-ended universe. We want our unshakable certainty and yet we hunger to be haunted.^[12]

The contentions bound to this antagonism are not exclusively epistemological; they extend into ethico-cultural territory, as well. For within a year of Durant and Marsching’s show, another event broadened further still the degree to which transhistorical anxieties operate in the present. Concerned with the consequences that a seemingly innocuous intersection of worlds—art and religion—provoke, Alison Edwards and Lawrence Sullivan, then at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, forced a defining moment in empirical questions in the form of a book and conference, Stewards of the Sacred ²¹. Aiming at decisive resolution of still-remaining, ambiguous and competing notions underlying distinctions between terms like relic and artwork, Sullivan and Edwards identified a range of practices, museological, governmental, and tribal, crucial to worlds in opposition but co-present in the same space-time. Here, anthropologists, museum administrators, artists, theologians, and First Nations tribal elders voiced conflicting perspectives on the objective importance of unearthed and otherwise reclaimed objects revolving on a singular transhistorical question: which world now owns the rightful claim to the power, value, and destiny of sacred objects? Whether as components of the archaeological record or consecrated items in need of repatriation, all contention inculpates the dilemmatic role, perhaps conspiratorial, played by the museum at a time when the institution stands transhistorically across two conflicting world views, one, belonging to contemporary institutional study, and the other, anchored in primordial structures of birthright.

With art and culture, music, too, has echoed a transhistorical phenomenology unique to cyberculture. Of innumerable examples, on, from the collaborative work of Brian Eno and David Byrne has placed special attention on the process. Presented neither as social study nor as parody, the 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts carved out a novel act of re-voicing. Adopting actual recordings that depicted a range of theological experiences—homilies, religious quarrels, songs, and exorcisms—as thematic metonymy for a larger sonic canvas, the album mortised the playback of these conversions, transformations, contentions, and incantations with the minimalist pulse of postmodernity’s precursor to trance. This technological replacement of acoustic foundation is not just an incidental instance of sound collage; in the act of substitution of an original audience present at the event with another, pluralized across time, space, and culture, a transhistorical isthmus of worlds comes into view. It is a space otherwise unable to harmonise one culture whose embryonic spiritual roots deliver transcendence but sacrifice relativism, with another, innervated by continual flux but limited to material reality. As similar to the work of Marsching and Durant, the album, replete with transcendental, conceptual and aesthetic significance, functions within a rare ethos in which the modern work of art is pressed into service as landscape surveyor scanning through an expressive field of ancestral moments and energies.

Even so, this is not the only compound tension induced through technological postmodernity. There is, in addition to the transhistorical colligation of epochs, another tension that cyberculture’s overlaying multiplicities have provoked. Rather than manifesting in the temporal dimension, its encroachment marks across the spatial axis, for which reason it is transformal. By this term I mean not only the substitution of form with mode, but specifically the process by which that exchange has been realized, such that form and shape now operate more as enunciative verbs than as static substances. This alteration appears most discernibly in art practices that now transcend all singularity of medium (and thus of form), yet retain the kind of pure formalism that one might have felt irrelevant to the deconstructive character of contemporary art. The theatre on which this transformal action takes place is, as I have mentioned, that of the image, but, insubstantially present only as projection, the image now assumes the dimensionality of a material support that extends beyond the two dimensions of a projection screen. Of this fusion of image and space, which may assume the name filmic sculpture, several examples indicate the transformal case for cybercultural encoding in spatial appearance.

Figure 1. Mader, Stublic, and Wiermann, Folded Space. Media facade, dimensions variable. Torre Pompéia, Sao Paolo, Brazil. ©2008, Mader, Stublic, and Wiermann. Courtesy of the artists.

The transformal might best be understood functionally, as the stipulation of one disruptive plane onto the visual structure of another. A naïve reading might assume this notion to include the realm of virtual reality, but VR follows rather the differing aim of creating non-disruptive planarity of maximal resemblance to the objectival cohesion of the physical world. Instead, the divergent stratification of space, implying among other phenomena, that of depth, which is to say more space, whether shallow or filled, is the rhetorical force of the transformal, which in a cybercultural context points to the function of the term I have been iterating: encoding. I have in other occasions discussed one exemplar of this new duality, proposed as a media façade by the German design firm of Mader, Stublic, and Wiermann on the headquarters of Orkuveita Reykjavikur, Iceland’s principal purveyor of geothermal power, melds onto the presence of an architectural body the projection of geometrical forms tightly bound to a new axis whose centre anchors to indeterminate space, but similar structures with similar post-constructivist projections exist (figure 1). Here, emblematic of cyberculture, is the expression of transformal tension, a projective opposition between forces, one entirely physical and conveying pure convexity and; the other, purely notional and injecting into the physical a fervent concavity—with each distending toward its own direction, which is to say, its own dimension.

A similar deconstruction of planar perception is central to the work of Andrew Neumann, whose series of electronic sculptures, Industrial Wall Panels, expresses transformal conjugation on a variety of levels. The material choice of these sculptures accentuates one such distinction, as the organic role of the back panel, comprised of unpainted plywood, contradicts the mechanical and optical operations of the mechanism that figures over it. In opposition, too, is the stasis of the panel against the motion inherent within the metallic machinery of self-observation in continual oscillating movement like a laden pendulum or a Duchampian rotorelief whose expressive dynamism has been translated from a circular contour to a horizontal one. The layering of planes stipulated in Neumann’s work is emphasised by the presence of one or various cameras trained on kinetic details of the work’s own rotary motion rail system, or conversely of an abstract line painted directly onto the sculpture, a recursive act that fills the distance between conceptual forms with a new reading of the work, a reading rendered by the work onto itself. These elements orchestrate simultaneously in Phase Cancellation with Sine Wave (figure 2), in which each half of a double rail structure, stacked and harmonising like the staves of a piano score, sets into motion an electronic component. The bottom module, exposing its circuitry so cryptically as to render it unrecognisable, is a camera assembly whose focal interest is a horizontal sine wave painted onto the panel beneath the rail. The top element in this duo, accommodating a compact LCD monitor whose image is the signal of the sine wave captured by the camera, moves across the panel to the rotation of its own helical screw rail. Each element, camera and monitor, paces horizontally across the surface of the panel in entirely independent rhythm, so that the reality of the painted sine wave becomes relativized and deconstructed in an act of scanning that is itself explicitly decomposed into an endless continuity of states combining viewing in one direction with presenting in another. Neumann’s work typifies how the transformal encoding of perception through planar differences destroys the transparency of mechanism and medium, replacing the intuitive assumptions of integration with relentless conspicuousness on implicit processes themselves.

Figure 2. Andrew Neumann, Phase Cancellation with Sine Wave. Plywood, LCD screen, camera, motors, electronics, 32” x 18” x 7”. 2002. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

In light of the numerous reciprocities that I have documented here, it is retrospectively arguable that the scope of possibility implied in Stieglitz’s letter to Duchamp turns on the acknowledgment of mechanical process as a new aesthetic and embryonically cybercultural code rather than as embedded groundwork for something else. This shift toward process is why the same question could have been asked by Duchamp of Stieglitz. Duchamp’s departure from conventional art practice, a moment seen as germinating in a diary entry containing the self-rebuking imperative to stop painting and get a job, is in many ways a permanent foray into the embrace of technical materials not only for expressive critique, but for a kind of engineering, which is to say the capture of functionality, that artistic practice had always ignored. The near-filmic motion that Duchamp’s early painting had striven to capture through Nude Descending a Staircase, through the fictive documentation of gear machinery in The Large Glass, and through the interrogative paradox on motion of Bicycle Wheel, will all later amplify in his electrically powered rotorelief work, itself a mechanical kineticisation, a multi-angle take on expressive perspective, a major disavowal of painting’s flatness, and collude to frame new conditions of art through an embrace of the artful media, which is to say conceptual engineering. This line of effort reveals how genuinely and repeatedly Duchamp’s empirical curiosities reached into the heart of Stieglitz’s own territory. For it was Stieglitz who had studied mechanical engineering in Berlin forty years earlier, and it was he again who had developed unusual expertise in photochemistry and who harvested a collection of cameras large and small with which to experimentalise the photograph. It was Stieglitz, the epitome of the artist artisan, who explored new media and confronted aesthetic and technical matter with equal skill. And, likewise, a visionary attention to multiple perspective was also valuable to Stieglitz, manifesting most momentously in vigorous and clairvoyant sponsorship of the young Picasso, for whom he organized the first solo exhibition, in 291, the legendary “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession” which Stieglitz and Edward Steichen opened in 1911. With such foresight and foundations, one can view this perplexing question of whither photography as art as a probe to Duchamp’s logic rather than as a factual quest for authenticity that Stieglitz would in any case have by then long resolved. And the probe proves fruitful, for Duchamp’s answer falls neither in the class of affirmation nor of denial but, looking to the role of artistic production within the continuity of historical process, presages what has become increasingly consequential to art’s encirclements around medium and materiality, namely that culture’s technological and industrial affordances now provide the bulk of what defines the principal experiences, events, and objects through which both contemporary art and the culture industry articulate.

These encirclements, measurable in art’s evolution through accelerating engagements with new technology and materials, are not isolated cases; they are overlooked or relegated as secondary to art’s genuine modernist concerns. But as an abundance of examples of what must now be called cybercultural art, they appear in several moments and places, in the geometric symmetries in the latticed sculptured of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, Francisco Sobrino, and François Morellet, the magnetic sculpture of Len Lye and Takis, the kinetic sculpture of George Rickey, the material deconstructions of Jean Tinguely, the light dynamos of Heinz Mack, recombinant revolutions of Nicolas Schöffer’s rotating objects and in the utter industrial depersonalisation of the Minimalist aesthetic. The material structure of these works expands and saturates expressive space to the point where critique folds within the fabric of work, for it is through technological proficiency that this kind of art is realized, and only through such technology that its significance would be decoded. To appraise the full extent to which such art functions as critique requires that critique itself migrate from a system built up of rational formalism and categorical abstraction toward the technological frame from which new media work is constructed and through which it codifies itself. To ask, from such a cybercultural frame, what sense it makes to view new media art through notions of flatness, to recall Greenberg’s modernist norms for painting, is to prompt a backward glance all the way to photography itself, and the critical difficulties that it imposed on art’s received aesthetic paradigms. For, even with its glaring representational characteristics, photography already embedded in itself a critique of culture mediated through a mechanism of production and reproduction that was no longer predominantly manual. And the perception of that distance, which locates the act of creation as something far removed from the immediate hand, was the major crisis for art and for culture, a point of simultaneous material, economic, and political transition at the turn of the last century.

Cultural production, no longer an immediate craft, becomes mechanized and industrialized into a new phenomenon that compels broad deciphering of social and technical codes. In this dual cipher, with production newly accompanied by and gradually supplanted by reproduction is the semantic etymology of cyberculture, the historical moment in which a conglomeration of signs produced both by humans and technology defines a turbulent sea on whose waves of innovation everything new instantly, virally, reproduced is continually rendered obsolete by further novelty, improvement, or replacement. Drawing closer to perception, this restless cultural language, manifest in the neologistic adoption, substitution, and convergence of art, system, craft, and language, is a sign of cyberculture’s perpetual “until something else”.

Bibliography

Debord, G., The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, Cambridge, Mass., 1967/1995.

Durant, M. A., ‘The Blur of the Otherworldly’, Art Journal, 62/3,Fall 2003, 6-15.

Durant, M. A. and Marsching, J. D. (eds.), Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture, UMBC, 2006.

Fawcett, E. D., ‘Matter and Memory’, Mind, 21/ 82,April 1912, 201-32.

Greenberg, C., Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1965.

Jones, C. A., Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005.

Latour, B., We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993.

Naumann, F., M. and Obalk, H. (eds.), Affectt Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. Jill Taylor London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Schjeldahl, P., The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990, (Lannan Series of Contemporary Art Criticism, No 2, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.

Sullivan, L. and Edwards, A. (eds.), Stewards of The Sacred Cambridge, MA: American Association of Museums with the Center for Study of World Religions, Harvard University, 2004.

Notes

[1] This introduction is based on one in a previous book that I edited, Cyberculture and New Media (Rodopi, 2009).

[2] Naumann, F., M. and Obalk, H. (eds.), Affectt Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. Jill Taylor London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. The typographic configuration shown is Duchamp’s.

[3] Schjeldahl, P., The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990, (Lannan Series of Contemporary Art Criticism, No 2, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. p. 187.

[4] See Jones, C. A., Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005. Jones documents this reduction, and through the question, “What was it that Greenberg took to be modern, such that an artist could emerge as either premature or ‘pseudo’ in relation to it?” (p.150) reasons its roots to be centered in a formalism of abstraction, one in which the body does not figure (as it were) and which conversely resonates with technology. Her further assertion that abstraction “also took from perception to purify” implicates Greenberg’s characterisation of modernism in Bruno Latour’s similar critique of modernity as largely manifesting through a practice of purification, of separation of “native” from “modern” sensibility, of pure from impure, whose culminating process is the scientific method, a methodological holy grail of sorts for Greenberg (See Latour, B., We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993.) .

[5] Greenberg, C., Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1965.

[6] This hybridism is for Latour, modernity’s second practice, a complement to that of purification.

[7] Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays,

[8] It is the relevance of this organicity to modernism that Greenberg dismisses. While Picasso and Matisse had broken with nature, the work of Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Kandinsky, rife with “mystical overtones”, was for Greenberg a “repudiation of technics and rationalism”, a metaphysical “messianism” that Caroline Jones connects to multiplicity of charges: of Greenberg’s view of Stieglitz as an intellectually puerile dandy; to Greenberg’s view of O’Keeffe as “pseudo-modern”; and to Greenberg’s inability to free the photograph from its indexicality (Cf. Jones, pp.145-175). As my later treatment of art and metaphysics reveals, these biases leave Greenberg outside the portals of cyberculture, with its propensity for assimilation through layered recoding of historical culture’s many previously unconnected manifestations.

[9] “Once society has lost its myth-based community, it loses all the reference points of truly common language until such time as the divisions within the inactive community can be overcome by the inauguration of a real historical community. When art, which was the common language of social inaction, develops into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too becomes subject to the movement governing the history of all separate culture. Its declaration of independence is the beginning of its end”. Debord, G., The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, Cambridge, Mass., 1967/1995.§ 186.

[10] Nor is this merely postmodern hindsight. Documenting Bergson’s rejection of the conceptual method in favour of the flux-like immediacy of experience, a 1912 review of the first English translation of Time and Free Will, makes clear that the basis for just such an essentialist reading of Stieglitz was available in his own day. Bergson’s “sympathetic insight” as fuel for the intuitive grasp crucial to a Stieglitz photograph is contrasted with the kind of formal/categorical reasoning that disrupts the captured phenomenon so that “to get at reality in its living movement we must break out of the prison of concepts and immerse ourselves, as best we may, in the flux”. Fawcett, E. D., ‘Matter and Memory’, Mind, 21/ 82,April 1912, 201-32.

[11] Durant, M. A., ‘The Blur of the Otherworldly’, Art Journal, 62/3,Fall 2003, 6-15.

[12] Ibid.

The received notion of the public sphere in fact melds an array of narrative and structural elements into a domain of expressive possibility whose center of attention serves both aesthetic and intersubjective concerns. This commingling entails two dynamic affordances that have been especially open to manipulation through new media art: the presence of architecture as sculptural object, and the use of projective strategies for pluralistic communication. The latter works as a new branch of street performance, not for actors, but for media. The sense of novelty here is more than mechanical; it compacts the distance between human and machine, the latter increasingly assuming roles played by the former, but organizes both in a new coordinate space that is neither entirely physical/real nor virtual/technological.

New media sculpture’s appropriation of architecture’s physical affordances utilizes those as a support for the kind of overlay that emerges naturally on the computer screen but not in three dimensions. For media artists Holger Mader, Alexander Stubli?, and architect Heike Wiermann the perceptual superimposition of one geometric structure over another makes a contrasting statement of this kind. Here, the felt directness that inheres in the stationary physical authority of a building or sculptural object is embedded into and within the dynamic projection of a moving grid, lattice, or framework, presenting itself as objective in its own plane within three-dimensional virtual space. And although the projected imagery congeals into position and reconfigures the physical into what would seem a “physical+virtual” compound, addition is not the precise operator to summarize the conceptual result. We can see in the resulting image-object evidence for how the categorical nature of image sequences, namely animation, is distinct from that of event sequences, namely, narrative; it is more accurately a progression of geometrical reconstructions whose logic destroys the confluence of order that a viewer expects when space and non-space collide and collude. It is the corollary of this distinction that Bakhtin finds in the literary novel’s relationship to temporal and spatial categories – a coordinate relationship that he terms the chronotope – and which is distinct for particular circumstances. In the romance, for example, Bakhtin locates narrative’s reliance on a space-time characteristic that is distinct from that which he terms “adventure-time”.¹ But in my present argument, the chronotope of spatial engagement is very particular to new media’s supplementation of subjective experience in architectural or real space.

This attribute is evident in Façade for example, a work originally designed for projection onto the Reykjavik headquarters building of Orkuveita Reykjavíkur, Iceland’s energy purveyor. The otherwise unremarkable, understated postmodern regularity of this structure is rendered unstable through a trans-axiality of non-Euclidian proportion. Abstract geometric forms appear in patterned unison, then, together, blend, meld, and transform into others equally rectilinear, with the unlikely flow of shifting desert sand. Depth against surface, figure against ground, edge against point, the primacy of spatial perception is subsumed under the polytonality of objects anchored in two separate coordinate systems within a single space.

Mader, Stubli?, Wiermann, Façade. Electronic Projection, 2007. Images courtesy of the artists.

This is not to say that projective space, as distinct from real space, obviates the social dynamic and function of spatial use as traditionally determined in the polis, or notion of the state as a representative layer over collective presence in a boundaried space. Rather, the character of projective space, which is already naturally transformative over architecture, is of a kind with what the notion of a dynamic democratic presence represented from the outset. It is, for example, in the early Habermas³ that full awareness of public sphere (Oeffentlichkeit) is first given, both as theoretical source of critique and empirical support for social transformation. As the historical roots of this term date back to the practices of the first democratic forum of ancient Greece, ‘public sphere’ has long been surrendered almost exclusively for political discourse. But it also operates elsewhere, in an art context, perhaps more openly, in ways that distinguish themselves from relations of power between humans and institutions. Here it would differentiate, for example, between perceptual provocation and moral persuasion.  But the public sphere’s immutable relevance and power, equally resonant with politics and with art despite their diverse agendas, lie in its potential for motorizing consciousness. Using the idea of the public sphere as the main analytic bludgeon in a sweeping critique aimed directly at the crisis of modernity, Habermas expanded previous thinking, constrained as it too often was, by the often longwinded pirouettes necessary to reduce the manifold reality of contemporary conditions down to Marxist or protest polemics. Inspired nonetheless but not constrained by such ideological biases (he owes much, for instance, to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment) Habermas’s concept, perhaps theory, of the public sphere draws on more than history and philosophy, but sweeps through economics, architecture, and sociology of communication to expand the opposition first established between private sphere – the arena of domestic concerns – and public sphere up toward something more nuanced and complicated – and can therefore relate art’s response to the encroachment of the public sphere in private life. And in new media, this opposition has grown into a mutual interpermeation, whereby the private self assumes a public sphere through the garb of a web persona from Facebook or MySpace, the bard of the blog, the prolocutor in the chat room, the doppelganger in Second Life. What means public sphere when each of those two words has been so altered by its virtual translation? Simply put, Habermas’s unspoken meta-contribution lies in first offering up an objective, workable, and sustainable distinction between the ideological and the critical, theretofore entirely conflated within Marxist discourse, and one might bear in mind the consequences for new media art criticism.

But this is not the only expanded alteration of importance to us. There are two other terms which have been observed operating in semantic equivalence in the work of Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno: modernity and avant-garde.⁴ While they may adequately serve the aims of critical political discourse as synonyms there, a difference among them bears retaining, particularly in the language of art, where they relate less through parity than through a kind of coextension of one another. In particular, the complex conditions of modernity extend to relations of production that are directed by divergent lines of interest, lines which often remain faithful to conventions where monetary value is manipulated and accumulates most steadily. In the art world, the gladiatorial venue for this ‘conservative modernity’ is the auction house, in which work from previous generations is traded as never before, applying price scales exceeding those of the diamond industry[1]. One can say, much more recently, that the same now applies to new art as well. But the trade in avant-garde art is much more bipolar, tenuous, selective, than that of prior generations, so that the sentiments that motivate the rules for this new kind of extreme value exchange are not in balance with those which, operating in the same spatio-temporal conditions of modernity, have produced and championed the avant-garde. In fact, the nadir of the modernity versus avant-garde wedge can, uniquely in art and unlike any other industry or discipline, be identified as radiating from one person, in Clement Greenberg, whose value judgments polarized the art world in precisely this way. But for art, the real factor of interest relating modernity and avant-garde is no longer played out in differences between formal abstractions of judgment like those which Greenberg articulated, flatness, for example, intimately tied with painting or sculptural modes of production. This battleground has been supplanted by others, the near-political zone and debates of the increasingly expanded and variegated public sphere is one of them. It is in that particular theatre that the sentiments of the avant-garde appear most poignantly, hold up a mirror to, and even clash with, the assumed framework of modernity in which the populace operates. Public art has come to challenge the public’s understanding of the functions of art and of space.

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, Cor-ten steel, 12 x 120 feet, New York City.

Of course, the infamous case of this challenge, chronicled in the story of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, serves as the icon of a polemic of the avant-garde within and against the assumptions of the public sphere. Commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Arts-in-Architecture program for the Federal Plaza in New York City, Richard Serra designed and placed a 120 foot long, 12 foot high wall of cor-ten steel so as to cut a previously unobstructed walking space almost entirely into diagonal halves. Serra’s spatial rupture made explicit the subversive use of art and the susceptibility of space to artistic objectification; in perhaps his most explicit remark on the sculpture as a phenomenological function, Serra asserted that “The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer’s movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.”² But this polemic of art and public sphere played out in the reconfiguring use of space – and in ferocious arguments in legal and critical circles – proved unequivocally tense, and art lost. Nine years after being erected in 1981, the sculpture was ordered destroyed. In its own arc of construction, “use”, and destruction this one work therefore responded both to the assumable notions of modernity – an unquestioning, uncritical avowal of art in almost anesthetic echoes of decorative art – whose (literal and figurative) position ultimately realized a necessary and conscious attack on those assumptions for art, space, and style that defines avant-garde as the refutation, rather than the Habermasian synonym, of modernist assumption. Through Tilted Arc, historians, political functionaries and the public found that while art of modernity extends the current environmental conditions for contemporary adaptation, avant-garde art confronts and redirects them, the literal case of which became the public sphere-as-experience of the sculpture’s plaza visitors. For when Serra stresses the engagement aesthetic, the explicit goal of transforming of viewer into the subject (“space becomes the sum of successive perceptions of the place. The viewer becomes the subject”⁷), he also makes that viewer into a proxy for the public sphere. As the avant-garde will, to quote the formalist phrase, make the familiar strange, the previous absence of even the vaguest reflection on space, destination, goal, and time that each pedestrian could afford to not-experience in Federal Plaza became replaced by the hyper-consciousness of those aims that Tilted Arc, as art (or obstacle) brought to inescapable awareness.

While one’s initial impression of avant-garde art comes to view as something abstract, formal, removed, and intellectually inscrutable, it is in the public sphere that what is an innocuous lout in this figure inexplicably becomes the threatening menace of corrupting value. Serra’s rightful anger found the crux of this turning point in the mind-numbing aesthetic judgments of political critics and pundits, whose diatribes for American freedom and democracy encountered no contradiction in their equally vociferous arguments for censorship of works which offended their own myopic sensibilities.⁸ Moreover, as Serra’s lawyers discovered, laws protecting copyright offered no protection on grounds of moral right of an artist to claim legal protection from distortion, defacement, or in this case, destruction, of a work once it is sold. A work, once sold, could be (and was) destroyed if the owner didn’t like it. This is problematic enough when it applies to a single individual (such as when a Japanese bank president destroyed a Noguchi sculpture that was not deemed worthy of artistic interest) but when the owner is the public, the work of art speaks in the public sphere, and the de facto executor becomes the bureaucratic public administrator.  Conservative arguments, like those overbearing dismissals of Hilton Kramer, refused to acknowledge the responsibility that necessarily accompanies the modes deliberative engagement and expression that the public sphere has historically afforded the populace and upon which democracy itself depends. Instead, the problem becomes restated as one of offensiveness to the public. What originates as the engagement aesthetic of Serra’s wish to make the implicit explicit, to bring to conscious awareness the function of space and art in it, distorts into an attack on the part of the artist against the public.  Consider Kramer’s misrepresentation of Serra:

What proved to be so bitterly offensive to the community that “Tilted Arc” was commissioned to serve was its total lack of amenity indeed, its stated goal of provoking the most negative and disruptive response to the site the sculpture dominated with an arrogant disregard for the mental well-being and physical convenience of the people who were obliged to come into contact with the work in the course of their daily employment.⁵

When engagement is recast as obligation, art judged by the extreme adjective of “decency” (burdening art with the impossibly subjective and historically transient definition of decency) no work in the public sphere can survive, for what work of art has the option to appear and disappear at the whim of a member of that public unable to critically reconsider his own conservative sensibilities? How in fact can the public sphere operate at all when it can be censored, shut down, controlled by rules of order defined by any single group whose umbrage is first or most virulently provoked? An historically, the effect is amplified; the avant-garde in this kind of public sphere is afforded no bottom or anchor.

If materially originated avant-garde art like Tilted Arc can find such little protection in the public sphere, what of art in the hyper-contemporary spaces of the virtual sphere, most of which is by definition avant-garde? Critiques that first looked at contemporary artists and works through the lens of their response to and relevance with ideological and counter-ideological statements ought to be extended in correspondence with the augmentation of the public sphere into virtual dimensions, particularly as this also-contemporary octave of the public sphere provides an empirical platform for dialogue on the same matters of substance that consumed the 18^th century salons of which Habermas wrote³. There is no doubt but that the participatory characteristics of that environment are increasingly corroborated by empirical research that should also enter the discursive spaces of art criticism in contemporary engagement, because destruction of art is not in the interest of that public sphere. It is within art, in fact that the public sphere can voice distinctly, uniquely, autonomously, single poles of oppositions that cannot be separated or stated apart from their mutual antagonism in the political forum alone. In its many provocations, contemporary art can and does address themes of money (or not), of violence (or not), of coercion (or not), of tradition (or not), of class and stratification (or not). Naturally, this capability for voicing one side in exclusion of the other predates new media art, and is so clearly the prerogative of the artist that even within highly specific strategies of production – for example, text art –an entire oeuvre articulates either ideologically, as does that of Barbara Kruger, or not, as relates to that of Lawrence Weiner, or,alternatively, can ambiguously fringe the margin throughout, as does the work of Jenny Holzer, or projectively, that of Krzysztof Wodiczko.

This is not to disavow the real political character of much new media art, which turns to the conventional uses of the public sphere – the examples of Kanarinka, Jane Marsching argue this explicitly. And, offered up not merely less as an art-political than art-prophylactic intervention, Paul Notzold describes his aptly titled TXTual Healing as an SMS-enabled interactive street performance, as another case of spatial engagement whose own chronotope is more than imaginary.

Paul Notzold, TXTual Healing. SMS-enabled interactive projection. 2006. http://www.txtualhealing.com/

Cambridge, March 2010

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, 84-258. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Buskirk, Martha and Weyergraf-Serra, Clara, ed. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeios Society. Cambridge: Polity, 1962 (trans 1989).

Hohendahl, Peter and Russian, Patricia. “Jürgen Habermas: ‘The Public Sphere’ (1964).” New German Critique 3, Autumn, 1974: 45-48.

Kramer, Hilton. “Is Art above the Laws of Decency?” New York Times, 2 July 1989.

Sandler, Linda. Christie’s 2007 Auctions Rise 25%, Boosted by Contemporary Art (Jan. 18, 2008) Bloomberg.com, translated, 2008 [cited Jan. 24 2008]. Available from http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&refer=home&sid=anpsAqCmYD_M.

Serra, Richard. “Selected Statements Arguing in Support of Tilted Arc.” In Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc”, edited by Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk. Eindhoven: Eindhoven, 1988.

Serra., Richard. “Art and Censorship.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 3 (Spring, 1991).

While the momentum of free software — no longer a fringe element, but rather a staple of Internet and applications development — has grown significantly, it seems to have shed its archaic character as a form of political resistance, a fact reflected by the softening of its appellation when the offhandedly referenced “free software movement” neutralized into “user-contributed community”. But why did this depolicitization take place, even as the quality and amount of worldwide free software production increased? In my thinking, it derives from two reasons. One is psychological, the other institutional.

At the individual level, the greater impulse fueling the software engineering mindset is to create, not to critique. It may not be far-fetched to think of programmers as engineering artists, problem-solvers who want to touch the world with a solution whose impact is ratified through its embrace within the larger world. The economic structure of commercial software is, in this perspective, almost irrelevant to the creative drive and ineluctable satisfaction that software design provides. This is a psychological rationale for the dissolution of a movement amidst the rise of its product. But this cannot suffice to explain how the change in ethical polemics surrounding free software in the decade following 1980 contrasts with that in the decade following 2000. Beyond this reason for continuing an upward slant of software production, there is an institutional one – namely, the adoption of free software *by* the commercial software industry, not for profit share but for market share. What used to be proprietary, like CompuServe’s patent of the GIF algorithm, became “owned but shared” in a manner that was to the end user indistinguishable from Stallman’s ethically pure free software. Microsoft’s infamous development of Internet Explorer against Netscape is one case study of this kind. Sun Microsystems’ development and release of Java is another. Earlier on, XEROX PARC’s creation of Smalltalk heralded not merely a program, but a whole object-oriented discipline. We know, too, that OpenOffice, while entirely free and open-source, was not brought to the world by a small group of programmers without portfolio, but rather by Sun Microsystems, after an acquisition and several other way-points. There are significant examples of software developed through similar etiologies in every user’s computer. Stallman’s argument made sense in 1990 when it seemed that free software would be fighting against paid software, defined as emblems of a world that was singularly fee-charging and imperial. But what of that fight when the user-contributed software community has not only grown wholly outside those (important, though antiquated) ideological vituperations but has, as with FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, the blogosphere, and other constituents of social media, given birth to the next version of the Internet? I thus agree with Nick that better programmability, not freer use, is the best and most inclusive future.

There are few places to go more crucial to the future of a medium than through evolutionarily close dialogue between modes of construction and the end content itself. We passionately want that; what do users want? Programming can be simplified, yet is not an Everyman pursuit any more than writing literature can naturally be. The best work in either field is always realized by a creative elite, not by the regular person (though we do romanticize this somewhat). In the late 1980’s , when HyperCard emerged, it represented the first serious attempt in history to provide a simple but powerful system for building interactive software to the masses. It was not alone, as mentioned, SmallTalk, and independently, LOGO, Pascal, and MacLISP became available alongside BASIC – all programming environments that bestowed extraordinary power on users with modest programming ability. In the simple-system route, many languages, to include Perl, Python, and PHP, have emerged, each seemingly simpler to use than its predecessor. The principal strategy for such ease of programming mirrored what was found to be true in the cognitive behavior of advanced learners. It involved what Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach called chunking – encapsulating large amounts of small processing ability in higher-level abstractions that could be represented as singular, rather than compound, entities. Despite realizing very sophisticated modular functionality of this sort, none of these systems managed to remain with the “typical” non-programmer, as Bill Atkinson had first desired in developing of HyperCard.

In the 1980’s, when I was a graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education a few of us were researching ways through which this potential “free programming movement”, as it were, could be extended to teachers – the ideal non-programmers – so that they could design learning interventions for their own students. Judah Schwartz, the fearless leader of this initiative, designed a course called Educational Software Design Lab in which principles of Piagetian constructivism and its empirical sibling, constructionism, would incrementally inform the design of interactive software. When some years later I co-taught the course, it comprised not only teachers but museum educators, historians, statisticians, an Army captain studying at the Kennedy School of Government, and an archaeologist. In less than five years, these fields had simultaneously come to embrace the idea that a content matter expert could create software whose use would support existing pedagogy. During this time, Seymour Papert’s Epistemology and Learning group at the MIT Media Lab was taking this idea to a logical extreme; inspired by Paolo Friere’s thinking, Papert wished for educational software to “destroy” the school, as he occasionally emphasized. The idea of free programming was becoming an object of curious promise to non-programmers and a polemical lever for Papert, Stallman, and others who were counter-institutionally motivated.

As with the polemics of the free software movement, whose output was co-opted dually by the commercial enterprise at one ideological extreme and bottom up social experiments at the other, educational software, starting with HyperCard (which cost $50 at first but which later came bundled with all new Apple computers), was essentially never a phenomenon that inspired the creation of a critical mass, a programmer in every home. What made sense to build in the 1980’s and 90’s was already commercially available in the subsequent decade. To write a novel, it no longer became necessary to create a program to provide the functions of a text editor. Perhaps more importantly, the creation of a medium requires a very different kind of craftsmanship than that of its content. But the line between both has been rendered less intractable as software has become more intuitive, intelligent, and inferentially informed. One remembers this same period – the late 1980’s – when during his years away from Apple, Steve Jobs founded NeXT, whose NeXTSTEP operating system featured an array of innovations like object oriented page rendering from web pages, or display postscript, to patents, from the electrical connector all desktop computers use today

NeXT cable plug

(US patent D312,240), the canonical design for desktop printers (US patent D319,461)

NeXT printer

all by Hartmut Esslinger, insufficiently celebrated design transformer of computer culture from the realm of industrial klunk  to that of the elegant and understated.

In this connection, however, NeXT’s chief innovation was the storage of software code that was precompiled – Hofstadter’s chunks – and which could be manipulated on a graphical interface by iconic means. Chaining and connecting the objects was the functional equivalent of programming; at the technical level it was linking the compiled objects together to form a new autonomous program.

NeXTSTEP workspace manager

The aims of education and simplifying programming have always been close; Alan Kay’s recent NSF grant for the Viewpoints Research Institute, for example, has both aims at the core of the mission. As with Jobs’s implementation of link-based programming in NeXTSTEP, Kay’s EToys and Squeakland/Squeak environments integrate the creation (painting) an object on screen with the menu-based scripting commands that make it functional.

EToys object-functional interface

It is difficult somehow to imagine a more seamless or uncomplicated path to the creation of programmed entities. Yet as I have mentioned, and as history shows, this has not proved to be the hoped-for method of popular embrace; to lay users it may seem too abstruse and thus not sufficiently simple; to programmers it may appear too rudimentary and thus not sufficiently powerful. Needless to say, Kay’s work is built on the same object-oriented architecture that powered Smalltalk, another environment that also passed on, perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for others. Software design, like other design, has in every other context proved to be most usable when it employs familiar metaphors and tropes. Can it be that this kind of acontextual design interface has failed because it is too free? Perhaps a theater of constraints provides the better road to optimal design, less as a polemical movement than as an inclusive philosophy.

Figure 1. A Microsoft Visio Drawing

Figure 2. Inspiration diagram

Figure 3. Microsoft PowerPoint Slide

For a culture whose millennia have been given with consistent rigor to the improvement of communicative competence – starting, not least, with the educational requirement that young Classical Greeks master the five-point techné of rhetoric – any new-fangled deviation from this progressive path toward communicative erudition is bound to have some noticeable impact. In particular, the displacement of topic-driven thinking by point-driven media introduces a special economy of language that reduces the archetypal expressive unit, the sentence, to an almost irrelevant and archaic artifact rarely seen in these new forms. Point-driven writing, whether manifest in drawing, diagram, or bullet list, desires to emphasize process and to communicate some kind of how concerning what is presented, and through its insistent visuality, renders the written form almost unnecessary. Not surprisingly, this alteration has attracted the attention of critics from diverse perspectives. There are some for whom the historically evolved forms of textual expression fulfill conditions of understanding that are not attainable merely with points, glyphs, or graphs, and others for whom the comparison between topical and point-driven media is not necessary, for each is its own class of communicative tool. Edward Tufte, who interestingly enough comes from a statistical rather than a literary background, finds these non-manuscript forms incapable of natural exposition and rich development of ideas¹³. For Tufte, focusing particularly on the single category of presentation software, the characteristic cascade of bullet points, garish mastheads with oversized, condescendingly obvious graphics, and distracting animations typical of its “texts” all amount to a jarring, disconcerting experience lacking not only in depth but also in all that “comes across” in the fullness of ample explanation. Conversely, a more exploratory interpretation comes from David Byrne, who, as visual artist, begins with parody, with “making fun of the iconography of Powerpoint”³ and redirects the medium into its own kind of expressive genre unrelated to any historically determined textual function. Utilizing the tools of the tool, such as its ability to render arrows, for aesthetic production in its own right, he subsumes the domain of text to that of image.²

Figure 4. Byrne's aesthetic exploitation of PowerPoint Still, “Sea of Possibilities”, David Byrne, 2003, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery

Two differing understandings – one pragmatic, one aesthetic – of the same phenomenon, now set the foundation for what has developed between the semi-textual and the orthodox-textual: the space of the neo-textual where oral and textual, and semi-improvised emerged, and we see a new kind of conversational writing be born in the form of blogs, emails, and other aleatory genres. Traditional textual practices, in the essay or novel, for instance, are perhaps six centuries old; the semi-textual is as old as the algorithmic or process diagram, whose heyday is somewhere in the twentieth century. But conversational writing has no direct ancestor, save perhaps for the personal diary, which, however, never took the sprawling, sometimes fragmented, form common today. The term is not entirely new, however, a version of it –  “conversational literacy”  –  appeared in Janzen-Wilde’s ⁶meta-analysis of oral and mediated communication. Wilde, too, was the first to notice that lying entirely neither in print-based nor orally based genres, mediated communication synthesizes from both and “has characteristics typically assigned to both ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ ends of the continuum”.

The characteristics of this style, embedded in its digital medium, are the subject of speculation equal to that of the effects of the medium on “traditional” writing. Special “mechanics” distinguish this new style, and these lexical characteristics which reflect the degree of orality embedded in the medium are encoded both for visual prominence and lexical conciseness, raising the prominence of one and attenuating the other, an increasingly evident observation:

The oral conventions are evident in the way people subvert or abandon traditional conventions of grammar and punctuation in electronic writing. Meaning is very often conveyed by cues recognized only by users of computer-mediated communication. Some examples are acronyms like BTW (by the way) and IMO (in my opinion), and specialized use of typography — for example, *word* to signify italics and the use of nonverbal icons or emoticons like a smiley face — which differ from traditionally recognized textual cues.⁵

Another relation justifies the popular belief in significant differences between oral, written, and online modes of communication: the production of digital textuality in relation to the principle of commitment. To consider the conditions of speech is to accept evanescent, improvisatory modes of expression projected literally into the air. Everything more or less spontaneous in this sense is captured within the notion of the utterance. To produce writing, on the other hand, is to engage in preparatory organizational work and editing prior to “committing” expression to paper, its natural chosen medium. We could take these practices as two ends of a spectrum, and see in electronic writing a middle ground with sufficient latitude to draw arbitrarily from each pole. Here, any resemblance to print text emerges from the common lexical nature of both: words uniformly arranged on a visual medium. The contrast however, is equally significant, for, as with air, the digital medium is highly unstable and fleeting, and its production is sufficiently simple that textual operations based on structural organization, prewriting, and detailed editing are anathema to its aleatory affordances, regardless of other distinctions within the medium, for instance whether the genre in question is transmitted synchronously (e.g., chatrooms) or not (e.g., e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups, and discussion groups). In conventional writing, the author generally writes to make a point. But in digital conversational writing online authors may pursue another purpose, since the style of this writing appears structured so as to reflect the social network in which the authors are participating.

Judging from what others have observed in this regard, a special relationship between physicality and orality holds, the lack of the former being compensated by the latter, both because the lack of another means of communicating introduces non-verbal communication into a predominantly textual medium and because networked users, interacting in large numbers, can experience many kinds of interaction almost simultaneously. Here a nexus of language is superimposed on one of populace, a two-dimensional grid of continuous interaction: optimizations to the traditional model of expository text are essential. In defining the notion of virtual community, Rheingold refers indirectly to the displacement of presence by expression, when, pondering both the breadth of collective contact and the demand for using language in the absence of material presence to assist in those relationships, he remarks that people in virtual communities continually

exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.¹⁰

We might conclude altogether that the more one looks into conversational writing, the less it resembles traditional text, in purpose or structure. The speed and quantity of messages (again, emphasizing points rather than topics) almost compels a new definition for its medium-specific functions, and one can understand the rationale for assertions like Ferris’s “computer users often treat electronic writing as an oral medium: communication is often fragmented, computer-mediated communication is used for phatic communion, and formulaic devices have arisen” or Murray’s classification of such writing as comprising a “language of action”.⁹

We have enough here to deepen our examination of conversational writing into specific questions posed by the foregoing comparisons. With the generous amount of speculation on the characteristics of digital conversational writing, one would expect a somewhat proportional body of observational data to support or refute theoretical claims, but this has not materialized. Considering that the operational nature and environment of digital text leads transparently to its archival– which is what the innumerable server logs and search engine indexes do – the paucity of systematic studies of data and material produced within and through the digital medium is nothing less than surprising. And it is not entirely clear what useful inferences can be drawn from much of what does exist, certainly stylistic knowledge – knowledge of what and how authors are creating online, and how the conventions adopted and evolving in their medium compare with those long established in the world of print – does not appear to be the focus of such analyses. One would, for instance, like to observe whether stylistic practices in the new medium conform to conventional modes of print-based writing: is there consensus on the length of sentences between both conventional and conversational writing? If conversational writing derives attributes from orality (Ferris’s observation that “electronic writing is characterized by the use of oral conventions over traditional conventions, of argument over exposition, and of group thinking over individual thinking” is representative of this belief) , how significant and present are these in any digital corpus, such as an online discussion group, or a library of similar communications documents? This suggests a spectrum of communicative modes ranging from most to least “formal” along lexical and semantic criteria defined next.

Figure 5. Spectrum of oral-literal communicative modes

1. Analytic Criteria

Let us establish the first dimension of an analytic framework that qualitatively incorporates the different “kinds” and forms of writing we wish to compare. We first assume, along with the general academic consensus, that print-oriented or traditional writing stands in structural contrast with oral communication – this point has been navigated throughout an entire literature and, as mentioned earlier, a relatively early informative meta-analysis (Janzen-Wilde, 1993) assembled relevant conclusions for comparative media, between literacy and facilitated communication:

Table 1. Characteristics of "orality" and their relationship to facilitated communication

Table 2. Characteristics of "literacy" and their relationship to facilitated communication

Janzen-Wilde concludes that “characteristics of orality which are common in facilitated communication include its use in regulating social interactions and the opportunity for the listeners/ communication partners to give immediate feedback to the speaker”, in this sense, conversational writing is most unlike its traditional predecessor. In the new millennium, emails and blogs are the everyday examples of conversational writing.

Content and genre present special problems for comparative media work, any conclusions deduced from textual analysis must only reflect structural features of the medium, such as specific conventions and communicative practices, rather than content features of it. The importance of structural inference can be illustrated in a simple example. Let us imagine a (flawed) comparison of print versus orality by means of examining five works of each. Our sample from print media, in other words, would comprise five novels and our oral sample, five transcripts transcribed from legal cases argued in a court of law. This assessment, after lexico-statistical analysis, would lead us to infer almost inescapably that print media are more ‘romantic’ and that orality, on the other hand, is more ‘factual’. This error of inference would reflect the nature of the samples utilized for each medium, not any features inherent in how the medium is used. In seeking to establish objective differences in communicative practices between media, therefore, we must choose criteria that are independent of special content-level features such as “factuality” or “romance”, for factuality is not intrinsic to any medium (were that it were so!). We must, therefore, confine ourselves to comparing media on strictly structural features that may emerge from communicative practices within them. And the structural characteristics must be present in all the media under scrutiny. Three such structural features offer themselves without much bias: sentence length, pronoun usage, and lexical density – let us now define each.

If, as some research in the Characteristics of Literacy table claims ⁴,¹⁴,¹² that written text possesses unique structural characteristics, concise use of syntax and ideas and cohesion based on linguistic markers, then the first and most important measure by which to compare communicative differences between text, orality, and conversational writing is the word length of sentences in each medium: if the belief is that oral media are more “rambling” and free than print-based ones, we ought to expect longer sentences from the former. Intuitively, it is reasonable to surmise that the length of sentences in one medium or genre might be radically different than in another; why should they be the same? We will analyze this variable below. Similarly, a second criterion, relative pronoun usage, is also worth exploring across media. Measuring the extent of pronoun usage across different media would indicate the degree to which persons are “close to the text” by way of direct reference, and may justify answering the question of whether one medium is in general more impersonal than another. Again, the instinctive hypothesis might be that orality is more informal and therefore more “personal” or intimate than text, and that pronoun usage in blogs and emails lies ostensibly somewhere between both. This is intriguing, but it is worth cautioning ourselves that pronoun usage may belong more to specific kind of content than to the intrinsic structure of how communication in media takes place. Nevertheless, given this instinctive hypothesis and caveat, comparative statistics on pronoun usage are presented here without firm conclusion, should they prove helpful for future linguistic investigations in new media. Finally, lexical density, the opposite of redundancy in language, is an indicator, in a text, of the percentage of words that are unique within it; the lower the density, the greater the verbal redundancy and therefore the presumed ease of comprehension. The formula for calculating the lexical density D for any text is

D = (U/N)* 100

where U is the number of unique words in a text sample, and N is its total word count. Lexical density is more than a statistical number; it confirms a central principle from information theory that the amount of redundancy in a message boosts its comprehension. Let us imagine that you want to learn a dialectical kind of Spanish, Cuban street argot, one word at a time. Today’s word is astilla, a noun which translates to splinter, although the slang means something completely different. With a single utterance, you might or might not guess the slang term’s denotation:

Use astilla for dinner.

The lexical density of this utterance is 100% because 4 out of the 4 words are unique. In my next lesson, my new phrase:

Use astilla for dinner. use astilla for payment

has 5 out of 8 unique words. Its lower (63.%) lexical density reflects the possibility that the redundancy in this text boosts its potential comprehension, and you now have some feasible ideas as to the slang meaning of astilla. My next phrase

Use astilla for dinner, use astilla for payment, use astilla for purchases

now has only 6 unique words out of 12, or a 50% lexical density, and this increased redundancy has supports your grwing conjecture that astilla means money. In this sense, comparative measures of lexical density would corroborate or disprove the claim that orality emphasizes familiar words as well as repetitive syntax and ideas (Westby, 1985; Rubin, 1987), and based on those research claims, we would expect to find lower lexical density in oral data than in print, and the density of online texts would presumably lie between both.

In having converged on these criteria, we attempt to determine whether, structurally, it is possible to infer higher-level patterns and implications about online conversational writing in contradistinction to oral and written text. The data for this investigation ranges across each of the four communicative modes in question, including sentence samples from print text, emails, blogs, and transcripts of spoken occasions. Scanning software was designed fur a number of purposes, including automatic retrieval of emails from a public database, retrieval of blog postings with archival in text-only form, and to gather statistical measures from each corpus. In the area of print, there is a half millennium of source material to choose from, but oral practices of today cannot compare to texts older than about a century. Subsequently, the works of the chosen text corpus (listed in Appendix B), though small, takes a roughly equal number of short stories from classic literature as far back as 1898 and combines with modern stories in an online magazine . Given the stylistic breadth of printed texts In fact, we do not need a massive text corpus because we are choosing a few thousand sentences for analysis from each of four modes: print, oral communication, emails, and blogs. The oral sources, listed in Appendix A, include transcripts of political debates, television talk shows, and one radio documentary interview. The email samples come from the Enron email corpus made public as a result of a U.S. federal criminal investigation. It consists of the text of 619,446 email messages from the Enron Corporation by 158 users who wrote an average of 757 messages each¹⁵, and a representative but random sample is chosen. Numerous analyses have been made of this corpus, the most systematic of these being that at the University of Massachusetts¹, and exemplifying rules have been derived as to the adequate length of an email and its subject line⁸. The source of blogs is taken from 30 sequential postings in each of 61 random blogs (1830 unique postings with 8726 sentences). As with emails, attempts have been made to categorize blogs automatically⁷ and results from writing style will be presented as well. Overall, a comparable number of sentences from emails (9875), blogs (8780), debates (8748), and texts (8600) was taken and analyzed.

2. Analysis

There is much theory on blogging, but few empirical studies exist of semantics or stylistic composition in blogs (or emails), and methodological problems are epidemic. One 2004 study¹¹ analyzed 203 blogs but reached conclusions based on the reported number of sentences detected (3260) and words collected (42930) cannot have looked at more than the first page of each blog, for in my study of 61 blogs, the scanning program requested 30 blog postings from each, for a total of 8726 sentences and 94433 words – from fewer than one-third the blogs in the 2004 study. In all, the statistics are based on are 522 individual postings. My analysis found the average number of words per post to be 303, not similar to Herring’s 210. We did, however not disagree on the average number of words per sentence; I found 15, Herring 16.

Herring count the number of paragraphs in their blog corpus, but I find this measure somewhat problematic in the blog genre. A paragraph, in the realm of conventional print, is a group of one of more sentences separated by one or more empty lines. However, the definition of paragraphs is different in web genres, where, rather than being used to separate groups of ideas in the same text, paragraph breaks instead introduce whole new ideas or micro texts. Similarly, the paragraph – or a set of empty lines, to be precise – is overloaded in blog style, being the default marker between blog posts, the separator between texts and graphic elements, the break between a text and an inserted quoted, and a mere cosmetic device where inserting white space adds visual balance to existing text blocks. None of these uses is related to the original purpose of the paragraph. A much more difficult problem is that of quoted phrases in blogs. Herring’s count presents the methodological complication that no single definition was given for what constitutes a quoted phrase. They provide two separate counts, quoted sentences/fragments and quoted words per sentence but do not state how quotes were counted, for, in blog style, there are at least three ways to quote. One is by inserting the desired text within quotes – the conventional way. Another is by inserting a block of quoted text, for which an HTML tag specifically exists. The third is not to include the text at all, but rather to link to it. This makes questionable the statistical measure presented there, the number of “quoted words per sentence”, which they find to be 7.6 – an almost impossible number if we accept their 13.2 “words per sentence” measure, as it would mean that over half of everything written is in quotes.

In an initial examination of 500 emails and 500 posts on random blogs, the pattern of sentence length for each genre appears to be very similar (see figure 7).

Figure 7. Frequency Distribution of sentences by word count, Emails and Blogs

If, even taking into consideration the wide disparities in style across all possible authors, significant stylistic differences are found with the distribution of sentence length in other genres, these could be attributed to the structure of the genre, and its writing practices, which for the most part lack interventions such as word count limit, editorship, and revision, all of which would influence its average length of sentence.

If we overlay sentence length (grouped in ranges of 5 words) all communicative modes a single graphical frequency distribution, we find the first significant difference between text and conversational writing.

Figure 8. Graphical representation of Relative Distribution, Sentence Length Ranges, by Genre

Table 3. Relative Distribution, Sentence Length Ranges, by Genre

From this table we can ask whether significant relationships hold between sentence lengths across media modes. A regression analysis of emails and blogs shows a powerful  (98.5% ) correlation between them (p < 0.05):

Table 4. Regression Analysis of Sentence Length Ranges – Emails and Blogs

Likewise, blogs and spoken text share a tight 75.4% correlation (p<0.05) in length:

Table 5. Regression Analysis of Sentence Length Ranges - Blogs and Speech

And the correlation between email and spoken data is significantly high (70.7%, p<0.05):

Table 6. Regression Analysis of Sentence Length Ranges - Email and Speech

These analyses demonstrate significant similarity in sentence length across oral and conversational writing modes. Conversely, and as expected, there is a low (28.4%) correlation of sentence length between email and written text, from which we reject the null hypothesis that they are from similar populations (or lengths):

Table 7. Regression Analysis of Sentence Length Ranges - Email and Texts

In summary, this shows, at the conventions of sentence length, how much closer emails and blogs are to spoken genres than to written texts.

One structural point about blog stylistics bears consideration: the notion of sentence must be somewhat redefined in this genre, which gives equal importance both to the “traditional” declarative sentence and the caption, which is not a sentence but a verbal adjunct to reinforce an associated idea or a graphic. Thus, what appear under normal grammatical conditions to be nonsensical fragments like “Rewards of some hard digging” or “gander mountain credit card” emphasize the dependence of text on other non-textual elements in order to substantiate meaning. This has become standard practice in blog writing. Typically, the fragment-caption will be a sentence missing either the verb, e.g., “Lots of diggers”, “Myself with a very good find”, “picture of beetle bug” or the subject, e.g., “Screening ore”.

The results of sentence length, which show conversational writing to be of similar length as oral utterances, does not carry in the area of pronoun usage, for as the next figure shows:

Figure 9. Relative pronoun usage in text, speech, email, and blog sample

The frequency slope shows that text employs more pronouns than blogs or email samples, and approximates only speech in frequency of use. This runs against the generally accepted polarity of orality versus literacy, with conversational writing synthesizing elements of both. The formula for determining pronoun usage is simply the percentage of words in a corpus that are pronouns. No doubt, a larger corpus is necessary to determine this more authoritatively, and we might keep in mind that some text genres are bound to have more pronouns than others. In the present case, the text corpus was comprised entirely of fiction works, but if we used scientific monographs, the resulting pronoun usage would differ greatly. Nonetheless, as a starting point for discussion, these results invite certain speculation. In particular, we might infer that blogs are more “impersonal” than email, and both are less personal than speech, which is as we might expect, since speech is more improvisatory; and email is easier to compose than blogs. In the Enron sample, many emails were of a highly personal nature whose appropriateness in a blog format may not be evident. Further research should statistically probe the comparative degree of personal reference in blogs and emails.

The final measure of potential communicative differences, lexical density, shows the differences divided into three groups – Speech (6%); Blogs (9%) & Emails (10.7%); and Texts (17.2%). It is accepted that text has a higher lexical density than speech, and, in support of our hypothesis, blogs and emails lie between both.

Figure 10. Relative lexical density in text, speech, email, and blog samples

Conclusions

This analysis of four distinct communicative modes – speech, blogs, emails, and printed text (as fiction works) – exposes sufficiently significant differences in sentence length, pronoun usage, and lexical density between them so as to support the assertion that blogs and emails, which I am calling instances of conversational writing, conform to stylistic and structural characteristics somewhere between speech and print. This may suggest that usage of different communicative media appears to respond to fundamental differences between them, with the most marked contrast being observed in sentence length and the least, for usage of pronouns. We might say that sentence length is the most structural of our three metrics, and pronoun usage the most stylistic, with lexical density somewhere  between both. In that the observed differences were largest in the structural variables of observation, further research should examine similarly structural variables in corpus samples across these or similar communicative media.

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Yang, B. Klimt and Y. “Introducing the Enron Corpus.” Paper presented at the CEAS 2005, The Second Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, July 21-22, 2005 2005.

Appendix A – Oral transcripts from radio and television broadcasts

1. The Third Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate (broadcast October 13, 2004, available from http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004d.html)
2. The Second Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate (October 8, 2004, http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004c.html)
3. The First Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate (broadcast September 30, 2004, available from http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004a.html)
4. The Cheney-Edwards Vice Presidential Debate (broadcast October 5, 2004 , available from http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004b.html)
5. The Abrams Report for July 6, 2005
   (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8498010/)
6. The Abrams Report for July 1,2005
   (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8485029/)
7. NPR Weekend Edition on Reincarnation: Tibetan Buddhism, radio broadcast Saturday January 10^th, 1998 Weekend Edition Saturday; available from http://www.npr.org/programs/death/980110.death.html
8. Hardball with Chris Matthews July 6, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8498025/
9. Hardball with Chris Matthews for June 30,2005 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8430780/)
10. Hardball with Chris Matthews for June 29,2005 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8416840/)
11. Hardball with Chris Matthews for July 5,2005
    (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8485042/)
12. Hardball with Chris Matthews for July 1,2005 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8485041/)
13. Countdown with Keith Olbermann for July 6, 2005 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8498013/)

All moderator comments tags identifying the speaker, and “stubs” (pre-written introductions and transitions between commercials) were removed to preserve only the actual spoken sentences.

Appendix B – Source Texts

1. Dracula by Bram Stoker, electronic version courtesy of The University of Adelaide Library, http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/s87d/
2. Evening Tide by Neal Gordon, Intertext, Issue #57, December 5, 2004, available from http://www.intertext.com/magazine/v13n2/eveningtide.html
3. Father Christmas Must Die by Patrick Whittaker Intertext, Issue #57, December 5, 2004, available from http://www.intertext.com/magazine/v13n2/christmas.html
4. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, available at http://www.zwyx.org/portal/kafka/kafka_metamorphosis.html
5. Star Quality by Melanie Miller, Intertext, Issue #5, January-February 1992, available from http://www.intertext.com/magazine/v2n1/star.html
6. The Legion of Lost Gnomes by T.G. Browning, Intertext, Issue #57, December 5, 2004, available from http://www.intertext.com/magazine/v13n2/gnomes.html
7. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, available from http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/36/36.txt

All chapter and/or section numbers, headings, or titles were removed from the texts prior to analysis.

Appendix C – The Enron Mail Corpus

In emails, inserting extraneous text (e.g., news stories from The Associated Press, Reuters)  is common, and these had to be removed so that the true style of email writing could be examined. The manual distillation process the elimination of all person references as well as titles (which are not part of the body of a text). Incidentally, having controlled for spam or automatically generated titles (e.g., “Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com”), “RE:”, “FWD:” and repeated entries, the average email title is 3.56 words in length. 500 random messages from the Enron email corpus were cleaned, scanned and parsed for style according to the criteria indicated below.

1. Repeated or extratextual lines were eliminated (those beginning with “>”);
2. Reports included in emails were eliminated (e.g., “Energy Executive Daily”);
3. Words containing “@”were eliminated as potential emails;
4. Lines containing email headers (e.g., “From:”, “To:”, “cc:”, “Subject:”, etc.) were eliminated.

The original extraction was of 99,241 words, 493,144 characters on 17,229 lines, the equivalent of 303 pages of text.

In knowledge representation, for example, the large problem was that of dynamically mapping schemas in a logically stable framework, while the smaller work involved the creation of semantic networks, frames and scripts, and production systems. All three of these methodologies exercised tremendous impact on research thinking of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and are all virtually dead today. Likewise, in natural language work, the big problem of parsing engendered the smaller approaches to it involving the investigation of grammars (formal, tranformational, systemic, and case grammars); systems to demonstrate real-time machine and natural-language translation (e.g., LUNAR, SHRDLU, MARGIE, LIFER); and state-based parsing solutions like augmented transition networks, and systems like the General Syntactic Processor. In search, too, the big problem was optimization against enormously large symbol spaces, whose smaller problems involved now-defunct research on state-space search, game-tree search, and proving machines like the General Problem Solver, David Gelernter’s geometric theorem-prover; STRIPS and many others.

It might be obvious that the large in each research area was the lasting question — proof perhaps that many of them remained unsolved — and the small was a compartmented decomposition of it into a hypothesis framework which would be the target of a particular kind of software program. It was the inability for this separation to become unified, a chasm in which big problems were never resolved by small programs, that led to the extinction of much of the artificial intelligence era. But the few species that survived did so as pedagogy, as examples of the philosophical, or ethical, conundrums that obtain when non-instrumental questions are so intimately addressed by machine-level cognitive processing. MYCIN, for example, the expert system whose rule base would prompt physicians with a series of incrementally specific questions on a patient’s presenting symptomatology and generate both a diagnosis and the rationale for the reasoning, was never widely accepted, unable to conquer another problem space, relating to less transparent questions of professional discomfort and liability at the implication of having a program render a medical verdict and treatment instructions. Even after output latency improved so that the time-delay in producing a diagnosis were reduced to several minutes, MYCIN, like CADUCEUS and INTERNIST-I (and unlike systems like DxPlain that produce analysis rather than diagnosis), was quietly swept under the production rug, never allowed in a clinical setting, despite systematically outperforming human professionals in diagnostic questionnaires.

Lastingly discussed today, but in a discipline distinct from computer science, in which it was created, or psychology, whose practice it reflected, is another of the survivors of AI lore, ELIZA. This program, which impersonates a Rogerian psychotherapist, performs a real-time dialogue with a user, who plays the presumed role of neurotic.

One of the unique and insufficiently discussed realities of this program is how the user complies — or not — with the implicit instigation to “become” a patient. Two worlds simultaneously claim the user’s speech-as-writing: in one, what is typed belongs to a curious “tester” of the system’s ability to understand and respond, to function in a converation; in another, the utterances are forced into another discourse as they become interpreted within the scope of a greater malady which ELIZA persists in exploring. There is communication but not dialogue, which with Bakhtin we would agree presupposes the position of both speakers in one and the same, not different, discursive worlds. The first is the intersubjective world of communicative competence that Habermas has problematized; the second, institutionalizing and projective of a pathogenic paradigm, is that of Foucault.

In its place in multiple intellectual lineages, ELIZA is more than an empirical probe for implementing and studying automatic conversation. Two additional ramifications persist, one involving the foundations of the literary (as beyond the linguistic), the other the foundations of being (as beyond simulation) . In the first, Noah Wardrip-Fruin has brought ELIZA into dialogue with story-construction systems, particularly James Meehan’s 1976 work with Tale-Spin, whose interactive output is not diagnostically constraining banter but rather questions about the world which constitute the basis for a new real-time work of fiction.[1] The second, in which dialogic intelligence is bound up with being — or rather the idea of identity as locating one’s condition in multiple comparative worlds — is one that I experienced firsthand in early life.

The experience in question relates, improbably enough, to a very specific moment in my youth in Cuba. A young girl, around the same seven years of age as myself at the time, took sick in a house party that I was attending. One of the visitors, a tall black Watusi, assumed control, demanding silence and dimmed lights. Shaking a petite bag of rattling pebbles, he gesticulated around the girl in a commanding exertion of energy, whereupon, returning to Occidental reality, he recomposed himself and declared the girl cured. Arising, she briskly ran to the rear of the house where we children were playing; everything resumed as before.

To all witnessing this, analysis seemed unnecessary, Cuban culture always accepted the workings of obscure causes on faith. But I was left with a why that transcended any possible how, as it had been shortly before witnessing this therapeutic intervention that I had been the target of a rather different one. A few months earlier, my parents noticed a persistent lump near my umbilical area, and brought me to Havana’s central hospital emergency room, where an aunt who coincidentally was the duty nurse that day was preparing the operating room for a patient. Suspecting symptoms of something ominous, she summoned doctors to my torso, who ordered me moved to the operating room for emergency surgery. Several hours later, I regained consciousness to the hovering voices of my aunt, my parents and the surgeon, clarifying the attack of an virulent, Ebola-like staphylococcal infection about to fatally enter my bloodstream. So when at the party, the girl had, like a phoenix, risen perkily, the imprint of Western medicine — my twenty stitches – forced the question of why I couldn’t have had that mystical intervention, rather than that of Western-style surgery.

Decades later, I recall this event as the example of transformation through opacity; the inexplicability of ritual shrouded in the enactment of a healing act was proof of intervention. In the space of the miraculous there is no room for explanation: the performance alone suffices. The logos of Western medicine, on the other hand, depends on a transparent kind of visibility: description, prediction, explanation. Its enemy is murkiness; no intervention is legitimate without explanation of method. Opacity is the wall separating the dialectic of miracle against that of mechanism, the sense of meaning versus the structure of language.

There is another domain in which the same tension plays out, concerning itself with the study of intelligence. In the frequent but miraculous performances of learning and deduction that entail human understanding, the shaman is the Every-person whose adaptation to cognitive challenges is both normal and extraordinary – and as opaque as the shaman’s rite. Learning is the greatest mystery for which no explanation has yet proved complete. It is with some irony then, that, as with medical interventions, there exist in the context of intelligent behavior performance conditions that are recurring and highly formulaic. And these recurrences have produced opportunities for mimicking intelligent behavior in computers through a tradition of experiments in which the challenge is to design the proper recipe capable of straddling the distance between the opaque miracles of understanding and the transparent mechanisms of language. Historically, two cases stand out. One of these, proposed as a Gedanken, was theoretical computer science’s greatest unrealized challenge, and the other, as its inverse, emerged as an actual computer program performing a quasi-farcical play on the opacity of intelligence and our desire for connecting with an Other through the miracle of understanding, even when that Other is a mechanism.

The first example, a theoretical challenge to understanding, was posed by Alan Turing in 1950, near the end of his brief but astonishing career and life, whose professional vector contributed vital chapters to the histories of computer science, artificial intelligence, and mathematics. The miracle under Turing’s scrutiny was framed by the question, “Can a machine communicate like a human being?”, whose underlying problem is whether such processing can ever be indistinguishable from human processing, perhaps locked in powerful opacities similar to those concealed by the “black box” of the brain. To that end, Turing imagined an imitation game consisting of three rooms: room A houses a computer capable of communicating using natural human language, room B accommodates a human being, as does room C, whose inhabitant serves as prompter and judge in the game. The computer and human respondents in rooms A and B would engage in ostensibly convincing dialogue with the judge, who cannot see which of the two locutors is the human one, but who, able to converse openly with each, must attempt to spot the computer. If, pondering the conversation, the judge cannot distinguish which of the two participants is the machine, the machinery will have passed the Turing Test. This test is not intended to establish objective definitions of intelligence, but to mark the point of sufficiently flexible processing at which the expressive difference between machine and human cannot be made with certainty. We might note that there is no need to identify how the machine constructs responses. The point is rather whether it can generate communication sufficiently intelligent so as to deceive human understanding, be it akin to the form of shaman, inspired by the forces of an unseen causality, or of physician, guided by the transparencies of scientific method.

Until recently, all computer learning followed the latter, procedural model. A set of instructions, explicitly ordered into a software program, was run by a system whose behavior conforms entirely to the logic of the source code, the computer’s recipe. And while by now, computer science has developed modes of machine learning through neural networks, whose complex webs of triggering associations agglomerate learning in a manner that is self-organizing and opaque to analytic breakdown, there is one program from the dawn of artificial intelligence’s golden age, designed roughly fifteen years after Turing’s challenge, that explored the minimal feasibility conditions for the Turing Test. Evocatively named ELIZA[1], the program’s ploy was the presumed encapsulation of specific human characteristics, much as Pygmalion’s statue, whose femininity seemed so flawless that he fell in love with it. If Ovid’s poem, recounting that “Art hid with art, so well perform’d the cheat/It caught the carver with his own deceit”, might have produced the earliest reference to an aesthetic Turing Test that history knows, ELIZA was the most trivial yet transparent case of impersonation in dialogue.

Presenting a teletype interface in which a user answers prompts generated by the system, ELIZA was configured as a Socratic therapist using the Rogerian technique of posing open-ended questions to probe for moments of cathexis and then selectively steering the patient’s attention. Even if it could arguably approximate a psychotherapeutic Turing Test, how could such a system be programmed in software? ELIZA’s method, exploiting the fact that intelligence is assumed to resemble understanding, focused on creating the illusion of understanding by drawing from a minimal recipe of syntactic patterns that transformed user input to construct a convincing response. When ELIZA’s rules match words and word groups from the user-patient’s statements, a transformation of the matched input produces a response. One such transformation involved first person to second person conversions, so the user typing, “It’s obvious that you must be bored of me by now” would surprisingly encounter, “What makes you think I am bored of you?”. This riposte was produced by the decomposition template (0 YOU 0 ME) where the first 0 matches anything until the word” YOU”, and the next 0 again captures everything until the word “ME”. Applying the four components of the template matches the input as follows:

This rule is in turn matched to another: (WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I 3 YOU), in which 3 represents the words matching the third element of the prior rule (“must be bored of”),  permitting ELIZA to transform the user’s input into the seemingly conscious reply

In another kind of transformation rule ELIZA exchanged specific words for categories within which they can be classified. Thus, if a user mentions the word “sister”, ELIZA, retrieving the family category, would then ask, “Tell me more about your family”. Similarly, words like depression promote up to feeling, so that if the user complains, “I am often depressed”, ELIZA counters with, “Tell me more about your feelings”. The illusion within what Weizenbaum called the “overwhelmingly psychological orientation” of the pseudo-therapeutic context to which it was meant to be compared, was absorbing.

However, none of ELIZA’s transformations actually preserved knowledge; the program only manipulated linguistic markers via single-sentence interaction. One of the therapist’s strengths is managing some memory of a patient’s statements. ELIZA, however, discards every input after its transformation into response. It thus has no notion of therapy through the logic of discourse, the perception of consistency, or contradiction, across a span of utterances[2]. Even so, with prescient anticipation of the fervor that the program would provoke in the coming decades, Joseph Weizenbaum, its creator, was careful from the outset to present the anatomy of ELIZA exclusively as a collection of processing statements amalgamated into a recipe for a specific encounter in discourse, by whose destruction of opacity in the explanation of its method, he was desirous to “rob ELIZA of the aura of magic to which its application to psychological subject matter has to some extent contributed”[3]. For ELIZA, as for the physician and the shaman, exchange of signs frames an encounter that turns on transformation rules, but in converting opacity into transparency, the visible evidence of these rules eradicates their power so that “once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible.”[4]

Lest, then, we interpret the notion of “transformation” too ‘opti-mystically’, it is worth noting that continual allusion to divergences between the transformation of conceptual structures, like machine-based conversation, against the opposite of transformation, the stasis of institutional structures which utilize those machines was not lost on Weizenbaum, who much later suspected that

if it had not been for the computer, if the computer had not been invented, what would the banks have had to do? They might have had to decentralize, or they might have had to regionalize in some way. In other words, it might have been necessary to introduce a social invention, as opposed to the technical invention.

What the coming of the computer did, “just in time,” was to make it unnecessary to create social inventions, to change the system in any way. So in that sense, the computer has acted as fundamentally a conservative force, a force which kept power or even solidified power where is already existed.[5]

Given the constraints against hopes for meaningful understanding that ELIZA demonstrated, we could read this as a proclamation of how the virtual symbolic provides a field for encounters involving recipe-like transformations not of knowledge, but rather of doubt itself.

APPENDIX
Selected and Annotated Fragments of ELIZA Script Source Code

Comments on source code functionality appear in italic prior to the source code.

“Sorry” mentioned in the patient’s input:

(SORRY ((0) (PLEASE DON’T APOLOGIZE)

(APOLOGIES ARE NOT NECESSARY) (WHAT FEELINGS DO YOU HAVE WHEN YOU APOLOGIZE) (I’VE TOLD YOU THAT APOLOGIES ARE NOT REQUIRED)))

Transformation rule REMEMBER 5 collects into item 4 everything after the patient’s mention of the word “remember”:

(REMEMBER 5

((0 YOU REMEMBER 0) (DO YOU OFTEN THINK OF 4)

(DOES THINKING OF 4 BRING ANYTHING ELSE TO MIND

(WHAT ELSE DO YOU REMEMBER)

(WHY DO YOU REMEMBER 4 JUST NOW)

(WHAT IN THE PRESENT SITUATION REMINDS YOU OF 4)

(WHAT IS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ME AND 4))

Any mention of “dream” is responded with a general prompt for the patient’s own interpretation:

(DREAM 3 ((0) (WHAT DOES THAT DREAM SUGGEST TO YOU)

(DO YOU DREAM OFTEN) (WHAT PERSONS APPEAR IN YOUR DREAMS)

(DON’T YOU BELIEVE THAT DREAM HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH

YOUR PROBLEM)

…

))

nothing matched, prompt for  more:

(NONE ((0) (I AM NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND YOU FULLY)

(PLEASE GO ON)

(WHAT DOES THAT SUGGEST TO YOU)

(DO YOU FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT DISCUSSING SUCH THINGS)))

Seize on tentative statements:

(PERHAPS ((0) (YOU DON’T SEEM QUITE CERTAIN)

(WHY THE UNCERTAIN TONE)

(CAN’T YOU BE MORE POSITIVE)

(YOU AREN’T SURE) (DON’T YOU KNOW)))

(MAYBE (-PERHAPS))

Mention of computers is another loaded term:

(COMPUTER 50 ((0) (DO COMPUTERS WORRY YOU)

(WHY DO YOU MENTION COMPUTERS) (WHAT DO YOU THINK MACHINES

HAVE TO DO WITH YOUR PROBLEM) (DON’T YOU THINK COMPUTERS CAN

HELP PEOPLE) (WHAT ABOUT MACHINES WORRIES YOU) (WHAT

DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES)))

Echo patient’s statement by inverting first-person into second-person::

(AM – ARE ((0 ARE YOU 0) (DO YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE 4)

(WHAT WOULD IT MEAN IF YOU WERE 4) (=WHAT))

((0) (WHY DO YOU SAY ‘AM’) (I DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT)))

(ARE ((0 ARE I 0 )

(WHY ARE YOU INTERESTED IN WHETHER I AM 4 OR NOT)

(WOULD YOU PREFER IF I WEREN’T 4) (PERHAPS I AM 4 IN YOUR

FANTASIES) (DO YOU SOMETIMES THINK I AM A) J-WHAT))

((0 ARE 0) (DID YOU THINK THEY MIGHT NOT BE 3)

(WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF THEY WERE NOT 3) (WHAT IF THEY WERE NOT 3)

(POSSIBLY THEY ARE 3)) )

REFERENCES

ben-Aaron, Diana. “Weizenbaum Examines Computers and Society.” The Tech, April 9, 1985, 2.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. “Eliza:A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine.” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 1 (1996): 36-45.

[2] This was left as a goal for a possible “augmented ELIZA program” that itself was never built.

[3] Joseph Weizenbaum, “Eliza:A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 1 (1996): 45.

[4] Ibid.: 36.

[5] Diana ben-Aaron, “Weizenbaum Examines Computers and Society,” The Tech, April 9, 1985.