1955, in a few descriptive strokes.

America, having recently emerged from a nebulous conflict in Korea, is caught between extremes – bookended between shadowy glimmers of the Cold War emerging into public consciousness, it watches the creation of the Warsaw Pact while being simultaneously presented with the appearance of Scrabble; it witnesses the announcement by the Pentagon of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, on one hand, and the opening of Disneyland, on the other; by the rise of McDonald’s, and the dawn of the Viet Nam War; by the announcement at General Motors Corporation of the first-ever billion dollar profit by any business, and the inaugural airing of weekly television programs Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Mickey Mouse Club – as it reads the first edition of Nabokov’s Lolita. And 1955 sees the passing of Albert Einstein, Wallace Stevens, Dale Carnegie, Cy Young – and of James Dean, 24, who is killed in a high-speed automobile collision on a deserted road in California. All of these events happened in those 365 days.

Between these extremes of vulnerability and refuge – one, a fraught realism of an emerging Atomic present and the other, the safety of romantic American dreams – it is not difficult to imagine why in 1955 Hollywood would favor the fanciful side of that balance, with Disney’s release of Lady and the Tramp alongside MGM’s Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons and Frank Sinatra, as well as Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me, accompanied by Marilyn Monroe in 20th Century Fox’s The Seven Year Itch. And, like unto a shooting star, James Dean was the only actor to star in two of the top ten grossing movies of that year, Rebel Without a Cause, and East of Eden. The success of these films reflects not only that rare and precious communion of outstanding script, direction, and acting, but in broader terms, the refusal of a new generation to align its identity with either the Cold War or The Mickey Mouse Club. It demanded sincerity, no matter how brutally told.

From this horizon emerges a portrait of youth’s unease with the past and its aching need for self-assertion as it writes itself for the first time into America’s cultural consciousness. It is a generational impulse that was presciently sensed by Hollywood, which in that crucial year released two feature films on the urban intensity of teenage turbulence, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. The groundwork was set for works in other genres that attempted to meld realism with high romantic style, like the musical West Side Story, which premiered on Broadway two years later.

But Rebel Without a Cause was the first film to speak through teenage rebellion, not against it, to voice its realism, rather than merely vilify it. Given the original film’s importance to the world of drama, one might reasonably ask what the thematic nucleus and aim of the REBEL exhibit might be, particularly from the vantage of the artist. When, he was first offered the role of James Dean in the eponymous television drama, James Franco’s challenge was not exclusively that of filling out the requirements of a proper biographical portrayal. During Franco’s training as an actor, James Dean had been held up, alongside Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, as the highest example of dramatic realism. In this new style, Clift first opened the door for audiences to experience an immediacy of dramatic performance that felt so complete, so transparent, and so intimate, that they overpowered the tacit knowledge of a set, a script, a camera, and a screen – in fact, the entire armature that separates performance from reception seems in Clift, Brando, and Dean as if to dissolve away and speak to us directly. In the realist style, virtuosity is the only possibility, for, rather than one being a vehicle for the other, the process of acting and that of human experience become an indivisible singularity.

Thus in his preparation for role, Franco understood that the job to be done was not solely that of one actor portraying another, but rather of one portraying another who in turn transcended the act of portrayal itself. One cannot act like an actor whose work is not like acting; one must come to the same human core that James Dean drew upon, and then drink directly from its essence. So, now in his early twenties, James Franco embarked on the inevitable work of mining toward that essence. He told his girlfriend that he could not see her for three months, and during this period of preparation, he cut off communication with friends and family. Sitting alone in his apartment in the San Fernando Valley, Franco watched Rebel Without a Cause over fifty times, alongside James Dean’s two other feature films, East of Eden and Giant, and his later live teleplays, while reading every available book on Dean, and doing related research to bring himself to the consciousness, temperament, and being of James Dean, the man, not merely the actor. Franco’s performance was – to emphasize the stylistic term – so realistic, so close to the person and performer of James Dean that one felt as though Dean were being channeled from Beyond. And for this exceptional performance, Franco won the 2001 Golden Globe Award.

And so, when, several years ago, Franco encountered a book on the making of Rebel Without a Cause, his interest in the film was renewed, and he began to conceptualize a project based on this film. With a foundation on James Dean and on the film itself, Franco learned more about legendary dramas that took place behind the scenes, and which shed new sidelights on the final production and on the social dynamics involving Nicholas Ray, the film’s director, and his young cast. Ray’s films always showed concern for spatial aesthetics – perhaps due to his early architectural apprenticeship under Frank Lloyd Wright – and for alienation, particularly as regards coming of age in modern society, this being likely developed through his other mentor, the dramatist Thornton Wilder. Correspondingly, Rebel Without a Cause was the first film to embrace teenage delinquency “from within,” as an existential problem, rather than “from above,” as a sociological issue (something that was the basis of the other adolescent-themed film released that year, Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle, whose plot centered on an ennobled teacher fighting the vicious antics of inner-city kids). Rather, Nicholas Ray wanted a portrayal of human anxiety confronting youth in a manner that conformed to nothing familiar at the time; the prevailing options included the infantilizing naïveté of Disney, the looming nuclear threat of the atomic age, or the violence of inner city life. None of these contexts reflected the reality of the boy and girl next door. And, reading about how Nicholas Ray had to find a new treatment for this reality, James Franco realized he, too, would need to create a new treatment on his project. With so much attention paid to this classic film in the past half century, it was soon evident that idea of making a conventional movie about the making of Rebel Without a Cause would not work; it wouldn’t convincingly capture the spirit of the film.

As James Franco and longtime collaborator Vince Jolivette began exploring the idea of dividing the new project into sections, the first task of the creative process was to identify the most interesting events during the making of the 1955 film. Crucial to this was the feeling that the factual veracity of any account would be secondary to the importance of its status as oft-recited legendary material, because the project was essentially about the conflation of truth and lore, of romance and performance, and of emotions in and out of frame that reflected three simultaneous realities: the world of adolescent development at that time, the film’s plot and script, and the private passions already in play among the cast and within themselves. Of principal interest was the intense matrix of off-screen events embroiling Nicholas Ray, Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper, Sal Mineo, and James Dean – including a provocative pass through Dean’s own complexes.

This dramatic matrix is remarkable even for Hollywood. Lore has it that during production of the film, Nicholas Ray, then 43, experiencing tensions with his son (who later married Nicholas Ray’s wife), was having an affair with Natalie Wood, then 16. Dennis Hopper, who was cast as one of the gang members for the film, was allegedly also involved with her. To James Dean, Nicholas Ray was as much a father figure as a director; both had bonded months earlier when Ray visited Dean in New York City. One of Ray’s aims there was to hone his understanding of the actor, whose character would be named “Jim Stark” – the first name being the actor’s own; the last name was a permutation of “Trask”(Cal Trask was Dean’s character in East of Eden). Also in this amalgam was sixteen year-old Sal Mineo, whose character, John “Plato” Crawford was smitten with Jim Stark – something that was mirrored in real life. As Mineo sought the affections of James Dean, Dean was fervently seeking the approval of Ray, who was in an affair with Natalie Wood, who in turn was involved with Dennis Hopper. The very spirit of the film was happening behind the scenes, much of it where Nicholas Ray stayed, at Bungalow Two of the Château Marmont, to which we will return later. This context led to the first section being called Château Dreams, a title underscoring the circumstantial – and legendary – nature of many of these accounts.

The 1955 film’s title came from a book whose rights Warner Bros. had previously purchased. As its subtitle indicates Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, by Dr. Robert Lindner was a 1946 monograph case study of a young man in a mental institution. The book, intended as a promising film adaptation and vehicle for Marlon Brando, was eventually shelved when, after several years, no script was deemed acceptable. One completed draft was eventually delivered to Nicholas Ray, who for his own part had already written a treatment called The Blind Run that included several scenes too intense for audiences and which were omitted from the feature film. These included one scene of a man on fire, presumably lit by teenagers, running toward the camera; another of a young woman stripped to her waist being whipped by a gang of youths; in another, someone falls out of a window; and the chickee run, shown in the 1955 film as a car race toward a precipice, was originally described with vehicles roaring toward each other – in a tunnel. Many of these scenes inspired the idea of including in the exhibit much of the material that was originally written but never filmed.

Separately, James Franco had seen the social education films of Sid Davis, whose narrated docu-dramas delivered explicit moral messages. Fortuitously, 1955 was the year that Davis produced his tour de force, Age 13, a short film about a boy whose behavior worsens after his mother dies and his stepfather remains unempathic; the boy, increasingly alienated, eventually brings a gun to school, and receives a stern lecture from adults. Despite its heavy-handed approach, Age 13 mirrors James Dean’s own life, for he too had lost his mother at an early age and his rejecting father sent the boy back to his aunt and uncle’s farm in Indiana. This had a deeply traumatic effect on Dean as an actor and man. Likewise, Nicholas Ray’s film is in a sense quite Freudian, the structure of the protagonist’s home, with his weak father and overbearing mother, produces resentment, frustration, and alienation in young Jim Stark, something that, as we know, characterized James Dean’s own life. Two persons in one – the actor in his life and the character in the film – each seeks love and guidance from his parents – and neither can attain them. It is naïve to imagine that Dean was only acting in these scenes, and so for James Franco, Age13, signaled an opportunity, a precious token of found material that could be reshot as a James Dean back-story.

In completion, the plan for the exhibit was to add one final section, without narrative, focusing on the raw energy of cars and motorcycles, in commemoration of their role in the film, their power as a new medium for youth’s emancipation from – and integration with – the world of adults, and their ominous fascination for James Dean. These machines would suggest that, as with all of Franco’s work, the appearance of any object or event operates as a nexus, a multipart bridge between several interpretive and existential worlds – the world of art, literature, and film, juxtaposed over the moral world of contemporary society, and all interwoven with crossings into the world of individual identity, each one – as Erik Erikson defined crisis – a point of heightened vulnerability and potential.

Once the sections of the exhibit were conceived, Franco and Jolivette turned to the task of casting. The aim was to identify actors or artists who could be connected with credibility either to the 1955 film or its milieu. The cast would necessarily comprise several generations – while the spirit of youth could be captured by older artists, the incarnation of youth would be the province of a new generation, as the exhibit illustrates. As regards Nicholas Ray, a connection to the actual man would suggest the director Jim Jarmusch, whose hair is similar to Ray’s and who had worked as Ray’s assistant when the latter taught at New York University toward the end of his life. This kind of choice would be logical in a project such as a biopic – that is, in a project whose intent is trueness to reproduction. But Franco’s aesthetic program, always rooted in a commitment to the spirit more than simply the look of art and experience, is necessarily interpretive in nature. The specific characters in this work would need to be symbols of the culture, rather than agents of visual resemblance. Sensitive to this, Vince Jolivette suggested Paul McCarthy, whose work in sculpture, installation, and performance evokes the kind of direct sensation and intensity that was essential to the youths of Nicholas Ray’s film. Rather than invite him to the project as an actor, Franco realized McCarthy might instead be a collaborator in the conceptual direction of the Château Dreams section (in support of the earlier bridge-between-worlds metaphor, it may also be evident that collaboration is a constant constituent of Franco’s aesthetic).

With Paul McCarthy’s participation, the way was paved for other major artists who knew James Franco to join the project. These artists included Douglas Gordon, whom Franco called upon to reinterpret sections of the 1955 film that had never been shot; Aaron Young, who had already done much work with motorcycles and whose contribution includes a series of crashed motorcycles as well as a suspended model of the vehicle that collided with Dean’s car crashed down from a vertical drop,

Terry Richardson, whose model shoot of Franco in black dress with make-up by Kabuki for the magazine Candy (and whose photoshoot was filmed by Christina Voros and is part of the exhibit) evokes an ambiguous quality that James Dean projected (and on which artists like Kenneth Anger commented);

and Harmony Korine, who captures youthful rebellion for the present generation with unparalleled realism. Without a section in the initial stages that might fit Korine’s approach and work, thoughts turned to a re-staging of the knife fight in the original film. The casting choice – as James Dean – was to be the actor Henry Hopper, whose father Dennis had been in the 1955 film, and who resembled and embodied the “free spirit” side of James Dean. In the Nicholas Ray film, the fight is between Buzz, a gang member, and Dean’s character, Jim Stark, with everyone looking on. In his own research for staging and blocking the new fight rendition, Korine had come across a video recorded on a mobile phone; it captured a skirmish between two groups of eight young women at gas station. Apparently, they had arrived to fill up at the same time and were in formal attire, but a fight soon erupted, and everyone came to blows, down on the cement, in high heels, with hair pulling, dresses coming off, and by the end, the women, now in g-strings, were still throwing punches. Drawing on this spectacle for inspiration, Korine reconceived the switchblade fight as one between two female gangs – but Jim Stark would now confront Plato (Sal Mineo) rather than Buzz, so as to make explicit the off-screen dynamic between Sal Mineo and James Dean.

Rather than appearing in this section as James Dean, Henry Hopper gave an emotive performance in the section filmed by Douglas Gordon, who transformed the never-filmed scene in which a man on fire runs down the street. Gordon had now converted the literal fire into a metaphorical one, depicting a man burning from inside. Gordon’s next contribution adapted another unfilmed scene, in which Nicholas Ray had described a topless woman being whipped by youths. For that work, Gordon, inspired by seeing his young daughter drawing on herself, exchanged the whip for a red pen, so that, as Hopper draws red marks and lashes on his body, he performs a subtler attack on, and exploration of, the body – an act that was simultaneously violent and creative.

One embryonic aspect of Nicholas Ray’s film called for potential inclusion: his aforementioned seventeen-page sketch, The Blind Run, written by the director in September of 1954 and proposed as the film’s first treatment. In the text’s principal vignette, which signals the title of the work, two young characters in their cars, lights off, race defiantly toward each other in L.A.’s Sepulveda tunnel. Parenthetically, Franco had collected a painting by Ed Ruscha, and the work was sold back to the artist in exchange for a mutually agreed-upon future work, which became the landscape painting with the word REBEL. But Ruscha’s earlier work was suffused with photographic and painterly works capturing automotive vistas. Some of the best-known such works, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1963), and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) are arranged as long interconnected sheets of photographs that can be leafed as if one were driving past their captured landscapes. This structure of these works led Franco to ask Ruscha to read The Blind Run, but as a more direct visual connection between Ray and Ruscha, where as Franco said, “one of the godfathers of the L.A. art world and one of the godfathers of Hollywood would be fused together,” the idea emerged of capturing Hollywood in one more way. Inspired by the Ruscha photo-works – this time from the air – a helicopter, rather than an automobile, now becomes the medium for shooting all of Sunset Blvd, Hollywood Blvd, and the Griffith Observatory, where the original switchblade scene had been filmed.

For his part, Paul McCarthy had now built a near-to-scale replica of Château Marmont’s Bungalow Two, as well as the stairwell set from the original film, since legend has it that all rehearsals took place in Bungalow Two, for which reason the living room set in the film was allegedly designed to resemble layout in the Château. McCarthy’s motivation for this inclusion acknowledges the three-way symbolic juxtaposition of the drama of the idyllic home, the filmic drama of the performance on set, and Château behind-the-scenes drama, three points that became simultaneously triggered while the film was in production. In this section, several scenes from the film are performed by McCarthy, who plays both the directorial father, Nicholas Ray, and the dramatic father, portrayed in the film by Jim Backus, opposite Franco, playing James Dean, in connection with his own past performance, but also as Jim Stark. These scenes were shot incorporating McCarthy’s provocative twist, to include extreme attacks on the father figure, breaking the fourth wall, and other dramatic/humorous/surreal divagations.

Using a young cast, the lore behind the film as material, and sets as sculpture, one final performative dimension was juxtaposed onto the overall work. Seeing any distinction between personal impulse and theatrical performance as false, and between on- and off- screen as specious (the moral tone being that drama is drama regardless of where enacted or how inspired), Franco’s project blended the McCarthy Bungalow Two with Château Marmont’s Bungalow Two, where Nicholas Ray and Natalie Wood probably had their affair; and where James Dean would show up late at night, Franco directed the enactment of some scenarios that had not been captured in any of other works in the exhibit .

In one legend, Natalie Wood was allegedly given a champagne bath by Dennis Hopper although the alcohol proved irritating to parts of her body.

In another episode, also shot for this exhibit, Natalie Wood, who felt that the role in Rebel Without a Cause would catapult her to older roles, was worried about Nicholas Ray’s hesitation about using her, feeling as he did, that she was too “clean”, too innocent-looking for the part. And in this, one legend has it that Dennis Hopper, driving her through Laurel Canyon one night, got into an accident; Natalie was taken to the hospital. For some reason, perhaps underscoring his symbolic role as the permissive father, Nicholas Ray was called, and came to the hospital to visit her, where, upon entering her room, Natalie Wood asked, “Alright, now am I bad enough to get the part?”. Yet a third shoot was a response to a legendary situation that took place during shooting of the gang scene at the Observatory. Nicholas Ray, putatively jealous of Dennis Hopper for his involvement with Natalie Wood, found in Hopper’s tardy return from lunch the immediate justification for giving all his lines to a non-actor, a member of a local gang called the Hollywood Athenians who had been hired to consult on the film. Thus, Franco re-staged a feud at Bungalow Two between Dennis Hopper and Nicholas Ray over Natalie Wood.

Perhaps in these last scenes it is fitting to return to our point of departure, back in the mid-1950’s, considering the extreme polarity between naïve visions of youth on one hand and the looming threat of the Cold War on the other. The cultural schism that Hollywood maintained in its film narratives, and which made no room for a story or the voice of youthful rebellion on its own terms, was first confronted by the pioneering realism of James Dean and Nicholas Ray in Rebel Without a Cause. The opportunity for revealing the full conflation between art and life, however, presenting personal and public spheres as two sides of the same dramatic coin, would wait five decades for the vision of an actor, author, and artist who joined these worlds by crossing them in his own art through daring, and rebellious, lines of exploration, collaboration, and integration.

This is the introductory essay for REBEL, published on the occasion of the exhibition Rebel at LA MOCA, May 11, 2012 – June 11, 2012

Nearly thirty years ago, Rosalind Krauss produced the preeminent analysis of the singular structure most unique to, most resonant with, and most emblematic of the aims of modern art – the grid. What the grid initiates with the symmetry of its abstract purity, the circle extends, in a new form that could be taken as Western postmodernity’s reversion to the cohesive infinity of the mandala, a site less of center than radiality. The circle’s compositional integration is a mirror simile for the universe as an expansive principle in which, as with the mandala, any presumption of a center is subservient to its overall order. But in order to understand the circle, we must appraise the allure of its predecessor, the grid.

Radical as the implication of its latticed form is, the grid is a form whose mystical potential modern art criticism doesn’t deny, for at least two crucial reasons. Reason one: the first artists to employ grids spoke to the transcendental ontology of its creative form – we note Krauss’s acknowledgment, that “Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit”.[1] Secondly – and more forcefully – it is in the grid’s transcendence that the idea of symmetry finds a way out of form and into an interpretive rabbit hole of possible pathways – as again Krauss affirms: “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”[2] Thus, in its embrace of this visual archetype, the art historical record is clear: the grid signals the height of modernity’s engagement with formalism.

Again and again, in the drawings, paintings, and prints of Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Chuck Close – and so many other artists – the twentieth century returned to the grid, as it rediscovered and exploited that archetype’s seductive significance for pure visual innovation. Unmistakably, this procession traced its single-minded lineage through the mainstays of the modern and contemporary canon. But the grid is, as Krauss notes above, a shape somehow dependent on the obviousness of a material support and the presence of labor for its transcendence. A grid painted by hand, declaring the commitment of artistic reduction to repetitious formalism, conveys something that a machine-programmed grid, easily realized through the iterations of algorithmic generation, cannot. So now if, in its exhaustion, the abstract geometry of the grid has been transposed into that of the circle, it is because the material support of grid composition is no longer innovative, and moreover, since material support itself is, in a technological epoch, no longer a precondition of creative production, we find how, in much electronic art, this new shape has borrowed the distant abstraction of its earlier rectilinear variety, and wants to go beyond it. The circle’s trigonometric correspondence with the engineering of the cathode ray tube, the computer monitor, and many kinds of projection, lathing, and impression systems, raises the status of that shape and renders it as the new grid, the palette and coordinate system for the age of contemporary electronic art. Of course, non-digital art, too, has long used the circle’s fertile promise – we could in fact draw a second historical timeline from Duchamp’s first filmed rotoreliefs in action up to Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone and therein rightfully include many lesser known artists.

Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, Anémic Cinéma, 1926. Film.

Figure 2. Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone, 1973. Installation at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2009

Rather, the insistent abstraction of the circle, for example, characterizes John Whitney’s Permutations, a series of short films illustrating the dance of analog signals in a progression of circular rearrangements over the spatial void of a CRT screen.

Figure 3. John Whitney, Permutations, 1966. Film.

Whitney’s work was the cinematic result of several computer programs designed by Jack Citron for IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center and filmed at the UCLA School of Medicine, and he was not alone. Similarly, and clearly illustrating the union of art machine with the archetype of circularity, is the work of Desmond Paul Henry, one of several artists to adapt war machinery – in this case, bomber sights – to a kind of spirograph on steroids.

Figure 4. Desmond Paul Henry’s “Drawing Machine 1”

Figure 5. Desmond Paul Henry, Untitled, 1962. Print.

II.

My thoughts thus far have pointed to a contextual review of the last century’s fertile adoption of one trope, the grid, leading up to another more recent one, the circle, in the technological sphere, particularly with the polemical sterility that abstraction provides. But there is a catch here, for as we know, there is no line of art history that makes abstraction, modern art’s most distinctive and recognizable style, a visual foundation for postmodernity, as well. Rather this latter era is characterized by a return to the real, drawing from the conditions of societal engagement as the materials for aesthetic production. So let us ask ourselves this: how feasible is it to imagine an artistic union between the detached perpetuity of the circle on one hand and contemporary art’s connection with the empirical world, not to mention the technological, on the other? How can a form like the circle be used in this world in conditions of photorealism, of motion, and of what a technological art form can bring to them? This is the question that Traffic Circle, Anne Spalter’s new show at the Stoyanov Gallery, confronts — which, in so doing, resolves a missing vector between the creative lineages of the grid and the circle – but the end result, it turns out, is not to be found in material supports, but rather in the technology of the projected image subjected to computational orchestration.

The works in the show comprise a consistency of architectural structure, each captures a temporal succession of events using taut cinematic grammar, namely the linear pan, the zoom, and the steady shot of traffic in a static place, and documents before the viewer the transposition of its natural Cartesian perspective of the world as our eyes see it — horizontal motion across the x axis and vertical, running up and down — to one whose coordinate system is radial, using a fragment of the visual field as a slice that weaves into itself about a circle. This singular move, seemingly effortless and unadorned, does more than produce a polarized fugue of marginally recognizable transit scenes and components. It also resolves the long-standing problem of how to unify the abstract promise of the circle with the pragmatic and embodied realism of a cosmopolitan life. It brings together the quasi-tessellated rabbit-hole of immersive order that we encounter in artists from M.C. Escher to Andreas Gursky, with the visual stimulation that a filmic setting, recalling from other traditions – for example, in literature – the historically recent turn from formalism to realism; William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson naturally come to mind. But Spalter’s visual assemblages present something more than abstract imagery or metropolitan metabolism, they propose a new visual trope that starts in Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema with those rotorelief mechanisms and come to traverse the naturalistic symmetry that Benoit Mandelbrot found embedded in the structure of natural forms from small scale to large, so that a film of a highway, in Spalter’s mutations reveals an uncanny similarity not to an object but to an entire range of them, to include at one moment, the floret seeds in a dandelion

Figure 6. Anne Spalter, Circular Highway, 2011. Video projection. 00:13

that in turn explode to the mathematical obduracy of a star

Figure 7. Anne Spalter, Circular Highway, 2011. Video projection. 00:23

And as this shape expands, its inner membrane dissolves, so that the points transform into spokes where separation between inner and outer form yields to that of an open nexus.

Figure 8. Anne Spalter, Circular Highway, 2011. Video projection. 00:26

In turn, this image’s radial augmentation quickly re-engenders the star this time, but now as its morphological negative, a space between points, and pointed to by them:

Figure 9. Anne Spalter, Circular Highway, 2011. Video projection. 00:30

Spalter’s eye for submitting horizontal linearity to applied movement in a single continual direction produces a progression or chain of transformations that resolves, as I have said, not toward a single image but rather to the presence of a principle of translation, one whose essence is formally abstract and simultaneously in the realism of physical phenomena. And it is this intersection of a new and different kind, between the worldly and the pure, that mandala makers understand, proposing fleeting visual monuments as aphorisms of contemplation which use form as a way to move toward all that lies beyond it. And it is the same meditative process into which Spalter’s transcendent motion draws us.

Figure 10. Anne Spalter, Circular Highway, 2011. Video projection. 00:55

“Traffic Circle” at the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, 29 Orchard Street, New York, NY, 10002,  Dec. 8, 2011 – Jan. 6, 2012.

[2] Ibid.

I. Manifest

As with so many other event cities that for a few days blossom into urban art constellations, it was time again to engage in that uncanny bit of ethnography called Art Basel Miami Beach. Upon my arrival, I sat to plan the agenda of this visit – like Proust, I actually expected that most of it would be dedicated to writing, essentially using the fringe energy of the fair for an enhancement of writerly perspectives on art outside of the Art Basel context. The idea of taking this as an ethnographic project underscores the intention of any theorist, which is to effect an immersive study of things, and in this case, the alien nature of the place and its rituals, so often described with the flavor of a festive marketplace, called for a probe of two of its central constituents: first,  the reason for the parties and a turn to festivities rather than the solemnity of attention that we see in art crits; and second, the affective/subjective take-away from a short voyage into this social complex. These are the questions that linger on many minds as they return to familiar environs.

Thanks to Lyn Winter, reflections on the direction of contemporary art were destined for a much more engaged turn, as, at her kind inclusion, my ethnographic project took the form of numerous thought-provoking events, which form a preamble to the phenomenology that I will discuss in the second part of this essay. But on a manifest layer, the familiar location and setting clearly made for an early itinerary that included large-scale parties like one in South Beach at a Herzog & de Meuron-designed garage, hosted by Interview magazine, Peter Brant, and Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s in honor Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo.

More private events included a quiet view of the art home of financier Adam Sender, whose kind invitation afforded a meditative jaunt through an extraordinarily variegated collection of contemporary art, but fostered the conditions for discussions on art among a broad range of the guests – art advisers, collectors, artists, patrons, and curators. This in many ways is the height of what one might aspire for in any art context — the social and intersubjective should circle around the presence of the art, rather than — as at least one journalist’s account portrayed — the other way round. Of this, I shall have more to say below.

Another crucial, if rarely considered, justification for the parties and social milieu of a major art fair is to create a reception for viewing work that is otherwise not in conformity with the formatting limitations and requirements of typical art and film venues. For example, when LA MOCA hosted a viewing of Harmony Korine’s film adaptation of the switchblade fight in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, it did so in conditions that allowed what was a short six-minute film to be viewed by hundreds of people who were connected to the museum, to Korine’s aesthetic, and to the vision of which the work was a central component, namely a multi-element installation by several artists commissioned by James Franco in honor of the 1955 classic.

On another occasion, the intensive energy and dialogue at a highly attended dinner hosted by the kingdom of Morocco for LA MOCA at the Raleigh Hotel signaled the work that museums do in order to secure a place at the table for a wide spectrum of those who participate in supporting the institution. A frequent holding pattern in these lofty discussions circled around the place of institutions in the art scene — I do not mean those which are there to sell or profit from work, which is nominally sensible in an art marketplace — but rather to curate, to preserve, to show it, and to share it as an optic of contemporary lines of artistic creation. Again, as this is nearly impossible to discuss outside the rarefied and exclusivist academic colloquium, the “social scene” of major venues such as this translate into potential platforms for critical reflection.

So while the many invitation-only parties such as this can end with a rave by Radio Soulwax, each is nonetheless a case of the few instances where the jouissance of art can find an opportunity for its alternative energy of what can somewhat vaguely be called reflective collectivity, an aspiration to enthusiasm that needs more than the classroom or museum walls to grow, and so it comes to the streets in the form of a major art fair. Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the intention is a worthy one.

II. Latent

Two days ago, I corresponded with another colleague, a curator, with whom I had met in Miami Beach. In a response to what was a kind of meditation on the high-powered, often vain, social maelstrom of this fair and one’s much more sensitive and contingent inner states of mind, my colleague admitted to feelings of emptiness after the event, feelings that no one speaks of in connection with giddily bombastic things like public gatherings that so many attend in order to be seen as much as to see. These were feelings which certainly mirror mine and, I suspect, those of many, many others. What is going on, one wonders, in that outer pretension to smug insiderness from which most people are excluded, and the private condition of anxiety in one’s inner self, to which the entire situation feels persistently alien?

One might suspect that the problem, to the extent that we can imagine it that way, is one of unexpected distance. There is in, in all of this, an existential canyon that tears at our sense of belonging, a chasm borne of the asymmetries of the art world as another of the worlds of power. Artists, curators, writers, and receptive souls come to this world of aesthetic work with little more a wish and willingness to see, experience, and share with others a personal enthusiasm for the creative energies that flow through them. But, as there are different kinds of wayfarers to this event, that sense of a halcyon playground isn’t the only motivation fueling general participation – there are other reasons for people to “be here”. Art has value, each work that sells participates in an exchange of value. And starting with the human value of the creative effort that engenders the work, that work becomes witness to a translation of value from one kind to another, from human to economic terms, so that its ownership can be transferred and the aesthetic and labor potential in the work can be enjoyed by someone other than the artist. While the expressive effort is always focused enough to lead to the creation of a work, these  new economic aspects require a representative effort that gives the work an identity relating to the conditions of its creation and drives the negotiation of its price. And it is not merely the work’s price that is subject to economic valuation; the reputation of the artist, the lore of the work’s genesis, and the buzz of presumptive opinion that surrounds attitudes about it are all ingredients in the representative constitution of the work.

So we are not surprised about the duality between creative effort — built into the ideal conditions of the work’s production — and representative effort — emerging from the social milieu that makes it all a public matter — as a totality of elements defining the art world’s idiosyncratic and hard-to-characterize complexity. But when creative effort is seriously subordinated to representative effort so that the latter so emphatically eclipses the former, the result is confusion, conflation, distortion, so that parts are taken for wholes, as if skin and bones were taken to comprise the human body without the equal consideration of organs, tissues, nerves, and psychology. As we can easily remind ourselves that representation is not creation, any conflation of one with the other means that those in the representative camp — dealers, and collectors — come to assume the legendary status of those on the creative side, as if they themselves were as important as the artists — and perhaps more so. Perhaps they are a different, better breed of artist. That is the mounting assumption behind this push.

And so it is that the fourth word in a recent New York Times article on the Art Basel Miami Beach scene — the operative term “sighting” — and the sighting being not of a work of art or famous artist, but rather that of a collector, which leads us to conclude that the confusion between creative and representative dimensions has pervaded even high corridors of critical and journalistic thinking. For the article in question (“A Shark Circles Art Basel Miami Beach”, Guy Trebay, New York Times, December 1, 2011 ) , the author focuses on the “sighting” (a rather eccentric designation more often used in accounts of wanted persons, UFOs, and rare marine species) of Eli Broad. If we are speaking of an art fair, the main topic could be, might be, should be, art, that is, chiefly what relates to the products of creative effort. And despite Mr Broad’s supportive prominence in the art world, dare we think that the proprietor of the most prominent collection in the U.S. is secondary to any artist, except in discussions of representative value? After all, despite the art, Mr. Broad, a man of discretion, did not come in order to be displayed. Despite this, the Times article’s focus is much less on an art fair than on the reporter’s sightings of one of the major figures in the art world, as he clocks these encounters with a temporal precision that implies that the occasional spotting here and there actually mattered to the creative effort underpinning the entire event: “The first public sighting of Eli Broad, the 78-year-old billionaire philanthropist and art collector, came at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.” This is the opening sentence. Chronicling the perambulations of Mr Broad as accompanied by his wife and an unnamed curator, somewhat oddly described as moving “beside him like a remora fish along for the ride,” the reporter’s eye is on the representative side of the art equation, since, as we are reminded, Mr Broad “maintains a mammoth personal collection of 500 major artworks, runs a foundation with another 1,500 and is the driving force (some would say pile-driving) behind the contemporary public art scene in Los Angeles. ” This has everything to do with a reporter’s awe of one man, through a lens rather impoverishingly narrowed to a fleeting sighting or two,  but precious little to do with art, the art fair, or the relation between one and the other.

But of course, my critique — weighing the bias against speaking of creative effort in that reportage and the festively dissociated social scene –  is naïve. Critics, theorists, and contemporary art historians, from Boris Groys (consider his latest book, Art Power) to Martha Busrkirk (or hers, Creative Enterprise: Art between Museum and Marketplace) understand that, at the global scale of events such as the Swiss and American versions of Art Basel, art has become essentially synonymous with power, the power of collection, the power of valuation, the power of the clique that collects it, the power of money as a form of attention, and the power of celebrity and lore under whose spell a reporter of the newspaper of American record can write about “sighting” and describing his encounter not with art works, but rather art collectors. And as this coverage turns to the recent history of Mr. Broad, to include his founding and major support of several museums, the account of the art fair traces not art but art atmosphere, colored by “heavy hitters of the Los Angeles art-collecting scene”. To be sure, that scene is central to the image of the fair, but it is not its total reality. Later, Mr. Trebay reports another “sighting” of Mr Broad at a party supplemented by the presence of people whose importance to the story is essentially predicated on their status as entertainment celebrities. True, Art Basel is a place for such sightings. But in a short article, it is they who are offered a quote, people who, without specific knowledge, interest, or engagement with the world of art, comprised “the typical motley scrum of celebrities that included Adrien Brody and Naomi Campbell (“I come down to be with my friends,” said the model, who acquires many things, though not art)”. Mr. Trebay is apparently more interested in tracking empty quotes than substantial engagements. For, if it be a motley scrum indeed, it is because art and artist — the creative effort that makes any art fair possible — have been elided, rendered extraneous from the journalistic account. In closing with the names of several others –  a prominent art dealer and an arts patron, and “a predictable assortment of the pretty young things” that, to him, resemble a now-obscure actress — Mr. Trebay excludes almost everything that preceded, justified, and transpired with actual connection to the creative substance of this sizable, if also festive, endeavor.

A discriminating collector, the presence of Mr. Broad is nonetheless often reduced in many accounts, as we see here, to a kind of neon sign, a fable of determination, an icon of capital coming to art. What is the story here? Art needs support on many levels, and capital moves in many directions of involvement. If money wants to come to art, it is not because money has nothing better to do. Capital, ever motivated by acquisition of the unique, knows that only art possesses the status of art. Real estate, financial management, industry, and family inheritance — these forms of wealth have respectability and influence but not the emancipating penumbra of art’s allure. Art’s status is essentially required, for it is tacit recognition that, at the historical level of what a culture can produce, and leave behind, many can represent but few can create. In this unique role, the artist is a kind of free prisoner, like the Delphic oracle, fleshing out visions in a magically removed context, operating as a psychic medium, producing visual statements that reveal more about something in ourselves than anyone cares to interpret. This is the creative angst which, like the athlete’s years of practice for the Olympics, does not reach the art fair; only the work and its reception matter now.

And in all of this are critics’ odd views of museum and gallery, often overlooked on one hand; frequent whipping-boys on the other. The caricature of a partisan of wealthy interest, where capital owns art in every sense, the museum’s image has been distorted, ignored, and attacked, although it remains the only credible bastion of cultural history. Have we forgotten that the museum, and its commercial kin, the gallery, have been patrons prior to, and after, the vogues of private patronage? Their brick-and-mortar worlds are ones of risk and investment in artistic voices, putting work before a public on whose education and interest they also depend. And as they expand toward greater popular engagement, their risks increase – both financial, and in terms of credibility. The museum, like the gallery, must continually create new spaces (literally and phenomenologically) for the exhibition of work whose size has grown in post-War times to unrivaled proportions, and whose interpretive demands on the same public are greater now than ever. And if the artist’s work is misunderstood or criticized, the exhibiting institution takes the same measure of opprobrium, even though it assumed the fundraising task, and the critical risk of hosting the work in the first place. The evidence reveals the Gargantuan task for directors of museums and galleries in these fairs, which they attend in order to give their institutions a presence and to validate their mission and choices in the art that is brought to view. They carry dual burdens of both representative effort and creative momentum, as well. If there is precious little time for conversations on aesthetic dimensions, it is because they must enlist resources to the institution’s goals. The fact that these institutions manage not merely to survive but to inspire reveals an energy that few other sectors of society can generate, although there are many casualties in a world built from the embrace not merely of art, but of caring, as my wistful curator knows perhaps only too well.

Pacific Design Center for Hedi Slimane California Song exhibit

There was a time not long ago when what we could call the critical elite would, from a historical perch, peer down on the creative voice of art whose agenda was not in line with that of the arch-bourgeoisie, but which instead reflected what seemed the general sentiment of new, halcyon generations. In a favored form of calumny, the conservative view would refer to this as “pop culture”, meant oxymoronically, while viewing what was called the “contemporary” as the the serious, legitimate, deserving heir to high modern art. But pop culture as a phrase no longer means much because all culture is popular, which is to say, resonant to all things contemporary. And the most meaningful acts in regard to a survey of such culture’s interest in the conditions of art are not those which question the ancien regime – this is an obsolete concern – but rather those which establish credible altars in which homage to what contemporary culture believes can find icons and rituals of its reality, not that of art.

If so, then Hedi Slimane is one of the Indigo children for that new truth, serving as an apostolic messenger bearing both word and image, most recently at the exhibit California Song, hosted at LA MoCA’s Pacific Design Center. Two floors frame the unusual structure of this show, which focuses on the polymath’s photography based in the Golden State after 2007, and his show at another major venue for photography — FOAM Amsterdam. In the first floor of the current exhibit, Slimane’s large format photographs are set in wood armatures that insinuate (without entirely resembling) something between shelving units and crate boxes opened vertically, their shape providing lattices for the artist’s meter-high photographs, and their material, unfinished wood, suggests that the images might have arrived in time for their exhibition in a public art venue.

But – and the exhibition is all about reflectivity – these images are co-arranged in their wooden niches with occasional and savvily positioned mirrors, so that what viewers are seeing transcends the visual and concerns the question of the subject itself – whether this points to the subject of the images or to the subject captured in the mirror squares and reflected back is left as an implied question. Passing beyond the preamble of this small room, the birch-like whitness of the first floor’s lighting and palette finds its chromatic inverse inthe second floor of the exhibit, which opens onto the full gallery space, walls receding back to the void of flat black as the center of the space is claimed by three fourths of a ponderous projection cube, nearly twenty feet on each side – as deployed in Berlin and elsewhere – and each facet presents a slow photo-procession of portraits, each image lingering in fixity yet seeming to self-modify with each second of inspection.

Against each of two walls in the larger space is an asymmetrical latticework of pipefittings that hold almost twenty speakers each, pumping the cosmic rock sounds of No Age and other bands, creating quasi-psychedelic ambience of such sensitivity that the viewer feels almost lifted off the ground.

Slimane’s images are unusually thought-provoking, so paradoxical is their aura, the locations of the shots are emblematic California – somewhere back stage, a studio, a surfer’s shore, a hilly backdrop – and these balance presence and mystery, recognizability and secrecy, historical moments and timelessness of being. And with these is a defiant sense of autonomy (and often vulnerability) that frames the expression – and the identity – of its subjects,  both young and old. Here we see recent portraits of an elderly but staunch Gore Vidal; of Ed Ruscha as an older artist, smiling wisely but owning the viewer with discerning eyebrows; or of a post-adolescent boy nearly  identical to a young John Cusack with guitar, eyes both squinty small and yet defining the entire expression of his face and person. And in all these faces, what is the name of that expression? It is presence, not merely as the here-and-now of a body whose force translates to vision with inexplicable but felt intimacy; it is also that of the temporal present whose stamp is so overwhelming and defining that the future is not anywhere in the cards, in the subjects’ expressions, or in the context of the images. Everything about the photographs is ad hoc, often capturing the blurry movement of something, always in a location which is not important as such but rather in an emotional place. Images of arms with tattoos, or of youthful beauty sitting, captured in the sleep-deprived expressionless stare that skirts some extreme edge of life to which we are not privy. But image after image, the consistency of these presences, so often full of feeling but devoid of passion, provide the cognitive allure that draws the viewer into a participatory wish – a wish to have been there, to have lived all that was taking place, to have forged some of the experience being shared but not narrated by these expressions, and to fit together the pieces that puzzle the viewer with seductive interrogation, an interpretive depth that fills the space between the quizzical detachment of the subjects in the photographs and the ambient sympathy of those staring directly at them.

But in their adjacency, we also realize the implied conversation between them, a harmony of sentiment that transcends the visual as it underscores the cultural unity of their mood. Images with textual provocations, where a “WHO” sign could be seen to question the neighborhood shown in a perpendicular image.

Or the taciturn expression of one portrait (Ruscha’s) being met by another in the next panel, but dissolving into the caricaturic photo of a toy monkey.

Images of the monkey, which appear in several forms, are almost a commentary on the sequence of representations, either humane, as in the overlay with the face of musician Christopher Owens

or potentially profane, as in their uncomfortable proximity to any of several variants of crosses or other biblical references.

But less Dadaistic associations emerge more frequently, often giving one pause to appreciate the formal aspects of similarity and lucid statement of line that have been so crucial to Slimane’s revolution in fashion design.  This self-similarity shines best when it appears to prompt the viewer with the uncommon sentiment shared by two faces. Perhaps it is a kind of wonder.

Perhaps it is less energetically what follows it.

And the linearity of apparent comparison muses over the iconic geometry of objects from two different, often archaic, worlds, such as an abandoned business sign and a musician’s drum set — each claiming the flatness of a circle as what Roland Barthes might call the image’s punctum.

To grasp these and so many other captured moments, the viewer need not understand the centerpiece of Slimane’s career, anchored as it is in the splendorous perfection that accompanies art direction in the top Paris fashion houses, because the show’s works are from the alternative parsec of his creative galaxy, one involved in eschewing synthetic and posed gorgeousness for the capture of splendor for magazine publication in exchange for the force of natural impulse in creative work. These images are figurative visas on the passport to life in California that every dreamer keeps in a proverbial pocket.  The exhibit’s visitors, many of whom could be in these photographs themselves, stood transfixed by the images, whose expressions at once languid and mute convey a stamp of inscrutable transition – perhaps from one phase of life to the next – or as in the shots of Ruscha, Van Sant, and Vidal, of comfort and authoritative success, as figures of the cultural moment. In this, they reflect the subtlest gift of Slimane himself: a unique ability to operate as a cultural barometer, which of course is where art and fashion share a defining agenda.

What is it like to stand at the juncture of four directions, four different dimensions of openness, in a single place? At any moment of our being, we are in fact, definably at a north-south-east-west juncture, but what I am pointing to is not a geography of site but of being. One of these dimensions of openness is that of a creative work’s medium, which in the discussion I am about to embark upon, is that of the poem, transmodally crossing over to that of film. Another openness is that of the work as what stands behind, before, beneath, and beyond its possible medium. In the poem, this openness is indispensable, for to think poetically is to move away from the form of the poetic work and into the vastness of human experience which, through reflection, funnels into its language. A third dimension emerges from the artist, whose inner world seeks an intersection with an expressive order such that each can enrich — that is, transform without diminishing — the other. The fourth dimension of openness is the indeterminate state with which we as readers, listeners, viewers, participants, come to the coalescence of the first three. This is what happens in the presence of a transmodal work, which in the case I am coming to, involves a film of a poet moving toward a poem, and in whose performance, an actor crafts an overarching space that accommodates all four of these dimensions, these senses, these commitments to creative openness on all counts.

The work in question, about to be released, is a biopic of the poet Hart Crane, directed by and starring James Franco. The Broken Tower operates in the medium of film, but it is not primarily a motion picture, nor can one fairly place it in the convenient classification of “character study” — these objectivist, externalizing terms prevent us from understanding the work that we must perform in order to observe a soul that is deeply poetic, personal, and palladian. The film is not be viewed as much as navigated, one must be in it, for its method is less that of a visual panegyric than that of the existential problem set that philosophy has set out for us, inviting us to take the red pill, but also offering the blue so that, to quote another palliative escape, when “the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe”. This was not an existential option for Hart Crane, the nuanced soul whose life and super-complex poetry are the subject of this narrative, correspondingly realized with long, slow shots, in black and white, with timing that breathes like a monk in prayer — an experience rendered more starkly by the lack of all music except for a recurrent short set of passages sung by a small choir and the tortuously unceasing refrain of Ravel’s Bolero. This work falls outside of typical genres; if there were one  established category, it would be called  phenomenological film.

Perhaps the role of yet a third medium, between poem and film, should be acknowledged here. Lost in the cult of personality, there stands behind the entertainment icon of James Franco a literary intellect that is too conveniently easy to overlook, for to conceive of this possible proficiency is to do yet additional work in the problem of understanding this question of multiple dimensions of openness. The archetypal identity of the star, the entertainment figure, requires a crucial coherence — even some simplicity — in order to operate feasibly, to cut through swirling oceans of attention-getting projects and products that sustain the culture industry. But that constitutes, like the variety of roles that Franco plays, only a partial view into a person with much greater energy than what any screen performance calls for. To understand the possibility of multiple talents, it is only necessary to imagine a proportionally equal degree of curiosity, love, and dedication to nourish each of them, and modernity’s late stage of anxiety and stress is perhaps only a reflection of the fact that many of us have been forced into the development of multiple talents that do not have pecuniary or other rewards, but whose execution is continually required in various interfaces to social life. Franco’s project has for several quiet decades turned on the nourishment of several simultaneous directions, and all — visual art, literature and poetry, and modeling and film acting — should be seen through the same interpretive lens, despite their having thus far received wholly different degrees of public attention. How can one validly separate, for example, the influence that Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho bore on the retrospection of Franco’s identity formation, with its subsequent chronicle in the fictions of his book, Palo Alto Stories; in that film’s highly conceptual non-narrative remake in Franco’s own My Own Private River, and even in the energy to which this struggle against the loss of a soul characterizes the present performance as Hart Crane? And so, the authorial James Franco, whose literary work appears with still too-precious-little of the critical interrogation that another author would receive, remains nonetheless engaged in the world of letters as author, as student, as reader, and as colleague to many other authors.

As a foundation to The Broken Tower, one of these links connects directly to Paul Mariani, whose biography of Hart Crane performs several kinds of analyses that no other work on Crane so thoroughly provides. The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), for example, examines to a greater degree than any extant monograph the strained relationship between the poet and his parents, whose own dispositions provide much in the way of fuel for emotional estrangement in young Hart. But Mariani exposes the resistance with which other poets, no less a figure than William Carlos Williams, had to come to acknowledge Crane’s greatness, even as many had dismissed his retrograde move to the Orphic, to the metaphysically hopeful, as the last Romantic, encircled by acolytes of the modernist nihilism that Eliot had darkly established. For his part, Crane’s own sensitivity could give in to loss — and did — but this surrender never subsumed poetry to the service of despair. Mariani’s work, the model of sensitive scholarship with a keen eye for the diligently researched detail, reads with the lively rhythm of an avuncular conversation with Paul himself. As his colleague and friend, Franco finds in Mariani what we should all determine there as well – a role for the supportive authority figure in our own world. Franco’s bow to this literal turn is to provide in The Broken Tower a role for Mariani, who, for someone who has given the portrait of Crane such lucid exposure, also appears in the film — appropriately cast as Alfred Stieglitz. The role is as knowledgeably played as the book is written, and Franco’s project — as one navigating the intersecting dimensions of openness — is not lost on Mariani’s considerable care — and patience – with his own multiple talents. And no less apposite to the normative concerns of the film, Mariani’s own professional domain, Boston College, has long been the ideal academic environment for developing the kind of social and moral engagement that is, as with Crane’s own vision, a sustained response to  — and against — the world’s perhaps diminishing commitment to hope. Even for any healthy skeptic, it is obvious that, if generosity of spirit is at a premium today, it certainly is not with Mariani, or with B.C. And the film provides a meaning-making conceptual juncture, having received its world-premiere at Boston College, thanks to coordination with Hallie G. Sammartino’s highly progressive Office of Marketing Communications.

II

How does one perform the life and work of a man whose power and sensibility both made his work timeless and yet destroyed his life prematurely? There is an alluring tension between the kind, neurotic fragility of Hart Crane, such as he was, and the inexplicable power of James Franco’s animal magnetism, something that reminds one of a different film with similar intentions — but posing a much less ambitious challenge — A Beautiful Mind, where the outsized Russell Crowe performs a kind of physionomic miracle in successfully scaling his brawny aura down to the meek absentmindedness of the schizophrenic mathematical genius John Nash. Schizophrenia is not something that has touched most people’s lives, and Nash’s mathematical reasoning is scarcely depicted, being the enemy of the film’s tension — the disintegration of one’s world in the face of overpowering mental illness. However, there are in Nash’s life many points of sanity that countervail the mental demons. There is, for example, the courageously unwavering presence of his wife, portrayed by Jennifer Connelly as the incarnation of loyalty without hope of reward or respite as she bears witness to the surreal decline of a highly ordered mind. There is also a woven world of professional and collegial support for Nash in the form of governmental and academic recognition, as he becomes selected for everything from secret cryptological projects to the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nash benefited from a career graced with the kind of renown that comes when the world listens to one’s work and thus finds in it an understanding of important problems. And that listening is what translates great ideas into great accomplishments, the former is what one gives to the world; the latter is what the world gives back. Few forms of existential dialogue can be more important to the struggling, gifted soul whose life demands extended dedication to its work so as to continue evolving.

But in Crane’s life, this balance between adversity and support is simply not available. This is the challenge that Franco confronts, and into which he immerses us. As we know to be true of so many poets, Crane’s craft emerges out of the shadows of a life that, while underpowered, is nevertheless fueled by the triumph of celebration of love, in its gaze at the world, at once critical as it is of the anemic sleep with which most of us carry on, and simultaneously joyous with vigil gratitude at the intimate closeness of another by whose love we are nourished. Crane’s method in this is to use language itself as the driving wedge into awareness, but not the kind of poetic language that we might imagine — something splayed out like a landscape painting and in which the viewer’s position is readily affixed and comfortably fitted for the reception of evocative harmonies. No. Crane’s linguistic approach at first seems evocative, but on second reading, or third listening, proves instead provocative. The abstractness of the descriptions, the droll but syncopated march of the rhythm, the sentences that distend like a sprawling techno-metropolis, all operate first to elicit confusion, but are to be parsed in the imperative, as a “Charge!” clarion call to reposition oneself, or rather, to find one’s vantage in the world picture not as viewer but as thinker, as someone ethically commissioned to embrace the extraordinary complexity that erupts between the timeless pull of human love and the doldrums of the contemporary attitude that negates it. Each poem is a kind of “Why?” unflinchingly pointed right at this asymmetry, felt almost as conversations with a higher being, rather than as elegies lamenting something dead.

And getting there is not without difficulty for the poet himself. Caught within the lingering inscrutability of Crane’s work, one is tempted to imagine these difficult verses as easily thrown together as an exquisite corpse-like exercise in randomization — such is the infuriation with which the reader struggles to get to the other side of its initial engagement. But Crane’s tenacious sensitivity to a single word, clinging for its concealed meaning as if the poet were about to drop off the edge of the Universe, is depicted with playful exasperation in one solo scene giving us Franco’s wrestling with a fistful of Naugahyde, struggling toward that place between its undeniable material presence and its vinyl-like failure to deliver on the organic promise.

We are not left wondering, then, about Crane’s desperation against the pathetic apoplexy of a workaday world; he is, in the noblest irony possible, imprisoned within the most anti-poetic jobs possible, from the humiliation of lowly sack-carrying clerk for his father’s business to the hypnotic stultification of the proverbial day job championing the message that will sell toothpaste and thereby save the world from tooth decay. His heart in a vice grip, the poet, on his own, without partnership, home, support of family, or many lasting friends, can only love and create, yet never compromising to shorten the conscious distance between the height of his writing and our reluctance to soar. He medicates with the usual panoply of libations for self-destruction, but alone, alone, all alone, and without even a tormentor for company, we witness the emptiness of time and the superabundance of emotional wellsprings slowly galvanizing his inevitable exit from the impossibility of success. He brings the world his gift, and the world never consecrates it into accomplishment, such is the prophetically minor key in which his poetry knows it can be played.

III

Of course, The Broken Tower is in so many ways not difficult, but so direct in its truth to the problem of living with dignity and reflection. A short, compact poem, the work spans three facts in the way that it mirrors the institution of God; the constitution of the human body, standing straight up and ringing out to be heard; and the destitution of faith, given that a place such as this need be built at all, since it cannot be nourished fully in the collective heart’s imagination. Many attributions have been made to its meaning; I can offer one that points to James Franco’s own emphasis on the internal sojourn of the poet, beyond social, romantic, or contemporary contexts — the film, we must remember, is an existential work. And so the poem sets sail with a call exactly as Crane’s own, for our heightened and transformative sensitivity, asking rhetorically if we can be so obtuse as to have overlooked all resonance between one’s own enunciation and the cosmos of otherness:

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray?

Here is the unflinching insistence — as if it could not be repeated more explicitly and still remain poetry — on the distance between the lofty ideal, escaping with fleeting mystery, and their dagger-like trace singing the language to which the poet is beholden, and thereby we to him, for he serves as interlocutor, the echoes of the bells in this allegory are left here in the plains of the earthly dominion, for the poet to gather:

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

But Crane’s poetry is more than a subjective appraisal, his is a complete picture of the response to the dystopian Waste Land of T.S. Eliot, who stands as his photo-negative. And with not a little irony: Eliot’s nihilistic canticles to the lost spirit of the modern world can scarcely be read without an equally resounding echo of his own success as renowned colossus of American literature. Crane, by complete inversion, is the modern-day Whitman. Modest of means, singing of hope, propitiating all that is human without repulsion or bias, he presents himself, no gender or other category limiting his embrace, and offers a hopeful but unmet hand and heart:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

And in this, his final published poem, Crane shares, as did Whitman, a backward glance o’er travel’d roads, paying for our sleep with what, as the coin of poetry, he could — a great measure of heart and language — even if misunderstood, neglected, until only death could give his work the strength that the world had denied him:

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope – cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

The Christ-like crucifixion now ready, Crane’s stage is now set for the final transcendence, where surrender from the world’s slaughters of denial finds restoration by repeating the motif of the crumbling physical, only this time in lasting spirit:

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip
Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

And the bridge-like fulcrum between the mundane and the immaterial is, in the final stanza, unsealed and bracketed by the physical object in the first line — the heart — and the ideal of its production in the last — love:

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

It is this very unsealing in the distant but homologous horizon of conscious being that opens out to the poetic spaces that Crane explores with such courage, portrayed by Franco with the kind of sensual surrender, recondite solitude, and existential estrangement that cannot be called acting in any theatrical way. And so it is that in films like Franco’s here, one should self-prepare before walking in, there is much from personal experience that we can naturally use to resonate to many of the depictions we see in Crane’s life, but Crane was also a struggling poet,openly gay at a time when the film shows the painful toll that was just as openly meted out for this. He was not openly sensitive, except to his friends; he waited out the world, but the world never came. And so, we must come to the film with more to bring than the expectation of passive entertainment, we are meant to bring, as to Crane’s poetry, what his contemporary day did not bring him. And we can choose whether to travel with him retrospectively, or to sit back and sit out the work of this alchemical unsealing, in which one kind of tower becomes another, and where the four dimensions of openness converge exactly where it matters to them and to the necessity of our full engagement:  the matrix of the heart. Can any place be more important? This confluence amounts to required media for required viewing, required reflecting — and required being.

In the visual arts, the domain of emotional attachment has always comprised at least two aesthetic horizons. One operates in the role of mirror, the other of prism, or perhaps kaleidoscope. The first, evincing the general concern with all that is socially constructed and sanctioned in any historical epoch, is the archive of works that reflect less Platonic instantiations of Love than the societally accepted portfolio of what can, in the profound space of longing, be respectfully enunciated, displayed and enacted. This of course is the world of high art, expression in the parameters of the sublime that we take, for example in a German context, from Goethe, Schiller, or Rilke. The second domain for affective realism is less prominent. It documents the nightside of emotional intensity, the fire of longing unconstrained by and unresponsive to moral structure. Far from finding expression in starkest terms, this second realm of emotional characterization has a rather protracted development in the work of artists and movements that saw no need to reflect social mores, but rather to refract, distort, and even effigy them as hypocritical restraints on an otherwise essential human spirit whose Sturm und Drang, to recall one version of it, merits nothing less than the vindication of its suffering and alienation in the full light of a new artistic day. It was in literature that Stendhal, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé found a means for such refraction, a language of expression that promoted itself from the mimesis of ritual feeling to the antagonistic refutation of the stagnant “ritualized”, of the implicit in all that is unspoken, all that is culture.

It is with the end of high art’s hegemony and its concomitant co-optation into popular culture that the first domain of emotional expression is gradually replaced by the second. And while popular art incubates within its own environment in the form of full-fledged media that include among others the radio program, the television show, and the comic book, the venues of high art — the museum, the gallery, and the academic publication — encounter a new tension in the attempt to accommodate the “low” within the “high”. Of course, the fit is ultimately incommeasurable, high art, we know since Kant, revolves on distance, which is to say, ineluctibility through notions of taste, while Low is about closeness, or the reach for immediacy through performance. The art of distance can afford to be mediated by costume, ritual and language that traverses all of a culture’s history. The art of immediacy derives impact by jettisoning all the signs of historical determination; they play no role in the depths of true personal longing.

And so this distance-immediacy dialectic becomes taken up as a principal problem for artists whose optic lies on the tangent of the morally or socially acceptable. The moral problem might include treatments of sexuality that have been eschewed by the High Art ethic. The compass of social problems might point, among other places, to the nodes of inner experience that, when documented “up close and personal”, transgress the traditional function of art as a framework for appreciative abstraction. The array of recent examples of each is an almost unbroken string since at least the 1960′s, even assuming we ignore the work of Dada artists four decades before that.

At one end, corresponding to reactions to moral code, several techniques have been employed as gambits on the distance-immediacy polarity. Since the distance of sublime appreciation remains central to high art, it cannot be circumvented. But since the immediacy of popular art’s freedoms offers relevance and expressive latitude, it remains too alluring to ignore. One recurrent solution, stylistic obfuscation, tackles the handling of the visually explicit; the image that is too salacious or extreme becomes manipulated into near-unrecognizability through compound methods of, shall we say, aesthetic degradation. Robert Heinecken, trained as a printmaker and working as photographer, was possessed by a predilection for this approach, exposing the subject through cross-montage and negative overlays that retain both aesthetic distance, through the suggestive character of the images, and aesthetic immediacy, through the evidence on sustained view of a more seamy source of the material itself. Not surprisingly, much of his practice could at the end of his life be characterized as occupying a resolutely contrary position, even among photographers. As synopsizes Andy Grunberg in  Heinecken’s New York Times obituary, the artist’s “hybrid integration of photographs with other mediums was a “rebuke to the aesthetics of conventional photography”³. The impact of this is all the more evident when we imagine what an wide-ranging set of practices and concerns the term “conventional photography” had come to embrace by the 1980’s.  Heinecken’s Mansmag of 1969, a starkly colored superimposition of offset lithographs in the form of a booklet recalls the impact of Warhol’s Disaster series, but with sensuality rather than death as its thematic center.

Robert Heinecken,
Cream 6 Single
photo emulsion on canvas, framed
signed, dated and titled on verso in pencil
30 x 40 in / 76.2 x 101.6 cm
Susan Spiritus Gallery

Robert Heinecken
From the series Are You Rea
1967
Photograph
Gelatin-silver contact print from magazine
8.5 x 6.5 in.
Rhona Hoffman Gallery

The artistic breach of moral code through convolution of image proves relevant to artists who questioned and contravened social codes as well. In video, the first social code to be broken is the fourth wall, destroying high art’s rule of aesthetic distance by having the artist address the viewer directly. Vito Acconci’s video work during the 1970’s adopted this as a signature technique, with the insistence of intimacy reinforced by the extreme close-up of the artist. Few of the many relevant instances in Acconci’s oeuvre were as salient as Centers, a 1971 performance in which the artist’s iconic insistence on the inclusion of the viewer into the work is conveyed by the unadorned, sustained act of pointing. A year after the work was completed, Acconci described the action as “Pointing at my own image on the video monitor: my attempt is to keep my finger constantly in the center of the screen—I keep narrowing my focus into my finger. The result turns the activity around: a pointing away from myself, at an outside viewer.’² It was this mise-en-scène that Rosalind Krauss saw not merely as a framing device but as the very structure of the video medium, yet one whose aesthetics she derides as narcissistic through and through. “As we look at the artist sighting along his outstretched arm and forefinger toward the center of the screen we are watching,” she writes, “what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci’s plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double.”⁴ In an argument where one kind of finger pointing underscores the basis for another, she indicts the medium for an abstract kind of narcissism, that is, not as mere self-aggrandizement but as a production logic that folds onto itself.

Vito Acconci
Centers
1971
Video

This is the tautology that opens a portal for unifying both the distance of high art with the immediacy of popular art when video and later photography assume a new kind of subject in performance – the artist himself or herself in self-revelation. For here, in this novel fount of expressive enthusiasm, the affordances of a new medium – video – meet the boundless potentials for exploration of a new kind of subject – the artist-as-asubject – in a scheme of practice where both are completely open and entirely flexible, available, and responsive to new directions. This is not the artist’s self-portrait of Rembrandt or van Gogh, that is, not an opportunity for the encapsulation of painterly technique. Rather, this expressive direction, emerging from but transcending the recursive terms of tautology, centers rather on the problems of medium-analysis, self-analysis, and, as mentioned at the outset, analysis of social code. Thus we can make sense of Pippilotti Rist’s bond with the medium as not only melding the inner landscape of artist and medium, but through the medium’s own techniques, produces in us a gaze that has focused on either figure or ground but never on both, and never on medium itself as a ground, with the contingency of the artist’s being as its figure.  The artist can, through this channel of articulation, say what could never be said before, as if two messages were conflated into one, in one, documenting the intimacy of lovemaking on one hand through the distance of medium destruction of the other, as in Carolee Schneemann’s classic Fuses, a subjective narration akin to a dream sculpture commemorating her relationship with James Tenney. The fleeting moments of togetherness evinced in the film are, as if to remind us of their momentary nature, blended with the artifacts of the film’s own destruction through various means. The impossibility of absorbing one story without the other answers in the affirmative a question that Schneemann presumably posed in one of her notebooks, “”How can I have authority as both an image and an image-maker?”⁵

Carolee Schneeman
Fuses
1967
Video

Painting, sculpture, and photography were blends in the work of Hannah Wilke in self-exploration, all pointing to a new use of medium and now-engaged personal voice that together give new meaning to the word “assemblage”. That even today Schneemann’s performance work is argued as an early “catalyst for the emergence of feminist consciousness”¹ is rather unfortunate, as the gender innovation argument entirely occludes how her performance and video work conjoined the distance-intimacy chasm more poignantly than any artist of her generation, a contribution of significantly greater historical import.

Pipilotti Rist
Homo sapiens sapiens
2005
Installation view at Chiesa San Staé
Photo: Heiner H. Schmitt jr

It is in this context that I turn to two recent videos of LanaZ Caplan, whose blend of practices has explored a range of practices that fall under what ought by now be called biographical media. As part of a series of music videos called “The Break-up Album”, the first, After you’ve gone, effects its triple media overlay as an object of attention through song, performance, and artist. In the tradition of the conceptual technique of explicit intimacy, Caplan , in synchronized doubled montage, sings inaudibly to a second synchronization with the playback of the eponymous song composed by Henry Creamer and Turner Layton and recorded by Bessie Smith. The song’s roots are located in the historical birth of popular culture, not high art, in 1918 it was first performed by Al Jolson, and subsequently recorded by an astonishing parade of luminaries, including Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Bessie Smith, Marion Harris, Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, the legendary Quintette du Hot Club de France, Cal Tjader, Johnny Hartman, and even Shirley MacLaine, among others. Thus, Caplan’s use of this song evokes an emotional pedigree of sorts, the domain of emotional attachment for which love lost finds many expressions. The appropriation, however, is not of the song but of a Bessie Smith recording, itself recoded to the performance of the artist’s lips in extreme close-up, and, as if recalling the aesthetic tautology that Krauss finds within video’s logic, Caplan appears not once but twice, layered in the signature avant-garde kaleidoscopic over-placement, repetition and non-scenery, and closeup of lips we find interspersed throughout Léger and Antheil’s 1924 classic Ballet Mecanique. Caplan’s overlay also recalls Alice Prin, better known as Kiki of Montparnasse, the protagonist of the earlier performance whom Man Ray had often photographed.

LanaZ Caplan
After You’ve Gone
2008
Video

Man Ray
Kiki in Man Ray’s Apartment, rue de la Condamine
1921
vintage gelatin silver print
5-7/8 x 4-1/2 in.
Zabriskie Gallery, New York

Acconci’s line of persuasive “reasoning” with the viewer, insufficiently explored, is taken up in Caplan’s second video, lovefool, with the artist posed off-center in neurotic high pitch and Cyndi Lauper regalia, uttering directives like “Love me. You don’t have to love, just say you love me.” As the “Love me” command repeats, gradually being mouthed through more insistent and grotesque mannerism, and the sentiment it could evoke is snuffed out, the work is an interrogation of what underlies the emotion itself when obsession, one of its principal ingredients, comes to dominate the relationship. The perception of insistence for intimacy fosters an equivalent sense of distance, each destroying what becomes obvious in its absence: the caring that fuels love itself. Such is the supplication that the artist sings, or lipsyncs, to the Cardigans’ hit single lovefool; the plea for deception that is evident in the lyrics’ refrain (“Love me love me / say that you love me / fool me fool me / go on and fool me”) is emphasized by Caplan’s acting of a jilted lover whose self-pity takes on a demeanor that is at once tenuous, defiant, anxious, and disinterested.

LanaZ Caplan
Lovefool
2008
Video

The kind of artistic engagement that Krauss found problematic in early video appears to have sustained itself, exploiting new directions. Her designation of its aesthetics as centering on narcissism is the product of a literal or iconic reading, something too closely anchored to the retinal effect, and therefore a partial characterization of its larger project, which is much more indexical, and more aptly termed a broad sounding of emotional indeterminacy. Thus Rist’s work in the 1990’s has moved into the more stoically Finnish self-absorption that characterizes the metaphysically enigmatic work of Eija Liisa Ahtila, whose own interrogation of how filmic imagination oversteps the physical world and vice versa can be understood in relation to the work of Joan Jonas. For her part, Jonas’s interests in symmetries of representation have assumed literal implementations in, for example, the mirror view of her 1972 Left Side Right Side , work that connects to much of Dan Graham’s own reflective phenomenology. But in both Jonas and Graham, the affective state of the performer, powered by autistically robotic refusal, is inescapably magnetic, how can this be ignored? And for Caplan, a hybrid of directions reflects the assumption of the medium as an adjunct to human sentiment. For as arrows in the quiver of shattered relationships, these two videos contribute to The Break-up Album not merely through the venue of popular reception, as in the “top ten breakups” of Cusack’s film High Fidelity but through the avant-garde lineage to which they pay historical homage. And if, in a word, there were to be but one undeniable denominator to every video artist’s oeuvre, each tributary would, additionally mediated, reflected, and constructed through the medium, intersect at a visceral point with the contingent selfhood that is articulated in the Dasein of Heidegger, and what follows the ontological uncertainties of Beckett’s world.

REFERENCES

‘Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses as Erotic Self-Portraiture’, CineAction, (2007).

Acconci, V., ‘Body as Place-Moving in on Myself, Performing Myself’, Avalanche, 6/Fall 1972.

Grundberg, A., ‘Robert Heinecken, Artist Who Juxtaposed Photographs, Is Dead at 74′, The New York Times, May 22 2006.

Krauss, R., ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October, 1/Spring 1976.

Princenthal, N., ‘The Arrogance of Pleasure – Body Art, Carolee Schneemann, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, New York’, Art in America, /October (1997).

If a work of art functions best when it allows us to engage it with the dual galvanism of uniqueness and familiarity, it is because what its aesthetic frame excludes is what cues the viewer on what is to be read back into the work. More relevant to Marclay’s practice, what is included within the frame of an art object is the work’s content; what is excluded is often determined by limitations inherent in the chosen medium. This terminus enables an experience of crucial duality between what is perceived and what is felt, what is sensed and what is imagined. It is a boundary that Marclay, as maven of the phonograph more than any other mechanism, navigates. His principal strategy could be called the metonymic filibuster, designed as it consistently seems to be, to take part of a work for the whole, thereby suspending the full performance of what an expressive medium provides. The tactical act is twofold, first involving a partial or incomplete selection of aural or visual work amenable to sensory reception via the photograph or phonograph and then impeding its reception by perturbing or hindering its some of its playback or display.

First in this exhibition trifecta is photography at the Paula Cooper Gallery, where the recent Marclay solo show named Fourth of July featured large-format torn color photographs of an eponymous parade in New York City that the artist photographed in 2005. The set chosen for display comprised seven portraits – if we could call them that, for we never see any of them in entirety – of members of a marching band, for the photos were torn into various shapes, each of which prevents us from seeing more than a fragment of the action. In the photographic medium, the image is always the site of reception, but when its physical reduction by tearing is so severe that its function as a representamen of the world is negated, we are impelled to lay equal focus on the boundary, the frame, such that the shape of the image whose fragmentation enters its formal dialogue with what is captured photographically. Denying the holism of a scene upon which the eye depends, these works, operate as anti-portraits, or at best, as scenes of scenes, which is to say, as subsamples, a term whose exploitation Marclay’s musical vocabulary also understands.

Thus to imagine that this collection is a photographic show is to misread the larger aesthetic operating here; it is one in whose structure the medium is presented in staged engagement with something outside of it, and this engagement – here, both physical and retinal – identifies the locus of the reading bridging two distinct phenomenal worlds. The fact that this engagement aesthetic – this selection of, bridging across, and playing through media – is now a prevalent artistic practice for a wide swath of artists, a kind of first class object itself as a logical step after collage, marks it as a historical point of departure from legacies of art making that precede it.

Figure 1. Christian Marclay, Untitled (from the series Fourth of July), 2005. c-print, 32 x 31 1/2 inches.
Image courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery.

Similarly, there is Festival, a Marclay mid-career retrospective literally and figuratively staged at the Whitney Museum, where form and genre are subject to a prodigal variety of treatments. Looking as much as art school classroom as rehearsal space at an experimental theater company, the Whitney show is a textbook case of how to structure the engagement aesthetic between form and frame. Enclosed video and exhibition spaces meld into a larger common area that is itself reconfigurable into quarters by the enormous black curtains that are selectively drawn closed during live performances by musicians playing some of Marclay’s instruments. In this open plan, inscribed through the entire span of one wall painted as a massive blackboard is an array of musical staff lines with chalk holders allowing visitors to “compose” what the performers might wish to read. That it is a pyrrhic gesture, since the wall is not positioned so that any player could easily see it, is no less crucial to the engagement aesthetic that the exhibition pursues, since the symbolic overlay of players using Marclay’s instruments, performing to the visitors, ostensibly interpreting their ‘compositional cues’ crosses several worlds of language, music inscription, and reader response to the exhibit, which in turn feeds back to the potential of live performance – each line of engagement speaks through its own language, frame, medium, and form.

The third deployment of Marclay work in New York City, part of the Haunted exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, is in the company of a larger undertaking organized around the theme, increasingly topical, of part-whole relations investigating how a medium that captures only a portion of experience – itself modulated through artistic voice – can reconstitute larger memory and meaning. While the principal medium for Haunted is photographic, space was made at the top floors of the museum for three video works whose identity as well as implicit partnership impels greater reminiscential allure than the rest of the show’s static constituents.

The thematic concern around the Haunted show, which I would term the notion of a “conceptual afterimage” where photographic media resuscitate in their engagement with memory as an aesthetic function (rather than just one of information retrieval), is very much Marclay’s, as when, in his contribution to the show, the single-channel video work entitled Looking for Love, he creates juxtapositions of memory in the LP records and similar analog media, juxtapositions that are immediately set off to destroy memory or undermine the conventional aesthetic experience for which they were created. And this, he accomplishes by literally going against the grain of the medium’s own structure and materials of reproduction.

Figure 2. Christian Marclay, Looking for Love, 2008.
Single channel video.  Image courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery.

One reading for both shows, the Marclay festival at the Whitney and the Guggenheim’s Haunted, could circle around the interface between the potentials of aesthetic perception and the production of sensory triggers for them. In the case of the Haunted exhibition, the production is photographic; with Marclay it is aural. Each form of production is thus anchored to departures from the particular character of specific media – the camera and the phonograph, respectively. But this interface reading between reception and production – the notion of memory woven as  the target of media production, whose sounds or images evoke references to the problematic past and our inability to reproduce it objectively – is only a cursory possibility for the total phenomenon of this larger relationship between self and media, a relationship that has come to dictate the preponderant conditions of art today in which new media choices – Serra’s cor-ten steel ellipses, Jessica Stockholder’s retail plastics, Thomas Hirschhorn’s low-grade material enclosures, Ilya Kabakov’s dreamy closet-like rooms, Rachel Whiteread’s blocks of architectural forms without faces, Tracy Emin’s domestic squalor installations, Damien Hirst’s taxidermy of the grotesque, Matthew Barney’s post-pagan carnival performances – all reflect an engagement between the status of art and the presence of the self, each contingent and seeming separate but with an ineffable connection to the other. More germane to the phenomenon is a different departure from the convention whose historical reliance on the figurative and representational became tied to production practices that both artist and audience understood. That aesthetics until the late 19^th century, therefore, was decided on singular qualitative bases of taste meant that subjective and objective – that the experience of art and the quality of art – were codetermined, decided together and simultaneously. It meant that art was a signifier of society because it was a matter of universal consensus, although this naïve sheen occluded an asymmetry that has augmented out toward all of contemporary art, for, like two circles that never overlap, the production of the work was entirely dependent on the artist, while the production of interpretation lay completely with the viewer, and today, this equation is no longer stable.

This change has not merely affected art; it has become by and large the principal mode of experiencing of it, both via artistic production and the assumptions of viewerly reception. The hermetic uniqueness of these phenomenal spheres is gone; they are no longer distinct or even sequential, now instead emerging together in single larger readings of artmaking, whose execution and context become dependent no less on audience than artist. One now self-evident factor here is that interpretation is no longer a matter of consensus – since the earliest Cubist work, or the subsequent articulations of abstraction variously adonized from Picasso to Rauschenberg, such work challenges the academic categorization of genres like landscape, still life, or portraiture. That these historically elaborated categories have lost ontological weight is evident in how both the schooled and unschooled eye become equally confounded. Another factor emerges from the problems of boundary in works whose space, or time can no longer be determined. And a third factor, which should be called aesthetic nominalism, points to the new practice of built-in measures against reproducibility of the work, which is uniquely performative. These are frequently present in a dual mode of existence, as indications, templates, or instructions for execution on one hand, and as specific but ever-unique instantiations in distinct occasions on the other. The results of these divagations from the cogency of convention have been given simple names, perhaps “pluralism” being the most common, if least informative. If, as we know, it is clear that, in this variety, a century of art has gradually increased its proclivity to challenge sensory expectations against conventional modes of experience and historical categorization, it must be equally obvious that, in concert, the many varieties of this challenge reposition the act of reception from something passively convenient to that which, in order to complete the work, must engage it in new ways. Artistic sensibility knew that in order for this to happen, for the viewer to enter the space of production, standards of aesthetic convention had to be sacrificed. To be sure, it is not that aesthetics has been purged from modern and contemporary art, but rather that it has become redefined, such that the familiar mode of its experience, which might be summarized as judgment from perception, is now less crucial to the experience of a work than the sense of, and commitment to, activating its world as constructed, as presented, and as possible at this moment more or less independent of any other, so that in order for the work to exist, it must exist now, that is, without necessarily any reference either to a history or a future. To the extent that this now is constructed by the overlap of the two circles of artistic possibility signified by the act of production or construction and reception or interpretation, artist and audience are led to collude in the contract of artmaking, and the final outcome forms a new experience connected less to disembodied universals like beauty or truth than to the immediate confirmation of one’s own being by injection of a participatory co-articulation with the artist of the work’s statement that, replacing the old universals, becomes that new form of artistic value that can be called the engagement aesthetic.

As it is no longer possible to manage memory without managing media, we must consider anew the critical question of where memory operates. With the revived age of enlightenment that accompanies the Freudian psychological model, the idea of repressed energy has moved from its earlier center in narratives of religion, and later even fluid dynamics, to ones based on a reliance on the function of the mind itself. In this, the problems of memory have been exposed; operating in the mind, its original repository creates a character of memory that is meaning-laden but flawed in structure. In this place, memory is, for example, woven into other memory, and these associations are not accidental, instead being motivated by a subconscious process where incompleteness must be augmented by imagination, such that recall is not merely informational but reflective and serves as description of the thinker. An aesthetic line connects this phenomenon – Freud’s principal insight – with the one that Marclay evokes in an unrelenting part-whole engagement within and against emotive associations with the media of memory and recollection.

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 Tilted 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.

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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S.C. Herring, L.A. Scheidt, S. Bonus, S. and E. Wright. “Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs.” Paper presented at the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’04) 2004.

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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.

Art historians and critics have known of an unspoken division in regard to classification at this all-embracing level between those who operate in the world of artmaking and everyone else, whose consistent exposure to that realm of activity is more or less tangential. And it is this latter group, whose inexperience with the empirical details of the studio, the crit, the gallery discussion, the collector’s whim, the curator’s research, and the administrator’s concerns translates into an abstract compensation by determining or denying in a once-and-for-all manner something like art status of an object, nay an entire class of activity, such as we have seen in the aesthetic question of computer games.

Surely, the question, although irrelevant to the conventional artistic establishment, deserves at least something of an answer. But, lacking disciplinary or theoretical focus, from whom? And, despite the force of its affirmation, is this the only way to frame it? We should wonder why this “Is it art?” question’s naiveté should be addressed with its inborn sense of categorical, binary yes/no resoluteness in which some popular culture critics, reluctant to contextualize it within at least some of the last century’s developments in conceptual art, have insisted on framing it. Even so, this persistence resembles that previous chapter in modern art when, in the early 1920’s, Alfred Stieglitz, working to legitimate photography within the gallery system, writes to the man most infamously devoted to undermining that system, Marcel Duchamp, asking whether a photograph can have the status of art. The consequence of this for new media art is something I have previously considered.[1] In that context we must see in Stieglitz someone who, working as more than an artist, and for fifteen years running a gallery devoted  “to advance photography as applied to pictorial expression” is continually assembling and promoting exemplars for a growing canon of photographic art. Yet here he becomes the ironic outsider posing the categorical art question about the creative product of a then-new medium.

Stieglitz, unlike Duchamp, did not come to photography through an art school education or even the practice of traditional art medium. His artistic advent would follow the unlikely trajectory of mechanical engineering, whose model was also central to his historic contributions to the development of the photographic medium. To be sure, whether inescapably rooted in the aesthetic sensibilities of the man or by witness to the ineffable evolution of his photographic eye, something coalesced in him such that mechanical precision progressed through artisanal perfection and arrived finally at mature consciousness of the photograph’s aesthetic promise. At that point, Stieglitz’s own attitude changed; photography became less the medium to be perfected than the art form to be cultivated. Nor is this unique to Stieglitz or even to photography; this progression from instrument craft to legitimate art form is the same one that Stanley Cavell locates in the origins of another – film. As it was with Stieglitz’s interrogation of photography, it is also true for Cavell’s questions of film’s aesthetic, whose genesis he finds, with Panofsky’s own and in opposition to Bazin’s, that it was not “an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art”.[2] The processual art always evolved from the objective medium.

Film, even more dependent on complex technology than photography, has never been defined by the gallery system. It is a medium capable of thriving within as well as outside it, for as film became “the movies”, it grew into a commercial empire not through the institutions of art but of entertainment. And thus, each world – art and entertainment – has adopted its own designation for it: if we can take up the relevance of films as art for themselves, and aesthetically important to the artist, we can speak equally germanely of movies as entertaining for us, and financially profitable to the producers. Big money and high art have always been brutal antagonisms, and the commercial film has evolved to serve precisely the industry whose adjective describes it. The presumable integrity of both art work and artist that depends on the romanticization of solitude and sacrifice was the single holdout against the ostensible aesthetic depravity of commercial film’s evolution in the 1930’s as a product of a draconian studio system, something that had also begun to happen with music. Today, of course, the preponderance of recorded music and film is commercialized, a description that impugns it as financially profitable but too often aesthetically impoverished. As social critique, this charge is less directed at the nature of the work than at the expectations of its audience, for it is the latter that drives the demand for popular entertainment. In this sense, the term “mass market”, and not just the word “commercial”, is also an inverse of high art. Not without irony, this distance from the masses allows high art to become profitable without losing claims to special integrity, since now many works of art, contemporary as well as classical, fetch auction prices exceeding the production cost of many commercial films. If there is a palpable shade between creation and production in this paragraph, it is one that will be expanded upon shortly.

The perplexity surrounding fiscal relations with which I have opened here is the beginning of several contradictions about the manner in which to regard the computer game, fundamentally an entertainment apparatus whose own industry in turn (it bears repeating) exceeds that of commercial film in sales and revenue metrics. Historically, photograph and film have seen a family of critics arise, writers with balanced and complex positions like Panofsky, Bazin, Metz, and Cavell, and promoters like Stieglitz – all ensconced in the problem of each art’s own ontology and the medium’s own authenticity within it. Games have not yet had that lineage, although the legitimacy of any art form always depends on the solidity of the critique that engages and presents it. Rather, the argument for games as art is frequently made through dint of retrospective claim, an authority akin to the sort of baptismal claim that allowed King Henry VIII to annul his own marriage by creating the religion that permitted it. This does not lessen the integrity of the game in itself, but that knee-jerk endorsement denies the role that history can and must play in determining the status of any expressive form as art — not as commerce. Indeed, proponents of photography and film emerged shortly after the medium had already been developed and explored principally as an optical device. Any claim that photography and film were from the outset motorized by an aesthetic program is patently untrue. Their historical trajectory followed that of the “technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art”. The commercial system that games have exploited, on the other hand, was already in place at their birth; it is an extension of the one that partly led to the other, co-created by the commercial film’s invention of the entertainment industry. This is the same industry that replaced an existing culturally integrated entertainment institution — Vaudeville. It is an industry that, even further back in time, did not exist at all during photography’s infancy, which is precisely why Stieglitz created the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, a name whose triumphant agenda we would do well to reflect upon. The cosynchrony of distinct stages of culture industry with the evolution of a technical art form’s products, then, is the question to probe, rather than whether any such form, by commercial emancipation, can claim arthood through institutional relationships, whether of support or antagonism.

Which brings up one of the more often-cited apologias for the art status of the computer game, the essay “Games, the New Lively Art”.[3] The position taken here and articulated elsewhere by Henry Jenkins, the scholar of popular culture, champions games as art on normative, if paradoxical grounds. Jenkins documents a personal epiphany encapsulated by the experience of attending two panel discussions at a conference. In the first panel, we are told, the discussion was “sluggish and pretentious” – and, it seems, disdainfully predictable: “I knew exactly what they were going to say before they opened their mouths”. By contrast, the discussants in the second panel “were struggling to find words and concepts to express fresh discoveries about their media; they were working on the very edge of the technology, stretching it to its limits, and having to produce work which would fascinate an increasingly jaded marketplace. They were keeping on the top of their toes trying to learn not only from their own production practices but from each other.” We don’t know what was sluggish, pretentious, and predictable about the first discussion, since no quote, paraphrase, or summary is provided in this account. However, the argument for computer games as an art form is undergirded by this dichotomy, which despite its paucity of quotation seems incongruous to the claim, given that the first group Jenkins dismisses are not theorists but digital artists. The second group, we are told, comprises game designers. Now, it seems to me that claims for the art status of any medium ought to be made in a manner that integrates, rather than rejects, the experience of its artists. This is not the essay’s only paradox, since the author’s dismissal of artists, on the grounds that their language appears too abstruse to him, is an anomalous position to assume for a professor writing at the time from a senior faculty position at an Ivy League institute of technology. And if, as the contrast between digital artists and designers implied, creativity marks the accelerated pace of the designer, how should we understand the common frustrations of game designers whose creative work is constrained, controlled, or curtailed by constraints of game industry structure rather than free? [4]

Jenkins’s essay, whose title alludes to a 1924 defense of popular culture as an art form, is posed as a redux to cultural critic Gilbert Seldes The Seven Lively Arts. From the outset, it might be said that Seldes aimed to present not a defense of the moving picture as art, but rather to “establish the picture as a definitely accepted form of entertainment”.[5] Lively art here must read synonymously with the latter term; the defense was important by itself, it did not seek to relocate the moving picture into  the legitimating context of gallery space. But the difference between art and entertainment is not one of legitimacy, it is one of topicality.  An art medium such as painting comprises conventions organized as genres – landscape, portrait, abstract – ones wholly unrelated to the fashionable trends and tides of cultural taste. An entertainment form, by contrast, is always a direct echo of the contemporary moment; it is a frame in the cultural skein reflecting the self-assertion of a society, not of an artist, a genre,  or a medium. Correspondingly, Seldes’s essay must be balanced in light of our evolved understanding of the film medium not as art but as entertainment, since the archaic appeal of one-sided proclamations of artistic merit such as that “the drama film is almost always wrong, the slap-stick almost always right”[6] are not credible except as portrayal, however legitimate, of a bygone social moment.

There is a second claim in that essay, evinced in wholesale generalizations that “games have been embraced by a public that has otherwise been unimpressed by much of what passes for digital art”. The premise now is that a very particular public – one which, like Jenkins, expresses disdain of new media art – has decided what can become art within the digital medium, while excluding whole-cloth the products of any currently evolving practice. The following thought is even more polarizing in that “contemporary efforts to create interactive narrative through modernist hypertext or avant-garde installation art seem lifeless and pretentious alongside the creativity and exploration, the sense of fun and wonder, that game designers bring to their craft”. For scholars, authors, teachers, and critics, who, like myself, work with the new in digital media departments and elsewhere in support of digital artists, at least one question in this argument is compulsory: what specific installations are “lifeless and pretentious”? What works might be “passing” for digital art? Might the impostors be the raster-based creations of early artists like Charles Csuri or Manfred Mohr? Or perhaps, more recently, the two-dimensional screen-based work of Mark Napier? Or the interactive poetry of Stephanie Strickland? Or the participatory projections of Camille Utterback? Or real-time data sculptures like Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post? Or the kinetic-semantic installations of David Rokeby or Jeffrey Shaw? Or the conceptual work of Caleb Larsen? These are but the most obvious names in a plurality of contemporary traditions whose art status has not been dismissed but rather critiqued, theorized, and, because of that deliberation, secured in the evolving canon of digital media art. Nevertheless, games are, in the Jenkins view, not merely superior to such art, but to all arts, as the essay quotes another apologist who, describing important characteristics of the computer game, nonetheless adopts a competitive view of aesthetic merit in which games excel at art better than art does:

Because the videogame must move, it cannot offer the lapidary balance of composition that we value in painting; on the other hand, because it can move, it is a way to experience architecture, and more than that to create it, in a way which photographs or drawings can never compete.

It is telling that this broadside comes from a book perhaps too literally entitled Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. We might note that although the revolution in question relates to entertainment, not art, the presumption is that the latter can be eclipsed by the former.

To advocate the art status of computer games by undifferentiated dismissals of art would seem not merely logically untenable but also counterproductive to any program of digital media aesthetics within which both the digital game and the digital work of art or literature ultimately belong. But Jenkins posits more than an aesthetic polarity. There is also a critique of how the institutions of art have excluded digital works. Some reference to the historical works of Ken Knowlton, Manfred Mohr, Charles Csuri and so many others who worked in the 1960’s and 70’s would have made evident the time span – at least several decades – before any expressive medium attains the maturity necessary to be co-opted into the museum. And, as if on cue, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is currently hosting exactly such an exhibition of digital art which includes both the seminal work of these early artists and more contemporary examples, for knowledge of which I am grateful to George Fifield. In all of  this, we should include the presence of digital art in festivals, as I have discussed elsewhere.⁶ Perhaps Jenkins reviles not art but an outdated stereotype of its tradition. Blending his mentations not with the process of computer games but rather their objecthood, Jenkins fashions nearly Surreal vilifications mockingly ascribed to the ghastly fiber of the contemporary:

I will admit that discussing the art of video games conjures up comic images: tuxedo-clad and jewel-bedecked patrons admiring the latest Streetfighter, middle-aged academics pontificating on the impact of Cubism on Tetris, bleeps and zaps disrupting our silent contemplation at the Guggenheim. Such images tell us more about our contemporary notion of art – as arid and stuffy, as the property of an educated and economic elite, as cut off from everyday experience – than they tell us about games.

Rather, such derisive images say more about the projections of ignorance by someone outside art world practice, history, or criticism – and downright angry about it – than anything else. This is not the nefarious distortion that new media art should countenance, especially from an otherwise articulate advocate of electronic media. Nevertheless, art cannot be, in the Jenkins account, the possible product of attention, sustained and reflected through the care of a developing practice. Rather, it can, at most, become but a by-product of insipid meandering:

As Hal Barwood explained to readers of Game Developer magazine in February 2002, “Art is what people accomplish when they don’t quite know what to do, when the lines on the road map are faint, when the formula is vague, when the product of their labors is new and unique.” Art exists, in other words, on the cutting edge and that was where games had remained for most of their history.

In the art programs and studios I have seen and worked with, art is an accomplishment, it is what happens when people do know what to do; it is not a side effect of buffonery. Beyond attempting a prosecution of art, this aforementioned quote is perhaps too transparently a wish-fulfillment to invert the outsider role of games (and why not happily outsider if the art world seems so banal?) vis-à-vis art by summarily recasting the past century of art as somehow belonging within the center of game activity’s motives. Again we could feel the annoyance of comprehensive characterizations about art, devoid of reference, nuance, or balance, dropped into a discussion of games that should not be absorbing itself with such distractions, much less with self-demeaning and specious competitions about the better art.

Yet a third, unstated implication of that position — but the most decisive — is worthy of consideration. It relates not to the institutionality of the work of art, to include the computer game, but rather to its objecthood. Generically speaking, the presence of the object has been a major constituent of the value function attached to any work. Here, the appreciable mastery of the aesthetic object combines with the conditions of its being, namely as a unique or one of a small series, and puts into play the power of a tension between the temporally distended history of visual art, of which this work is a member, and the irreplaceability of the singular object, whose care and being are controlled by its owner. Through this tension, the desirability of the work derives from two separate but integrated roles, to wit, ones where the beholder is also the holder; the abstract lineage of an extended belief tradition adhering to the importance of art’s development through ages, stages, and movements makes a stop in the present work, and the collector partakes by association in membership within that history. This is the historiographic model of art value that has been contested by conceptual art in the 20^th century, art assembled from low-grade materials, art whose works are intentionally non-unique, and art whose objecthood is denied by immaterial conditions of being. What has not happened is the freedom of such art from another dimension of ts being: exchange value. There are instructive ironies about art’s commodity status at a time when an artist like Lawrence Weiner can assert that “the work of art need not be built”, but where the statement, itself part of a work, remains subject to the same commercial and licensing proscriptions as any other artwork. But the most characteristic inference we can draw from this is that art history rarely mentions but continually relies on every work’s exchange value. Membership in the annals of visual history, for a work that cannot be sold, is especially difficult, since, however indirectly, its value also relates to its provenance. The uniqueness of the object, in other words, becomes more interesting as the number of owners of the work increases, the implication being that the work possesses some value that endures through a lengthy succession of exchange agreements. There is no issue here, except as an inversion of the situation with the computer game, whose commercial ontology is more akin to the literary work of art – rather than existing as a unique work with successive collectors, the game and book are released in the form of many identical copies, one for every possible owner, so that the value of those works accrues not through their uniqueness but through their multiplicity, for any book or game that has sold millions of copies becomes valuable for a company, not just a culture, or a reader. Exchange value, it seems, has a role to play  in determining aesthetic value regardless of whether a work’s distribution is unique or myriad.

And this brings us to that aspect of the distinction between games – and other creative works – that exists independently, rather than because of commercial profit. It is difficult to advocate for any abstract status of an object created and produced principally to sell as many copies as possible, as are many slickly packaged games based on sequels, sports stars, or big studio feature-movie-based computer games. If this is a kind of production that anyone can credibly argue, to counter-quote Jenkins, “passes for digital art”, while other art is not, then its logic is impossible. While we might assert that books – including literary masterpieces – do conform to this pattern, this is not true. There are countless works of literature, one thinks immediately of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, created under conditions where profit could not be possibly have been the force motivating their creative intention. Although crafted in the grueling conditions that artists know too well, once published, these works would come to assume a new incarnation based on mass reproduction, and through it capture a world audience. This chrysalis, through which it makes sense to produce a maximum number of copies, does not detract from the art status of any such work. All that this tells us is that a work like Solzhenitsyn’s is created in one reality and produced in another. Games of the arch-commercial kind I mentioned are not of that ilk. Their creation is famously beholden from the outset to conditions of maximal commercial production to such a degree that the first of these modes is functionally indistinguishable from the second. Creation in this collapsed creation-production sphere is tightly controlled, budgets are made, resources are assigned, marketing plans are written, and timelines are put in place to control every phase of the work so as to guarantee the anticipated profit margin. This has often been expressed as a major frustration of creative souls who work in game companies, film and design studios, and publishing companies. As this is not the reality of the artist, the critical crossroad is inevitably encountered when creative individuals who work for such companies must decide whether to follow the path of the game artist, perhaps forged from previous art school education, or of the game designer, an employee of a corporate environment’s conduit of creation in the cubicle. Clearly Jenkins favored the latter, without considering how their own steady employment in a commercial system of that size also allowed them to be less tentative about their craft. Designers are less theoretical not because they disdain theory but because they must operate within the utilitarian mode and temporal constraints of commerce, rather than the discursive spaces of art. And the distinction ought also to be made between the corporate game designer and the independent creator. For the latter, game studies and theory comprise an ever-important dimension — we can see in individualists like Jesper Juul or Gonzalo Frasca examples of the designer-theorist extraordinaire. But even as regards the corporate sphere, there is no objection to this line of work, which is like unto that of the graphic designer or stage designer for any theatre company. Integrity and constraints are endemic to every profession. What is problematic is the presumed elevation of that kind of practice over another in the name of art, particularly when history’s trajectory has run so polemically opposed to it and when the argument is more fully opinionated than fully informed.

And so, this distinction between creation and production, obfuscated in discussions of the computer game, is at the crux of conceptual artists’ commercial jamming of the commerce aspect of art, most contemptibly felt in the auction system, by undermining the reproducibility, stability, and objecthood of the contemporary work of art. Michael Fried’s invective against Minimalism revolves on that practice’s objecthood, made even more problematic in subsequent practice, as the title of Martha Buskirk’s best-known book The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art¹ makes clear. And this transformation in the work of art it is not lost on digital artists, despite Jenkins’s heated denunciations. The creation, for example, of digital poetry as thoroughly non-objective points to something whose aesthetic value centers on one substitution at the ontological nucleus of new media art: the one in which process becomes object.

An example of this arose in a recent social occasion with Nick Montfort, the MIT theorist and creator of digital poetry whose series collectively titled ppg256 is an extraordinary case of constrained poetic practice in digital media. Each ppg256 poetry generator is a Perl-based program whose source code is exactly 256 characters long and which produces an endless procession of verses rigorously consistent in form, meter, and occasionally rhythm.⁴ The invocation of each program is the first part of the performative act, the second being the output produced in real time. In our discussion of aesthetic ontology, not implausibly held in the collegial ambiance of a café, Nick made evident the fact that ppg256 does not — and should not — archive its output. There is no object, only potential literature signified by the code and the process as aesthetic statement. To illustrate the imperative basis of process, rather than object, he produced his mobile phone and connected to his remote server, invoking one of the ppg256 programs, which generated poetry from the ether and to it, while we discussed its ontological characteristics. In this act, he made entirely clear how the potential aesthetic work referenced by the code became real in its process. We might, of course, as we would have done with the works of any of the Fluxus artists, be seeing ppg256 as not only a game but also as play, and as art — in other words, something that is no less art in its transmodal function within and beyond the literary. To speak of it as poetry without play is to reduce its ontology to an old and insufficient category, as does the question on the wall with which I opened this essay. For play here is to be understood synonymously not with the place of expression in any institution, or with the specific vocation which the creator engages, or even the status of an object but with process alone, something that remains ubiquitous to all media forms and genres of digital creativity. This is where we are all going.

Nick Montfort invoking ppg256 via mobile device. Note source code at top and verse output beginning directly underneath.

Cambridge,
March 2010.

[2] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 38.

[3] Henry Jenkins, Games, the New Lively Art (2000).

[4] As writes one designer against a popular myth:  “Designers are creative souls with the freedom to make worlds: Er…  Nope.” (http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AnthonyHartJones/20091127/3664/Game_Designer_As_A_Dream_Job.php).

[5] Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Sagmore Press, 1957 [1924]), 3.

[6] Ibid., 7.

Bibliography

Buskirk, Martha. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003.

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Jenkins, Henry. Games, the New Lively Art, translated, 2000. Available from http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/GamesNewLively.html.

Montfort, Nick. Ppg256 Series — Perl Poetry Generators in 256 Characters, translated, 2009. Available from http://nickm.com/poems/ppg256.html.

Ricardo, Francisco J. “Until Something Else: A Theoretical Introduction.” In Cyberculture and New Media, edited by Francisco J. Ricardo, 1-22. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2009.

———, ed. Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 2009.

Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Sagmore Press, 1957 [1924].

Web2.0 archaeology (1)

Moreover, in the traditional sense of games, participation is almost exclusively constrained to the closed system of signs in the game world, specifically the figure or foreground elements such as dice, marbles, cards, or other loose tokens and the background field, typically a table or game board. When supplemented by digital mediation, this arrangement becomes irretrievably opened out. In early technological days, for example, the single strategy of choice for introducing openness was randomization — the shuffle of cards or toss of dice ensured this. But in contemporary practice, the recent co-option of network culture has resulted in a sophisticated upgrade of this process, whereby randomness, which is to say, a source without causal meaning, is now replaced by collective input, which is to say, a source with distributed meaning. Thus, interaction with a system in which the rules are explicitly known and behavior is conditioned by them, while at the same time outcomes are permuted by collective or network activity as an input, constitutes in summary a kind of participation entirely distinct from that which non-interactive systems provide. And it is of course in the frame of the computer game that we find significant turning points of the broader kind, which could be seen as differing by aesthetic order from the non-game aesthetic experiences. Participation, electronically mediated, implies an ontological change in key categories of perception and engagement to the point that the context of a game now entails a redefinition of, and even a crucial escape from, narrative as a rule system. Similarly, notions of performance must be altered to reflect a more open and virtualized theater of activity; and in turn, such a venue calls for a crucial redefinition of empirical connotations underlying space itself.

It may seem up till now that by being condensed through digital media, aesthetic experience evinces a renewed dynamism that modernist practices do not possess. Indeed, the rather special energy that we feel with digital media does exert an accelerating influence on experience, which must be contrasted diametrically with the contemplation with which the reception of art has been associated in its sublimest potential –  something that has for centuries remained a normative criterion at the center aesthetic philosophy. Contemplation, on one side, and reflex response, on the other, are mutually exclusive poles, a fact that awaits critical reconciliation in bringing digitally mediated art within the rubric of contemporary and conceptual work. And every variation between the virtual and the traditionally aesthetic needs theories that place these differences on some converging trajectory, some mode of productive relationship. To think of participation as an aesthetic activity within a game context is to define as well the constituents of participatory experience that have not formed the basis of material in contemporary art; the culture of the game revolves around icons of signification, instructions and indications, hints and cheats, and more that simultaneously reinforces and undermines rules of play. And as the context of gameplay has come to transcend its own conventions, digital communications processes constitute additional supplements to the material of the game as an art form, to include social media, network architectures and protocol, and database structures.

Complicating this expanded palette is yet another class of what we might call recursive participation whereby, as Wittgenstein noted with language use, the vocabulary of a game becomes extended by the objects that users can create by means of tools provided within the game environment itself. In the proverbial example, The SIMS, delay involves not merely interacting with the objects that are present in that closed world, but also call for the creation by the user of new objects, places, and even virtual characters. Such recursive or meta-participation is not manifestly evident either in art or conventional games, and we might imagine how such a process could enhance interpretive experience in these two creative realms. Games alone, however, do not constitute the primary means for meta-participation; a more common alternative is to be found in traditional rituals. The ultimate theater of Second Life, of course, holds up a funhouse looking glass to behavioral ornaments of real-life social rites like weddings and mediates them as intensifications of the virtual with the titillation of its environment’s over-embellishing snicker. In this territory of expanded participation, game and ritual lose any distinguishing ontological boundary.

Reception for the Wedding Performance of Misprint Thursday and Selavy Oh (2)

REFERENCES

[1] http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2007/01/opensource_archaeology_taking.html

[2] http://slurl.com/secondlife/New%20Vladivostok/232/145/23

Cambridge, February 2010.

Function is a given, an a priori condition borne of the common spatial, monetary, and legal denominators that constitute any architectural project as a relatively objective necessity. Form, by contrast, emerges a posteriori, having navigated a relatively subjective path through a creative spectrum. With this partnership, the theoretical landscape of architecture would appear to be complete. Yet, as circumferential as this form-function duality appears, it is nonetheless astigmatic; if the aim of a discipline’s mantra is to be all-inductive, this formulation will not do, it is partial to a small subset of the architectural establishment: physically realized formations, little else. If architecture were only about the end phase, about optimal fabrication, there would only be fabrication — that is, effort without preponderant countervailing critique, distinctive manifestos, or contemporaneous but philosophically contrariant schools. All element of controversy would long ago have been factored away, for form and function gaze only at, and revolve around, construction, fabrication, completion, consummation of area, the nisus formativus, and as such do not allow or accommodate the philosophy of the discipline, the region of critique.

There is, however, another predicate relation that more directly addresses architecture’s complete ontology, namely, that between space and structure. That this association is more logically architectural is evident in its obvious commutative property, for in the claim that space follows structure the inverse also holds. And likewise, to say that space enables structure is true in reciprocal inversion, that structure enables space. And to claim that space limits structure, too, is well-founded when stated in its inverse. There is no tautology in any of these relations — space is decidedly not structure. In the catalytic power of design, one can contain the other — something that is not true in the semantics of the form-function pair. The linguistic symmetry of space-structure utterances is grammatically optimized speech for architectural thinking, but this duality is also more generative because it is frankly more teleological. Specifically, it is more appropriate to speak of post-architecture, to include the virtual, in terms of space and structure because these terms simultaneously retain their conventional sense while also conveying new cognates and references that reflect dynamics of the “populated non-built” of cyberspace, which fabricates not over real estate but over virtual estate. Although form can address both physical and virtual worlds, it is nevertheless too indeterminate, applying equally and thus with too-vacuous reference to two, three, and n-dimensions, and even to characteristics of zero-dimensional things — as when we refer to the “form of an equation” — as well as to connotations of partial organization, without the sense of a whole, as when we refer to the “formal properties” of a thing. Yet — though for the opposite reason — function is also problematic, it is too narrow-minded. Understood as the objective motivating the environment’s creation, this term is constrained by its reference to physical realization. In virtual architecture, function is no longer anchored in either geospatial coordinates or the actual capacity of a space in relation to its occupants. Increasingly, too, postmodern architecture has begun to use (or conflate) “function” to mean, “form that looks functional” through its notion of  reconfigurable space, the all-purpose structure, supermodular minimalism, and algotecture, all of which suggest a greater  allegiance to virtuality’s transcendence of physical constraint than to the quality of the habitat’s experience for its residents. More anchored in form than function, therefore, these structures do not operate, do not function, out of regard for optimal conditions of use, but rather by projecting displacement, perturbing functionalist imperatives and asserting architecture’s impending reliance on new and different vernacular, with all that this word implies.

Algotecture. A housing development that uses stochastic search to determine the location of its units. Terzidis, 2006, p.88

Zvi Hecker, Spiral Apartment House, Ramat Gan 1989

Günther Domenig, Steinhaus, 2002

The argument that the visual evidence makes is that as contemporary practices aspires for material transcendence, for literally working outside the box, the relevance of architectural function is transformed into a reference system for a new kind of physics that refutes gravity, containment, and obviousness. One constraint, however, hinders this neo-functionalist flight: form and function matter through, and remain beholden to, the immediate priorities of human accommodation. But when, as happens in virtual space, a structure is allowed to transcend material limits of appearance in relation to physical use — because neither appearance nor use now operate in limited space — then the embodiment imperative is no longer the independent variable, the consumable factor, the last criterion of adequacy in determining the success of a design. And because of this escape from embodiment, we might rightly ask whether, in considering any domain where the pronouncement that form follows function loses relevance, we are still discussing architecture at all. As has long been argued within the critical establishment of the field, how else, if not by tying its functionality to physical construction, is this profession distinguishable from that of design? Soberly, Diane Ghirardo located this propensity not where we might expect — ensconced within Utopian programs like Buckminster Fuller’s — but instead as recoil from economic adversity:

…when building opportunities dwindled in the United States in the 1970′s, architects turned to drawings — not even designs of a different and better world, but instead a set of increasingly abstract, pretty (and marketable) renderings of their own or of antique works and reycled postclassical picturesque sites. Like much building of the decades just preceding, these aesthetic indulgences simply masquerade as architecture. They reveal architects in full retreat from any involvement with the actual world of buildings.

This retreat points to the two key moments of the profession, the design moment, and subsequently, that of “involvement with the actual world of buildings.” Since design is design for actual construction, architecture must “build” virtually before plans become transposed into physical space, and, while the initial design is fictive, the world into which it will be projectively realized is not; it is unequivocally physical.  Several post-medium questions now bring us to the heart of the matter. What, then, of the nonphysical world? Can one have a veritable architecture, as opposed to design of virtual things, there? Imagining an architecture devoid of its second moment, fully committed to non-involvement with the actual world: isn’t this like unto the difference between fiction and nonfiction, rendered within corporeal dimension? If, for architecture, the diagram or plan provides the means, and materials become the tools, then by extension, the medium of the discipline is the environment itself. Without its physical environment, which is then to say, without its medium, the discipline, albeit possessed of a design character, can only be potentially architectural. For, who could otherwise distinguish between design and potential (which is to say unbuilt) architecture? I should point out that we are not speaking here of the unbuilt architectural proposal that addresses itself to true physical coordinates and idiosyncrasies of any actual location. Although unbuilt, such proposal is a necessity in practical construction, and thus remains empirical, just as hypothetical scenarios contrast with works of literary fiction by the presence or absence of worldly reference.

This ontological criterion of worldly reference — the empirical standard — defines the threshold of form and function in architecture. Where form is unbuilt and function is disconnected from material realization — each a condition of virtual space — there is an architecture without constraint or confinement, which is to say, without consciousness of limits, and thus without reality as praxis. In all respects, save two, virtuality negates the limits that characterize architecture’s methods, means, and materials. The two exceptions are space and structure, which remain compulsory parameters for virtual and actual domains, and arguably become aesthetically heightened in nonphysical environments, where endless examples of distended spatiality and structurality disconnected from physics, become defining elements that blur all distinction between edifice and myth.

CyberMoCA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Second Life

Alan Sondheim, Debris Field

References

Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. [1st American ed.] New York,: Hill and Wang, 1968.

Ghirardo, Diane. “The Architecture of Deceit.” The Yale Architectural Journal 21 (1984): 110-15.

Terzidis, Kostas. Algorithmic Architecture. Amsterdam: Elsevier, Ltd., 2006.

One half-century vexation that dogged photography’s quest for legitimacy as art relates precisely to the ambiguity with which photographs like Alfred Stieglitz’s were first read. Street views during the first decade of the twentieth century, while innocuously aesthetic to modern view, signaled a major departure from the posed obduracy of studio portrait tradition, and through this impulse his work surely materialized as more documentary in nature and closer to Muybridge’s own physiological studies than to the hauntingly alluring images of Atget’s Paris throughways, images structured and angled through desolation’s purity of appearance.

Eugene Atget, Notre Dame, 1925.

The model of Stieglitz’s own evolution in imagery as something that simultaneously describes and explains is not unique; photography in the hands of many American artists marks the change in the status of the photograph from object to statement, through a change effected variously, including what has imprecisely become much discussed as the copy. To confer the status of original to a work indicates the bestowal of uniqueness both to it and to the concept underlying the work itself. The copy is, necessarily then, more than a case of reproduction of the object, it is an assault to its status as original, so that when, more contemporaneously, Richard Prince speaks of his appropriation of the models portrayed in cigarette and magazine commercials by the practice of the rephotograph, he is decidedly not suggestion the production of a copy, but rather interrogating, in a wholly original manner, the status of an image we have already seen but whose function we must subsequently reconsider:

More images than portraits of people, the rephotographs that comprise the Untitled (Couple) series look like they belong in the luxury goods section. These are people who have been placed at the service of the commodity. They have been given the vampire treatment, had the blood sucked out of them by capital to become vampires themselves. ¹

Richard Prince, Untitled (Couple), 1977. Ektacolor photograph, 45.5x59cm.

Prince’s most recognizable rephotograph, which Michael Newman calls a stolen image, is in every sense a doble entendre that argues the transition toward photographic statement, not offered as the chronicle of journalistic exposition, but within the analogic web of aesthetic production. In this double nature, the photographer enacts the role of visual ventriloquist appropriating not object but statement, that is, not the original but its function, causing what exists for one stilted and fictive use (in the vernacular of advertising) to speak in another, which is to say, disputing itself reflectively, self-critically, stepping out of its fictive frame out to the domain of factual critique on the condition of advertising’s collusion in the hallucination of distractive consumption. And through this critique, we work backward to the original image’s function, to discover that it is itself a copy, an imitation of the archetypal duality, the perfect human pair, a hoax given to the consuming public, whose engagement with its seductive allure will translate into targeted consumption. To orchestrate the image as an object is to orchestrate desire, but to view it as a statement of such manipulation is to question the illusion that the object projects, and to detach it from its source in lustful aspiration. It is a rationale where, in every ultimate sense, the copy as a statement cannot truly exist, since, as with Jung’s archetype, this Baudrillardian simulacrum’s ontological origin cannot be located. Or more properly, the statement, framed between two photographic objects,  is the only unique.

From this purity of fashion’s mise en scéne, where style becomes substance, Prince has molded an argument for the discipline of photography that appears thoroughly modernist, that is, to rely, as Greenberg claimed memorably of modernism, on “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”. Except that there is no critique of photography here; Prince’s work instead advances a necessary dissection of the fashion system and, by association, the complete visual semiotics of the consumption function. Prince’s move transforms the image into a statement, something not evident in his European counterparts. In each of Helmut Newton’s images, for example, the stunning perfection of each model is presented as a thoroughly photographic object without irony or contradiction.  Conversely, even Prince’s critique is itself ironic, standing over a backdrop of the artist’s own collaboration in designing handbags and other retail items for Louis Vuitton at the same time that his own Overseas Nurse painting has recently sold at Sotheby’s London for almost $8.5M and set a new auction record. This incongruity proves, if nothing else, that in its ephemeral category, photography can say things that painting cannot. That no photograph will ever sell for eight million dollars guarantees the integrity of the medium, whose inability to produce a unique object prevents it from being entirely co-opted into mercantile art.

But this inability to engender the unique object, does not obviate its capacity to speak with, to create, the unique statement, through what we might term functions of the medium. That is, the age of reproduction does not prevent photography from fully serving out a highly functional role, in fact, it is in that role that it finds its unassailable integrity. And what is that function? As Stieglitz knew, the ability to document critically is photography’s hegemonic capacity over any art medium.  And its use as a critical statement, an American discovery, is historically borne in the simultaneity of purpose in the ambiguous portrait-as-factual-chronicle/portrait-as-artistic-image of early European artisans of the medium like Julia Cameron.

Julia Margaret Cameron, c. 1870 Thomas Carlyle. Albumen print, 14 7/16 x 10 3/16 in. J. Paul Getty Museum.

This promotion, up from original object — the value that inheres to canonical art forms — to original, and critical, statement in the face of an impossible original — the condition of photography, points to one summit that electronic art and literature have yet to fully claim, although it is a perhaps inevitable moment of development for a medium whose objecthood is as contingent to it as it has been for photography itself.

¹Newman, Michael. Richard Prince, Untitled (Couple). London: Afterall Books, 2006. p. 51.