David Hunt is a San Francisco-based writer whose work can be found in
Flash Art, Sculpture, World Art, Wirednews, and Artweek. "The Alchemical
Imaginary–Magic, Technology, and Digital Media" was a lecture given
last week by Peter Lunenfeld, as part of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology,
and Culture Colloquium.

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"From the 9th Century to the cusp of the 21st: I maintain that
cybernetics is the alchemy of our age: the computer is the universal
solvent into which all difference of media dissolves into a pulsing
stream of bits and bytes. Like alchemy it offers the promise of unity,
and serves to counter the disrepute unities suffer in the rest of the
academy. In addition, the proto-scientific qualities of alchemy have a
remarkable resonance in the proto-aesthetics of digital media."

So begins Peter Lunenfeld's lecture "The Alchemical Imaginary–Magic,
Technology & Digital Media," given as part of U.C. Berkeley's ongoing
"Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium."

Lunenfeld acts as a theoretical curator, adopting the alchemical
metaphor of transformation, and its veiled mythologies depicted in
constellations of charts, diagrams, drawings, and paintings, in order to
decode the extremely idiosyncratic and elaborate work of three
contemporary artists: Matthew Barney, Michael Joaquin Grey, and Matthew
Ritchie. Although these three are not digital artists per se, their
hypercoded personal cosmologies reflect the superimposition and super
saturation that constitute the defining aesthetic of the digital age.

Just exactly what the "alchemical imaginary" is, is best described by
Erik Davis' explanation of the talismanic quality of the word
"information": "Today there is so much pressure on 'information'–the
word, the conceptual space, but also the stuff itself–that it crackles
with energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics, hints of arcane
magic." Anyone who has seen an engraving by William Blake or Kircher's
17th Century Musurgia universalis, a pictorial representation of God as
an organist and organ builder whose six day labor of creation is likened
to the six musical registers of an organ, will have a good idea of the
kind of occult, pictorial mosaics that Davis is referring to.

Historically, alchemy and digital art can be conceptually linked through
the utopian idea of the gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art," a term
traditionally applied to opera's melding of music, lyrics, acting, and
stagecraft to create an enhanced vision of creation, reception, and
meaning. Not only was alchemy viewed as a physical transformation of
base metals into gold, but a moral transformation into a harmonized,
cosmic whole-one that reflects Joseph Beuys' attempts to reconcile
spirituality with his totalizing view of the world as a stage for art
and play in the 60's and 70's.

Lunenfeld explains how digital art has become not only the
gesamtkunstwerk, but the gesamtkunstmedium, a conceptual space where
representational and non-representational strategies converge–where the
vast arcana of esoteric, religious, and scientific systems are woven
into highly personalized "information fantasies." Enter Mathew Barney.

Lunenfeld describes Barney's Cremaster series of short art films as
"dynamic sound/image matrices." They are a "phantasmagorically
overcoded" personal cosmology that both entrance and confuse critics
(including this one) who describe his "hermenuetical corpus" and
"personal mythology" where "nothing is arbitrary." True, Barney is
mysterious in his cut-and-paste nonlinear narratives, but to describe
his work as "post-symbolic" or beyond legible seems a stretch. Anyone
willing to bask in these metaphorical assemblages will derive a sensual
or erotic meaning that seems peculiarly absent in our present
information saturated world.

Similarly, Matthew Ritchie's cartographic web sites, which most resemble
historically alchemical documents, derive their power from cryptic,
hieroglyphic, iconographic systems that reference everything from Dante
to Dungeons and Dragons. This is a wholly new aesthetic theory where, in
the words of critic Susan Kandel, "Ritchie creates a dream-like space
where cultural memory and personal obsession intersect." Sound like the
internet?

Perhaps Michael Joaquin Grey's fusion of art and technology is the
purest. With a STARDENT super computer, he created images akin to 3-D
animation cells engraved into two carbon tablets, recalling Moses'
commandments, literally investigating how we impose meaning on pure
information. Toy fanatics may recognize Grey as the sole creator and
marketer of the ZOOB, a Lego-like plastic joint that currently exists as
five of a possible twenty interlocking joints, creating a poignant
metaphor for all the possible bonds found in nature. The real alchemy is
in Grey's transformation of typically dry, sales based marketing
material into, a quasi-fairy tale/sci-fi fable of ZOOB's origin.

"Not long ago, cryptic clues from the long lost COSMIC BOOKS led to the
development of the PRIMORDIAL Fossil. Since then, a significant
breakthrough was made by the PRIMORDIAL Think Tank which uncovered the
technology behind ZOOB-the CITROID SYSTEM-for pure play." Clearly, the
fanciful nature of children will have an easier time accepting this
parallel universe.

With characteristic critical brio, Lunenfeld brings resolution to his
argument and a sense of cohesion between his three examples by citing
Blake's transcendent "optics of the visionary"–one that is vehemently
opposed to Newton's mechanized explanation of vision. What makes these
artists unique, he says, is that they refuse to play into the computer
industry's inevitable cycles of upgrades and technological improvements
in the hopes of attaining an "ever more subtly nuanced realism." They
strive for more coded internal standards to lend their projects a sense
of individual artistic authority. Who says the author is dead?