"Computing Culture: Defining New Media Genres"
May 1-2, 1998
UCSD, San Diego, US
A Report by David Hunt

"We would do well to watch over the Unicorn of aesthetic experience as
attentively as we watch over the Sphinx of science. Bereft of a complete
fable, the Unicorn has earned a place in our imagination as an arcanum,
an emblem of what we do not know. Every day, the arts enter new domains
and new media. We cannot tell in what proportion the resulting works
will enlighten, or entertain, or infect. Meanwhile, we have moved a long
way from the disinterestedness that gave fresh impetus to art and
science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To curiosity have
been added since then the strong entangling factors of progress, free
enterprise, compulsive consumerism, and a semiautonomous technology."
–Roger Shattuck, "Forbidden Knowledge"

Object-based aesthetic practitioners could learn a lot from new media
artists. With the rise of pluralism and the sense that anything can be
art, we are dubiously rewarded with "anything-like" art forms. The
absence of any formalist "end games," a market hungry and ready to
absorb any retro movement, and a public dazed by historical amnesia, all
of these remind me of Joseph Brodsky's saying that, "Perhaps art is
simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations."
Without these limitations or obstacles to overcome, art becomes a
tentative meandering rather than a directed assault. Its timid meanings
are signed, sealed, and delivered to us in diffused and attenuated
forms. Enlightenment is passe, cleverness is chic. It's ironic then,
that in the frictionless world of cyberspace, where the rules don't
apply because there are no rules, we find digital artists and theorists
striving to overcome self-imposed boundaries, using discipline and
constraint to lend compactness (elegance) and force to their arguments.
Thankfully, Lev Manovich assembled them in his "Computing Culture:
Defining New Media Genres" symposium at UC San Diego. Using the porous
labels of Database, Interface, Navigation, and Spatialization, Manovich
attempted to "inquire about the emerging logic, grammar, and poetics of
new media" without relying on deconstructive autopsy and the embalming
weight of academic citation, or the methodologies, tropes, and rhetoric
of other genres.

Presenting over the course of one day, the twelve speakers sometimes
seemed rushed, each with twenty minutes to present their ideas. Yet the
conference was able to achieve in the words of Deleuze, "a high level of
intoxication through extreme sobriety." Manovich provided a Cliff's
Notes capsule of digital art history on opening night by displaying the
real-time 3-D photorealistic computer graphics of a flight simulator, an
early post Cold War navigation metaphor, next to the database nature of
Greenaway's "goose-stepping" procession of objects and images in
"Prospero's Books"–a literal marshalling of catalogued images in rows
and columns across the cinematic screen.

The event was guarded or "protected" by "etoy" the pseudo corporate
saboteurs and pranksters who gained notoriety by hijacking websites.
Their slogan, "the popstar is the pilot is the coder is the designer is
the architect is the manager is the system," goes hand in hand with
their mission to be "your fashion beta test pilots." With shaved heads,
black sunglasses, and day-glo orange crew jackets emblazoned with
corporate logos, the four secret agents stood sentinel over the event.
Think Devo in Prada with a certain Luftwaffe charm.

John Welchman of UCSD moderated the Database/Interface discussion and
opened by sharing his thoughts on the dictionary as the fundamental
archetype of the databank/archive form. New Media theorists tend to
strike a defensive posture when obsessively reciting the history of
their own medium. These pret-a-porter reflections tend to be database
lists in their own right–fortune cookie aphorisms from continental
thinkers that might foster legitimacy through their broad, antique
appeal. Nietzsche's, "we are wandering encyclopedias," Benjamin's
"unpacking my library," and Baudelaire's, "Those that copy the
dictionary suffer from the vice of banality," evoke a shopworn and
dispensable parliamentary procedure.

Far more effective in my mind is Stephen Mamber's populist analogy of
the card catalog. In a library we typically move from a large and
physically unwieldy database, in order to find a much smaller book, but
the computer inverts this logic as we begin with the "book" and then go
to a card catalog structure of information in the shape of a database.
Michael Heim has cautioned that while a library's sheer immensity breeds
a sense of humility, the hyper-linked world of the web encourages a
sense of omniscience; the illusion that all knowledge is separated from
us distally, rather than through the temporal labors of sitting down and
actually turning endless pages. Mamber's digital movies both eradicate
temporal and spatial concerns by serving up all the possible information
we could ever need in the form of a grid of thumbnails right at our
fingertips. He has taken each frame of Hitchcock's "The Birds" and
transformed it into a thumbnail. Clicking on an icon, the image is
enlarged and that portion of the screenplay is revealed. The linear
"reverse" and "fast-forward" of traditional viewing is exploded into a
kaleidoscope of possibilities; innovation providing all the
justification one might need. This is technology as Ritalin: speeding up
the play of images until they are in synch with the reeling, hungry
mind; bringing a sensation of focused calm.

Joining Komar and Melamid's "Most Wanted Paintings," a web survey that
proposes to give the people the art they want (it turns out they want a
mountain/lake landscape and a couple of deer-not a far cry from dogs
playing poker), and Ken Goldberg's tele-robotic conceptual investigation
of the nature of legal responsibility and counterfeiting on the web
entitled "Legal Tender" (www.counterfeit.org), Victoria Vesna affirms
with Bodies INC. that the future of art on the web points toward
Baldessari rather than Titian. An open, evolving field, Internet art
will most likely be dominated by conceptual projects like the
alpha-numeric obsessed and abstract jodi.org, rather than the stills of
lingerie-clad ingenues-poster girls Vanessa Beecroft has on view at The
Thing.

Bodies INC. is the Home Shopping Network of prosthetic virtual body
parts: use it to create your own surrogate avatar. It sports the same
crystal-meth, used-car dealer corporate marketing schtick to ensure that
collagen injected, bee-stung lips are just the tip of the iceberg.
Conjuring William Gibson's cyber-gothic chic or the "morbid manner"
deployed by Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers, Vesna created a
multi-tiered conceptual warehouse or manufacturing plant featuring LIMBO
(where previously ordered or inactive bodies are put on hold),
NECROPOLIS (where members go to delete their previously ordered or
inactive bodies), SHOWPLACE (where bodies are put on display, chatted
about, and interacted with, and HOME (where members begin their
explorations).

While the first iteration of this very well known project appeared
several years ago, at this point the cloaking of Bodies INC. within a
Gothic shroud seems slightly dated–as a satirical strategy the gothic
style has been resuscitated more times than the undead in a George
Romero film. As critic Susan Kandel explains in her review of "Gothic:
Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art," "As a paradigm,
then–as an art world zeitgeist–it contrasts utterly with the
insistently political, identity-based practice that so dominated
throughout the late 80's and early 90's; what it represents is a retreat
from the social into the intricacies of the commodity form. That Trent
Reznor's New Orleans home features the actual door of the Tate mansion
on which the Manson family once scrawled the word "PIG" is quite
perfect, then. Here is an emblem of every subculture's destiny in and as
collectibles; and further, the danger of appropriating a subculture as
the point zero of an aesthetic moment"–a kind of Byronic, ruined
Graceland for Bauhaus fans.

Personally, I know that when I'm not "Awakening the Giant Within," I'm
"thriving on chaos" with the "Seven habits of Highly Successful People,"
so maybe it's a good time to rethink my fetishizing of corporate
marketing platitudes rather than the peculiar stranglehold the actual
products of these companies have on me. For commodity critique, I felt
Bodies INC. lacked the time-release subtlety of Koons' vacuum cleaner's,
or the comprehensiveness of Hans Haacke's skewering of Mobil, not to
mention the wink and nod appropriation of historical photography by
Diesel advertising (take, for example, their ad with Churchill, Stalin,
and Roosevelt at Yalta with an inviting supermodel digitized into the
picture). In fact, Diesel ads let us in on the joke, commodifying our
dissent, repackaging it into hipster-rebel chic, and literally selling
it back to us, proving that clever, ironic pose and not pragmatic
"wrinkle free," is what moves product.

Nonetheless, Bodies INC. is essential as a dead-on skewering of the
"one-click shopping" mantra that attempts to parade convenience as a
panacea for all of societies ills. Vesna points out that avatar filled
chat rooms stand to make $1 billion in revenues next year and legal
documents from Disney reveal that they are spending millions designing
human like avatars of their own. Anyone who has attended a Whole Life
Expo or is familiar with the crystal channeling of Carlos Casteneda's
books knows that the New Age demographic is ripe for manipulation. Its
spiritual longings and "cyborg envy" can be felt on the web. Whereas,
"The Celestine Prophecy" was self-fulfilling (you got took, but you
liked it), Vesna's project offers the rare instance of not preaching to
the choir, not flattering the cynical slacker-savant weaned on the
necrophilic ennui of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho." If most
conceptual art is a parlor game for bored bohemians (a "Where's Waldo?"
of referents), the subversion of corporate lingo and the ever present
fear of just exactly where our transactional "cyber cash" is going is
directed towards the evangelical desperation of what David Beers calls
"Cyborg Fundamentalists," clearly, those most in need of a healthy dose
of satire.

I suppose Vesna qualifies for the database/interface discussion since
her avatars are more catalogues of physical information than symbols of
emotional complexity–perfect for the Tin Man or Scarecrow looking for a
heart or a brain, but perhaps not as compelling as the Cowardly Lion
waiting in the checkout line in LIMBO to purchase some courage.

Fabian Wagmister of UCLA began his discussion by questioning the ethical
nature of digital media and how so much of database discourse is ruled
by the blind impulse toward accumulation. Databases are revered to the
extent that they act as giant vacuum cleaners sucking up and storing
anything in their path. He calls for an analytical reading of databases
where value is based on consciousness, interpretation, and feeling
rather than the power to store and collate mass quantities of
information.

For Wagmister the database becomes the tool for viewing, the tool for
construction, and the work of art itself (which locates itself in the
interactive performance between himself, the computer, and the
end-user). But even more fundamental than the consciousness of the
database is the core identity of the search engine where whimsy and
flexibility are allowed to run free. As curator of a web gallery devoted
to posters, songs, and poems of Che Guevara, Wagmister assigns
algorithmic values to "modes of interpretation" such as local vs.
international and essential vs. marginal to demonstrate the expressive
qualities of the search engine. We are actually able to touch the screen
and "click" on a pensive image of Che while specifying the mode of
"courage," leading to a succession of grave, noble, Social realist
tableaux. Wagmister's highly programmed curating is more controlled and
narrow than any museum show, but he immediately hands over the reins and
transfers that power to the participant. Imagine going to Documenta and
being able to change the configuration of each pavilion.

Marcia Kinder of the University of Southern California describes the
symbiotic relationship between database and narrative and how each one
allows you to arrive at a new conception of the other. For Kinder,
narrative is essentially a discursive mode that exposes the dual process
of selection and combination that is at the heart of all stories, and of
language itself, as well as the arbitrariness of these choices. The
database paradigm asks which character or plotline should be followed,
which version should be trusted. Whether you look at a popular movie
like "Groundhog Day" or "Back to the Future," or a European art film
like "La Jetee" or "Marienbad," a database inquiry always reveals the
meta-narrative issues at the core of storytelling. In a hilarious
anecdote she reveals how Bunuel, in his brief tenure in Hollywood,
fashioned a synoptic table of American cinema. He came across a series
of storyboards divided into categories: ambience (Parisian, Western,
Gangster), epochs, main characters, etc. By rearranging these simple
categories, which are really databases, he showed how anyone could
predict the outcome of any plot. Mark America's "Grammatron" is an
excellent example of undermining any concept of an official text, while
demystifying the hidden mechanics of writing (the complex series of
choices) by relinquishing that process to the reader in a highly
self-conscious way. Kinder's examples were more subtle than Grammatron
and dealt not with new ways of presenting the Novel, but in fundamental
modes of storytelling.

The best description of spatialization comes from Peter Lunenfeld of Art
Center College of Design who contrasts the overdetermined, constantly
forward generating momentum of the filmic trance with the word/image
relationship of dynamic typography in graphic design. As the original
"push media," film and television rely on the superiority of their 35 mm
resolution and the vastness of the cinematic panorama to create a series
of billboards and not a page. Film uses its monumental scale to
overpower us, self-consciously advertising the seductions of the medium,
dangling the carrot that meaning is present just over the horizon of the
next consecutive frame. Even in a film as perspictively deep, and
drenched in metaphors of lushness as "Lawrence of Arabia," space is
still compressed in favor of the inertia of the narrative.

Alternatively, Lunenfeld describes a "poetics of lingering"–a
set-your-own-pace inversion of temporal control where the interactive
user is free to graze on an image for as long as he/she likes, speeding
forward and slowing down as one slips away from the dull, plodding
"cruise control" of film. Using the model of ambient sound, he implies
an ambient narrative–the story of objects, rather than human
characters, that are cast into a human environment–a kind of totalizing
anthropomorphism. He shows an example similar to the early countdown
videos on MTV, where a series of images flash and dissolve upon each
other in quick succession, each with their own idiosyncratic
sound/image/text matrix. "It's pretty, it's fast, it moves, yet how much
information, thought, dialogue, and hence meaning can it hold? How much
deeper than film can it go?" The answer is: a lot. Lunenfeld
acknowledges the preening, supersaturated display of early MTV as a kind
of "Muscle Beach" of graphic design, suggesting that the ultimate
torture is to be strapped down like Malcolm McDowell in "Clockwork
Orange," forced to watch its progression. As testimony to how far we
have come: his example of student Saeri Cho's work, accompanied by the
fittingly spliced break beats of a drum-and-base soundtrack, depicts the
coalescing and disintegration, the show and flow of meaning in a
constant state of becoming. Images don't advance (their own iconicity,
the pleasures of the medium, a linear narrative)–they just are.

Although Caligula would have blushed at the profusion of images
Lunenfeld shows, he goes far to demonstrate that spectatorship and
spectacle are not synonymous, and that we have outgrown the linguistic
tyranny of de Saussure's oppositional construction of meaning through
signifier/signified. I think he would agree with Barbara Stafford who
explains: "These vebalizing binaries turned nuomenal and phenomenal
experience into the product of language. Not only temporal but spatial
effects supposedly obeyed an invisible system, the controlling structure
of an inborn ruling 'ecriture.'"

In describing liquid or transArchitecture, Marcos Novak of UCLA provides
a fitting, conclusive metaphor for the aspirations of the conference. As
a world of invisible scaffolds, cyberspace is a place where conscious
dreaming meets subconscious dreaming-a habitat for the imagination whose
ultimate goal is the full embodiment of the mind. If imagination is now
dispersed across endless woven matrices of bits, Manovich's conference
went far in retrieving those voices that are stationed like outposts on
the forefront of the digital age.