Adobe Photoshop 5.0 comes with more than 100 filters which allow the
user to modify an image in numerous ways; After Effects 4.0 is shipped
with 80 effects plug-ins; thousands more are available from third
parties. Geocities Web site, which pioneered the concept of hosting
users' Web sites for free in exchange for adding ad banners into users'
pages, gives users access to a collection of over 40,000 clip art
images for customizing their sites. Index Stock Imagery offers 375,000
stock photos available for use in Web banner ads. And so on.

These examples illustrate a new logic of computer culture. New media
objects are rarely created completely from scratch; usually they are
assembled from ready-made parts. Selecting from a library or menu of pre-
defined elements or choices is one of the key operations for both
professional producers of new media and for the end users. This
operation makes production process more efficient for the
professionals; and it makes end users feel that they are not just
consumers but "authors" creating a new media object or experience.

Interestingly, electronic art from its very beginning was based on a new
principle: modification of an already existing signal. The first
electronic instrument designed in 1920 by the Russian scientist and
musician Leon Theremin contained a generator producing a sine wave; the
performer simply modified its frequency and amplitude. In the 1960s
video artists began to build video synthesizers based on the same
principle. The artist was no longer a romantic genius generating a new
world purely out of his imagination; he became a technician turning a
knob here, pressing switch there - an accessory to the machine.

Substitute a simple sine wave by a more complex signal (sounds, rhythms,
melodies); add a whole bank of signal generators and you have arrived at
a modern music synthesizer, the first instrument which embodies the
logic of all new media: selection from a menu of choices.

The first music synthesizers appeared in the 1950s, followed by video
synthesizers in the 1960s, followed by DVE (Digital Video Effects) in
the late 1970s - the banks of effects used by video editors; followed by
computer software such as 1984 MacDraw that came with a repertoire of
basic shapes. The process of art making has finally caught up with
modern times. It has become synchronized with the rest of modern society
where everything is assembled from ready-made parts; from objects to
people's identities. The modern subject proceeds through life by
selecting from numerous menus and catalogs of items - be it assembling
an outfit, decorating the apartment, choosing dishes from a restaurant
menu, or choosing which interest groups to join. With electronic and
digital media, art making similarly entails choosing from ready-made
elements: textures and icons supplied by a paint program; 3D models
which come with a 3D modeling program; melodies and rhythms built into a
music synthesis program.

While previously the great text of culture from which the artist created
her or his own unique "tissue of quotations" was bubbling and shimmering
somewhere below the consciousness, now it has become externalized (and
greatly reduced in the process) - 2D objects, 3D models, textures,
transitions, effects which are available as soon as the artist turns on
the computer. The World Wide Web takes this process to the next level:
it encourages the creation of texts that completely consist of pointers
to other texts that are already on the Web. One does not have to add any
original writing; it is enough to select from what already exists. Put
differently, now anybody can become a creator by simply providing a new
menu, i.e. by making a new selection from the total corpus available.

It is often claimed that a user of a branching interactive program
becomes its co-author: by choosing a unique path through the elements of
a work, she supposedly creates a new work. But it is also possible to
see the same process in a different way. If a complete work is a sum of
all possible paths through its elements, then the user following a
particular path only accesses a part of this whole. In other words, the
user is only activating a part of the total work that already exists.
Just as with the example of Web pages which consist from nothing but the
links to other pages, here the user does not add new objects to a
corpus, but only selects its subset. This is a new type of authorship
which corresponds neither to pre-modern (before Romanticism) idea of
providing minor modification to the tradition nor to the modern idea
(nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries) of a creator-
genius revolting against it. It does, however, fit perfectly with the
logic of advanced industrial and post-industrial societies, where almost
every practical act involves choosing from some menu, catalog, or
database. In fact, new media is the best available expression of the
logic of identity in these societies: choosing values from a number of
pre-defined menus.

How can a modern subject escape from this logic? In a society saturated
with brands and labels, people respond by adopting minimalist aesthetics
and hard-to-identify clothing style. Writing about an empty loft as an
expression of minimalist ideal, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp
points out that people "reject exposing the subjectivity when one piece
of stuff is prefered to another." The opposition between the
individualised inner world and objective, shared, objective, neutral
world outside becomes reversed:

"The private living space has taken on the guise of objectivity:
neutral, value-free, as if this were a found space, not an impeccably
designed one. The world outside, meawhile, has become subjectified,
rendered into a changing collage of personal whims and fancies. This is
to be expected in a culure dominated by the distribution system. That
system, exists, after all, not to make things but to sell them, to
appeal to individual impulses, tastes, desires. As a result, the public
realm has become a collective repository of dreams and designs from
which the self requires refuge" (Muschamp).

How can one accomplishing the similar escape in new media? It can only
be accomplished by refusing all options and customization, and
ultimately refusing all forms of interactivity. Paradoxically, by
following an interactive path one does not construct a unique self but
instead adopts already pre-established identitities. Similarly, choosing
values from menu or customisng one's desktop or an application
automatally makes one participate in the "changing collage of personal
whims and fancies" mapped out and coded into software by the companies.
Thus, short of using the command-line interface of UNIX which can be
thought of as an equivalent of the minimalist loft in the realm of
computing, I would prefer using Microsoft Windows exactly the way it was
installed at the factory.

+ + +

This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book "The Language of New
Media" (MIT Press, Fall 2000).