Today, Barbara London's essay seems refreshing [see http://www.tech90s.net
and "virtual artistry," RHIZOME CONTENTBASE, 4.25.97] – she places the new
media artist smack dab in the historical continuum… just like a painter.
The theme of Tech90s, it is worth mentioning, is to demystify technology.

But, a few days ago, I was interested in the way that technology is read
as a signifier of artistic radicalism, as per the nettime discussion
below. I guess it's the spirit of usage… What follows was posted on
RAW on Tuesday, but it seems like a nice counterpoint to Barbara's
essay.

The discussion begins with hackers, who, I think are referenced in the
Tech90s series, by the work of Natalie Jeremijenko and the Bureau of
Inverse Technology. They're hackers in spirit, but not in practice…

+ + +

David Garcia wrote:

*anti art*

Although artists are always desperate to hang on to the shirt tails of
radical information movements it is usually futile because these
movements are, often without realising it, in the profoundest sense
*anti art*.

Although they deal in a language as symbolic as art; "code", the hacker
ethic revives the situationist proposal of an alternative type of
creativity. A creativity which starts where art leaves off. It is normal
everyday life that should be made passionate and rational and dramatic,
not its reflection in the seperated world of art.

"Imagination should be applied directly to the transformation of reality
itself not its symbols…this transformation should not be left in the
hands of a small body of specialists but should be made by everyone".
*Internationale Situationniste* 1958: the zero number.

Robert Adrian wrote:

The "professional" artist (like many other "media-professionals") finds
her/himself in ever deeper trouble as the mystique of production
dissolves under pressure from (for example) increasingly sophisticated
desktop editing/production systems.

Reacting to the "Internationale Situationniste" citation, Robert
continues:

I don't see any problem here. If the "specialist" is merging into the
"everyone" then the split between "reality" and its "symbols" becomes as
redundant so many other familiar dualisms.

Rachel jumped back in the discussion:

This discussion goes material in the work of the Bureau of Inverse
Technology. Recent projects, under the ur-Project Database Politics,
explore how "neutral" information is produced and represented, how the
world becomes understood as data, and in turn, how database fields
create and impose categories. Sperm banks, voicemail, and despondency
indexes (part of a piece on the data of suicide) are mobilized to show
how human life choices and experiences become defined by a limited, and
problematic, set of categories.

The Bureau's "engineer," Natalie Jeremijenko, recently gave a lecture at
the Museum of Modern Art. It bordered on performance art (transcript at
http://www.tech90s.net) – don't miss it. The Bureau's work does, as per
David's comment, take place in areas where art leaves off. It still
belongs to the world of Art though… its very conceptual, and compared
to hacking, the production scale is huge.

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