[This interview with Peter Lunenfeld is the latest in a series that I've
been archiving at my site, frontwheeldrive.com. Lunenfeld is the
director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics (ITA), author of
Snap to Grid (S2G) , and editorial director of the Mediawork Pamphlet
series, and this is the record of several days of email correspondence,
during which he and I volleyed questions, ideas and rants covering
everything from his concept of Vapor Theory to my frustrations as a
'professional designer.']

frontwheeldrive: Can you briefly explain Vapor Theory?

Peter Lunenfeld: In S2G, I define Vapor Theory as 'dialectical
immaterialism, critical discussions about technology untethered to the
constraints of production.' I started thinking about vapor theory back
in the days of VR, when otherwise sensible people got misty-eyed about
abandoning their identities and moving into fully realized, photo-
realistic virtual worlds. They were saying this at a time when most of
the VR systems that I was seeing demoed had limited interaction in and
among a small library of graphics primitives. The vapor theory bought
into the short slope concept of technological development – that just
because people wanted something (in this case fully immersive
virtuality) to happen that something would indeed materilialize.

fwd: Do you see this 'flapping of the gums' subsiding with the recent
fallout of businesses on the Web?

PL: I remember Biz Markie's old school rap that went through the usual
enemies list of sucker MCs, claiming they all 'caught the vapors.'
Within a decade of the VR boom and bust, venture capitalists caught the
vapors and funded the new economy business plans of the dot.comedy.

fwd: With this fallout, the Web (and the other 'pop' aspects of Computer
Science) has gone through what other relatively new areas of
technological advancement (e.g., Artificial Intelligence) have gone
through, but on a very condensed time scale. AI seems to have found its
feet again (small and shaky as they may be). Do you see the Web and
other previously inflated digital arts going through a similar evolution
(less hype, more real applications)?

PL: I'm fascinated by the post-utopian periods of aesthetics and
technology. The utopian moment of a medium or field is intoxicating, of
course – when the cinema or AI, rock'n'roll or robotics, the portapak
or the Web, is going to change the world that very instant. But no one
movement or technology can support that level of hype. Often, it's after
the general public's attention has been raised and then dashed that
artists, technologists, and yes, even entrepreneurs, can go back into
the wreckage and make interesting, even lasting interventions.

fwd: Where many on the art side of the fence see all commercial forces
as the enemy, you contend that art and economics are symbiotic. Given
that artists of all kinds need money to do their work, isn't there still
a line somewhere in there that shouldn't be crossed (for art's sake)?

PL: I'm regularly misunderstood on this point. It's not that art and
commerce are the same thing, just that all art exists in relation to the
economic activity of its era. After Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, it's
impossible to speak of lines between art and commerce that "shouldn't be
crossed," because, after all, that's one of the things artists do –
cross lines. For thirty years or more, art historians and critics have
been hashing this out, and it's pretty hard to ignore this fairly
obvious point when you talk about the complex interwinnings of art,
design and commerce in the realm of the digital. One of the reasons that
these relationships were so contested in the boom years of the '90s was
that a huge number of people came out of art departments, or trained
themselves entirely outside of the academy, and took jobs as designers
either to support their art – a quintessential day job – or just
because that was the hot thing to do at the time. So, they called
themselves designers without much in the way of exposure to the ethos of
design as a profession.

fwd: Well, I'm one of those people. Thanks to computers, I've been doing
print and Web design professionally for almost 8 years now. Though I've
been through years of art school, grew up painting, drawing, and started
making 'zines 16 years ago, only a small fraction of this experience is
used in my job as 'designer.' The frustrating part, I guess, is that
this division between designers who are involved in the discourse and
designers who aren't is obvious and the fact that industry that requires
design work - for the most part - is completely unconcerned with the
discourse. How can we bring the discourse inside the corporate walls?

PL: At the risk of sounding like a workplace psychiatrist, I'd like to
talk about the frustration you're feeling. Knowing something about the
ways in which designers from earlier eras convinced their corporate
clients of the validity of design research and experimentation might
offer you, and others in your position, a way to approach these
discussions. Certain designers have been able to shift the dialogue from
service to collaboration, staking out either new territory or
reformulating the way the game is played (think Charles and Ray Eames).
The computer democratized access to the tools of the professional
designer, and brought about an amazing efflorescence of new styles and a
deepened pool of people who, like you, consider themselves to be
designers. Unfortunately, though, the democratization of digitization
didn't go hand in hand with any kind of informed discussion of the
history and discourses of design as a field.

fwd: Can you give some examples?

PL: Let's just talk about the Web for example. With all the hype about
Flash, and the concomitant backlash against it, this is precisely the
time to revisit the debates about deep design versus styling. But, the
very ones who should be talking about this haven't got the vaguest
notion of who Raymond Loewy was, much less that as early as the '30s, he
was talking about the designer's role in "reconciling" people to new
technologies through exterior styling. I'm not endorsing Loewy's
position by any means, but I'd sure like to talk it through with Flash
partisans and their detractors. How about countering the banality of the
Nielson-Norman rap on Web usability by recasting Adorno's condemnation
of functionalism? In the '60s, Adorno was dealing with the unintended
consequences of modernism's reductivism: the creation of boring and
inhuman living spaces. Connecting the dots from these historical
arguments to a staff meeting is tricky, but it can be done. Essentially,
it's about making history, theory and criticism viable in non-academic
environments.

fwd: Getting back to the academe, Paul Virilio once said, 'Play at being
a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of
accepting the rules, challenge and modify them. Without the freedom to
critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts
and nothing more.' Kodwo Eshun adopts the title 'concept engineer'
instead of culture critic. What's your stance on the role of critique
and critics in this culture?

PL: Hats (berets?) off to Virilio, but these days, even porn fans
understand the importance of critique. The motto of the
rec.arts.movies.erotica newsgroup is cribbed from Pauline Kael: 'In the
arts, the only source of independent information is the critic. The rest
is advertising.' And, sorry to say, if 'the freedom to critique and
reconstruct' guaranteed liberation from addiction, those guys in the
trench coat brigade might be able to get up from their sofas, turn off
Edward Penishands, and go out and meet some real people. I'm a big fan
of Eshun's redemptive approach to criticism, but I'm not sure exactly
what he means by 'concept engineer.' As a label, it doesn't seem that
much more helpful than lumping critics along with doctors, lawyers and
software designers together as 'symbolic analysts.'

fwd: Indeed. I recently asked Eshun to explain his role as 'concept
engineer,' but have yet to receive an answer. We shall see.Can you talk
about the relationship between a general social critique and the focus
that you tend to put on art, design and technology?

PL: It's hard to argue with Christopher Hitchens' claims that the critic
needs to live 'at a slight acute angle to society' if you're doing
politically motivated criticism. In the realm of aesthetics, though,
there has been such an explosion of cultural production of all kinds in
the past quarter century, that I'm less interested in the model of
critic as scold – castigating producers for their errors – than I am
of the critic as curator. The curatorial function is one which brings
together and juxtaposes objects, systems, ideas and people to make a
case. The case I'm interested in making right now is that nostalgia for
past glories is counterproductive, and that the contemporary world is in
the midst of a ferocious pluralism of styles and media and aesthetics
right now. There are wonders to be found in intriguing pockets,
sometimes in full view, but often 'at a slight acute angle.' I hope that
my methods and my writings can serve as something of a model about how
one can curate compelling experiences with art and culture.

fwd: Whom do you read and respect writing about New Media (or whatever
else) these days?

PL: I'm really interested in the work that's developing in Southern
California. It's where I live, and I believe that people need to nurture
local as well as virtual intellectual communities. Luckily, I'm in the
right place at the right time. There's UCSD's Lev Manovich, of course,
author of The Language of New Media, CalArt's Norman Klein who's been
working on scripted spaces and special effects, independent scholar
Margaret Wertheim who is writing and curating around the topic of
outsider physics, and a passel of people from UCLA including film
theorist Vivian Sobchack, Red Rock Eater News Service organizer Phil
Agre, and N. Katherine Hayles, who holds a joint appointment in English
and Design | Media Arts. For fun, I've been enjoying independent
publisher Tosh Berman's TamTam Books. Berman used to be the director of
Beyond Baroque, the venerable Venice, CA-based literary organization,
but now he's putting out beautifully designed translations from the
French of weird little books. The first three are Boris Vian's brutal
noir I Spit on Your Grave; Serge Gainsbourg's Evguenie Sokolov, about an
artist whose medium is farting; and Guy Debord's Considerations on the
Assassination of Gerard Lebovici, in which the Situationist reflects on
being at the eye of the media storm that hit when Lebovici, his friend
and publisher, was murdered mysteriously in the mid-'80s.

fwd: Is there anything on which you're working that you'd like to bring
up here?

PL: I was trained as a film theorist, but haven't written about the
movies in a long time. That's shifting a bit these days, and I've got an
essay on "The Myths of Interactive Cinema" coming out in Dan Harries'
The New Media Book for the British Film Institute. As a long term
project, I'm working on a new book about the aesthetics of information.
Closer at hand, I'm putting together a collection of my "User" columns
from artext magazine which I'd like to see come out in 2003. And, I'm
continuing to put out the Mediawork Pamphlet series.

fwd: What is the premise of your Mediawork pamphlets? What are you
trying to achieve with these?

PL: Mediawork pamphlets pair major writers with contemporary graphic
designers to produce 100 page 'mind bombs' in the tradition of McLuhan
and Fiore's The Medium is the Massage. These 'theoretical fetish
objects' cover art, design, technology and market culture with verve and
impact. The first, Utopian Entrepreneur, written by Brenda Laurel and
designed by Denise Gonzales Crisp, was published in 2001.

fwd: To be precise, it came out on September 14th, 2001. What did it
mean that a book written and a series conceptualized before the events
of 9/11 were both seen, at least in part, as having something to say to
that moment?

PL: We almost cancelled the San Francisco launch event that the
International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences was hosting for us, but
Brenda, Denise and I all drove up from LA to the Bay Area on the 15th to
confront a San Francisco as empty as I'd ever experienced it. There was
a sort of doomed solipsism in the air, as though the attacks on New York
and Washington, though 3000 miles away, were the logical conclusion of
the meltdown of the '90s. The Bay Area and Silicon Valley, as the former
epicenters of all new new things, were confronted by the triumphant
resurgence of Ford Administration dinosaurs like Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld pulling back the curtain and reminding all us tech-heads
who really runs this country. So, in the end, it was great to hear
Brenda rally the troops and talk about a better future, and the still
unfulfilled promise of (some) technology.

fwd: What's coming up?

PL: In these slightly calmer times, we're finishing Writing Machines,
written by N. Katherine Hayles and designed by Anne Burdick, for release
in the fall of 2002. Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid is
writing Rhythm Science for 2003, and we're trying to figure out the best
designer to pair him with, which is one of the fun parts for me.

New Science and New Media:
http://frontwheeldrive.com

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