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Bubbly: the Utopian Impulse in New Media Art Discourse Richard Rinehart

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Bubbly: the Utopian Impulse in New Media Art Discourse Richard Rinehart Bubbly: The Utopian Impulse in New Media Art Discourse Richard Rinehart Aaron Koblin: Ten Thousand Cents, 2009 (detail); Internet art Abstract It should come as no surprise that communications emanating from Silicon Valley, in the form of hi-tech industry marketing and talks delivered by “visionary” CEO’s, is typified by a certain amount of techno-positivist hyperbole. New media art, in particular Internet art or “netart”, grew rapidly during the same time as the tech bubble (1995-2000) in an ideological and logistical embrace with hi-tech that continues today. Partly because of this, the discourse of new media art is conflated with that of the tech industry; in particular, both are inflected with a strong utopian impulse. This is not to say that everyone involved in the hi-tech industry or new media art participates in carnival barking. Many in the hi-tech industry are familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle (Gartner, Inc.) a simple chart predicting that most hi-tech hyperbole goes through five stages; the technology trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and plateau of productivity. In the world of new media art, as early as 1995, the Critical Art Ensemble published a paper entitled, “Utopian Dreams - Net Realities” that attacked inflated utopian discourse, but did not disavow entirely the promise of new technologies for artists. However, despite occasional critiques, the utopian impulse has remained a defining characteristic of the both discourses. In this paper I will extend earlier critiques of this utopian impulse through close analysis. Specifically, I will employ art historical theories and methodologies to examine the nature of the relationship between the hi-tech and new media art discourses and to unpack the utopian strategies of new media art. I will look at how the utopian impulse plays out in the practice of new media art (since practice is integral to art discourse). To illustrate this I will provide examples provided by several new media artworks to demonstrate how this discourse resonates throughout the field, and then I will focus on one work, Ten Thousand Cents by Aaron Koblin, to provide more in-depth analysis. Toward these ends, I will draw primarily on relational aesthetics, but I will also deploy neo-marxist theories, post-colonial critique, and the theories of Foucault and Lacan. It is my hope that these investigations may improve our larger understanding of how new media art functions as a critical tool for social analysis. I should admit that, while I object to uncritical glossolalia, I am committed to the utopian impulse in art and new media art in particular. It is not my intent here to refute that spirit, but to refine it. Evidence and Initial Analysis The American narrative has always contained a strong utopian element, from the founding of a new form of government based on Enlightenment principals to experimental utopian societies such as the Quakers or Mormons, to Manifest Destiny. These developments were not utopic for slaves, women, or Native Americans, so we might say that utopia has been used to paper over the cracks in the American narrative; still, utopia maintains a strong presence in the discourse. Technology is central to this utopian narrative (Segal 1-9). The telegraph, repeat-action firearms, and the train are often credited with enabling the vision of manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and our inventors such as Edison are our national heroes. When one frontier seems exhausted, America seems just finds another; in fact every century seems to provide its own frontier waiting to be conquered with technology. The eighteenth century offered a new world to be tamed, the nineteenth century went westward, the twentieth century sent American “voyagers” and “pioneers” into space, and the twenty-first century provides a frontier conveniently created with the very tools that will wrestle it into the national history; computerized information and communication technologies. Seminal hi-tech organizations signify this epic narrative in their names, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and popular media continues to characterize the Internet as “the wild west”. Perhaps it comes as even less of a surprise now that the discourse of the hi-tech industry is heavily inflected with the utopian impulse of the techno-positivist variety. “Everything is possible” - Hewlett Packard corporate tagline (Hewlett Packard) [The digital revolution will bring] “...social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.” - Louis Rosetto, founding editor of Wired magazine (Rosetto, 10) “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” - Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Long Now Foundation, and Global Business Network (Brand, 1) As Mark Surman explains in his conference paper, “Wired Words: Utopia, Revolution, and the History of Electronic Highways”, Not surprisingly, the language of the wired world and the electronic highway reemerged in the early part of the 1990s. Magazine racks and TV screens filled up with news about the "new" highway. Headlines screamed "Welcome to the Highway of Hope" and "The Info Highway: Bringing a Revolution in Entertainment, News and Communication." (Globe and Mail, May 13, 1994, cover and Time, April 12, 1993, cover.) Conferences were organized to talk about wired cities, and the most popular, profitable, new magazine of the era was just, well, Wired. … “Everything has changed in the Wired World: technology has reinvented how we live, work and play" and "We are in the midst of sweeping technological changes that will affect our lives even more than the industrial revolution." (Globe and Mail Information Highway supplement, May 1995, cover, and Futurescape, p. C4.) The discourse of new media art often does not stray far from the mothership. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai proudly presents 'Merging/Emerging-Art, Utopia and Virtual Reality' from the 8th of March. This new media art exhibition combines art with technology and delivers to the audience the creative power of a new era….. Merging/Emerging-Art, Utopia and Virtual Reality brings out a global perspective that transcends art movements, races and countries. …. It transcends the boarders of art and music, to create a utopia of an ‘all- encompassing' art, allowing the audience's imagination to run free. (MOCA Shanghai) In the hands of a theoretician, the discourse can be more subtly intoned while retaining its utopian inflection. The modern political era, which came into being with the Enlightenment, was based on the desire to emancipate individuals and people. The advances of technologies and freedoms, the decline of ignorance, and improved working conditions were all billed to free humankind and help to usher in a better society. ….It is evident that today's art is carrying on this fight, by coming up with perceptive, experimental, critical and participatory models, veering in the direction indicated by Enlightenment philosophers, Proudhon, Marx, the Dadaists and Mondrian. (Bourriaud 11-12) In addition to mirroring the others’ utopian tone, hi-tech and new media art discourses also find several specific points of agreement in content. Later, I’ll offer some examples of new media artworks that translate these ideas as strategies, but before that, let me offer some sample points of concurrence between hi-tech and art discourses. Information Wants to be Free Stewart Brand once quipped, “Information wants to be free.” (Brand quoted), a sentiment that directly informs new media art’s resistance to copyright and its adoption of the idea that the Internet has an inherently democratic nature. For instance, that social media facilitated recent student protests in Iran is seen to reflect the inherently power-leveling nature of the Internet, while Google’s collaboration with the Chinese government to censor Internet access is seen as a corruption of that nature. Everyone is a Creator Apple Computer’s promotes their video software, iMovie, as a technology that transforms the average citizen into a movie director, “Make home movies look like Hollywood masterpieces.” (Apple Computer) This notion of consumer-as-producer has a direct equivalent in the Beuysian notion that everyone is an artist and this egalitarian idea is especially popular in interactive and participatory new media art. Twin Mavericks The tech industry positions itself as existing outside mainstream industries (ahead of them, of course). For instance, the regular economy is too cumbersome for hi-tech so they birthed the “new economy”. Similarly, the Dow Industrial Average was linked to the industrial revolution, so the stock market developed the Nasdaq; a new stock indicator specifically for hi-tech. Many hi-tech founding CEO’s are labeled visionary, and the whole industry positions itself as maverick. Similarly, in bypassing the artworld’s institutional filters and constraints and going directly to the people, Internet art claimed a similar maverick position for itself. Both hi-tech and new media art gained from these positions the freedom to innovate outside old and restrictive institutions, but for each there was a cost. Hi-tech did not avail itself of tested business models and the result was an industry-wide economic crash in 2000. New media art did not avail itself of theoretical models that had been developed in the art world over centuries and so that methodological gap was filled with the ideologies of hi-tech. The hi-tech industry and new media art share more than a few high-level concepts. They are also conflated at the operational and logistical level; something that must be considered in the larger field of cultural production (Bourdieu). First, and most obvious, is the fact that new media art makes use of technologies (and their implied practices) developed by the hi-tech sector. New media art also produces content that often shares its format and distribution mechanisms with hi-tech’s commercial and entertainment content.
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