Gregory L. Ulmer
Looking back on 21st century art, what will have been the most influential …
Looking back on 21st century art, what will have been the most influential …
1 – technology? A determining factor in the transformation of art was the shift in the language-memory apparatus from literacy to electracy (from alphabetic print to digital imaging). The apparatus includes an interdependent matrix of technology, institutional practices, and identity formation (collective and individual). The imagined forms of selfhood and the nation state were specific to literacy and were displaced by and subordinated to emergent forms, originating in the institution of commercial entertainments, but not, ultimately, bound by the economics of capitalism. Art as an aesthetic anomaly in a utilitarian lifeworld gave way to art as a general practice of mass electracy, applied to all language, memory, reasoning, and communication needs. 2 – curriculum? In the context of a globalized information datasphere, schools shifted priorities and promoted instruction in art to the status of a method of study and pedagogy across the disciplinary curriculum. Ordering of information into knowledge shifted away from structures based on analysis, into elements or principles, and turned to quantum order based on holistic atmospheres created by image design. Students learned performance devices of improvisation and impersonation to manage their self-image in virtual encounters with people, data-agents, machines, and their own avatars. Artists as professionals became integrated into the teaching and training professions. 3 – aesthetic? The most prescient aesthetic insight of 20th-century art was the Situationist International's commitment to the construction of ‘situations’, defined as energy vortices (plaques tournantes), created through environmental moods associated with specific locales and places in the urban environment. The appropriation of mapping, tourist practices, and the poetic encounter for psychogeography created an open channel between modernist image-making and collective knowledge. 4 – popular culture? William Gibson's dramatization of cyberspace in his science fiction novels, beginning with ‘Neuromancer’, but especially in the sequels, ‘Count Zero’ and ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive’, starting the cyberpunk movement, was a catalyst for designing interfaces for virtual environments and virtual realities. The most practical feature of Gibson's cyberspace was the metaphor of Voodoo possession as a representation of how an individual experiences direct access to collective knowledge. 5 – music? Funk rhythms and dance in general, and funkadelic in particular, anticipated most clearly the syncretism underway in the post-colonial era, forming a hybrid culture out of Afro-Caribbean civilization and the Western tradition with its previous syncretism of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilizations. The particular contribution of funk was its ability to focus on the chief obstacle, preventing full accommodation of modern society to electracy – the mind-body dualism of the Jew-Greek heritage. Funk behaviors and attitudes counterbalanced the transcendental tendency inherent in virtualizing technologies by insisting on embodied experience as an irreducible dimension of human intelligence. 6 – philosophy? Georges Bataille's work with the informe (formless) provided the theoretical basis for quantum imaging as logic, and ultimately as metaphysics (understood as the mode of category formation or classification used by a civilization). The demonstration of singular, affective connections with phenomena as an alternative to universalized definitions – of accidents rather than essences as the best descriptors of entities – opened the way for archive interfaces customized to the learning styles and cognitive maps of individual netizens. The exposure of the abject dimension of experience as the circulation of untransposed values made possible democratic politics capable of administering a republic of equal opportunity for head, heart, and viscera. 7 – architecture? The unbuilt design for a folie in the Parc de la Villette, resulting from the collaboration of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, brought renewed attention to the notion of chora, remotivated from Plato's ‘Timaeus’ as an emblem for invention on a cosmological scale. This new understanding of space permitted a holistic immanent grasp of specific geographical regions as rhetorical devices. This connection between actual places and rhetorical operations proved to be for the internet what the connection between electrical switches and truth tables was to the computer. Gregory L. Ulmer Gainesville, USA |
