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Vision extends only to the horizon of language and the behavioural rhythms of a culture or social group. These rhythms interact with the habitus (Pierre Bourdieu's term for the ideological resources we use to deal with the world) and human biological systems as well as their environmental relations, essentially unchanged for thousands of years.
Since vision, or worldview, is culturally relative, a yet unknown art will inevitably appear in the guise of familiar technology with a meaning to match - in a similar way to interpretations of "unidentified flying objects". We imagine UFOs as spacecraft, but before the invention of the airplane, many people saw them as airships. It may sound silly now, but it made sense in 1897 that a strange, elongated craft with protrusions and blinding lights could float down from the skies over rural Rockland, Texas, and that the man who climbed out could ask for "some common hardware items to repair the craft".
For an art to be radically new, it should baffle us like Ludwig Wittgenstein's lion. If this lion could speak to us, it would speak in vain because we cannot possibly understand life from a hummock of grass on the Serengeti plains. Even if we could make sense of it, as Francois Truffaut made some sense of aliens in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", what would be the point of something new, outside the comfort zone of fine art? Critical continuity - or discontinuity - is everything. Novelty outside this institutionalized discourse is meaningless. A well-connected artist can make an unmade bed into a work of art, but a western Nebraska family who built a Stonehenge out of cars ("Carhenge") cannot, joining all the other ordinary people with their farmyard sculpture gardens, glass bottle castles and other eccentric creations. No critical frisson results from their peculiar visions.
The essential problem with a yet unknown art is that invention is meaningless until contemporary art creates a meaningful place for it. Iron emerged as a minor novelty in Bronze Age Europe. Despite its functional superiority, it took many generations before people were ready to accept it. The question at hand, therefore, makes abundant sense - since, truly, a yet unimagined art must necessarily fit within the discourse and practice of contemporary art.
While this makes the whole exercise somewhat predictable, it does suggest that we should look around us, rather than into an empty sky, for something novel. For example, life seems to be increasingly mediated by cellphones, especially in western Europe. One generation grew up with television, another with computers, and now cellphones define the horizons of daily experience. What impact will this new behaviour have on the future of electronic arts, this transformation from a state of being wired to wirelessness?
The wired world of the World Wide Web and the Internet continue to erode our notion of inviolate selfhood as they draw us into their interactive networks. When knowledge and behaviour extend long and far enough through these systems, human nature itself will change. Yet, this freedom is a subtle illusion. Computing is just another form of obedience. We are deskbound, slaves to monitors, prey to network management and security. A forensic analysis reveals the strict architecture that guides imagination: electronic circuitry etched on green plastic cards.
Wireless computer systems lack an umbilicus. In the Bluetooth system, small chips on PDAs (Palms and other small, hand-held computers) allow short range transmission and reception between units, as well as communication with mobile access points that serve as links to wider systems via cellphones. Wireless computing is therefore anarchical, allowing for completely mobile and ever-changing small group interactions that have no more allegiance to a specific place or formal system than buskers in an English town square.
To imagine how this will change the rhythms of our information culture, think of the present as Marshall McLuhan's "global village". This phenomenon is not simply a world reduced by modern electronic media to the scale of a village, but also the industrial world of high capitalism transformed into a condition resembling the more humane, small-scale agricultural societies at the roots of western civilization. It is an appropriate analogy. Before agriculture, when people lived by hunting and gathering, life was highly mobile, social organization fluid, and people responded to the world as situations demanded. The arrival of agriculture set the foundations for modern society: sedentary living, the production of surplus, and the hierarchical structuring of time, space and ideology.
In my contrary vision, a future wireless world will hearken back to the more ancient reality of hunters and gatherers. Of course, we are not going to turn into gypsies, nomads or Travellers, but people with wireless connectivity will range through the modern natural world - the built landscape - seeking, marshalling, and distributing their own information. It will not mean the end of the global village, but rather the beginning of vast communities of villages, more suitable to the diverse worlds we share.
The first signs are here already. The metaphors of the ageing sedentary computer age - wired, wired-up, hard-wired - are beginning to look rather stale. Cyborgs, those quaint computer geek extensions of the robotics age, now have the feel of mechwarriors or battlebots. Desktop computers, machines of the agricultural era, will soon litter the environment like old farm implements.
Since the wireless environment provides power without the need for central control, wireless communities will favour the sort of anarchical creativity at the fringes of contemporary art. As artists have explored and manipulated the web-like environments of the modern computer age, so they must seize the opportunities for physical and spiritual release provided by a wireless ethos. This will lead to more individuality, less conformity, more localized artistic communities, and a greater diversity of creative ideas and practices. The new rhythm will be much like it was in ancient times, not the highly structured, corporate routines of businesses, governments, schools and museums, but the chaos of a medieval market - or the wonderful uncertainty of the natural environment, teeming with disparate life.
Brian Leigh Molyneaux
Vermillion, USA
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