Joseph Tabbi
Bruno Latour once wrote a book called "We Have Never Been Modern", and when I look at the Internet now, I ask myself whether Web artists have ever been hypertextual. Initially, in 1963 when Ted Nelson defined the terms, hypertext and hypermedia had little to do with linking as such; connectivity was not about the maximization of research efforts, and the Internet was not meant to be a global archive of everything, ever. Nelson, it is true, imagined a medium to end all media, where everything said becomes a kind of footnote to everything else. But he also, more interestingly, proposed that a text or media object, once established in a database, could be cited in its entirety - taken wholly, collaboratively and freshly, into a new composition. Each individual work then can be regarded not so much as an entry in an encyclopedia as a sample in a DJ's mix - except that what is sampled is the whole. An art capable of enacting the Internet's recombinant potential, art that begins life only in circulation, takes other works into its own data space, and goes on living only as long as it is cited by others - this is as yet unknown in the context of contemporary art. Which is another way of saying, simply, that the art we have is already, for the most part, unknown because individual works are too often experienced in isolation. Using the Internet not only to access these individual works, but also to organize various works in various media, is one way to make known what contemporary art has already achieved. The work we have needs to combine together, clash, and separate out into meaningful clusters. Rather than another new form or radical movement, we need instead a more reasoned hypertext collectivity, whose principles of selection, organization, and internal arrangement are themselves significant. You can read Nelson's initial formulations, by the way, by pointing a web browser to http://www.xanado.com. That's all it takes to enact a "basic or chunk style hypertext", one that comes on the screen when you reference a web address. But Nelson also talks about "collateral hypertext", "stretchtext" that changes continuously through annotation and so forth, as well as an "anthological" hypertext in which materials from all over come together, into an electronic book with a table of contents that can be revised. What I would wish for in 'a new internet art' is deeply referential practice in which all of these modes work together: that would help create a digital archive adequate for widespread nostalgia that arguably drives the whole project of Web construction - a nostalgia less for the past than for a present that is incompletely experienced. As Nelson said, we build new and more reliable forms of digital storage because "thoughts and minds do not last." And neither does art - unless it keeps on circulating within the media where thoughts and minds find expression. Soon after its commercial introduction in the mid-'90s, much was made of the Internet's mind-like qualities - its capacities, as a distributed network, for linking widely separated sub-networks together and doing associative work. The web, it was claimed, was capable of remembering everything; its storage capacities were essentially limitless, and information could be gotten in a moment by those who most needed it. What has been missing from the cognitive analogy is an appreciation of an actual, human mind's incredible powers of selection and attention, its capacity not only to remember but (much more often and more actively) to ignore and to forget - that is, to repress information not relevant to the project at hand, to filter out unwanted demands on our attention and to fit what is remembered to new circumstances. Along with distributed memory, the mind has the serial ability to focus, moment by moment, on a continuing and extended present. The mind takes from past experience only what's needed (and it's never enough) to make sense of the present, to correlate what's seen, heard, felt, and read with patterns and schema that have been experienced before. However this process works (and whether the mind's work can even be known is itself a subject for debate), cognition clearly involves much more than information storage and retrieval. The information that a mind calls up changes what's experienced, and is itself changed by it - even as an artist's sketch is often less an external aid to memory than a means of creation. The sketch itself can always become an active element in the emerging composition, a transformation no less than a record of the artist's thought. Likewise, past achievements in art, instead of remaining static sources for citation, can be, and need to be, brought to the screen as active elements in current compositions. "Making it new", in Ezra Pound's well-known dictate, but with an emphasis on the making. Too much postmodern art has been characterized by an ironic "citing" of past styles, treating established art forms apart from enabling life forms. Collages without content, patchwork personalities, bricolage absent of cultural purpose, and corporate compilations should not be models for the present. When a skyscraper roof models the pattern of a Victorian chair; or when once-powerful, clashing symbols appear together as neutral hybrids, we have evidence that we are living too much in the mode of information. The past, in such art, is called on too freely, without any commitment to everyday life practice or overall worldviews embodied by the art. An art, however, that takes responsibility for what it selects, that cites works whole, not piecemeal, goes beyond the exchange of information and makes a kind of intersubjectivity possible: the chance (in Nelson's words) once again to "become a community of common access to a shared heritage." This is, for me, a worthwhile vision for a yet unknown art. Realizing its potential would be less a matter of inventing forms than of more fully experiencing what we have, in the present moment when we have it (and not in some future archive). Joseph Tabbi Chicago |
