Telematic
Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness
by Roy Ascott, edited and with an essay by Edward A Shanken.
California University Press, Berkeley.
2003427pp., illus.
ISBN:0-520-21803-5
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, Screen and Media Studies, University
of Waikato,
Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand
seanc@waikato.ac.nz
"Networking invites personal disclosure" (186). And
there can be few more networked artists than Roy Ascott, whose
forty-year career as teacher, theorist and pioneer of networked
art is celebrated in a handsome volume of his essays.
Two modes of writing meet in this one book. Eddie Shanken contributes
a characteristically authoritative historical and analytical
account of Ascott's life and work, an addition to the editor's
welcome and growing historical project to recover the earlier
critical discourse of cybernetic and technologically mediated
art. Shanken makes you want to read on: to dig out your dusty copies of Jack Burnham
and Radical Software.
Ascott's essays are quite different in tone. They make you want
to stop reading and respond.
As my own department goes through a modestly radical reorientation,
I find myself dropping the book to make notes on institutional
redesign (response to Ascott's mercurial and inventive program
for the Ontario College of Art) and communication between disciplines.
Or I drop the pen and e-mail a colleague with annotations for
a joint essay on media education in the 21st century, fired
by Ascott's student projects at Ealing and Ipswich. Or I contact
a friend in Scotland about
our project to rebuild the reputations of the 1960s generation
of conceptual, performance and media artists disowned by the
UK's hyper-conservative curatorial establishment (who thought
Francis Bacon was somehow contemporary in the 1990s, and still
prefer Lucien Freud). Or, as now, compose myself enough to write
a cogent and scholarly review for Leonardo, many of whose readers
already know Roy Ascott, have collaborated with him, studied
with him, met him at exhibitions, conferences and colloquia
or online.
The single most important thing to remember about Ascott is
that he is an artist. We cannot ask of him the same kind of
rigour we would ask of a PhD student. There are ellipses and
leaps of imagination here, and lapses of taste, appeals to mutually
contradictory authorities, strange admixtures of shamanic visions
and cybernetic logic. But that is precisely the point. Ascott
was never so much a prophet as someone who already lived in
the future. To that extent, his work, as a teacher, an artist
and an essayist, is held together by utopianism. It isn't as
if he doesn't know this, or ignores the accusatory tone with
which the word can be pronounced. In one of his most significant
essays, 'Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?', he responds,
perhaps slightly disingenuously, that his 'cultural prospectus
implies a telematic politics, embodying the features of feedback,
self-determination, interaction, and collaborative creativity,
not unlike the "science of government" for which,
over 150 years ago, André-Marie Ampère coined
the term "cybernetics"' (242). Published in 1990,
this passage betrays the loneliness of the intellectual path
Ascott elected to follow. On the one hand, the fashionable judgements
of the art establishment largely continued to ignore the visionary
and technopoetic discourse of the technological arts. On the
other, Ascott had held aloof from the discourse of semiotics,
Marxism and psychoanalysis which, though exhausted perhaps by
the 1990s. had provided a serious oppositional discourse for
photography and film, for example in the work of Victor Burgin
and of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Nor is there much sign
of a brush with postcoloniality.
There is a sense in which Ascott has been proven right. Neither
the World Wide Web as a mass medium, nor e-mail as the killer
application that has brought internet into common use, respond
well to the traditions of critical modernism. And the semiotic
tradition has been all the weaker for following Saussure instead
of Chomsky, and Derrida instead of Maturana and Varela. The
lack of information theory in artistic discourse has been something
of a weakness all round, though whether symptom or cause of
the wagon-circling of the current phase of 'post-conceptual'
vacuity is hard to fathom. Everything Fried feared when he wrote
of the theatricalisation of art has come to pass, as witness
the passionless and in every sense thoughtless practice of the
now aging yBa's (young British artists).
These hyperobjectified objects tempt no-one to interact
with them, their inertness ostensibly a comment on the culture,
but functionally a continuation of it. Ascott's pedagogy, extending
into his art, is of a quite different order, messy and in the
best sense of the word amateurish, made for the love of it and
of the unforeseeable possibilities that can be realised when
you set up a system with the capacity to attract and enhance
the visitors' interactions between themselves as much as with
the art.
At the same time, it is also true that Ascott rarely demonstrates
an awareness that art and teaching carry responsibilities as
well as rights. Responsibility is, in his thinking, not personal
but systemic. A well-designed system will automatically evolve
protocols for its use. Sadly that has not proved the case in
the evolution of the web. If the medium is the massage, profiling
is the pimp that runs the parlour. Marketing, data mining and
the ubiquitous cookie have stolen the innocence of the web as
a self-governing system, and punctured the belief we might have
had that it was capable of a kind of self-enclosure. Internet
could never be a closed system, and since its nearest neighbour
is the capitalist corporation in the age of globalisation, every
step towards global connectivity has been shadowed by a step
towards global exploitation. Even Ascott's plunges into visionary
consciousness with the aid of shamanic rituals and drugs can
seem touristic, the expropriation of indigeneous knowledge for
a privileged Northern élite.
At the heart of Ascott's practice is the question posed by Niklas
Luhmann: how is it possible to know – and to communicate
– when we know how what we know is constructed by its
communication? Ascott's response is to focus not on the what
but the how, not on content but on the communicative. Oddly,
however, for such a passionate man, his response involves the
disembodiment of humanity, a move towards pure consciousness.
It is this abandonment of the corporeal that allows him to argue
for the significance of the virtual in another key essay, 'Telenoia',
in which he argues that play in "the world as net . . .
empowers us to de-authorise meaning just as it enables us to
reconstruct the world. The reconstruction is a model, to be
sure, creating a virtual world, from which other worlds can
emerge" (258-9). De-authorisation, stripping meaning of
its authority, is a product of a parallel process in which networking
strips meaning of its authors. While this might suggest a source
in Barthes, there is a significant difference between the two
thinkers. For Barthes, the death of the author is the necessary
precondition for the birth of the reader, who now must take
reponsibility for the work. For Ascott, on the other hand, the
birth of the network abolishes both readers and writers, instead
instigating a regime of connectivity and global consciousness.
The utopianism of this is startling, and indeed beautiful. But
it leaves responsibility for the production, if not of meaning,
then of communicability and connection, in the hands of an emergent
consciousness presumed to be benign, presumed to be autonomous.
Quite rightly, in the same essay, Ascott describes the private
galleries of the 1960s as Sherman tanks: "We failed to
see the connection between the supreme individualism of art
and the supreme individualism of business and speculation"
(258). What is missing here is a sense of the supreme anonymity
of telematic art and the supreme anonymity of global corporations.
The individual and the anonymous are as closely interwoven as
the rational and the irrational. Seizing on one at the expense
of the other doesn't heal the gap: it preserves and deepens
it.
All the same, I have to admit that I feel these comments are
graceless, for a reason mentioned above. Ascott's fundamental
inspiration is artistic. It is not his job to give a cure for
cancer or for world debt. His task is vision, on a scale that
mere futurology cannot undertake. His work is certainly not
selfish, quite the contrary. He has the most generous attitude
towards his fellow humans it is possible to imagine. And though
a critic can carp at this as wilful and dangerous naîveté,
well, that is the job of a critic. The work of an artist, in
the early 21st century, is no longer negative. Adorno, for my
money the most important philosopher of the 20th century, can
no longer convince us that Beckett and Berg are the last word,
not when nihilism has become coffee-table theory and No Future
has moved from punk situationism to become a staple of the Top
40. As essayist, Ascott doesn't pretend to coherence: he
wants to inspire. As you look over his career, you see
that he has indeed achieved that, and then I realise that even
this critique has its own tribute to pay. If I want to anchor
Ascott, he now wants to anchor himself, 'flying with our feet
on the ground', as he says in the Moist Media Manifesto that
concludes the collection. The body after all is a system, and
the globe a braided web of systems interacting with systems.
Conceptualising art as the production of systems that will nudge
and adjust all abutting systems, and be nudged and adjusted
in turn, is indeed a visionary statement of the potential for
humanity to proceed, but now in partnership with the green world
and the technological. The challenge Ascott lays down is not
so much to disprove him, as to find better ways to include more
actors in the network, to democratise more radically, and to
ground more substantially. The reader will find much to disagree
with in this book, and much to learn in the disagreeing.