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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.

 

 

 

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