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Why are so many writers, theorists, artists and other assorted 'cultural commentators' so insistent that electronic and digital technologies are changing what we are. Much attention has been given to pronouncements from high-profile theorists like Donna ('we are all cyborgs') Harraway, Rosanne Allequare a.k.a Sandy ('we are all post-gender - wanna see my rubber glove?') Stone, and ('I am post-human and harbinger of the future') artist Stelarc - yet little of this attention has critically examined these claims and their basis in reality. These claims seem to run counter to our commonsense. After all, the pragmatic front-part of our brains says, human beings have always made and used tools - indeed are often defined by this very aspect of our survival behaviours - so how come those old tools didn't alter our 'essential' nature in the ways that the new technologies are purported to?
The statement that the late twentieth century is undergoing an unprecedented rate of technological change and innovation has become a worn-out truism. Certainly within the privileged sections of the Western world we can easily feel overwhelmed by the avalanche of new gadgets and gizmos that daily compete for our time and our dollars. We are frustrated, and therefore self-righteously indignant,as yet another black or beige box resists our attempts to use it to do what the sales-person assured us it could (and far more easily than the last gadget of its type). But for most of us, it seems deeply unlikely that the almost instantly ubiquitous and therefore func-tionally invisible electronic gadgets could possibly have the power to fundamentally affect what we as individuals are.
We could be wrong.
Along with those ever-friendly personal work stations and ever more intrusive personal com-munications devices come a whole host of far less visible but potentially far more omnipresent and subtle technologies. Among these are genetic manipulation and gene therapy, nano-technologies, telepresense and telechirics, machine intelligence and Artificial Life to name just the most obvious. And it isn't just the theorists, hanging on the coat-tails of a clutch of pointy-headed research boffins, who propose that the human race is due for a thorough altering of its state. Science fiction writers prepared the ground, street culture contributed, but perhaps the most obvious and influential espousement of the inevitable coming change, fetishistically delineating both the pleasures and perils, has been mainstream cinema.
So convincingly has the future been pictured that we find ourselves shocked at the paucity of our actual knowledge and technological capability. It seems so unlikely that the best we can do is a few little astronauts hunkering down in an ungainly and disintegrating tin-can space station, or a tonka-toy marooned alone on Mars. Even the future-seer William Gibson famously expressed horror at the noisy, clunky and limited capabilities of his first computer when he finally began using the things instead of just writing about them a couple of years ago. The future might not be what it used to be - but the present is just too pass³.
And then too, there seems to be something so well known, so familiar about the millennerial pronouncements of the digital prophets. They have a flavour of what we recognise, a rhetoric - not to mention a vocabulary that appeals to the nostalgic in most of us (and I suspect that this even applies to those suit-soldiers of the corporate world). And we're right. We've heard it all before. Some of us were there and the rest of us have spent our lives deluged with the music, the styles, the poses and the politics of the sixties.
There is an obvious causal relationship between the familiarity of cyber-speak and the extent to which baby boomers, those wide-eyed flower-brandishing astronauts of inner space who came of age in the sixties, still seem to drive many of the techno-assisted subcultures of the present. Certainly it is an undeniable fact that many of the notable figures of the sixties have come out of their own 'headspace' to disappear/reappear into 'cyberspace'. Leary, although he did not carry through his threat to die on-line, did electronically publish the day-to-day details of his life including his daily drug intake (weren't we all so fascinated?) whilst insisting that the 'PC is the LSD of the1990s. Stewart ('we are as Gods and we might as well get good at it') Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, co-founded one of the most influential on line com-munities, The Well, and insists that it was hippies that led the computer revolution: "The personal computer revolution was initiated and carried to fruition by youthful longhairs, on purpose, with striking consistency between what was intended and what was accomp-lished. The impulse was to decentralise society - to undermine the high priests and airconditioned main frames of information technology and hand their power to absolutely everybody. There were a few inspirers but no leaders and no books to follow."1 Self-proclaimed techno-crank and purported leader of the psychedelic revolution at Wesleyan University, former poet and SDS mischief-maker, John Perry Barlow contributes frequently to Mondo2000 and is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He now insists that all of his activities share one unifying purpose; "we - humanity - are engaged in in a great work which is... hardwiring the collective consciousness."2 Merry Prankster, Ken Kesey, is cyberjamming, not to mention promoting his books, on the Net. And Augustus Owsley Stanley III, maker of the famed Owsley acid and now hiding out in Queensland under the name of Bear, shares his tips for living a long and healthy life on-line (#1. NEVER eat vegetables).3
Younger prophets (read sales reps) and media symbiots of the new age such as Douglas Rushkoff, R. U. Sirius, Kelvin Kelly et al have not been slow to pick up the trippy mantle of their psychedelic forebears and run with it. So much has our thinking been shaped by these mediagenic proponents of a digital counter-culture that it scarcely seems counter to anything. Instead it is the commercial imperatives of the corporates and the Nanny-stance of the politicians which seem to be resisting the current of the inevitable. Mark Dery, in the almost sole intelligent exception to the generalised uncritical acceptance of new age cyberbole, Escape Velocity, has drawn attention to the connections between military infotainment complex,4 and the rhetoricians of the cyberdelic revolution. He points out that we are currently "witnessing the convergence of what Leo Marx has called "the rhetoric of the technological sublime"... and the eschatology that has structured Western thought throughout history, in one form or another: the Judeo-Christian Second Coming, the capitalist myth of never-ending progress, Marxism's pre-destined triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie"5
Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius, in one of their maundering Mondo2000 editorials, state that the "pagan innocence and idealism of the 60s remains and continues to exert its fascination... Look at old footage of Woodstock and you wonder: Where have all those wide-eyed, ecstatic, orgasm-slurping kids gone? They're all across the land, dormant like deeply buried perennials. But their mutated nucleotides have given us a whole new generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights."6 So, whilst age may have wearied the free spirits of the sixties and the years condemned them to the dormitory suburbs of Straightsville suitable to their unforgivable descent into middle age, we should look to their literal and metaphorical off-spring for transformative redemption... This not an unsurprising conclusion in a society in which it would be surprising if a week went by without some self-satisfied columnist expressing bewilderment with some example of technology and wondering at the 'natural' ease with which its sub-adolescent kid has mastered it. Australian artist and theorist, Simon Penny draws attention to the current 'adolescent' state of electronic technologies and suggests that at least part of their fascination lies in their still unformalised relationship to society - parallelling that of both counterculture kids of the sixties and the febrile 'superbrights' of the nineties. Initially such parallels encourage variations on the 'like attracts like' cliche, more of the 'kids naturally understand this new stuff' waffle: but Penny's analysis is less sanguine: "Beneath this lies the vicious possibility that although the tools change, the underlying value systems do not. We are confronted with a paradoxical condition in which we are challenged to keep up with a changing tech-nology whose philosophical agenda is stagnant or retrogressive.7
Whilst Penny blows the whistle on the techno-revolutionaries, and Dery has critically charted the free form and floating relationships between the Mondo-esque search for a republic of gratified and techno boosted desire attained through escape from time, space and human body and the various strands of sixties counterculture 'philosophy', other contemporary writers are less critical. Mediababe Douglas Rushkoff, in his survey of the 'new' techno-cultures, Cyberia, writes "the single most important contribution of the 1960s.... to popular culture is the notion that we have chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the Cyberian culture of the 1990s, armed with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully."8
So are these much vaunted 'alterations' simply as superficial and cosmetic as the substitution of 60's psychedelia with 90's cyberdelia, hallucinogenic drugs with 'smart' drugs and VR, Reichian therapy with gene therapy, back to the land communalism with MOOs and rave teepees, free love with TinySex, the 'me gen' with the meme gen, hippies with zippies? Same-o same-o but with new nomenclature? Just how deep and meaningful is the relationship between the counter-culture revolution of the sixties and the digital revolution of the millennium?
Certainly, and ironically, the US military is deeply implicated in both; not only was LSD developed, in part, by the ClA's 'Lab Madness Boys' exploring possible 'truth serums' and mind control substances as 'weapons' in the Cold War,9 but the Internet was also the progeny of that same stand-off, developed to ensure that the USA did not lose its communications network, and, therefore its ability to respond in a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the USSR. The modern development of electronic technologies them-selves was a direct result of the arms race of the Second World War. Friedrich Kittler has noted that "The project of modernity had essentially been one of arms and media technology... All the better that it was shrouded in a petty phraseology of democracy and the communication of consensus."10 Dery suggests that the most pivotal difference between cyberdelic and psychedelic culture is the "ecstatic embrace of technology"11 by the former (forgetting just for a moment that the slogan of the Whole Earth Catalog was 'access to tools' and that the interactive multimedia is a direct scion of the multiple-media techno-intensive extravaganzas of the sixties 'happenings' and festivals). Whilst 'the street' has found its own uses for the products of the American military-industrial complex it has often been at the expense of the lessons of history or a clear-eyed examination of probable futures. So eager are we to find a new and efficacious source of personal transcendence and salvation that we are more than willing to jump at whatever is proposed.
The reality, of course, is that instead of tuning into some sort of universal spirit-web or morphic resonance we are far more likely to find ourselves tuned into the shopping channel, 'ecstatically embracing' consumerism rather than social connectivity or political change in our lust for the latest tech. It's so much easier to buy ecstasy in handy tab form than to struggle to attain it through arduous and time-consuming spiritual and/or physical disciplines. We may not know what we want - but we want it NOW...
Twentieth century Westerners are infatuated with the notion that we each individually construct 'reality': that by changing our con-sciousness through using psychotropic substances we can usher in the 'Age of Aquarius' and an era of universal peace and understanding; that we can 'own our own life' through the assiduous repetition of affirmative homilies; that freedom is a state of mind rather than an outcome of par titular socio-economic conditions; that if we can dream it we can be it; that the expectations of the observer inevitably effect the outcome. These currents of western thought can be thought of as 'soft-technologies': ideas whose rapid dissemination and up-take have promulgated major changes in our social and creative landscapes. Today this array of individualistic options is further augmented by the hard-technologies of personal computers linked to global networks, reality simulators, genetic manipulation, prosthetic and telechiric devices, and a host of others. Cyber-delia represents just one of the possible outcomes of the 'plug and play' mating of these soft and hard technologies.
Concurrent with this notion of individualistic primacy and efficacy have been counterstreams of thought and practice equally as powerful and influential if less humanistic. Information has become the great transforming paradigm of the 20th Century, with impact on every area of our lives. It has structured government policy, technological innovation and dissemination, social structures and economic possibilities - as well as our own sense of our corporeal selves. The world has come to be seen as constituted of information. Much of the efficacy of the concept of 'information' has been gained from the discovery of DNA and the realisation that in modern molecular biology, information is not a metaphor; rather, it is a literal account of the operations of the genetic code. Thus the understanding that information is the organising principle of life itself. Cybernetics, or the idea of natural and artificial systems operating as self-stabilising mechanisms through signal-to-noise ratios and feedback mechanisms, has become the underlying metaphor of various scientific enquiries into the 'natural' - the 'code' of DNA providing the 'operating system' for biological organisms, the 'electronic' operations of neurosynapses, visual models of objects and systems with no 'physical' homologue - as well as providing 'cyberculture' with half of its titular tautology. As early as 1948 NorbertWeiner (the inventor of cybernetics) defined humans as machines for exchanging information, whilst Timothy Leary has happily re-shaped his past in concord with present thought modes: "In the '60s at Harvard, people like Ginsberg, Huxley and I were people from the Mechanical Age trying to work out the computer that was the human brain. We couldn't do it; we were working with words like 'illumination' and 'bliss', words from another time, words from the past. Nowadays, the language we use to describe the effects of all drugs, and the reaction to them, is in the terms of how the brain is actually organised and how it stores, processes and recalls information; computer terms. The great breakthrough in the information sciences and our knowledge of computers is leading us towards human brain evolution."12 Game theory, signal-to-noise ratios, feed-back, and the genetic code share a relationship to represent-ation in powerful ways. Join this with computing and the rise of the televisual display, and the tsunami effects of postwar systems-thinking and the passage from industrial to electronic cultural becomes inevitable. The foundations set in the 1950s have converged in the 1990s, and an entire range of human disciplines are now formed within an algorithmic imperative. On the brink of the new millennium, man (sic) is no longer the measure.
Piecemeal and uncoordinated as the process may be, the industrial revolution is being dismantled and replaced by an information economy. On the representational plane, Walter Benjamin's 'Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is giving way to an 'age of cybernetic simulation' which calls into question all that we once knew of the nature of reality and the world. The mechanically reproduced object sundered art from its previous dependence on ritual and allowed that, in Heidegger's words,"the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture."13 With time and increasingly sophisticated tools, reality seems more and more intelligible - more and more picturable as images on screens, images of events that we will never ourselves experience; subatomic collisions, the DNA helix, movements of ions within synapses, models of ecological systems which have not ever existed - and less and less apprehendable. Suddenly our technologies are not just amplification aids re-presenting datum perceivable in the 'real world'; now they can present entirely new images, unmediated with any relationship to the reality that we can perceive through our unaided senses. Boundaries between the real and the imaginable have become inevitably blurred. Our under-standing of the world and of ënature' is increasingly becoming secondhand and personally unverifiable, or overtly fictional but compellingly ëreal' (e.g. the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park).
This inevitably affects how creativity is mediated. The con-temporary productions of digital artists signal a sea-change from the practices hallowed in the traditional fine arts. What has become important is a re- thinking of imaging beyond the limited terms of aesthetics, memory, sentiment, or phenom-enology. Instead, a consideration might be made of the image as not just a signifier, but rather as an event; a ëpresentation' rather than a representation. With any sort of luck the traditional roles of art (artifactual, class-based distribution, contemplative, single direction communication from artist to beholder) are being jeapordised by productions which are (potential if not always actually) immaterial, multi-directional, active, and infinitely reproducible and therefore democratically dis-tributable.
Alterations in available tech-nology, like Walter Benjamin's identification of the replacement of the ëaura' with ëmystique', coincide with the third major change posited by Benjamin - changes in categories of perception: "During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence."14 A radical change in the nature of art implies that our very ways of seeing the world have also changed. But what happens when there is no 'original' for a copy to made of? When a work does not have a prior independent or material existence? Such works can represent no-thing other than themselves (i.e they do not re-present any thing) - as opposed to the ëhaving been there' of photographs suggested by Barthes in Camera Lucida. Electronic technologies allow for the creation of simulated ërealities' which have no necessary pre-existence in the 'real' world. If mechanical reproduction centres on the question of reproducibility and renders authenticity and the original problematic, cybernetic simulation renders experience, and the real itself, problematic. "Instead of reproducing, and altering, our relationship to the original work, cybernetic communication simulates, and therefore alters, our relation to our environment and mind... Instead of a representation of social practices recoded into the conventions and signs of another language or sign-system, like the cinema, we encounter simulacra that represent a new form of social practice in their own right and represents nothing."15 Baudrillard contends that "Instead of facilitating communication, it (information, the message-in-circuit) exhausts itself in the staging of commun-ication - this is a gigantic simulation process."16 Rushkoff, on the other hand, is predictably far more optimistic: "This is why art and literature are seen as crucial to coping there (Cyberia): they serve as celebratory announcements from a world moving into hyperspace...these authors still delight in revealing the textures and possibilities of a world free of physical constraints, boring predictability, and linear events."17 Henri Lefebvr³ has also proposed the concept of the 'spectacle' - the exhibition, the show - as exemplifying the present form of mass consumption. Goods and shop windows, traffic and advertisements, stores and the world of commodities, news and packaging, architecture and media production come together to form a totality, a permanent theatre, which dominates not only the public city centres but also private interiors. With the emergence of the screen as the the central point of the communicative and aesthetic experience, cultural life has become the crucial reciprocal signifier of the bond between representation and technology.
The business of making symbols is no longer peripheral to the mainstream economy. The information industries, the vast amalgam of all symbolic and communication activity along with the material support for such activity, now functions at the very centre of the economy. These days, the information industries could be said to have subsumed what Horkheimer and Adorno called the 'culture industry'. They defined this as "the mode by which cultural forms are produced, organised and exchanged as commodities within a capitalist socio-economic system."18 This sublimation of ëculture' by information has not left artists out in the cold entirely - as computing has become more visual, new opportunities have arisen and the skills of image-makers are increasingly being called upon.When multimedia and its ensuing commerce in 'content' became all the rage, suddenly story-tellers, cinematographers and animators were needed. As computing becomes multidimensional we will increasingly see sculptors, choreographers and their ilk utilised. This repurposing of skills garnered in pursuit of the objectives of art and culture does not, however, guarantee that the humanist ideals can be as easily ëported to this new platform. It is not entirely coincidental that the trans-formation of culture into information is concurrent with the transformation of communities into 'economies' - cybernetics and communications theory inevitably have had to examine the role of, in John Stroud's words, "the human operator surrounded on both sides by very precisely known mechanisms"19 - i.e. we have become the machine in the middle. And, increasingly, a machine which may be out of warranty and nonadaptive to the tasks ahead.
Small wonder then, that at the end of the twentieth century, in a culture which prides itself on its scientific understanding of the world and technological sophistication, the technosphere has become an ironic repository of teleological vision and transcendental myths - all of them testimony to the abiding influence of sixties counterculture on nineties cyberculture.20 Again it is the perfectly reasonable fear of de-humanisation and individual redundancy which has provided the fertiliser for the cybercultures of the nineties. The sixties saw an eruptive reaction against the grey conformism of post-war life in which individual realisation was traded off for societal and personal security. The cyberdelic strands of the nineties can be seen as a similar reaction to a renewed and generalised anxiety about the future. The 'organisation men' and pen pushers of the fifties and sixties are re-appearing in the nineties as 'microserfs' and pixel pushers - as many have pointed out, Dilbert is a documentary not a cartoon... Within the new conformism the technologies enabled by the personal computer, in particular, offer a chance for personal escape - but at the price of being enchained to the commercial cycle of commodity innovation and obsolescence.
Give me drugs any day.
©Shiralee Saul
MESH film/video/multimedia/art #11,MESH is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts
This issue of MESH was financially assisted by the Australia Council through its New Media Fund, Experimenta Media Arts gratefully acknowledges this support.