Public (E-Journal, York University)

Yamaguchi, Joanne

English

Culture, Technologies: Conversant

Dowler, Kevin

Asleep in the Storehouse of Culture: The McLuhan Conference and the Technologies of Remebering

Renaud, Alain

PLACE AND IMAGE
ALAIN RENAUD
·"Right away I would like to clear up something that was
in the program. It presents me as a high-definition expert
while I completely disavow this notion of the expert.
I am not an expert: there are other people who could better fill that role. In
fact, I find myself in a slightly atypical position, for in the "fourth world" of
telecommunications the presence of a philosopher is somewhat incongru-
ous, and in a certain way surprises people. What is a philosopher doing in
the middle of such an industry? I work for the Parisian Department of
Visual Materials and I specialize in identifying and, if possible, developing
and organizing policy for a high-definition production program with a view
to multi-media and multi-support development in a large number of fields.
Why talk about the museum? Well, quite simply because amongst
the sectors identified as being important in the field of high-definition
visual materials, the museum claims that it can contribute. The museum
exists; the works of art exist; and there is a need for the representation of
those works. As a result, in a certain sense, I am betraying the spirit of
this conference by leaving today in order to return to Paris to film the
works of Monet at the Musee d'Orsay. But I can tell you, the philosopher
in me is laughing.
It is possible you might think: "You're just trying to present a kind of
opposition to everything that we have seen at this conference." Certainly
not. In my opinion, the dangerous or nihilistic aspect of the panels that
I've attended today is to be found in the opposition which is posed
between man and technology. As we know, the virtual is not the opposite
of the real, but rather the opposite of the actual [actuel}. The virtual and
the actual are not modes of reality, they are something else; they are, more
precisely, manifestations of the real. In reality, however, we can work with
these possibilities.
I teach in a school of architecture, and, for a long time, architects have
known perfectly well what the virtual is: even if it's not today's binary
virtuality, even if it's not as sophisticated or refined. Architects have, for a
long time, worked hard with the mental image. They didn't wait for the
invention of information machines before beginning to somehow con-
struct in their heads, and force into existence a certain reality, even before
it existed in a form that we, as so-called pragmatists, could call reality.
In any case, the story of virtuality is an ancient one. New technology, in
a way, modernizes and reactivates this concept-with its own force, its speci-
ficity, and gives it both proper form and content. It has, without a doubt, a
completely unequaled strength. Yet writing, drawing and model making,
(and the intellect that constantly builds itself up with the large number of
prostheses that make up art history, as well as both technical and scientific
histories) all reflect, in some way, this capacity to seize an immediate pre-
sent from our reality in order to allow for an essential consideration of
another form of being, which has the virtual presence of a reality waiting
to become real. Which means that the virtual only exists for the sake of
representing something else. I'm sorry, but I do not see at the present time
any pilot in a flight simulator who would end a session by saying: 'Tm
staying here!". He gets out. In other words, one must always 'get out" or
else it's something completely different, something called autism or schizo-
phrenia. That, however, has nothing to do with art or technology, that has
something to do with psychiatry, which is interesting to think about, bur
which, you'll agree, has nothing to do with our topic.
What bothers me about binary high definition, is its claim to replace.
What interests me is when binarism displaces other technologies. If the
science of photography were to replace photography, that would bother
me, because the chemical trace that constitutes a pictorial metamorphosis
is extremely provocative. The day when industries decide not to make
optics or chemical support for photography, that will be a loss. An
irreparable loss. You may notice, by the way, that this wouldn't be a tech-
nological decision, but rather an economic one. And, in a few years, as
American economists predict, there will be merely five groups controlling
and managing international telecommunications, making their decisions
on the basis of economic concerns. That's a serious problem. But it's a sep-
arate problem.
So, incredible things are happening with visual materials in museums,
in art and in medicine. When you want to capture data about hard-to-see
organs, you need a high-definition high-end technology, a mechanical eye,
a camera that can penetrate and capture the maximum information possi-
ble. And with these we have done incredible things in surgical operations.
In the near future, we will hear the surgeon saying: "This is very strange.
I am in the middle of operating on the screen, yet the body is right in
front of me. I have blocked it out without even noticing, and now I can
see much more clearly." Here you have the index of a prodigious event:
the emergence of a genuine visual thinking created through technological
equipment capable of magnifying our field of vision. Although we're still
able to communicate at a low-resolution distance, the naked eye - this
marvelous old pair upon which the entire history of art has been built -
is currently in the process, not of disappearing, but certainly of fading,
becoming more marginal, making way for another pair: brain/informa-
tion. This is called simulation.
Through simulation new industries and new fields of inquiry emerge.
Still, there remains the question of art, the question of creation. When I
consider what art has to go through in order to become Art, when I see
the work that goes into the artistic process (in any era), when I see the
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subversive power that the creator must oppose in order to produce a work
for which there is no guarantee, it reminds me of a story of a student of
Picasso whom one day asked him: "Master, are you sure that what I'm
doing is art?" To which Picasso answered, "I do what I do, the furure will
decide, that's its job." Similarly, today the people who go into this area of
art and technology must avoid being crushed by the pedagogical presence
of the artistic classics flaunted in the museums. I think Picasso's is the
best answer for their doubts. On the other hand, they must also be aware
that the minute they take a single step into the artistic world, they will
pay dearly for producing a genuine creation and not simply a gadget, spe-
cial effects or specious effects.
It appears that speciousness is quite the specialty today in certain
domains... The worst architects go into computer sciences. Since they
were terrible architects, they turn to the making of 3D imagery. Cezanne
said: "Do you have any idea what it's like to touch the third dimension?"
Cezanne said it but we have forgotten it. Today, we approach the third
dimension shamelessly, brutally, with a rudeness that gives you pause.
So, I'm going to show you a little video. This is something that claims
to be a representation of ancient Cluny, with a set-up that permits a
Parisian art historian and a Catholic intellectual to take an interactive
tour of the digitally 'restored' Cluny church. Incredible! I'll show it to
you and then I'll tell you what I think of it.
After this experience, I know myself that I'll never again visit a site
without being reminded of this virtual tour. So, we must examine this
performance with a certain degree of ambivalence - and it was quite a
performance, when it took place at l'Imagina studios two years ago. It
was created with the same technological media that you saw earlier in the
conference - binary technology, the same technology as the telephone.
Clearly we could have done much more sophisticated things, but they also
would have been more expensive. On the other hand, it's done in real
time, which means that the spatial arrangement is organized interactively
as a function of different viewers' perspectives.
So, what exactly were the intentions of the producers of this program?
"Our wish;' said the filmmakers, "in making this film, was to show, thanks
to the extraordinary power of these synthesized images, the Roman era to a
contemporary audience; the Roman attention to beauty, Roman grandeur,
and perhaps also Roman uncertainty. We will be able to merge the dream
and the reality even better than Hugues, a monk of the Cluny church who
died in 1095." This is where I switch alliances. At this point, I have to say:
Let's not go overboard here. I would say: Let's not get too excited. This is
unquestionably a communication tool, but it's not architecture.
Acrually, I think that the issue of what words actually mean is an
essential question these days: the word "art;' the word "architecture;' the
question of space. The man who spoke before me, who has done some seri-
ous research in this field, addressed the issue of perspective, which is much
too serious an issue to be left in the hands of engineers. Much too serious.
Excuse me for saying this, because I don't want to be xenophobic about
engineers, but as soon as you pose the question of architectural space, and
thus question our understanding of space - that is virtuality's objective -
we must be all the more sure that we know what we're dealing with.
Roman architectural space is defined, specific, extraordinarily complex but
quite varied, but CAr (computer-assisted imagery) sidesteps this provoca-
tive subject. This is where CAr is doing us a disservice by claiming that it
will resolve our spatial communication problem, and will, in time, redefine
and replace industrial design by giving us a tactile way to conceptualize
architectural space. If ever this displacement occurred, I think we would
experience devastating losses, not only in terms of representation and visu-
alization, but also in terms of construction. In recent memory, for instance,
we can see that the history of modern architecture has been linked to this
rather weak, mismanaged relationship between visual information and spa-
tial functions in the real world of people like you and me.
All throughout history, an organic link between art and technology
has maintained itself. We don't have to give an a priori blessing to every
user - because CAr presents problems different from other types of image
construction. On the contrary, all users should be warned: "Be careful.
You must try hard as well, you must implicate yourself in this issue."
Still, there remains the problem as to whether industries, or those in the
information market, really intend to go that far. For me, this is a matter
of deep concern. I'm not at all sure that they will want to...
Having said that, I would not be too pessimistic, because in the end
"the proof is in the pudding." So we must move forward, we must get our
hands dirty. Of course, this must be done without knowing for certain if
we are creating art or not. Nevertheless, we must move ahead without
staring too intently either into our rear view mirror, or into a sort of cave
at Lourdes that would call itself technology, or the immaculate conception
of technology.
I'm a philosopher, and I cannot change that. In other words, I am not
religious in any way. And while there are more and more Ayatollahs
appearing daily, while there are many high priests and gurus ... I believe
simply that we must get to work. As Nietzsche said, we must assume the
risks of our epoch, and we must truly support our pretensions with true
convictions."
Translated by Rachel Fulford and Johanna Tzountzouris
73


Place and Image

Richards, Catherine

Virtual Bodies

Bradley, Dale

Situating Cyberspace

Hollinger, Veronica

Cyborg Unities: Feminist SF and Cyberpunk

Kerckhove, Derrick de

DESIGN, INTERACTIVITY
AND THE 'PRODUCTION
OF MEANING
DERRICK DE KERCKHOVE
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At the dawn of Western civilization, Aeschylus's
Prometheus Bound revealed the West's deepest secret.
Nobody heard it, but it is still there in the archives of
the world. The invention of letters made technology the
basis of the western cultures: Syntheseis ton grammaton,
mousometor, the assembly of letters, mother of the muses,
mother of invention. The alphabetic code was like the
genetic code, a system available for recombination and
engineering. It was the source of all blueprints and all
inventions in the west; it was also the most powerful
model for digitization. The alphabet would one day
lead to digitization as the natural consequence of divid-
ing reality in meaningless but extremely modular bits.
Today, thanks precisely to digitization, design takes over. The binary
code can translate anything into anything else: forms, textures, sounds,
feelings, even smell, and why not taste soon. Design is the essence of sim-
ulation and representation, hence its ominous responsibility to simulate
properly and represent usefully.
Governments are beginning to grant design a renewed attention
because many people sense that design bridges technology and psychol-
ogy and that the economy will depend on design as an interpreter of tech-
nology and as an inspiration for technological development in a software
environment.
When governments take an interest in design, however, it is time
to watch out. When it is abused rather than just used, design can and
has served some rather questionable political functions, such as propa-
ganda (seventy years of communism amounting to naught, five years of
raging war in Europe, over forty million dead both at the front and in
the background.)
Advertising, a minor form of propaganda and a major component of
design, is partly responsible for the tacit war waged on the environment
by accelerated consumption and the creation and support of artificial
needs. Even social engineering can be the downside of design: as in the
urban wastelands its modernist ambitions generated.
Now we hear from Stefano Marzano, Ezio Manzini and others that the
design industry should become political. It always has been, so it is
refreshing that now it will become self-consciously so. However, if that is
the case, then we ought to be as informed as possible about the relation-
ship between design, technology and the social construction and produc-
tion of meaning.
In the old days, before design became necessary, technology was tame
and obedient, and life was evenly paced. There was a real world out there
•
called "objective", and there was a real person right here called "subjec-
tive;' and there were a lot of printed words to bring order to their rela-
tionships. Things were simple, at least in the industrial countries founded
on alphabetic literacy, because there was a human and environment polar-
ity, within which one pole was constantly evolving and adapting while the
other remained stable. Or at least appeared so. This was the blessed time
of non-interactivity: time and space were fixed, and minds and bodies
were free to roam without losing their bearings.
But then, with the unstoppable ingenuous innovations of engineer-
ing, the pace began to quicken. The telegraph helped create remote-
control markets (with their attending accelerated need for production
and distribution of goods), and colonies. The radio generated mass
audiences, economies of scale and the early stirrings of an advertising
industry supported by the press. And then television provided a post-
war delivery system for accelerated war-time production, which meant a
massive increase in the numbers of the buying public. Among other
demographic developments, women entered into the work force and
began to appear in the political, economic and public life, even as their
images were being sold on TV. Nothing, however, apart from the evident
speeding of society, seemed to have changed; that is because none of the
above media was interactive.
Surely it was a fast world, but still the same polarity prevailed: from
mobile human to stable - if accelerated - environment. The Gulf War was
perhaps the last time television was given full range, albeit under the
tightest control ever practiced by design, for the one-way production of
meaning. In the words of Augustin Berque: "If the world said OK to the
crusade against Sadam (Hussein) it is not only because the world drinks
Coca Cola. It is because, to a large extent, the meaning of today's world
finds it source, its creation and its distribution in the USA." But the era of
television, of a mass creation of meaning, is over. The time has come for
the interactive creation of meaning and that is the fundamental paradig-
matic shift in social discourse.
By 1991, personal computers had already stolen the attention of a full
generation from the seduction of the TV screen. By 1991, computers were
already celebrating what has become known as "convergence," the greatest
technological marriage of all times, with the telephone (the most power-
ful of the unsung technologies of communication). The fundamental
polarity had changed. Humans were mobile, active, changing - but so
was the increasingly intelligent environment that machines were creating.
The old comfortable relationship between subjects and objects was chal-
lenged. Strange new breeds of consciousness had begun to flourish with
interactive systems: real-time self adjusting databases; rapid updating of
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political statements via polling and spin-doctoring; intermediate, anony-
mous, asynchronous, mind collectives on nets, usenets, newsnets, eather-
nets and internets; distributed parallel processing; self-adjusting learning
expert systems with neural networks.
And, to make matters even more complicated, both time and space are
now being trashed in "real-time" technologies and "virtual reality"
machines. With Virtual Reality, interactivity brings renewed considera-
tions about time in space. We are loosing ground: not content to argue
with our screens, after decades of passive acceptance of their dictatorship,
we now feel the need to penetrate them, to plunge into them as so many
Ulysses beckoned by the siren calls in an ocean of electrons.
From now on, between the subject and the object is the traject, the
pattern of transmission or travel. Now that we share our privacy with
world distributed databanks, we have to add another mental being to the
construction of our own private mind, the interjective. We are both statis-
tics and persons all at once. Our prized psychological legacy, our personal
"point-of-view;' the greatest gift of the greatest designers, the painters
and architects of the Renaissance and after, is now being challenged by a
much deeper, much larger, much more intimate and intense, and perhaps
intimidating, perception - that of our "point-of-being." The deepest
thought of Marshall McLuhan, in my opinion, was not the "The medium
is the message." It is the lesser known, equally succinct, more enigmatic
statement: "In the electronic age, we wear all mankind as our skin."
Indeed, the world is not "om there" anymore, it is right here, under
my skin. The other fundamental paradigmatic shift accompanying inter-
activity is the shift from the visual to the tactile sensory processing.
While the printing press generated strings of data affecting our visual
processing strategies and bringing on perspective as the distantiated,
objective spatial arrangement for our personal information processing,
electronic media are bringing the world and what we still call reality
right into our bodies as extensions of our central nervous system. Interac-
tivity is a technical term for the extensions of our proprioceptive and tac-
tile relationships to the environment.
The result of all this is that we are all - including designers - fright-
fully confused. The creation of meaning is not homogenous anymore, ide-
ologies have been thoroughly trashed along with the Berlin Wall, and TV
is henceforth too decentralized to pretend to the status of a "public mind"
anymore and in some way, which does indeed recall the heyday of the first
Renaissance, when people began to make up their own minds with the
rapid spread of books, we cannot let other people or institutions do our
thinking for us; we are under the responsibility of creating meaning our-
selves in our much mediated dialogue with the world.
Is all this leading to a political platform for the design industry? Perhaps
not directly, but it is to artists and designers that more and more people
will turn to ask for an intelligible and livable technological environment;
it is to designers and artists that they will look for a comprehensive
approach to reality; it is from designers and artists that we could expect a
new civism, one addressing the global as well as the local needs. After all,
if cities managed to reduce social anarchy to civic order, it was not just
the military or the police action, it was largely because architects, plan-
ners, restaurateurs, painters, poets, novelists, dramatists and musicians
provided from within and did not imposed from without, the need and
the urge for a social reality that was truly satisfying, if only for short peri-
ods of time. The responsibility of design is to make this world livable, not
just for those who have the means, but for all. This is not wishful think-
ing, not rhetorical, it is the expression of a very strong feeling that, if they
are supported by enlightened design with the greater good and the larger
reach of people and the greatest respect of differing cultures in mind, the
contents of our newly developing global psychology will be thrilling and
worth living for.
59


Design, Interactivity and the Production of Meaning

Théberge, Paul

The Act of Listening in the Age of Digital Musical Instruments

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Daniel Bougnoux is a Professor at
the Universite Stendahl in Grenoble.
He is a specialist in the science of
communications and has written
Sciences de I'information et de la com-
munication (Larousse, collection
"Textes essentiels" 1993). He writes
frequently for literary and scientific
publications on subjects such as the
documenting of psychoanalysis, and
on the paradigm of self reference in
literature and social science.
Dale Bradley is a PhD candidate
in the Social and Political Thought
Program at York University.
Nancy Campbell is Curator of
the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre
in Guelph.
Critical Art Ensemble is a collec-
tive of six artists of various special-
izations, committed to the production
of criticism and new genre art that
explores the intersections between
critical theory, art and technology.
Kevin Dowler is an SSHRC post-
doctoral fellow affiliated with the
School for Studies in Art and
Culture at Carleton University.
He is presently working on a history
of cultural institutions in Canada.
Steven Fong is on the faculty of the
School of Architecture and Land-
scape Architecture at the University
of Toronto. His work has been pub-
lished in Abitare, Arts, Lotus Interna-
tional, The Canadian Architect, and
Progressive Architecture.
Veronica Hollinger is Chair of the
Cultural Studies Program at Trent
University, Peterborough, and is co-
editor of Science-Fiction Studies.
She has written extensively on post-
modern theatre, science-fiction and
vampires.
Toshio Iwai is Artist in Residence
atthe Centre of Art and Media
Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. As
an interactive media artist, he began
experimenting with animation in
1981. He became a cult figure in
Japan with his computer generated
virtual sets for Einstein TV and for the
virtual sets and characters for the
immensely popular daily interactive
children's show for Fuji-TV, Ugo Ugo
Lhuga. He is currently working on
Soundfantasy, an advanced version
of his Music Insects for the Super
Nintendo Entertainment System.
Derrick de Kerckhove is Director
of the McLuhan Program in Culture
and Technology at the University of
Toronto. He worked with Marshall
McLuhan for over 10 years as a
translator, co-author and assistant.
His most recent book, Brainframes:
Technology, Mind and Business
(Bosch & Keuning, 1990), addresses
the differences between the effects
of television, computers and hyper-
media on corporate culture, business
practices and markets.
Yoshitomo Morioka is a Tokyo-
based art critic and writer who has
written extensively on technology
and cultural production.
Alain Renaud is a professor of
Anthropology and Aesthetics at
the Ecole d'Architecture de Sainte-
Etienne. He is experimenting with
informational recomposition of
images and the aesthetic, epistemo-
logical and anthropological dimen-
sions of digital imagery.
Catherine Richards is an Ottawa-
based artist and writer. Her piece
Spectral Bodies was produced at
the Computer Science Dept. at the
University of Alberta with the first
virtual reality system in Canada.
Her work has been Widely exhibited,
most recently in Antwerp, Linz and
Helsinki.
Suzan Sel~uk is a student of archi-
tecture who is currently completing
her second degree at the University
of Toronto School of Architecture
and Landscape Architecture. She
is the co-author of The Cabin in the
Electronic Woods (Printed Matterl
DIA Foundation), and is also cur-
rently working as assistant director
of Culture Lab books 2 and 3.
Allucquere Stone is the director
of the ACT Multimedia Laboratory at
the University of Texas at Austin.
She has written widely on cyber-
space, gender, cultural studies and
feminism. A primary force behind
the International Conferences on
Cyberspace, she recently hosted
3CYBERCONF in Austin.
Matthew Talbot·Kelly trained as
an architect at Carleton University;
he works and designs on the com-
puter. He is currently preparing a
performance utilizing the Bedlam
Stage.
Paul Theberge is a professor in
the Dept. of Communication Studies
at Concordia University. He teaches
sound production and lectures on
the social and cultural aspects of
music industries
Joanne Yamaguchi is currently
on a fellowship and is writing a book
about cyberspace and virtual reality.
She is also organizing the Newton
Session for SEAM '95 in San
Francisco.


Contributors

Bougnoux, Daniel

Virtuality and the Ghost of Religion

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