Way Back in 1995*
Tom Sherman, 1999
You expect middle-aged and elderly people to reminisce, to remember the good old days when they were young and crazy, or when they used to work for peanuts (and a candy bar used to cost a nickel). But in a culture driven by computers, today’s engines of obsolescence, people find themselves over the hill before they even begin to make their mark. Machines and systems turnover so fast today, and this churn apparently overwhelms the artists and designers operating these machines to the extent that they appear to be aging prematurely. (The old days are now way back in 1995!)
Despite the fact that machines and systems are at the heart of today’s digital transformation, computer culture isn’t driven by equipment or software manufacturers. It is pushed along by computer operators. Cultural scenes have always been generated and manipulated by operators. Such operators were traditionally hustlers, self-promoters, and adept exploiters of critical resources (the means of production and distribution). The digital art domain is run by a new breed of operators. Machine operators. Actually, because the machines are naturally networked, the new operators are really cooperators. Stand-alone operators are history. Computer culture is the domain of cooperators.
One of the most amazing things about the digital transformation of culture is the way the tools of production and distribution are proliferating and saturating the environment. Nonlinear video-editing software is arriving in our mailboxes in the form of advertising supplements. The means of production and distribution, once limited and controlled and exploited by traditional operators, are now practically everywhere. Artists and designers in unprecedented numbers are assembling digital studios, making work and distributing this work without institutional sanction, bypassing the gatekeepers, commercial or nonprofit, the governing corporate institutions of material, intellectual, or spiritual exchange.
With all this traffic running circles around traditional institutions, it makes you wonder what the middlemen and middlewomen (the middlepeople) are doing these days. Institutionalized people function in part as a resistance to change, a moderating force like a social or cultural field of gravity, inert in a positive or negative way, depending on your point of view. Institutions are also memory devices. Middlepeople permit and encourage audiences to take a second look.
The cost of this end run around traditional corporate institutions is minimal, though disturbing to some. In the short term, direct access to audiences has definitive advantages. But in the longer term, early adapters to the Web are beginning to realize their contemporary history is evaporating before their eyes. Platforms and formats are fading from memory, and network art (cooperative information design) is disappearing before the audience takes a second look (or a first look through the documentation). Actually, network art is being buried by the debris of mundane commercial activity.
Network artists, having taken their work directly to audiences, now (oddly enough) court the middlepeople, the producers, curators, publishers, bureaucrats, teachers, librarians, and archivists, in corporate institutions, to acknowledge, classify, grade, maintain, and preserve this rather recent, momentary history. Network artists now seem to crave recognition and support from the authorities they have spurned. This quest for recognition and certification is bizarre, a kind of appropriation of status by reverse engineering, but then artists have always wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
The glory days and classic works artists reminisce about today will be remembered only if the time and the work is recorded, archived, and historicized. It must be preserved and organized for future audiences or it will vanish. Contemporary art history is always written first and best by the practitioners themselves. History is the compilation and interpretation of evidence; in the case of network art, a vanishing trail of relationships between cooperators. Fortunately, there is a material base to this history. (If consumer behaviour can be tracked in great detail by corporate data-mining operations today, then digital historians and archaeologists can certainly piece together events and “things” created cooperatively through networks in the late twentieth century.) The relationships between cooperators were fixed in digital memory, way back in 1995, and many years before that.
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*Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, Tom Sherman, (edited by Peggy Gale), Banff Centre Press, Banff, Alberta, 2002.
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Professor Tom Sherman
Syracuse University
Department of Transmedia
102 Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse, NY 13210-1210
USA
tel 315.443.1202
fax 315.443.1303
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