This prophetic essay revisits questions posed by philosopher Walter Benjamin in the age cyber art. I wrote it in 1994 when most Canadians didn't know what the internet was and many had never heard the term. The web was new and experimental and its terminology uncertain.

The internet is a new and unprecedented vehicle which defies our culture’s widely held preconceptions of art, media and power. Herein I have tried to come to an understanding of some of the main issues surrounding personal and political aspects of the internet as an artistic vehicle, much the way Walter Benjamin did with his essay that addressed issues surrounding "mechanical reproduction" in 1938. The net is still at the outermost fringe of our culture. It is still in the process of being defined and its full impact on our culture has yet to emerge. I therefore do not have the luxury of hindsight to use during my inquiry, but then again, neither did Benjamin.

No Definition

The internet (the international computer network) is a network of computers which began in the 1960s under the direction of the United States military. Very quickly, other large institutions worldwide such as governments, corporations and universities joined their local computer networks to the net. I must make it clear that just because the US military was the cradle of the net does not mean that they are at the centre of it. The net has no centre and nobody controls or owns it. One either connects to the net and thereby becomes part of it (known as getting wired) or one does not. Recently, small businesses and individuals have been getting wired by storm, and the net continues to grow exponentially as the cost of computer hardware and net access continues to plummet.

The net allows all computers on it to share digital information. Initially this was confined to texts such as newsgroups and email, but now full colour digital photographs, animations, and stereo sound recordings have become commonplace. Digital art has emerged: art which makes full use of the digital medium to produce native digital works. By contrast, digitized photo-, video- or phono- graphics are of works which were originally produced by and for non-digital mediums. Bianca Jaggar’s Dream Home, a virtual reality domain in which visitors can see and do private things in different rooms, is an example of native digital art on the net. You can even leave graffiti on the bathroom walls. An example of digitized art might be a high resolution digitized colour graphic of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Further, a new mouse driven user friendly interface standard known as the world wide web (WWW) now exists, making the net immediately useable by people who are otherwise computer illiterate.

The net is the principal example of cyberpunk, a post-modern social phenomenon by which a state-of-the-art technology very quickly escapes the grasp of the elite who developed it and falls into the hands of street level "hackers" who redevelop it for themselves. In this case, the net was conceived in secret by the most powerful military on Earth to facilitate an organized nation wide atomic assault, but is now built of millions of organizations and individuals worldwide who both further its development and use it as a personal, economic, political, scientific, educational and artistic cultural tool. The net defies definition; it is constantly redefined as it continues to expand and evolve. New net utilities such as the web and new uses such as digital art galleries are being developed by hackers and users everywhere.

On its surface the net might sound like a mere extension of the same mechanical reproduction which Walter Benjamin and others since have contemplated. But it is apparent to anyone who has surfed the net that even at this early stage it is well beyond the wildest televisual dreams of Marshall McLuhan’s "cybernation". Benjamin’s concern with the art "object" when there is no object, "location" when there is no geography, "providence" when there is no ownership and "authenticity" when there are no originals makes at least three things clear. First, our culture’s widely held preconceptions of art, media, and power are once again faced with a direct assault from within. Secondly, Benjamin’s particular conclusions are of little use to us when faced with digital art on the net. And finally, his field of inquiry has never been more relevant.

No Original Object, No Location

Benjamin states that the original does not "preserve all its authority" when confronted with its technical reproduction for two reasons, "First, the process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. " To support this idea, Benjamin sites examples of photographic manipulation which immediately shows his argument to be inconsistent. In as much as the photographic reproduction is a perfect copy (which it never is), it is not removed from the original. In as much as a photographer processes the original and thereby produces something unique and removed, the product is not a "reproduction" at all and therefore allows the original to remain unique. Either way the original preserves its "authority". Digital reproduction and manipulation enhances the potential in both of these directions. First, a unique digital artwork is no less unique when it is copied because there is no physical object which could be called the "original". While there is still a culturally and historically specific origin of any artwork, there is never a digital art object, original or otherwise. Second, through digital manipulation, any digital artwork can be digitally altered any number of times thus producing any number of versions. Any one version will be unique regardless of how many times it may be copied or how many locations it may be perceived at. What makes a digital artwork unique is not its specific object, indeed there is no object, nor is any physical "singularity" an issue. What makes a digital artwork unique is the specific configuration of information that it is.

The second reason Benjamin sites for originals not preserving their authority when faced with mechanical reproductions is this:

Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its local to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room"

Once on the internet a work of art has no specific location and there is no object to "move", even metaphorically. Benjamin states that "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." Actually, original art objects rarely "happen to be" anywhere, but are and have been moved about at the whim of those who own them. Even Florentine frescos have been pulled from their church walls to travel as far as Tokyo and Washington, D.C. In this context the leap to digital art on the net which can be everywhere at any instant is not so great. Site specific art is only one specific mode of art, and you will not find any on the net. Thinking of the net in geographic terms is a mistake, a site on the internet is more accurately referred to as a domain .

Non Linear Interactive Multimedia

A major assault on our traditional concepts of art, media, and power is the non linear capabilities of the net and digital art. The simplest example of how digital art can defy the traditional belief in linear reception is hypertext. If this text you are reading were a hypertext page, you could point with your mouse and click on any of the bolded words for any action predefined by me. This action could be a written definition of the word, the sound of it being pronounced, an illustration, a movie, an entirely different hypertext page on the subject word by a different author held in some computer in Australia or even a hypertext bibliography. The web consists of such interlinked hypertext pages so there is no beginning and no end. One might think of the web as a massive and constantly updated collection of divinely cross referenced multimedia footnotes. One usually starts at one of many webserver pages which are especially written hypertext entry points to the web (many people write their own webserver pages), or do an automated search through the web for instances of a subject, title, word or name.

The non linear capabilities of the digital domain requires the audience to make decisions which affect their experience. Non linear digital art both demands and offers an immediate response. Just as one can decide in the real space where to go, what to look at and how to look at it, in the entirely artificial cyberspace of the digital domain allows people to become actively involved within it. The implications of this are astounding. First, the conception of the artist and viewer as distinct and autonomous bodies, a myth which still holds wide currency today, is challenged to the point of bankruptcy by art on the net. In his 1992 article "The Work of Art in the Domain of Digital Production", P. Jukes states that "For the first time, artworks will be actively created by the spectator (within parameters set by the artist)." In fact it is not the "first time" at all. All art regardless of the medium is actively created by the spectator within parameters set by the artist. Fully non-linear interactive cyberart merely makes this negotiation between art and audience unavoidably apparent to those who get wired.

It is now more than ever apparent that "the media is the message", to use McLuhan’s phrase; they are not separate but intrinsically bound up together. Non linear digital art is as much a medium to create art as it is an artwork in itself. One can not simply separate the technical tools or medium from the art. While I believe that this holds true for all traditional mediums, it is only in the fully interactive digital domain that it becomes immediately and inescapably apparent. Hence digital art on the net will not so much change the nature of art as it will change our widely held cultural preconceptions of what art is, and in retrospect what it always was.

Not Mass Production, but Mass Access

The net is not about mass production but mass access. Mass production requires an object that can be mechanically reproduced many times and be widely distributed. There is no cyberart object to produce let alone mass produce. Further, digital information is not distributed by a central body, it is retrieved by the end user. Anyone who gets wired has access to all art on the net, and the only object they require is access to a networked computer terminal. While this minimal requirement may seem small to us, it is beyond the means of most people in the world. To date the internet is a first world phenomenon. Further, Europeans lag behind in internet development and access because of the enormous tariffs it imposes on imported digital equipment and its pay per use telephony. However, as today’s new brilliant inventions become tomorrow’s trash, "obsolete" gear has spawned an unofficial second hand market the magnitude of which can not be calculated. Foreign students who return to Nigeria, for example, often return with an old IBM 286 clone which here only gathers dust. It is a case of perceiving a glass as either half full or half empty; while access to the net in the third world is rare, it is still better than no access. As access to the net increases, the often geographically remote third world will gain involvement with art, technology and information that had previously been physically inaccessible to them due to the distances and costs involved.

Jukes puts forth the following observation in his article:

Not long ago, the honour of being typeset, of "seeing your name in print", conferred real authority. Today, with the relative accessibility of desktop publishing, anyone can produce near typecast quality. If he could look over my shoulder as I write this on my PC now, Benjamin might not be so worried after all.

Jukes seems not to understand that the bottleneck was never the ability to produce a readable copy, but one of mechanical reproduction and distribution. Desktop publishing has diversified the ownership of the paper press, but that accomplishment is nothing compared to the potential the net offers for distribution of not only text but multimedia hypertext. It may be that the power difference between those who are wired vs. those who are not wired will soon be analogous to the well documented power difference between the literate and illiterate. As a first world intellectual reading this the question you should be asking yourself is not whether you will get wired, but how soon.

No Perceived Aura

When Walter Benjamin wrote about the "aura" of a work of art he was writing about something that is not a physical part of the art object but is very real nonetheless. The "aura" that he so valiantly grappled with is our perception of the medium and art mode which contextualizes the artwork. Artwork in any new medium will seem to be void of an aura as just as the then new mediums of photography and phonography seemed to be largely void of an aura to Benjamin. In his 1989 article "Recasting Benjamin’s Aura", Patrick Frank does not question Benjamin’s belief that:

The mechanical production of artworks severs them from their places in the fabric of tradition and thus erodes the aura of originality, uniqueness, and permanence which attended them at first: "The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition...."

This belief is shattered when faced with the fact that the domain of tradition includes mechanical reproduction. And who is to know what if any "aura" attended art in ancient mediums "at first"? Today, black and white photos and vinyl LPs are thick with aura, as are Duchamp’s ready-mades, DADA montage and Picasso’s collage art. Duchamp, like so many simulationists since, tried to eliminate any personal style or "hand" of the artist in his ready-mades. By doing so he shocked many into reconsidering art. Today any ready-made art object in a gallery screams "DUCHAMP!" to us loud and clear, complete with the heavy baggage of historical, political, and cultural associations. The aura of a work of art consists of the discourse which surrounds it and its medium(s). The ready-made, photograph and analog sound recording are traditional mediums, especially now that they are confronted by digital art.

Digital art is new, and is therefore perceived as lacking an aura by many. In his article "The Work of Art in the Domain of Digital Production", P. Jukes expressed his concern with the present lack of aura in digital art:

...the digital image has one great flaw which casts a shadow over its artistic potential. In the first years of the compact disc, many people complained that the aural quality was too bright, almost empty. Even today, I rather like my old vinyl Gigli recording, complete with scratches, pops and hisses. It reminds me that this Italian tenor is singing across great gulfs of years, from the other side of the grave.

Jukes describes similar "problems" with video as opposed to its more traditional counterpart, film. Jukes’ article reads very much like Benjamin describing his problems with photography and phonography when they were new. As cyberart theorist Diana Hulick points out, "The acid colours of [a computer’s] uniformly glowing screen are as arbitrary as the black-and-white or colour tonality of the analog photograph." Like Benjamin before him, Jukes was left at a loss (of aura) when confronted by a new medium. Also like Benjamin before him, Jukes contributed to the new discourse surrounding the fledgling medium and therefor helps to construct its new aura!

Many people are now actively discussing cyberart. The product of this new discourse is none other than a new "aura" which already surrounds both digital art and the net. Hulick proposes that "if we accept George Kubler’s definition of art as an inventory of culturally significant artifacts, we must also accept the possibility of an apparent lack of traditional stylistic elements in new artifacts." While cyberart is still on the margins of our culture, it will soon become a traditional medium just as photography and film have. The computer has already become more than object, it is now also an icon and metaphor that demands new ways of thinking about ourselves and our art.

Ownership, Validation and Censorship

The transition to the digital age of cyberspace is creating huge rifts in our culture to which we must and will adjust. At the same time our inherited institutions of ownership, validation and censorship are not going to simply lay down and die. Something has to give.

Ownership

The net poses a threat to our materially based information economy. In his 1988 article "The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems", Bill Nichols observed that legal decisions have funneled control of cybernetic systems "back to a discrete proprietor, making what is potentially disruptive once again consonant with the social formation it threatens to disrupt." In 1988 the net was not nearly as widespread as it has become, so it is understandable that Nichols would still be thinking about the digital information in the archaic material terms of the floppy diskette. With our legal system left behind in the erupting age of information anarchy, our social formation is now being disrupted.

Books and images once hoarded in library stacks are being digitized and made available to anyone, anywhere, on the net. "Instead of a fortress of knowledge, there will be an ocean of information." The French National Library, for instance, is making 100,000 of the "canonical works of the 20th century" electronically available. The British Library and the Library of Congress have similar programs because it is much cheaper for them to administrate and care for digital information than material mediums. Further, most texts are digitally created in the first place so it is much cheaper to add new digital texts than having to print books, and the cost of reprinting existing texts and images far exceeds the cost of digitizing them before they decay. Electronic cataloging systems are the norm today and most are accessible from the net, but soon we will see more and more entries that, when selected, will download the actual digitized or digital work we want to our home computer.

If information including digital art is divinely cross-referenced and freely accessible on the net, then how can people own information and how will they be paid for producing and cataloging it? The same problem is faced by artists who work in the digital domain. But if access to digital books on a library’s electronic shelves is not free, then what is left of the library’s traditional reason for being, namely, storing, cataloging and making information available to those who cannot afford to buy it? The publishers’ power stems from the cost and difficulty of printing. In an electronic world, "printing" is trivial; anyone can copy a digital or digitized text or artwork with a few keystrokes.

The commercial consequences of electronic libraries could be huge - and publishers’ trade associations are already closely watching libraries with a suspicious eye.... one of the more vexing questions concerns copyright. If libraries do not charge for electronic books, not only can they not reap rewards commensurate with their own increasing importance, but libraries can also put publishers out of business with free competition. If libraries do charge, that will disenfranchise people from information - a horrible thing. There is no obvious compromise.

The role of the printers may be diminished and in most cases eliminated, while the expanding position of the publicly funded librarian/editor/curator/critic becomes central to our culture.

One "solution" was "offered" by Bill Gate’s Microsoft Corporation. Gates somehow managed to buy the "digital rights" to many famous historic works of art and released them on a CD-ROM called Microsoft Gallery. The CD-ROM was encoded in such a way that individual files could not be copied from it, they could only be displayed on the computer screen. Unfortunately for Gates, within a week of its release hackers had figured out how to capture the digital information from their video cards as it was leaving for their screens, then save the digital image information to any standard graphic format. The hackers did not really want to "steal" the images, they just wanted to see if they could hack them. The concept of privately owned "digital rights" of publicly owned art may be frightening, but it is equally untenable.

Intellectual property rights in virtual environments is another big problem our culture will have to deal with. An interesting precedent has been set by a recent American Supreme Court decision on fast food franchises which puts into question the value existing copyright legislation. A major legal tool for defining the "virtual real estate" of the future will likely be found in an esoteric branch of trademark law known as "trade dress" protection. Normally, trademarks are brand names or logos indicting the source of a commercial product. But through trade dress, trade marks have been extended to brand-indicating design features of the products themselves. The court ruled that the distinctive interior of a certain taco restaurant was covered by trade dress, regardless of whether customers ever perceive it as trademark. The possibility of persecuting a competitor who sells knock-offs of the virtual realities you developed should be possible under trade dress. The exception, of course, is functionality: you cannot claim to own the idea of virtual reality any more than you could a chair. Unfortunately, the line between functionality and decor in virtual reality can not easily be drawn. It is yet another case confounding case of the media being the message.

What we may find is that the bottom will drop out of the information market, the whole thing will simply crash. Any profits will have to be made in traditional mediums or media before a digital version can be released on the net, much the way drug companies can own chemical compounds before they are made "generic". This however can not help the artist who works with native digital media. Digital art may be free, but about as profitable as chalk drawings on the sidewalk. One possible scenario is that computers and industrial automation, the ultimate products of multinational corporate capitalism, may cause the collapse of the very economic system that produced them. Another scenario is one by which everything on the net will come packaged with advertising, following the model of television. It will be technically possible to separate the work from the ads, but most people will not bother. Hypertext pages may soon appear on hypertext commercial place mats which advertise everything from fast food to Manhattan real estate. What’s even "better", you can order whatever it is that is being sold with the click of your mouse button as you can now when you shop at the new virtual malls. While sponsors will not be able to decide what gets published and catalogued on the net, they will decide who gets paid. In this final and most likely scenario, information including digital and digitized art will not be sold - rather, it will sell.

Validation

With a dead digital art market which can deal no material art objects, the validation of digital art and artists will have to be done entirely by critics, reviewers and art historians. This work will be key to any public funding, private sponsorship and the ability for the layperson interested in art to find something interesting in the forever mounting gigabytes of datatrash on the net. A new breed of international media aware electronic critics is on the rise, some of whom have gained tremendous followings. Two of the most widely known critics of the digital domain are Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. They not only write cyberart theory and criticism themselves, they also promote work by new writers in the field with their cyber magazine Ctheory which now exists in hypertext on the web. Their latest book, Spasm, comes shrink wrapped with an audio CD by electronic composer Steve Gibson and has gone through three printings in its first year. It is ironic and revealing, however, that most written discourse about the digital domain is still published in sellable hardcopy (on paper). Without sales made possible by traditional material mediums, the independent digital critic, like the digital artist, would be penniless.

Censorship

As the internet becomes more populated, government regulators and law enforcement agencies are becoming more concerned at the fact that the net is a powerful medium which is immune to state control. In an interview with the Krokers, Arthur expressed his fear that the net could place enough stress on the status quo to create a reactionary conservative move by the worlds most powerful governments who together might shut down or at the very least severely cripple the net. This possibility, however, is becoming more remote as more people get wired. Like literacy before it, the net is an explosive and tenacious idea.

The recent Canadian publication ban on details concerning the Karla Homolka trail was a testing ground for state ability to censor information on the net. The ban was surprisingly successful at keeping Canadians in the dark, except for wired Canadians. A net newsgroup, "alt.fan.karlahomolka" was wildly popular and allowed anyone to post or read even the most graphic details of the case. Not only Canadians, but the wired worldwide became interested and informed about both the case and the legal issues surrounding the ban. Nothing could be done to stop it, and as more people get wired publication bans will become more untenable.

Pornography that can be described as "unredeemed trash" has found wide currency on the net. Thus Canada’s expensive and highly restrictive battery of censorship legislation and tools of implementation are being rendered ineffectual. More importantly, many literary, scholarly and artistic works which our law enforcement bureaucracies have deemed "obscene" and thereby illegal may now freely be downloaded into any Canadian home. The very long list of banned works include the following recent additions:

Bad Attitude, an erotic and issues oriented magazine by, for and about lesbians which was seized and declared illegal in 1992. This was the first use of the Butler Decision, a law which was particularly intended to protect women from the allegedly harmful effects of pornography on men.

Andrea Dworkin's books Women Hating and Pornography: Men Possessing Women which were seized and declared illegal in Canada by Canada Customs even though they are one feminist's radical pro-censorship position against pornography.

A Place I've Never Been: Stories by David Leavitt was seized by Canada Customs October 8th, 1993 on its way to Glad Day Book Shop and was declared illegal in Canada. Leavitt is a critically acclaimed American author who writes about gay life. He was scheduled to read at Toronto's International Festival of Authors on October 23rd, a mere two weeks after the seizure.

Research is a bi-anual New York based periodical which contains articles on specific contemporary cultural subjects or individual artists and is now illegal in Canada.

Many gay erotic drawings by the late Tom of Finland are determined illegal in Canada by Canada Customs. Presently the Tom of Finland Foundation keeps a library of erotic art in Finland and an extensive laser disk documentation of works for distribution on the net. The foundation hopes to build a museum which specializes in erotic art from around the world.

Paintings by artist Eli Langer were confiscated by Toronto Police from the Mercer Union artist run gallery in 1993. In this intriguing case, charges against Langer have been dropped but his paintings are still awaiting trial. The material art objects themselves are guilty until proven innocent by a court of law!

I find it interesting that the only people who ever have the ability to censor information are those in power. But many are optimistic that the net will continue to usher in a new era of a free press and freedom of expression; an era which will especially affect traditionally repressive countries such as Canada. The flip side of the same coin is that hate mongering can not be stopped either.

Alan Borovoy is the general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and a writer for the Globe and Mail newspaper. In his book When Freedoms Collide he makes the following conclusion after citing many attempted definitions of "obscene" material, the OFVRB's banning of the NFB's anti-porn film Not a Love Story, and customs officials seizing a film dealing with male masturbation even though the intended recipient of the film was the University of Manitoba Medical School:

Our language simply lacks the precision to make the requisite distinctions [concerning a definition of obscenity]. Thus, the key question is which of the competing risks is the least dangerous to incur. Is it better (or least bad) to risk the suppression of works of art and important political statements? Or is it better (or least bad) to risk the greater proliferation of unredeemed trash? At this stage in history I believe it is more sensible to opt for the latter danger over the former one.

While I agree with Borovoy that it is far better to have an open forum where hate and its counter discourse meet than to not have any forum at all, there are many including our more than 5000 Canada Customs censorship officials who disagree. This issue may never be resolved, but it appears that the new cautious optimism of artists and civil libertarians is warranted. It may be that only non-digitized traditional mediums will continue to be censored while the "untouchable" digital or digitized art on the net will render the state’s rational and the public budget for censorship inane.

Conclusion: History, Power, the Exotic and Art

To conclude I must ask you stand back with me and try to understand better our Western culture as it is invading itself with cyberspace. It is a story about art and power. It is also about the more illusive qualities of history and interest value.

Concerning History

More people have lived since 1900 than in the entire history of the planet before that date. It has become disturbingly obvious that 1800 and 1900 are closer in history than 1940 is to 1950, and that 1980 and 1990 are yet more distant. Now, every year, more is published than in the entire preceding century. The amount of time perceived by humanity in 1994 was well over five billion years - a mind boggling value completely beyond any concrete comprehension. Viewed in this light, cyberspace has already been with us for much of our history. The 32 bit computer with which I write runs at 33 megahertz, a value which again is beyond any concrete comprehension, and it is considered slow. The traditional conception of history as linear and constant has come under such duress that in practical terms it has entirely collapsed.

A more workable theory concerning history is to see it as a system of ideas. Vast and messy, the present began in Mesopotamia and may still have thousands of years to go. The bulk of what comprises the present so far lies roughly between 1850 and 2000, with spurts and fits happening at various earlier periods. The "present" I am referring to is history - the recording of ideas - which has sewn a cohesive present from the practically eternal expanse of space and time which surround it. Western culture leaves nothing untouched, it appropriates whatever it can for its own use or examination. Our culture consumes other cultures and its own past. But it doesn't stop there, it also appropriates the future: "the final frontier", the "avant-garde". In fact, we are psychologically and physically addicted to technology and its advancement. We would die without it and the present would come to an end.

Concerning power

The state controls the traffic lights and we all follow its direction to avoid disaster. Imagine that the traffic lights broke, the electricity went off, would their be a disaster? No. Anyone could stand in the centre of the intersection and direct traffic with their hands. With a minimal knowledge of hand signals, you could control thousands of tons of plastic, metal, and glass which sift along at fantastic rates. Not only that, everyone would appreciate that you came along at just the right moment to ensure their safety and restore a workable order. You would instantly be accepted as the state at that intersection, and you would therefore be the state at that intersection. At the intersection of culture and the internet there are no lights and there is no law. One would assume then that a self appointed regulator would come along and assume the power of the state, controlling the flow of information. In fact this can never happen because the net is a true network with a potentially infinite number of virtual intersections. The only way a state could control the net would be to declare owning a computer without a licence punishable by death as Iraq has done for typewriters. Even then the net would only be crippled in that particular state. The costs involved in effectively controlling the free flow of information in a literate nation, let alone a cybernation, far exceeds any benefit a government might derive from it.

Concerning interest value

An aspect of art history which is largely overlooked is interest value. The exotic has always had a clear advantage over the banal. The exotic catches human attention and demands a response. The exotic animals in the bestiaries are an example, the exotic size of the Parthanon is another, the exotic formal qualities of African art, roman ruins, an IBM 586 with Super VGA and fax modem, the list goes on for ever. When something like the internet stands outside of tradition, it captures our immediate interest, then we capitalise on this by distributing it to the point where it becomes integrated with our tradition. This process of appropriation has gone on so long that not even the future is sufficiently exotic to us any more. We entertain ourselves idly with romantic notions of the past and many have deduced from this that art died. But the history of art is not a linear history of styles which progress toward some kind of perfection (and by that logic death) as modern art theory would have us believe. While the presence of historically specific styles cannot be denied, styles come and go at an ever more frantic pace as history collapses. The history of art is really the history of the appropriation of new or foreign ideas by the vacuum cleaner or black hole we call Western culture. Our history of assimilating ideas is what sets our culture apart, it is a defining feature.

Concerning art

To see art as a series of styles which evolve from gloom and become increasingly enlightened as time goes on would completely ignore the evidence I have outlined above. Art by that conception is dead, or more accurately, that conception of art is dead. That conception of art suffered brain death in 1923 when Malevich painted his black square, but the heart of the conception did not know enough to stop beating and its popular inertia pushed it through to the point where today there are still people who say, "post-modernism, what's that?"

To see all of western culture, including its art, as a system of ideas which form and grow in concentric rings, is a more reliable model. Like the concentric rings of a tree, the centre is dead wood, banal but by no means rotten. Near the very centre one might find Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, the rate of growth per year was minimal, and the system of ideas was a mere sapling. Since then concentric rings were consistently laid down, frozen in history, each larger than the last. The exotic was plentiful and found on every side of tradition, consumed and deposited at the centre of Western culture as dead wood, and the process repeats itself. The avant-garde is not at the front of a linear procession as the military metaphor suggests, it is rather at the outer fringe of Western culture and is appropriating the exotic in all directions simultaneously. Like any single model, this one is extraordinarily simplistic, and it is at this point where the model must become more complicated than a tree analogy will allow. It will suffice to say that what we call Western culture is not only today’s living ring just under the bark, but the entire cross section of recorded history. This cross-section, which includes King Tut’s tomb and Bianca’s Dream Home, is entirely contemporary; all of it exists, dead or alive, right now.

At closer inspection the living ring of Western culture appropriates both outward and inward. Living Western culture consumes its own history which has taken on an exotic aura with time as well as anything new or foreign (and therefore exotic) which surrounds it. Whatever the frontier, the process necessarily converts the exotic to the banal. When big industry was exotic we had an oil refinery with smokestacks on the back of our ten dollar note. Now that 95% of Canadians live in metropolitan centres and are no longer impressed with oil refineries, we have an exotic bird on our note. With Western culture's insatiable appetite for the exotic, artists and critics are turning in every direction possible to find a fix. Sometimes there are ideological head on collisions in the frantic search for something different to consume. Any attempt to take control of the state of art may initially receive some appreciation for what order is imposed, especially by investors, but many will refuse to buy into the declared order. Whoever it is that claims to have an ordered and linear theory of fine art will quickly be run over by anyone doing anything imagination catchingly defiant of that order.

Art on the net, like the net itself, is still in its exotic experimental stage and is therefore a hot issue, but not for long. As an aura for cyberart evolves and the digital domain becomes integrated with the domain of tradition, more reliable models will have to replace our dominant conception of art. Whatever the specifics, the way we perceived ourselves and our art before cyberspace will become as difficult for us to imagine as the way we perceived ourselves and our art before mechanical reproduction.

Selected Further Reading

Beyond what is in the footnotes.

On the Net:

alt.artcom

alt.art.ctheory

alt.binaries.fineart

alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art.digitized

clari.living.arts

rec.arts.fine

Hardcopy:

Carrol, Jim, The Canadian Internet Handbook, Prentice Hall; 1994.

Kroker, Arthur, Technology and the Canadian Mind, Montreal: New World Perspectives; 1984.

Pryor, Sally, "Thinking of Oneself as a Computer", in Leonardo, 1991, v.24 n.5. Pages 585-590.

Stelarc, "Prothetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevoloutionary Strategies", in Leonardo, v.24 n.5; 1991. Pages 591-595.