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  ROY ASCOTT
The golden age of the electronic, post-biological culture may be far ahead, but the world of digital photography is opening up, just as the world of analog photography as it has been practiced is, if not closing down, then being absorbed within the digital discourse. This is not a debate about the relative merits of gold and silver. It's a matter of attitude, both of the artist and of the viewer. We are at the beginning of the era of postphotographic practice. Although it is true that their various interests are evidently and potently invested more in what cannot be seen at the surface level of reality, in what is invisible, fluid, and transient: human relationships, systems, forces and fields as they are at work in nature, politics, and culture. It's that photography as a stable medium is giving way to a practice which celebrates instability, uncertainty, incompleteness, and transformation. And I don't just mean semantically. What these artists have taken on board is the radical change in the technology of image-emergence, not only how the meaning is announced but how it comes on stage; not only how the world is pictured, or how it is framed, but how frameworks are constructed from which image-worlds can emerge, in open-ended process.




















  RAYMOND BELLOUR
As we can see, the very idea of a calculated image obtained not through recording but through models, according to a form of expression which, over and above language, has dispelled the doubts about meaning and resemblance, does away with the questions of analogy. If the only analogy of the language machine is the human brain, the bounds stretch far beyond what it can handle. But, on the other hand, there is still the eye: there are images, quasi images, what ones sees, and what one foresees. The computer image is always connected with what it represents, no matter what the conditions for the formation and appearance of the representation are (in the form of interactivity or of sight, since it is connected with both, and with all the oscillations that may take place between them). If we take things up where we left them off, we will see that the computer image reduces the power of analogy out of all proportion, while absorbing it and making it disappear by removing the image from recording and time. It is all the more "represented" in that it reduces all representation to zero and, for both the eye and the spirit, can claim of everything it calculates and represents that such things are and are not representations. The computer image is the final, paradoxical expression of the double helix: by itself, without resorting to any precondition, it can virtually modulate the four sides that make it up, and, above all, vary their tensions at will, ad infinitum. In a sense, the pixel is (or will be or would like to be) capable of doing everything. But the extent of this everything suffocates it, and leaves the computer image with doubts about itself, in the grips of its own myth, so to speak, and of what it gives to us.





















  HAKIM BEY
Americans and other "First World" types seem particularly susceptible to the rhetoric of a "metaphysical economy" because we can no longer see (or feel or smell) around us very much evidence of a physical world. Our architecture has become symbolic, we have enclosed ourselves in the manifestations of abstract thought (cars, apartments, offices, schools), we work at "service" or information-related jobs, helping in our little way to move disembodied symbols of wealth around an abstract grid of Capital, and we spend our leisure largely engrossed in Media rather than in direct experience of material reality. The material world for us has come to symbolize catastrophe, as in our amazingly hysterical reaction to storms and hurricanes (proof that we've failed to "conquer Nature" entirely), or our neo-Puritan fear of sexual otherness, or our taste for bland and denatured (almost abstract) food. And yet, this "First World" economy is not self-sufficient. It depends for its position (top of the pyramid) on a vast substructure of old-fashioned material production. Mexican farmworkers grow and package all that Natural food for us so we can devote our time to stocks, insurance, law, computers, video games. Peons in Taiwan make silicon chips for our PCs. "Towel-heads" in the Middle East suffer and die for our sins. Life? Oh, our servants do that for us. We have no life, only "lifestyle";an abstraction of life, based on the sacred symbolism of the Commodity, mediated by the priesthood of the stars, those larger-than-life abstractions who rule our values and people our dreams‹the media-archetypes; or perhaps "mediarchs" would be a better term. Of course this Baudrillardian dystopia doesn't really exist‹yet. It's surprising, however, to note how many social radicals consider it a desirable goal, at least as long as it's called the information revolution" or something equally inspiring. Leftists talk about seizing the means of information-production from the data monopolists.6 In truth, information is everywhere‹even atom bombs can be constructed on plans available in public libraries. As Noam Chomsky points out, one can always access information‹provided one has a private income and a fanaticism bordering on insanity. Universities and "think tanks" make pathetic attempts to monopolize information‹they, too, are dazzled by the notion of an information economy‹but their conspiracies are laughable. Information may not always be "free," but there's a great deal more of it available than any one person could ever possibly use. Books on every conceivable subject can actually still be found through interlibrary loan.7 Meanwhile someone still has to grow pears and cobble shoes. Or, even if these "industries" can be completely mechanized, someone still has to eat pears and wear shoes. The body is still the basis of wealth. The idea of Images as wealth is a "spectacular delusion." Even a radical critique of information can still give rise to an overvaluation of abstraction and data.





















  DAVID BLAIR
As cinema collapses into the computer, where it will meet virtual reality, science, and many other residents of our cultural world, we approach a situation where all the film-production data, gathered from places beyond our ordinary point of view, is passed into a unitary workstation. The maker, sitting in front of the workstation screen works on this data like cellular automata on pixels, forcing various pieces of meaning to interact so that pictures will become more visible to us. However, simultaneously, the maker will also encounter real automata inside the machine.





















  ANNE BRANSCOMB
Cyberspace is a frontier where territorial rights are being established and electronic environments are being differentiated in much the way the Western frontier was pushed back by voyageurs, pioneers, miners, and cattlemen. And the entrepreneurs are arriving with their new institutions and information technology, in much the same way as the pony express and railroads pioneered communications networks during the nineteenth century.
Lawmaking is a complicated process that takes place in a larger universe than the confines of legislatures and courts. Many laws are never written. Many statutory laws are never enforced. Legal systems develop from community standards and consensual observance as well as from litigation and legislative determination. So, too, will the common law of cyberspace evolve as users express their concerns and seek consensual solutions to common problems.
Vannevar




















  BUSH
Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to stick closely to the methods and elements now known and undergoing rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility, not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is only a doubly involved guess.





















  CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE
Assuming that the flesh machine is guided by the pancapitalist imperatives of control and profit, what will occur if these two principles come into conflict with one another? This has been known to happen as social machines march toward maturity. The sight machine is currently facing this very contradiction in the development of the Net. Currently the Net has some space that is relatively open to the virtual public. In these free zones, one can get information on anything, from radical politics to the latest in commodity development. As to be expected, a lot of information floating about is resistant to the causes and imperatives of pancapitalism, and from the perspective of the state is badly in need of censorship. However, the enforcement of limited speech on the Net would require measures that would be devastating to on-line services and phone-service providers, and could seriously damage the market potential of this new tool. (The Net has an unbelievably high concentration of wealthy literate consumers. It's a market pool that corporate authority does not want to annoy.) The dominant choice at present is to let the disorder of the Net continue until the market mechanisms are fully in place, and the virtual public is socialized to their use; then more repressive measures may be considered. Social conservatism taking a back seat to fiscal conservatism seems fairly representative of pancapitalist conflict resolution. The question is, will this policy replicate itself in the flesh machine?





















  JEAN LOUIS COMOLLI
In fact, it is a matter not simply of a gain in the sensitivity of the film but also of a gain in faithfulness "to natural colors", a gain in realism. The cinematic image becomes more refined, perfects its "rendering," competes once again with the quality of the photographic image which had long been using the panchromatic emulsion. The reason for this "technical progress" is not merely technical, it is ideological: it is not so much greater sensitivity to light which counts as "being more true." The hard, contrasty image of the early cinema no longer satisfied the codes of photographic realism developed and sharpened by the spread of photography. In my view, depth (perspective) loses its importance in the production of "reality effects" in favor of shade, range, color. But this is not all.





















  HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
Incapable of any theoretical construction, McLuhan does not present his material as a concept but as the common denominator of a reactionary doctrine of salvation. He admittedly did not invent but was the first to formulate explicitly a mystique of the media that dissolves all political problems in smoke‹the same smoke that gets in the eyes of his followers. It promises the salvation of man through the technology of television and indeed of television as it is practiced today. Now McLuhan's attempt to stand Marx on his head is not exactly new. He shares with his numerous predecessors the determination to suppress all problems of the economic base, their idealistic tendencies, and their belittling of the class struggle in the naive terms of a vague humanism. A new Rousseau‹like all copies, only a pale version of the old‹he preaches the gospel of the new primitive man who, naturally on a higher level, must return to prehistoric tribal existence in the "global village."





















  VILEM FLUSSER
The existential transformation from subject into project is clearly not the result of a "free decision." We are forced into it, just as our distant ancestors saw themselves forced to stand up on two legs because the ecological catastrophe of the period compelled them somehow to cross the space between the more widely scattered trees. We, on the other hand, have to learn to perceive the objects around us, and our own self (which was formerly called "mind," "soul," or simply "identity"), as computations of points. We can no longer be subjects, because there are no more objects whose subjects we might be, and no hard kernel which might be the subject of some object. The subjective attitude and therefore any subjective insight5 have become untenable. We have to leave all that behind us as a childish illusion, and we have to dare to step out into the wide-open field of possibilities. With us, the adventure of becoming human has entered a new phase. This becomes most apparent in the fact that we can no longer distinguish between truth and apparition, or between science and art. We are "given" nothing but realizable possibilities which are "nothing yet." What we call "the world" what our senses, by not entirely clear methods, have computed into perceptions, into emotions, desires, and insights, as well as the senses themselves, all these are reified processes of computation. Science calculates the world as it has previously been put together. It deals with facts, with things made, not with data. Scientists are computer artists avant la lettre, and the results of science are not some "objective insights," but models for handling the computed.





















  N. KATHERINE HAYLES
In this last decade of the twentieth century, information circulates as the currency of the realm. Genetics, warfare, entertainment, communications, grain production, and financial markets number among the sectors of society revolutionized by the shift to an information paradigm. The shift has also profoundly affected contemporary fiction. If the effects on literature are not widely recognized, perhaps it is because they are at once pervasive and elusive. A book produced by typesetting may look very similar to one generated by a computerized program, but the technological processes involved in this transformation are not neutral. Different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification; changes in signification are linked with shifts in consumption; shifting patterns of consumption initiate new experiences of embodiment; and embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds. In fact, each category‹production, signification, consumption, bodily experience, and representation‹is in constant feedback and feedforward loops with the others. Pull any thread in the skein, and the others prove to be entangled in it.





















  MARTIN HEIDEGGER
When we reflect on the modern age, we are questioning concerning the modern world picture [Weltbild].We characterize the latter by throwing it into relief over against the medieval and the ancient world pictures. But why do we ask concerning a world picture in our interpreting of a historical age? Does every period of history have its world picture, and indeed in such a way as to concern itself from time to time about that world picture? Or is this, after all, only a modern kind of representing, this asking concerning a world picture?
What is a world picture? Obviously a picture of the world. But what does "world" mean here? What does "picture" mean? "World" serves here as a name for what is, in its entirety. The name is not limited to the cosmos, to nature. History also belongs to the world. Yet even nature and history, and both interpenetrating in their underlying and transcending of one another, do not exhaust the world. In this designation the ground of the world is meant also, no matter how its relation to the world is thought.
With the word "picture" we think first of all of a copy of something. Accordingly, the world picture would be a painting, so to speak, of what is as a whole. But "world picture" means more than this. We mean by it the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us. "Picture" here does not mean some imitation, but rather what sounds forth in the colloquial expression, "We get the picture" [literally, we are in the picture] concerning something. This means the matter stands before us exactly as it stands with it for us. "To get into the picture" [literally, to put oneself into the picture] with respect to something means to set whatever it is, itself, in place before oneself just in the way that it stands with it, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in this way. But a decisive determinant in the essence of the picture is still missing. "We get the picture" concerning something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us--in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it--as a system. "To get the picture" throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himsel.Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.13 Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.





















  KATHY RAE HUFFMAN
The new electronic territory is media information.This is an invisible architecture without the interface of technology, and it faces new challenges in the public domain. But, it is not a fictional nor simply a virtual environment. Artists, for expressive and theoretical intent, have discovered important lessons about the image and its relationship to this created space, especially as it relates to the vast worldwide Internet territory of seemingly unlimited and compounding information. This space, a potential new shared platform for collaborative artmaking and communication, demands an entirely new use of language, space, and time. And, if we believe Wittgenstein‹that language is also a fundamental technology, and not merely a vehicle for expressing thought but the driver of thought‹then the new information technologies are doubly important for our future understanding of space and information. Very seriously we must judge how they affect our culture, our lives, our living. As a working space, electronic architecture impacts our creative practices and physical reality‹which certainly will bring about new social practices and observed realities.





















  ERKKI HUHTAMO
In summary, it seems to me that a media archeological approach has two main goals: First, the study of the cyclically recurring elements and motives underlying and guiding the development of media culture. Second, the "excavation" of the ways in which these discursive traditions and formulations have been "imprinted" on specific media machines and systems in different historical contexts, contributing to their identity in terms of socially and ideologically specific webs of signification. This kind of approach emphasizes cyclical rather than chronological development, recurrence rather than unique innovation. In doing so it runs counter to the customary way of thinking about technology in terms of constant progress, proceeding from one technological breakthrough to another, and making earlier machines and applications obsolete along the way. The aim of the media archeological approach is not to negate the "reality" of technological development, but rather to offer some balance by placing it within a wider and more multifaceted social and cultural frame of reference.





















  FRIEDRICH KITTLER
This ongoing triumph of software is a strange reversal of Turing's proof that there can be no mathematically computable problem a simple machine could not solve. Instead, the physical Church-Turing hypothesis, by identifying physical hardware with the algorithms forged for its computation, has finally got rid of hardware itself. As an effect, software successfully occupied the empty place and profited from its obscurity. The ever-growing hierarchy of high-level programming languages works exactly the same way as one-way functions in recent mathematical cryptography. This kind of function, when used in its straightforward form, can be computed in reasonable time, for instance, in a time growing only in polynomial expressions with the function's complexity. The time needed for its inverse form, however, that is, for reconstructing from the function's output its presupposed input; would grow at an exponential and therefore unviable rates. One-way functions, in other words, hide an algorithm from its very result. For software, this cryptographic effect offers a convenient way to bypass the fact that, by virtue of Turing's proof, the concept of mental property as applied to algorithms has become meaningless.





















  PIERRE LEVY
For at least several centuries, in the West, the artistic phenomenon has presented itself as follows: a person (the artist) signs a particular object or message (the work), which other persons (the recipients, the public, the critics) perceive, taste, read, interpret, and evaluate. Regardless of the function of the work (religious, decorative, subversive) or its ability to transcend that function and pierce the enigmatic and emotional core within us, it fits into a classic pattern of communication. The sender and the receiver are absolutely distinct, their roles are clearly assigned. The techno-cultural environment that is emerging, however, gives rise to new art forms, ignoring the distinctions between emission and reception, creation, and interpretation. It is only a possibility that has opened up through the current mutation, a possibility that may never materialize or only very marginally. One hopes, above all, to prevent it from closing up prematurely, before it has explored its rich diversity. This new art form allows what is precisely no longer an audience to experience other methods of communication and creation.





















  GEERT LOVINK
Innocence may be lost through committing murder, participating in a little S&M, joining a bikers' club, opting for art, going under cover, yet the underworld of entertainment offers no consolation. One final option much in vogue consists of defecting to the war or genocide. There can, however, be no refuge from the conglomerate and its diktata. The Mountain Bike, T-shirt, Olilly clothing, compu games, graffiti, bumper sticker, spoiler, cap, sloppy casual wear, hair gel are all the "objets nomades" of Jacques Attali's Europe heading for a stylized uniformity. Innocence cannot be negated, or compensated for, by its opposite. The one thing it can't stand is party poopers. This process of decomposition within normality offers no alternative and puts up no fight, nor even does it make a point. Through it, innocence is exhausted. One cannot be spritely and happy all day, forever tearing asunder the grime by constructive thinking. Innocence is not in danger of being wiped out by either revolution or reaction. It can only wither, go under in poverty, slowly vanish out of sight, as though meant to waste away. Grounded love affairs are resolved by ordering a dumpster in which one's accumulated innocence is disposed of, in order to make a cleaner, wilder start after interior redecoration procedures. A generation before, the politicization of the private managed to get some innocence out the front door, but it's regrouped with a vengeance and now has grunge rockers, generation X-ers, trance freaks, and other youth categories all searching in vain for some firm footing they can react against in some other format than that of fashion or the media, innocence's latest organizational modes. Government itself is now the most outspoken antiracist, antisexist, antifascist, antihomelessness, and generally anti- anything the well-intended insurrectionists are liable to oppose. The one thing left for innocent younger generations to vent their anger on is all forms of organized innocence itself. Abundant material for grounding an enormous social movement, to start working at innumerable separate issues, in order to discover a common grounds in all those disparate little divisions. Boycott insurance companies, raid those self-assured infant clothing shops, torch the redundant gift stores‹we've a consumers' paradise to destroy! But let's not get excited. We'll have innocence fade away, see it quiet down. Tell you what, we'll not even mention it.





















  LEV MANOVICH
The field of computer vision can be seen as the culmination of at least two histories, each a century long. The first is the history of mechanical devices designed to aid human perception, such as Renaissance perspectival machines. This history reaches its final stage with computer vision, which aims to replace human sight altogether. The second is the history of automata, whose construction was especially popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, despite similarity in appearance, there is a fundamental difference between Enlightenment automata which imitated humans or animals bodily functions and the modern-day robots equipped with computer vision systems, artificial legs, and arms. As noted by Leonardo Torres, old automata, while successfully copying the appearance and movement of living beings, had no economic value. Indeed, such voice-synthesis machines as Wolgang von Kempelen's 1778 device, which directly imitated the functioning of the oral cavity, or Abbé Mical's Têtes Parlantes (1783), operated by a technician hiding offstage and pressing a key on a keyboard, were used only for entertainment. When in 1913 Torres called for automata that would "accomplish the results which a living person obtains, thus replacing a man by a machine," he was expressing a fundamentally new idea of using automata for productive labor. A few years later, the brother of the Czech writer Karel Capek coined the word robot from the Czech word robota, which means "forced labor." Capek's play R.U.R. (1921) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) clearly demonstrate this new association of automata with physical industrial labor.





















  ARTHUR I. MILLER
Whereas Heisenberg began this essay by demonstrating how nature in the small contradicts our customary intuition, he concludes with emphasis upon the fact that the existing scheme of quantum mechanics contains contradictions of the "intuitive interpretations [anschaulichen Deutungen]" of different phenomena, and this is not satisfactory. For the quantum theory places restrictions on the reality of the corpuscle and there lurks the notion of the light corpuscle. Heisenberg's essay ends with a most interesting and curious passage. Despite repeated warnings throughout this paper and in the many-body paper against intuitive interpretations of the quantum mechanics, Heisenberg reports from Copenhagen where he and Bohr are in the midst of their intense struggle toward a physical interpretation of the quantum mechanics (late fall 1926-spring 1927): "Hitherto there is missing in our picture [Bild] of the structure of matter any substantial progress toward a contradiction-free intuitive [anschaulichen] interpretation of experiments which in themselves are contradiction-free."





















  BILL NICHOLS
We might then ask in what ways is our "sense of reality" being adjusted by new means of electronic computation and digital communication? Do these technological changes introduce new forms of culture into the relations of production at the same time as the "shock of the new" helps emancipate us from the acceptance of social relations and cultural forms as natural, obvious, or timeless? The distinction between an industrial capitalism, even in its "late" phase of monopoly concentration, and an information society that does not "produce" so much as "process" its basic forms of economic resource has become an increasingly familiar distinction for us. Have cybernetic systems brought about changes in our perception of the world that hold liberating potential? Is it conceivable, for example, that contemporary transformations in the economic structure of capitalism, attended by technological change, institute a less individuated, more communal form of perception similar to that which was attendant upon face-to-face ritual and aura but which is now mediated by anonymous circuitry and the simulation of direct encounter? Does montage now have its equivalent in interactive simulations and simulated interactions experienced according to predefined constraints? Does the work of art in the age of postmodernism lead, at least potentially, to apperceptions of the 'deep structure' of postindustrial society comparable to the apperceptive discoveries occasioned by mechanical reproduction in the age of industrial capitalism?





















  KEVIN ROBINS
In the space of simulation and virtual reality, the "user" is immersed in a dematerialized and surrogate reality that has no apparent relation to the "real world." He functions as a component of a microworld, operating at a purely cognitive level within a closed world of reason and logic (although it seems to him that it is more than this). His existence in this alternative space is disembodied, and any engagement with the real world (that is, tele-operation) is indirect, mediated through a screen or some other imaging technology. It is as if there is a "desire to escape both the human body and the human world," as if the obsolete human body no longer has any place in the new "datascape"25. In this derealized state of being, anything and everything becomes possible, whether it is fantasy adventure in a virtual environment or pushing buttons and watching screened simulations of slaughter in real, so-called Nintendo wars.





















  FLORIAN ROTZER
Territorial closeness in this case does not only provide the chance to integrate oneself into the established urban life at some point. Suburbs, ghettos, and slums are characterized by poverty and unemployment, by ethnic minorities, refugees and immigrants, by crime, drugs and alcohol, by warring youth gangs and an underground economy, by a more or less lawless area which evades the political authorities and urban administration. Many other characteristics of urban life are also missing in the European suburbs; only boredom is in abundance.There are few businesses and fewer jobs. Leisure-time facilities are just as rare as those of the public transportation system. Instead, radio and television form a link between the people and urban life, which is often further removed from the suburbs and slums in a social sense than from the villages and small towns, although the standards of the popular culture, which in principle promise participation, are omnipresent thanks to telecommunications technology. To a great extent, they have drowned out and destroyed the social culture and neighborhood control of even the earlier worker settlements. One constantly sees that which one can neither be nor have.The media, insofar as the residents of the suburbs can afford them, are similar to messengers from another world who constantly pound the difference in levels of affluence into the heads of the people and show them how things are somewhere else, possibly just around the corner. Interactive media such as computer games reinforce this trend of promising participation, though even television has, of course, already undermined social ties, which are, of course, always constraints. Media do not always force themselves onto their consumers; they do not always attempt to draw them in by constantly showing the crossing of borders and making the intimate public. They also have a tendency to invade every niche of everyday life, thereby blurring the conventional borders between the private and public spheres.





















  DAVID TOMAS
The ecological absorption of the photograph and the obsolescence of the photographer precipitate the cultural dissolution of the photographic eye. A postphotographic culture has no need for a witness, a transcendent and discriminating eye, to testify to the significance of events by organizing and fixing them according to a chronological code of before and after. With postphotography there is no longer a point of view, but visual contexts; no longer an eye, but a continuous contextually interactive, visually educative process in which biological eyes reflexively commune with the fragments and possibilities of their cultures. With this negation of perspective and chronological codification, postphotographic practice calls into question the sovereignty of history.The inauguration of this postoptical practice will signal the beginning of the end of history as postphotography liberates the fixed superhistorical aspects of a culture of images and communicates the eternal as the continuing.14 Images will now take the form of ecologically immanent processes that unfold in a perceptual present, the continuous product of contextual oscillations between the unhistorical and the historical.





















  SHERRY TURKLE
Watch for a nascent culture of virtual reality that is paradoxically a culture of the concrete, placing new saliency on the notion that we construct gender and that we become what we play, argue about, and build. And watch for a culture that leaves a new amount of space for the idea that he or she who plays, argues, and builds is a machine.





















  KIM VELTMAN
The electronic versions of perspectival space have brought fundamental changes to this process. They entail a fragmentation in the process of creating illusion and amount to removing this implicit footnote to the original object in the physical world. In its simplest version, an image of a location in the physical world may have superimposed on it an image from the world of animation as in Roger Rabbit or Terminator 2. Conversely, a computer-animated space may have superimposed upon it the figure of a live person from the physical world as also happens in Roger Rabbit and more dramatically in Kurosawa's Dreams where a modern spectator in a museum walks into two paintings of Van Gogh. In both of these cases the illusion of the context is quite separate from and provides no hint concerning the source of the isolated figures within them. Traditionally there was a challenge of making classical quotations which could and would be recognized. Notwithstanding, isolated demonstrations in the Hitchcock pavilion at Universal Studios, and occasional studies on the subject, the modern art appears to be in hiding the source (ars est celare artis, in a new sense). Indeed, special effects have become the main theme of movie series such as FX (1986, 1991) and play a serious role in other movies such as Darkman (1991), Lawnmower Man (1992), and Ghost in the Machine (1994)





















  PETER WEIBEL
Ontological art represents the realm of hard fact of the Church-Turing Thesis, where existence and its formulation, recognition and predictability, syntax and semantics converge. Here nature appears in terms of computable numbers and computable images accounted for in a kind of universal computer. However, the real truth of the metaphorical computer reveals an image in direct contradiction. Increasing predictability and computability (chaos theory) has in fact revealed the intrinsic limitations of computability in the aleatoric structures of mathematics as discovered by Chaitin, as well as the absolute nonreducibility of the universe's nonpredictability. This amounts to a meta demasking. The descriptive terms (of macro-, micro-, and meta-universes) are dissipative and reversible. Information must be perceived as floating freely in the digital visual medium, able to be instantly transformed at random. The price paid for the viability of information and the system lies in its volatility defined by variability and virtuality. Post-ontological art represents a dynamic model of covariance between observer, interface, and environment, where the observer may be incorporated as part of that environment or context, constituting a dissipative structure. Genetic algorithms that are able to separate the image from the observer-controlled context will constitute another dissipative structure. Thus, instead of the conventional world of the picture we have a universe of "free variables" floating in specific event-worlds, which can be comprehensively filled or replaced, and which interact with one another. The image has turned into a model world, autocatalytical as well as context controlled. The animated image constitutes the most radical challenge of our classical visual notions of image and representation.





















  LOUISE WILSON INTERVIEWS PAUL VIRILIO
LW: But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?
PV: We'll dream of being blind. This is the art of the engine. Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc., but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality. This is what I call the art of the engine. For instance, when I take the TGV ("Train a Grande Vitesse") in France, I love watching the landscape: this landscape, as well as works by Picasso or Klee, is art. The engine makes the art of the engine. Wim Wenders made road movies, but what is the engine of a road movie? It's a car, like in Paris, Texas. Dromoscopy. Now all we have to do to enter the realm of art is to take a car. Many engines made history.





















  SIEGFRIED ZIELINSKI
One of the reasons for including this concept in the title of my presentation today is that I would like to recommend rereading the central heuristic texts of apparatus theory. What drives these texts is of paramount interest for us today from an artistic perspective: the question of how, in the future, to conceive the interfaces as borders to the world of computer programs and computers themselves.
The concern of apparatus heuristics‹in a debate that was by no means solely confined to film‹was not to lose sight of the fact that media apparatus serves to create illusions, is an instrument to produce a transcendental subject. Mise-en-scène of the contrived essence of media messages versus the media as clear and simple apparatus of psychic substitution/compensation! To dramatize the interface is a task that is becoming all the more urgent the more the apparatus aspects at the border to the world of the Net fade into the background in favor of more direct connections of powerful imaginations. I am thinking here of environments that dispense completely with the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen, where the communication with the programs takes place directly via haptic, gestural, and spoken mediation: intuitively.
To dramatize the interface means to keep it flexible; to keep or make its signs/icons recognizable as constructs, as a result of a calculating machine.I am for a culture of double agents: the orders of the Net managers and entrepreneurs on the one hand and the orders of the individual users on the other come from opposing camps, they follow opposing interests. This must remain absolutely clear.





















  SLAVOJ ZIZEK
How then does one "think with a computer" beyond its instrumental use? A computer is not unequivocal in its socio-symbolic effect but operates as some kind of "projective test," a fantasy screen on which is projected the field of miscellaneous social reactions. Two of the main reactions are "Orwellian" (the computer as an incarnation of Big Brother, an example of centralized totalitarian control) and "anarchistic," which in contrast sees in the computer the possibility for a new self-managing society, "a cooperative of knowledge" which will enable anyone to control "from below," and thus make social life transparent and controllable. The common axis of this contrast is the computer as a means of control and mastery, except that in one case it is control "from above" and in the other "from below"; on the level of individual impact, this experience of the computer as a medium of mastery and control (the computer universe as a transparent, organized, and controlled universe in contrast to "irrational" social life) is countered by wonderment and magic: when we successfully produce an intricate effect with simple program means, this creates in the observer‹who of course in the final analysis is identical to the user himself‹the impression that the achieved effect is out of proportion to the modest means, the impression of a hiatus between means and effect. It is of particular interest how on the level of programming itself, this opposition repeats the male/female difference in the form of the difference between "hard" (obsessional) and "soft" (hysterical) programming‹the first aims at complete control and mastery, transparency, analytical dismemberment of the whole into parts; the second proceeds intuitively: it improvises, it works by trial and thus uncovers the new, it leaves the result itself "to amaze," its relations to the object are more of "dialogue."