TIMOTHY DRUCKREY

  1 TELEKPHRASIS:
CONFIGURATIONS OF COMMUNICATION

  2 "Telekphrasis: configurations of communication change this apparatus over from distribution to communication." (Bertol Brecht)

  3 "...for the first time in the history we have achieved creativity by theoretical means" (Vilem Flusser)

  4 "The operating system we inherited from the Renaissance then undergoes digital metamorphosis: book, author, authoritative text, book market, library, all become something else." (Lanham, p.156)

  5 Discourses of production and reception, principles of interface design, theories of perception, trajectories of narrative, practices of implementation, strategies of distribution.

  6 A litany of issues reinvigorated by the consequences of digital media. The list of course mutates continuously, altered by accelerated innovation and by virtually unfathomable technical development. Incessant claims of revision and the stakes of marketingground so much of technoculture ? . Endless promises-the kind of positivistic ? euphoria that haunted modernity ? reemerge in an evirement of almost tidal accessibility.

  7 Speculative consumption ? fills a gap between the end of industry and the beginning of the virtual corporation; a field of information driven by claims and representing a certain refusal of stakes. Aligned with the revolutionary shifts in expressive media come equally expressive (extensive) metaphors, connectionism, parallelism, nanotechnology, associative systems, fuzzy mathematics, chaos ? , distributed or ubiquitous computing, immersion, interactivity, hypermedia, biocomputing, networking ?, smart technologies, tele-fill in blank-an "intelligent ambience" of a set of interfaces redefining a relationship with language ??, memory ? *, the body ? *, aesthetics *, politics *, and communication.

  8 The promises and pitfalls of a cybersphere obstruct some of the essential cultural issues of digital media in the yet vague hope that matters of access and meaning will fulfill themselves in the future. This is a difficult presumption of technology and creativity linked with the scientific view that a problem is not so much surmountable as it is contingent and evolving. For so much work ?? utilizing electronic media, the characteristics ? (often seen as limitations) of the delivery system represent a hurdle to be overcome rather than a form ???? to be interrogated.

  9 Articulated as speculative, and perhaps legitimated as such, creative work utilizing digital technologies often promises more than it reveals. And while the stakes of production are not to be considered lightly, it seems crucial to articulate the issues emerging from the differences between deeply potential communication systems like the internet and more practical ones that provide broadbased access and distribution. Notwithstanding the rush to establish territories in cyberspace, the proliferating "spaces" for on-line experience and access, the utilization of hard media * (disk and CD-ROM) offers both a broad opportunity to configure information in ways only slowly maturing on the net ?? * and to resolve issues information layering and linkage. Given the wide bandwidth necessary to carry information as memory intensive as video, sound and text (often in combination), the networks are still prohibitive and limited.

  10 How, or whether, disk ?? based interactivity will form the core of a new communication system will not be simply resolved. Fast developing formats, software, video capabilities, higher speed playback, compression standards, and compatible platforms are only small stumbling blocks to the more substantial problems ? of developing meaningful ideas and finding a route for distribution. Without falling into a discussion of technicalities, the transition to electronic distribution (no less to ubiquitous networks) will not be as smooth as hoped for.

  11 Two enormous investments will be necessary, the first by industry to develop extensive, and interesting, material (rather than repackaging content on disk), to evolve hardware that is both reliable and affordable, and the second requirement will have to be on the part of the consumer to be enticed into investing in technology that is too often considered obsolete before it reaches the consumable market. Yet overshadowing all the technical reasoning is an imperative to confront the dynamics of a remarkable hybrid media. In the rush to cyber-ize all forms of media, the danger would be to dismiss the significance of hyper and interactive media as merely transitional. This kind of avoidance unfortunately adumbrates intellectual development in favor of technical improvement.

  12 Several key challenges face the development of interactive technologies: To adequately account for the shifting histories of technology in terms of its relationship with cultural theory and experience; to create a forum for elucidating the form these changes take; to integrate social and aesthetic issues into the discourse of technology and politics; to develop industry initiatives for the support of independent production; to find identify means of distribution for creative projects.

  13 Interactive works ?? will also require a complex assessment of the relationship linking experience and discourse ?? . If media are to become increasingly experiential, then a theory of representation must be evolved to account for the transaction provoked by participation. Intention will become reciprocal. While this endangers the authorial position of the producer, it simultaneously must account for an audience willing to investigate the space of electronic expression ?.

  14 In Discourse Networks ? *, Friedrich Kittler established the reciprocity between technologies of representation and archaeologies of information. The discourse network can "designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.' (Discourse Networks, p, 369) Further, Kittler's work realizes the limits of rhetorical theory unmediated by technology itself. Practices of information exchange plagued the culture of modernity-as they would its economic practices.

  15 Writing, that process of inscription aligned with data transfer, rooted catastrophic shifts in the relation between developing technologies and culture. By 1900, "the ability to record sense data technologically shifted the entire discourse network...For the first time in history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data. The technological recording of the real entered into competition with the symbolic registration of the Symbolic." [p. 229]. More pertinently, the strained continuity of exchange exposed the semiotic constitution of both the mechanism and meaning of information: "To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves reshaping ? them to conform to new standards and materials.

  16 In a discourse network that requires 'an awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other,' transposition necessarily takes the place of translation." [p. 265].

  17 Considering the integration of practices of appropriation and sampling that have characterized postmodern communication, transposition might serve as one of the signifiers for the mutating sources of experience. In some ways cognitive processes will supplant material ones as sources of consciousness. The shift is daunting and fascinating.

  18 Fallacies of identification that have plagued semiotics and that have complicated the interpretation of language and image could, finally, be exposed as acts of will mediated by representation. What is at issues here is the form that the mediation will take.

  19 Technologically induced consciousness ? outdistances most of the extant mechanisms of analysis. Vague understandings of cognitive processes ? will not suffice for theorizing the development of a communication system whose symbolic system is discursively rooted in the history of media but speculatively connected with simulation.

  20 How technology and representation establish engaged attention as a denominator is an issue rooted in the growth of the "consciousness industry". * In the era when the structures of cognition are themselves under siege by the adherents of intelligence models that tout their artificiality- and one might identify the emerging model as the cognition industry resolving the issues of knowledge and the relationship between cognition and representation is pivotal. How far this seems from the culture industry of Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer!

  21 Artificial intelligence ?, conjoined with information technology and simulation modeling, could supplant the relation between knowing and consuming. Indeed, as the distinction between research, information, conceptualization, and expression are determined by computerized potentials which funnel expectation and thwart imagination, knowledge may become a form of consumption ? .

  22 Assimilations of the languages of technology ?? are already underway. Consider Lanham's remark that the "operating system" ? of the Renaissance has been changed, or that the brain operates like a CPU, managing data in parallel. Instead of ideology or consciousness, a culture or a mind is a program determining behavior. Yet an operating system and an ideology are not symmetrical even if they seem isomorphic. Most obviously, there simply wasn't a singular "operating system" driving the Renaissance but many linked ideologies converging in overwhelming cultural transformations.

  23 Reading history with technological jargon ?? is not the same as reading the development of technologies as integral to cultural change. Foucault made this quite clear. Yet the impetus to do this is revealing. It demonstrates that language ???? can be applied almost literally to reverse engineer history as linked with the rhetoric of techno-speak and suggests that the assimilation of history can be technologized rather than politicized! One could find in these approaches the depth in which technological metaphors ???? influence critical thought. And if one thinks of the development from the Freudian unconscious, to Benjamin's 'optical unconscious' one could pose a 'technological unconscious,' one that inflects consciousness epistemically.

  24 This 'technological unconscious' is also parallel to Frederic Jameson's "political unconscious." And if the "political unconscious" represented a fundamental grasp of the "ideology of form," the relationship of necessity and expression, then a critique of the 'technological unconscious' requires a deeper consideration not only of culture, society, and history ? but also of the psychological and ideological effects of form immersed in the illusions of artificiality, simulation, immateriality and the virtually "real." In the shift from a discourse concerned with the material critique of representation-of gender ?? , of sexual politics, of the institution of narrative ? -there is merging of discourse of the postmaterial, the cybernetic ? , the virtual ?? .

  25 How we root this speculative discursive assessment ? within pragmatic intent will be something of a challenge. Jameson's remark that "no society has ever 'embodied' a mode of production in any pure state," is, in some ways, being altered by the intrusion of 'productivity' into the biological roots ? of behavior or consciousness ? at the same time that technoculture ? offers itself precisely as the embodiment of production ?.

  26 Whether it is the Human Genome * initiative, the digital superhighway or the development of cities, the issue of information-from ownership to economics-has achieved status as a powerful element if culture.

  27 A recent analysis by Manuel Castells, The Informational City, considers the relationship between urbanism * and new technology: The fact that new technologies are focused on information procesing has far-reaching consequences for the relationship between the sphere of socio-cultural symbols and the productive basis of society. Information is based upon culture, and information processing is, in fact, symbol manipulation on the basis of existing knowledge ...If information processing ? becomes the key component of the new productive forces, the symbolic capacity of society itself, collectively as well as individually, is tightly linked to its developmental process.. (p.17)

  28 The issue that Castells raises in terms of the constitution of urban space, is precisely the same as that raised by hypertextual media. Discursive space is becoming distributed space. Virilio * identifies this with the "victory of sedantariness, behavioral inertia, discreteness." [Rethinking Tech p. 5]. With all the potential of hyper, inter and networked media, we are compelled to find threads of influence that link every aspect of representation ? with elements of culture and history ?? . Finding ways to express this concept of eco-systemic association is the challenge of hypermedia and interactive communication.

  29 Writing about the catastrophic transformation of the topos Virilio writes, "so in spite of all this machinery of transfer, we get no closer to the productive unconscious of sight...Instead, we only get as far as its unconsciousness, an annihilation of place and appearance the future of which it is still hard to imagine." [The Vision Machine, p. 8] Mediated by the tele-visual, the issues of memory, consciousness, perception are disassociated from experience, other than the experience of the perceiving self.

  30 Perception becomes scanning, retention becomes retrieval and thinking becomes processing ???. And while the model of the mind as a distributed parallel-processor might be useful in explaining the ability to store, process and retrieve vast amounts of memory, the metaphor is only useful as discursive and not as fact. Years of study of distributed models of cognition are as yet irresolute and not fully convincing as to their efficacy as scientific models. Proving the Turing test in no ways legitimates the computer as an organism. Yet the merging of the cybernetic ? and the cognitive ? is having remarkable effects on human experience and expectation.

  31 Norbert Weiner, the pioneer researcher in cybernetics * wrote, in The Human Use of Human Beings, that "every instrument in the repertory of the scientific-instrument maker is a possible sense organ ? ." But the difference between instrumental recording ? and sensing ? are not wholly synonymous, even if the extension of the perceptual field is enlarged by technology.

  32 Vilèm Flusser writes that "electronic memories provide us with a critical distance that will permit us, in the long run, to emancipate ourselves from the ideological belief that we are 'spiritual beings', subjects that face an objective world...Our brain will thus be freed for other tasks, like processing information." He continues (and hear the similarities with Castells) on the benefits of electronic memory * that "A person will no longer be a worker (homo farber) but an information processor, a player with information (homo ludens)," and that "we shall enhance our ability to obliterate information...this will show us that forgetting is just as important a function of memory as remembering ? ." (On Memory).

  33 Situational knowledge, contingent expression? Perhaps the aftereffects of the eradication of legitimate canons of artistic, literary, even political narratives, has created a circumstance in which the meaning and usefulness of experience is wholly related with its engaged relationship with the present. And it comes as no surprise that interactive media demands a level of participation in the flow of information, intention and technology. Immersive media does not, necessarily, imply unreflective experience.

  34 Indeed, in interactive or hypermedia, the merger of text, sound, and image with narrative, cognition and information extends the implications of discourse formation into the simulated and immersive. Indeed one would have to consider a range of technologies and cultural discourses to understand the movement toward interactivity in the twentieth century. Much of the century has grappled with the ruptured continuity initiated by physics, psychology, philosophy, literature, cinema, etc. Quantum physics, discursive identity, phenomenology, stream of consciousness literature, cinematic montage *, photographic montage *, scientific visualization *... among many these disruptions root the history of the destabilized narratives of postmodernity.

  35 Linking these disciplines are diverse practices of representation that converge in digital media. Revamping representation in electronic culture ? is a key to tracking the complexity-and subtlety-of the configurations of communication ?? .

  36 Emerging from digital media there is a kind of transformation of several traditions: montage ?, narrative, temporality, a rethinking or extension of the issues surrounding the simple semiotic constitution of the image ? ("techno-semiotics" as Rotman calls it: Configurations ? ), and a concern with the "space" of electronics ? . Technology brings a systematic language ? of mathematical rationality into the realm of production, a language that is to be distinguished from the discursive language of communication.

  37 Interfacing communicative discourse with technological discourse ? becomes a philosophical, intellectual, creative, political issue of the greatest importance. Cybernetics, biology, Artificial Intelligence, simulation, interactivity, in short, almost every form of cultural engagement is immersed in the technosphere. Its languages and its implications are fundamentally significant to considerations of electronic media. Programming ? determines a set of conditions ?? in which the represented is formed as instruction, while language destabilizes the conditions through the introduction of formations in which the represented is extended ??? .

  38 The terms of the deconstruction of imaging ? will be forced to adapt to the systems-imperatives * of digitally coded images * as well as to the aesthetic imperatives ? * of images whose constituted meanings are no less significant than any previous symbolic system.

  39 At the same time, a differentiated "space" ?? emerges in which the displayed image is transmitted through the screen ? . The repercussions of screen based media are consequential for a number of reasons: distributed sites of reception, human-computer interface issues, reconfigurations of experience ? , integrated use of text/sound/image ? , and a relation to critical theories of representation on technoculture ? . The site of the assimilation of social content is shifting toward the immaterial, toward the programmed, toward the intrinsic [?] power of the medium. As Baudrillard writes:

  40 We used to live in the imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and alienation. Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen ? , of the interface and the reduplication of contiguity and networks. All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens. Nothing that appears on the screen is meant to be deciphered in depth, but actually to be explored instantaneously, in an abreaction immediate to meaning - or an immediate convolution of the poles of representation.

  41 The "space" of knowledge and the "space" of perception are merging. How much this relates to the issues of cognitive research ? and representation is pivotal to grappling with the development of hyper, inter, cyber and virtual media. Indeed, the development of reproducible media and technology form much of the basis for social communication. And if the cultural logic of technology succeeds in mastering a universal digital system of exchange (as seems likely), then a far-reaching critique of communication will be necessary, one that would account for the cultural meaning of technology in terms of the meanings it forms-aesthetically and politically. In the distributed system of digital communication, the issue of power is crucial precisely because it seems dispersed: "The cyberelite is now a transparent entity that can only be imagined." [Critical Art Ensemble * p. 17].

  42 Conjoin this with a range of effects concerning everything from surveillance to identity and the ramifications of electronic culture take on staggering proportions.

  43 One cannot overestimate, for example, the effect the "space" of television ? has in transforming experience-even if toward passivity. But if is no exaggeration to suggest that televisual culture established what Paul Virilio would call the "third window," the window of the screen, the tele visual window. And even though television established the criteria for mass experience for the past half century, it did so in a curious balancing act that sustained the power of the institutions of modernity at the same time that it initiated the rupture of totality that so characterizes postmodern experience.

  44 The efficacy of modernity-as the bearer of unified narratives and coherent representation-was splintering from within. As Paul Virilio writes in The Lost Dimension:

  45 "Ultimately, the intellectual debate surrounding modernity seems part of a derealization phenomenon which simultaneously involves disciplines of expression, modes of representation, and modes of communication." He continues, "If there are any monuments today, they are certainly not of the visible order...this monumental disproportion now resides within the obscure luminescence of terminals." It is, however, quite a leap from television to telesthetics. Identity, experience and technology now assume equal status in the culture of hypermedia, whose distributed data is navigated thematically rather than sequentially.

  46 PROBLEMS IN HYPERLAND. Hypertext fragments, disperses, or atomizes text in two related ways. First, by removing the linearity of print, it frees the individual passages from one ordering principle-sequence-and threatens to transform the text into chaos, Second, hypertext destroys the notion of a fixed unitary text. [Landow, p. 54]

  47 Electronic text...leavens with comedy the serious if not solemn business of clear, brief, and sincere human communication... Afterall, screen space is free. You can make carefree mistakes and correct the, doodle with impudence. [Lanham, p.40]

  48 The rhetoric of hypertext-and all of us who work in hypertext are guilty of this exaggeration-tends to be a rhetoric of liberation. We sometimes talk as if the goal of electronic writing were to set the reader free from all the arbitrary fixity and stability of print culture. In fact hypertext simply entangles the reader in nets or networks of a different order. [Bolter, Literacy On-Line]

  49 Yet where does this idea come from, this pervasive, largely unexamined belief in the opposition of literacy and technology? [Tuman, p. 26]

  50 The four remarks above establish a groundwork for considering some of the boundaries of thinking that hypertext will reinvent a relationship with text within an evolving technology. In some ways the four writers, though differing widely in approach and scope, are limited in an approach to digital media built of the linking mechanisms of cross-referencing, one that Tuman identifies as "high-powered footnoting." [Tuman p. 60].

  51 And while the hope that literature will find a place in the interactive future is not wholly misplaced, it recapitulates an approach which is constrained by the problem that Kittler identified as translation rather than transposition. Lanham's writing is particularly ecstatic in its parodic conclusion that "electronic expression has come not to destroy western arts and letters but to fulfill them." [Lanham, p. xiii]

  52 The relationship between interactive and hypermedia and the breakdown of the "master narrative," is not coincidental. Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition established a pivotal assessment of the effects of technology on knowledge. The opening chapter to this book reads like a diagnosis:

  53 And it is fair to say that for the last forty years the "leading" sciences and technologies have had to do with language ??: phonology and theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics, computers and their languages, problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information and data banks, telematics and the perfection of intelligent terminals, paradoxology. The facts speak for themselves. [The Postmodern Condition, p.4]

  54 Slowly, the links ? between the development of digital technology and that of postmodern culture are becoming clearer. Critical theory, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist critiques of technology, sociology, philosophy, and a myriad of other disciplines have emerged to address the deconstructed subject of culture ? .

  55 George Landow's Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology elaborates a persuasive case for the affinity between deconstruction and technology in terms of the technologizing of discourse in works ranging from Roland Barthes to Jacques Derrida. Yet the case for textual media, often seen as a pedagogical device for reinvigorating literature, pales when confronted with the complexity of interactive technologies ? whose relationship with sound, images, and text outdistance the relegitimation of literary theory in cyberspace.

  56 It also elides the dynamic configuration of reception as the crucial discourse of interactivity-even as it "empowers" the reader. More than this, the development of digital media has ruptured the very institutions that have dominated the production of art and literature. What better to sustain the hangover of modernity ? than to attempt to religitimate its forms in new guises! Interactive works pose the problem of the breakdown not of meaning but of the bourgeois concept of rational[ized] order and representation ???. Add to this the merging of the computer, information, telecommunication, and entertainment industries, and the foreclosure of the field seems obvious. We are already in a culture in which the cultural logic of information has shattered any conforting notion of order. Non-linear principles of form. *, in fact, are the signifier of a culture accustomed to fragmentation and montage ? . Information in this environment comes as an array ? rather than as a sequence ?.

  57 Deciphering the array-or even producing the array-is no longer a sign of "schizophrenic" experience, but of rendering the codes of experience ?? as a new social logic. Indeed as Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateau's: "The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its subject...A system of this kind could be called a rhizome...The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing...Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways ? ."

  58 How does interactive media characterize its goals in ways that differ from theories of hypertext *? The answer will not form the core of a unified theory of interactivity. Rather, the responses come as diverse approaches to the maturation of shifting theories of temporality, cognition, psychology, narrative and technology. The mutations of interactivity emerge without a centralized theory. But the development of works that confront the issues of mutable narrative through rethinking of the relations between discourse, the apparatus and the issue of technology as a central ideological component of experience, is well underway.

  59 Alongside the development of interactive media must come a renewed assessment of the meaning of experience ? . Experiential imagery is a provocation to traditions of images and texts that have become ragged in an environment itself immersed in representation. Enactment and representation are linked in interactive media. This conflation of agency and reception is crucial to articulating the potential of interactivity. Theories abound. Yet the willingness to speculate ? about the merging of text, image, sound, tactility, presence and power are more active than in literary theories of hypertext.

  60 The work of Grahame Weinbren extracts not so much from literary theory as from literature itself a set of criteria for the development of a hybrid "interactive cinema." Rather than literary form, Weinbren educes from cinema *, psychology, fiction, and critical theory * an extended view of inclusion: If the interactive cinema is a more veridical representation of reality, it is precisely because it can forgo some of these criteria of narrative structure. Because we can affect it, an interactive work's length is indefinite, its time determined by viewer input and not by the clock of the apparatus. Its limits are the limits of its database or the closing time of the gallery, but unless it is so decided by the author, timespan is not a factor that determines the content or the presentation.

  61 Thus, like everyday (non-cinematic) experience, the interactive cinema, not tied down by temporal closure *, need not be structured in a linear development. A viewer uses an interactive work until she has finished with it, until he has finished with it, and not until it is finished with her, not until it is finished with him.

  62 Citing a range of figures, from Freud to Calvino, Weinbren's approach to interactivity avoids the pitfalls of adapting literature, cinema theory, or fiction to digital media. Instead, in works like Sonata (1992), he adapts and fuses components. Citing Paul Ricoeur, he theorizes the role of the issue of reception:

  63 "The fragile offshoot issuing from the union of history and fiction is the assignment to an individual or a community of a specific identity that we can call their narrative identity ? . Here "identity" is taken in the sense of a practical category. To state the identity of an individual or a community is to answer the question, "Who did this?" "Who is the agent, the author?" We first answer this question by naming someone, that is, by designating them with a proper name.

  64 But what is the basis for the permanence of this proper name? What justifies our taking the subject of an action, so designated by his, her, or its proper name, as the same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death? The answer has to be narrative. And the identity of this "who" therefore itself must be a narrative identity. Without the recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution." [Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, Part 4, p. 246]

  65 The interplay between history *, memory *, fiction *, and discourse * poses essential questions about the meaning of interactive media. Rather than approaches that equate the formation of linkages in episodic forms, there are approaches that structure material as thematic. One might draw on the development not of literary theory to account for this but on cultural studies, particularly the works of Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari. Foucault established the relationship between information and power in terms of the archive, and posed the methodology of archaeology to address it. "Archaeology," he wrote, "tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline; it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be 'allegorical.'" [The Archaeology of Knowledge p. 139]

  66 In fact, the issue of the archive, of archaeology. strongly affects the work of a number of artists utilizing interactive media. George Legrady's An Anecdoted Archive From the Cold War, (to be issued on CD-ROM) draws directly on Foucault to ground its approach. In a process of restructuration, Legrady assembles a political history * of representations drawn from his flight from Stalinist Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

  67 The Archive is an act of retrevial unburdened with nostalgia but filled with a lucid sense of the cumulative effects and histories that constitute the event. Years of memory and collection culminate in a work that confronts the relationship between the logistics of the archive * and the alignment of memory *.

  68 A similar interrogation of the formative aspects of the interface between culture and self is Ken Feingold's Childhood/Hot & Cold Wars (The Appearance of Nature). Engulfed in the experience of television during the cold war, Feingold's work unhinges the illusive innocence of the culture industry. Personal history and childhood are overshadowed by truculent entertainment.

  69 In Feingold's work, time, memory, politics and representation assume stunning collisions. He writes: I have undertaken a search for my childhood TV memories, a kind of archaeology of those images and sounds I remember, or see now, as having been formative in my personal understanding of what was going on in the world. I decided to create an interactive artwork with these images and sounds, one that will provide a means for others to search through this image-repertoire, to let this part of my image-history intersect their own, to reflect on this period of American culture--a time when this new medium, television, was first used to promote values, interpretations of history, beliefs and ideas that have had profound and often terrible effects.

  70 In school and at home, we practiced for nuclear attack, and watched people, monsters, and cartoon animals killing each other on TV. It seemed natural, the way things were. I was learning, in a way, to view violence as the language of the world, as a kind of entertainment...Like fragments of early memories, disconnected, crystal-clear, momentary--the "seconds, minutes, and hours" in this work are stretched to infinity, going around over and over (as in my mind) with the hands of the clock, changing through the interaction of a viewer-participant, or going along without them.

  71 Forgetting, returning ? , forgetting, returning... Instead of the textual cross-referencing of hypertext, these works collapse many of the limits between text, sound and image and situate the user in the midst of assimilation and feedback. Episodic, or arrayed, information is created in forms that suggest that the usefulness of the unified image or text cannot serve as a totality, but rather that events ? are themselves complex configurations of experience *, intention *, and interpretation *.

  72 In this sense, the narratives of electronics are non-linear and kinetic ? rather than linear and potential. They suggest transition and not resolution. The cultural space of media is increasingly circumscribed by an uneasy conjunction of powerful symbolic form and accelerated technology. As they reach into the exhibition and distribution systems of a fast growing audience for interactive media, they will serve to enjoin developers to abandon the metaphor of the screen as a page and, instead, to encourage the transposition of the book into a discourse with interactivity, as both representational practice, and as a measure of production emerging as an essential discourse in the extension of ideas in the sphere of the experiential ? .

  73 CONCLUSION. In the 1930s a critique of the issues of reproducibility was hinged on the "revolutionary potential" of technology. Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction or Heidegger's * essay The Age of the World Picture (or The Question concerning Technology) focused attention on the deepening effects of the political repercussions of representation, technology and politics. Indeed, the reading of these essays in light of current developments in digital media demonstrates the affiliations-and differences-between materialist critiques of technology and media (one might call them exo-genic theories) and post-materialist approaches to immersive media (one might call these endo-genic) is an essential opposition and represents an assimilation of technology on a much deeper level.

  74 And while the exigencies surrounding the critical positions of Benjamin and Heidegger reveal that issues of technology played a crucial role in the maturation of fascism and modernism, the essays did not lead to a radicalization of artistic production as much as they stood as assessments of the impact technology was having on the means of communication and expression.

  75 What is crucial is that the demands of distribution and reception were to be reconsidered as fundamental to any further thinking about representation. In the ideas of reproducibility, politics and "enframing" were laid the groundwork for a reconfiguration of representation as integral to the cultural concerns of technology. The issues of mass communication through technology were to irrevocably alter the signification of the means of production.

  76 As reproducibility and the issues of mass psychology set the agenda for a critique of culture during the 1930s, the technologies of transmission and consciousness wound themselves into the broadcast era after the 1950s. Joined by the tele-visual and the cybernetic *, the inexorable drift towards an information economy * and the emergence of the "consciousness industry *" were recognized as pivots in the discourse of transformed reproducibility *.

  77 Hans Magnus Enzensberger's phrase departed from what he saw as the affectation of the cultural, and honed in on the dilemma of McLuhan's "reactionary doctrine of salvation" (Constituents, p. 43) and instead offered a kind of manifesto for the usurpation of the hierarchy of production and consumption. While both Benjamin and Enzensberger were embroiled in a dialectic with the circulatory system of information, the next generation was emerging with more interest in neurocognitive issues than in those of perception and ideology. Indeed the sphere of immersive media are heading towards a rendezvous with cognition.

  78 Interactive media, born in the belly of the 'body without organs,' proposes an alternative that confronts the issues of the assimilation of representation into the technosphere. Allowing production and reception to coincide suggests a field in which the authoritarian text/work/culture is exhausted by the intervention of technologies that reproduce and exchange information with impunity. More than a new mechanism for exchange of data, hyper and interactive media enable a discourse with the telesthetic.

  79 Technology has reached a stage in which its effects can be processed in a system of feedback. This transformative aspect of technology, in which there is a shift from media that 'enframe' to technologies that immerse, is the most disruptive and most challenging dimension of the shift from the triumph of machines to the biologizing of technology *.

  80 "Can these technologies," asks Donna Haraway, "be prosthetic devices for building connections? ... Can these technologies be part of producing social agencies in first world cultures that are less imperializing?" "My hope," continuing, is "that the power, the visual and sensory power of the technology, can be a way of dramatizing the relativity of our place in the world, and not the illusions of total power."

  81 Technoculture's spectacle is that of distributed thinking, distributed identity, distributed text, distributed processing. In the many metaphors that are emerging, the fragmentation of form and the prioritizing of content is one of the most interesting. Hypermedia and interactivity present a range of solutions that reside within the machine and do not confront the issue of technology as a material force.

  82 Its physical insubstantiality though cannot be mistaken for a lack of meaning. What emerges in these technologies is the constitution of experiential space. Knowledge as sampling, experience as intentional ??, communication as transactional ?? , these are some of the terms of a culture of "nomadic madness."

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