Makers: DIY Agents of Social Change, Alyce Santoro

Everyone Is an Artist

As our society collectively awakens to the realization that it must devise ways to stem the hemorrhaging caused by years of denial and excess and as the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement grows in popularity, Joseph Beuys' words, "everyone is an artist" ring all the more true. Beuys, who referred to himself as a "social sculptor," believed strongly not that everyone should make (so-called) fine art, but that everyone can live a richer and more meaningful life by infusing any vocation or action with his or her own personal creativity.

From the 1950s through the mid-1980s, Beuys expressed the notion that personal creativity could be cultivated and honed by connecting with nature and by developing a more intimate relationship with it. He believed that individuals as well as our entire society could be healed by returning to a simpler way of life and by becoming more attuned to the subtle, ineffable forces of the ecosystems we inhabit.

Everyone Is a Shaman

Some call one who consciously connects to, communicates with and elaborates on the intangible a shaman. Some called Beuys that. Most just called him an artist. Shamans, artists, cooks, gardeners, scientists, inventors, and all others who bring imaginary things out of the realm of the intangible to help give them form routinely benefit from enhanced access to the mysterious force of inspiration. In this sense, everyone is a shaman as well.

And as people begin to seek opportunities to "do it themselves," they are exercising a form of personal creativity that has been largely neglected in our culture for far too long. A basic fact of existence that has been all but forgotten is that human happiness and the sense of freedom depends largely on the ability to express personal creativity. Beuys also famously said, "To make people free is the aim of art. Therefore art for me is the science of freedom".

The Joy of Fluxus

It is possible that the reshuffling of our collective deck, while discomfiting at times, will ultimately result in an overall increase in happiness as people come to realize that we were misguided in relating the ravenous, mindless accumulation of stuff to personal joy, and as we begin to experience instead the sense of simple, profound satisfaction that comes from planting a seed, sewing on a button or cooking a meal from scratch.

Autonomy as Radical Act

Consciously creative types ("makers" as they have come to be known) are returning to the sort of DIY approach to the creating and sharing of their work that the fluxus artists of the 1960s and '70s pioneered - only now we have the Internet. Web sites, blogs and social networks have made the notion of the white box/velvet-rope-style gallery virtually obsolete - now everyone has the same access to the same art and artists, from the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Sculptors can create installations in a basement, musicians can give concerts in their living rooms, writers can publish in an instant - and everything can be shared with millions of people across the globe.

Digital Pioneering

The Internet is a fascinating artifact of the fundamental human longing to connect. The telegraph, telephone and television are all apparatus devised to facilitate communication. The Internet takes it all a step further - now we are able to pool resources, share information and generate tangible links. In 1998, Howard Rheingold, an early Internet researcher and pioneer, published a brilliant article called "Thinking About Thinking About Technology" in the Institute of Noetic Sciences newsletter. In the piece, Rheingold posits that for new technology to develop into tools for enhancement of creativity and "mind amplification" as opposed to becoming merely a source of "disinfotainment," we must develop a philosophical framework within which it can evolve. That was 12 years ago. Now, we can say for certain that technology, devoid of philosophical framework, will become everything that we are - enriching and distracting, elegant and dangerous, brilliant and ridiculous.

Technology has arrived at a point in its evolution when it is exceptionally easy for the maker to direct all aspects of his or her own creation, from inception to publication, marketing and dissemination. From Facebook, Twitter and Blogger to Ebay, Etsy and YouTube, it is an exciting time for the DIY innovator.

Internet as Cave Wall

Technologies for the amplification and enhancement of imagination and conscious intent have existed in every aspect of human culture at least since the first cave painting was created. Modern western civilization's fanatic rejection of the unquantifiable has, in many ways, done us a great disservice. To trust only that which can be measured negates inspiration, intuition and imagination - some of humanity's most precious attributes.

Perhaps Beuys was right - re-enchantment with the intangible, reverence for nature and an open-minded acceptance of alternative modes of perception may make it possible for humanity to emerge from this period of economic, environmental and social upheaval and re-evaluation into a more peaceful and contented era. By perceiving ourselves as artists of our own particular medium (be it plumbing, politics, cooking, medicine, teaching, healing, engineering or painting), we have an opportunity to sculpt our very culture into a masterpiece that's beyond our wildest collective imagination. We just need to keep in mind that technology is only an electronic, externalized version of some far more sophisticated software that exists inside all of us, preinstalled. There's no Google search that can tell us how to use it, however. For that we'll need to move away from the machines and step outside.

Creative Commons License
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

above copied from: http://www.truth-out.org/makers-diy-agents-social-change59919

Interview: Sina Najafi: On Cabinet magazine, critical writing & ethics, Claire Ruud

Sina Najafi is a co-founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Cabinet magazine. …might be good caught up with him last month while he was in town as one of Arthouse’s Visiting Lecturers.

…might be good [mbg]: I’ve heard that one of the reasons you founded Cabinet was to fill a gap you saw somewhere between journalism and academic writing. You saw that in Europe public intellectuals could publish in popular newspapers in a way that they couldn’t here in the States. Since then, have you perceived a shift in the presence of the public intellectual in the U.S.

Sina Najafi [SN]: Here? No. It is shifting in Europe though, unfortunately for the worse. I think today there is less space for the public intellectual even in Europe, at least in newspapers. In Sweden, which is where I was before I moved to this country in 1995, there were four newspapers. Two of them were tabloids, and a friend of mine was editing the cultural pages of one of these tabloids, Aftonbladet. They were publishing interviews with intellectuals like Paul Virilio and Baudrillard. That blows away the content of the cultural pages of the New York Times, for example. In Europe at that time, it wasn’t unusual for academics and other public intellectuals to write for newspapers in a way that was both smart and jargon-free. These types of intellectuals cared about trying to engage in a larger cultural conversation and I felt like the New York Times—well, I have not read the New York Times for a long time, actually—

mbg: Really?

SN: I can’t read the Times anymore—I get most of my news online from European newspapers like the Guardian or Dagens Nyheter in Sweden—but when I still used to read it, people like Stanley Fish and Edward Said used to write for it sometimes. Then after a while Said’s views were considered too radical for the Times and they dropped him. On the whole, the cultural pages of the Times are—or at least were when I used to read it—highly disappointing.

There are not enough non-academic venues in which intellectuals can publish. For that reason, I think, they end up being sequestered in academic journals, where they write in a particular mode, and their language atrophies. It’s very sad because what those specialists know can and should be of interest to a much larger audience. However, writing for a larger audience requires a different type of language that you have to practice to become good at. So, we thought of Cabinet as being—and this was one of the impetuses for starting the magazine—a place where we could encourage that mode of writing. About a third of our articles are written by academics. Many academics in the United States are dissatisfied with what academic writing offers them, so we’ve not been turned down by many—unless they’re about to get tenure and they know that, in that last stretch, writing for Cabinet won’t be considered relevant by their tenure committee. Other than that, most people are very happy to have the opportunity to write for our audience. Our audience is fairly small; we sell about 13,000 copies of the magazine and it’s usually estimated 3 people read each sold copy, so we’re looking at around 30,000 people. But that’s a lot more readers than the journal of 18th-Century French Studies, or wherever academics might usually publish.

mbg: Do you find that academics are well-prepared to write for Cabinet’s audience, or do you have to work fairly closely with them as an editor?

SN: Well, we interview a lot of academics, in part because I find that the interview format allows them to speak very naturally in much more accessible language. They do write for us as well, and sometimes we have to edit vigorously to push them towards a language that’s jargon-free. However, the academics we approach to write for us may be from a self-selecting pool. We can already see that their mode of writing is going outside of the traditional bounds of academic writing. There’s exuberance there, there’s speculation there, and you can see them busting out.

mbg: As an editor and writer myself, I think a lot about what “critical writing” is or could be today. What part of critical writing do you think Cabinet is doing, or is it doing critical writing at all?

SN: I’ll tell you components of critical writing that we are not interested in. The idea of critical distance is something we are definitely not interested in; this idea that I somehow survey the object of contemplation from a particular distance, which is the right distance, and from this right distance that is only available to certain people, I can then make judgments that are true or valid in some way. That we don’t like. We prefer the person who is too close in some way, who is passionate and makes no claim to being at just the right distance, the person who in some way acknowledges that her insights and blindnesses are deeply related. But we also prefer the person who is too far, who is too distant to have any engagement at all, including the act of judgment, and is providing almost a cold description of an object that most people would want to pass judgment on. I say “almost” because I don’t want to pretend that neutral description is possible, but there is a permanent delay in reaching a conclusion in this second mode of writing that I think is worth holding onto.

There are also certain genres that we are not interested in. All those catalogue essays, for example, I don’t know who reads them, to be honest. They have a certain mode that you know in advance—you know what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it. I’m being grossly unfair here; there’s lots of fantastic writing in catalogue essays, but as a genre I feel it has no audience, and for good reason. We also don’t have reviews, for example, in the magazine because when we started to think about reviews we kind of fell asleep. People should trust tedium as a guidance system for what is good or bad. I don’t know many artists who are excited to read those big long articles in the middle of most art magazines, and if art magazines aren’t read by artists, then something’s going on. Part of what we wanted to do with Cabinet was bring different modes of writing —including new experiments in critical writing — and see if we could help dislocate some of these sedimented tendencies.

mbg: So is there anything left to keep from critical writing?

SN: From critical writing in the dominant mode? Yes, there’s carefulness and specificity, and that has to co-exist alongside the potential for abandon, exuberance, speculation, adventure. At Cabinet, we’re looking for writing that is anchored somewhere; we like the text to hit ground at some point and have traction. It’s not about creative writing, otherwise it becomes an exercise in just making stuff up and I don’t think that’s ethical or interesting in the context of our pages. I’m a traditionalist in this sense: academics have produced all sorts of great texts about the world and how it became what it is, and we have to take that work on board and think about it.

mbg: Okay, so you’re talking about a kind of faithfulness to facts and histories of ideas that results in specificity. Where does critical processing come into this?

SN: To take an example, if we have a fictional dialogue between Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol walking through New York—a text that Saul Anton wrote for us in 2001—we want the conversation to stage exactly what those artists could have and could not have said. This requires thorough familiarity with their work and writings, absorbing it, and then producing wholesale something that is built on all that research but doesn’t end up just rehearsing the same positions. The dialogue genre will itself produce new knowledge and insights into the two artists.

Many texts that we normally think of as being critical share a strategy: they aim to show the reader the falseness of some other person’s position by carefully dismantling it. It’s in part a game of intellectual one-upmanship. These are very authoritative modes of passing judgment, and they have a lot to teach us, but these are exactly the modes of engagement that we try to sidestep. There’s a place for those traditional modes of critical writing, but we’d like to be a venue for modes of writing that undermine themselves, that are at times excessive or not appropriate, and they certainly don’t worry about decorum, or how things should be done. They might even undo their own authority by overreaching or by refusing to gather things up in the right way. They definitely shun disinterestedness as the primary criterion for criticality and they want to interact with the object in as many different interested ways as possible. They are experiments or essays in a deep sense, and they might fail, which is ok.

mbg: So I have a couple different questions related to what you’ve said so far. You mentioned that artists don’t read art magazines very much. Anecdotally, this feels right to me. But I wonder whether you have any hard evidence about how much more artists read publications like Cabinet.

SN: Hard evidence? No. Scanning through our subscriber list, I’d guess that roughly half of our readers are artists, just from the names I recognize. But then I have a skewed set of friends, you know? [laughs] Not knowing your readers is very helpful because the moment you start imagining the reader, you risk attempting to cater to that reader. When we’re editing a text, we never imagine, ‘will readers understand this?’ ‘will readers like this?’ ‘will readers be disappointed?’ None of those questions ever enter our heads.

mbg: What are the questions that enter your heads when you’re putting together an issue?

SN: Do we enjoy this? Are we learning something from it? Can we understand everything we are editing? We think of ourselves as the first readers. We’re a large group, so hopefully it’s not just one ego being refracted.

mbg: I’ve always wondered how you come up with the themes of issues.

SN: Sometimes one of our editors will suggest a particular topic. That happened with “Electricity” and “Ruins,” for example. Other times, the topic comes out of conversations between me, my colleague Jeffrey Kastner who’s senior editor of the magazine and is in the office with me, and one other editor who randomly walks in. “Insecurity,” for example, came out of a conversation in that way. And sometimes people from outside have suggested themes to us. “Shame” was suggested by a reader who was a professor at the New School.

mbg: How do you decide whether an idea is a workable topic for an issue?

SN: We would like the topic to be large enough so that it can extend into all the sorts of nooks and crannies of culture. Some theme ideas, even though we liked them, seemed too specific to two or three disciplines, at least given the amount of time and energy we have to devote to each issue. We also would like the topic to be untimely. If everyone is talking about a particular topic, we definitely prefer not to do it. We prefer something that has fallen out of favor or is marginalized. We liked “Shame,” for example, because it was important in 18th-century philosophical discourse before guilt sidelined it in the 19th century. We’ve in fact only done one issue that was timely, which was the “Animals” issue. We were doing an issue on “Evil,” and mad cow disease was happening. Those scenes of cows being burnt in England were so incredible that we decided to postpone the “Evil” issue and do an issue on animals. That was the one time where we responded to something happening in real time.

Part of this is just functional. It takes roughly nine to twelve months for us to go from an idea to getting it together to publishing it to getting it back from Belgium where we print. Something that is timely would be untimely by the time we get to it. The other part of it is that if everyone is talking about something, I don’t see the point of being one more person talking about it. There are so many things to talk about.

mbg: Your upcoming issue on education seems pretty timely.

SN: To be honest, that’s a reason why we are uncomfortable with it. We’ve even thought about canceling it but we’ve already put it in the distributor’s catalogue and received submissions for it, so we’re going to go ahead and do it.

mbg: And you recently had a show touching on the topic of education at your space—videos of classrooms by Darcy Lange. Do you think of your space as an opportunity to be more timely?

SN: No, though Lange’s work is of course about pedagogy and education. In the 70s, he made a series of works in Birmingham and Oxfordshire in which he would put his camera in a classroom and film the whole class and then show the tape to the teacher, and tape the teacher watching the tape and having a discussion about his or her performance. Then he would show the tape of the classroom to the students and tape them watching the tape and having a discussion about their performance. I think it’s an incredible body of work and one that had never been shown in the United States.

mbg: How do you understand the relationship between the space and the magazine?

SN: Some of the shows have come out of the magazine. Recently we showed work by Victor Houteff, a Seventh Day Adventist from the 1930s who founded the group in Waco that was later taken over by David Koresh. Houteff’s paintings were part of his evangelical work and they’re amazing—many of them offer strange timelines of history understood through Houteff’s particular religious framework. We showed them in the magazine in 2001 and we all loved them, so now, nine years later, we decided to show them in the space. I don’t know many places that can show this kind of historical material on its own. Our shows will go back and forth between contemporary artists—our next show is with Mark Dion—and historical stuff.

mbg: So the shows are just based on whim?

SN: They’re based on what is interesting and would be great to see and learn from. Whim, in some sense, in that if we ever tried to get a grant for the space, I don’t know how we would describe the program, but not whim in the sense that we of course think that the work we show is absorbing and compelling.

mbg: How do you fund the exhibitions?

SN: We have a budget of about $2000 a year for it.

mbg: No.

SN: Yeah.

mbg: So the work and labor are all donated?

SN: Well, for example, with Darcy Lange’s show, they sent us the DVDs from New Zealand and uploaded the scanned pictures for us and we printed them out on a donated Epson printer and mounted them ourselves. The whole show cost $250, and I think it was a great show.

mbg: And you use the same space in which you produce the magazine, eliminating those costs.

SN: Yes; whoever is in the office working also oversees the gallery. That’s the only reason why we can pull it off. I love having no budget on certain things. I love the fact that at the end of this year we’ll probably spend less than $2000 having done about eight shows. I like the ethics of being tiny. Olafur Eliasson will forgive me, but his waterfalls piece is antithetical to what the ethics of the art world should be, I think. With that much money, you could have 1,000 great art projects instead. That’s one a day for 3 years. Those kinds of enormous projects should be rejected out of hand. I’m not saying it’s comfortable to do things with the budget we have, and I’m not saying it’s fair to everybody who participates because we can’t offer any fees, but all the participants know that we’re not getting any money for it either, so in that sense we’re not abusing them, or if we are, we’re abusing ourselves first and inviting others to join us. If it’s unethical, it’s a shared unethics.

mbg: As you’re talking about ethics, I want to go back to something you said earlier. You mentioned that what you called “creative writing” unethical in the context of critical writing.

SN: Not creative writing per se, obviously, but creative writing in the mode that we are interested in at Cabinet. We want to look at historical materials and the pre-history of the contemporary. If we un-tether the texts completely from the factual and historical, if the speculative, the imaginative, the creative, the unbound, the adventurous become our only guidelines, then we would end up with what I mean here by creative writing. We want an attention to style, and we also like to offer the freedom to mix genres and voices within the same text, but we also want to always signal our commitment to the factual and historical and the idea that there is some stake there that needs to be taken seriously.

mbg: I have another question about ethics. I get why the idea of a Cabinet of Curiosities is attractive for its rich juxtapositions, but I sense some ethical danger here, too, given the place of such cabinets in the history of colonization.

SN: There are dangers in what we’re doing. Historically, certain types of curiosity, women’s curiosity for instance, has been highly regulated and censored. And of course, with the figure of the collector, there is the danger that the objects, whether textual or actual artifacts, are simply there to reflect the collector himself.

But dilettantism is another way to discuss this. If you learn a little bit about something, this may seem like dilettantism from the specialist’s point of view. But gaining little bits of knowledge about many things can also be an additive process whereby you start to care about the histories and the artifacts that surround us. You begin to think, “my god, this window next to us, when did this become the dominant way to decorate a window frame? Where is this wood from and who made this thing?” All of these little bits of knowledge become a way of thinking around the social, material world around us. Those little bits of history, I think, if offered to you in the right way, can help to shift your perspective. We become more careful about thinking about why the world is the way it is. In that sense, I do think what we’re doing at Cabinet is ethical.

mbg: I think you’re right, in an ideal world that’s how the magazine functions. It doesn’t always function that way, though. Cabinet’s aesthetic seems to play right into a trendy, mostly cosmetic antiquarianism right now. I still read The New York Times, and last summer they printed an article about the “new antiquarians,” 20- and 30-somethings in Brooklyn who are collecting relics of a colonial past, but are completely disassociating these objects from any kind of historical, political context.

SN: Well, first, I think collecting objects is a little bit different than putting texts together around ideas. Texts are harder to fetishize than objects. Second, that is a trap that we have certainly fallen into at times: a bad issue of Cabinet may have too many articles about “19th century fads,” as one of our editors put it. That’s a danger, but I hope that a good issue of Cabinet is not just about antiquarianism. And I hope that many of our articles can be read as a pre-history of what happens today and help us understand our relationship with the world today. Sometimes this is explicit in the articles, and sometimes it’s not, and we’re trusting the readers to make the connections. If they don’t, that’s a failure of our part and we need to then address that in some way.

mbg: Or also a failure of all texts in some way. You can’t, of course, guarantee the reader will read the same thing you wrote.

SN: Which is maybe why it’s best not to think too much about the reader. [laughs]

Above copied from:

http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/index.php/interview/index/146/73

VITTORE BARONI: FROM MAIL ART TO WEB 2.0, Tatiana Bazzichelli

Eng: Luisa Bertolatti


Vittore Baroni was born in 1956 in Forte dei Marmi, Italy, and lives and works in Viareggio. A Music critic and investigator of countercultures, he has been one of the most active operators in the mail art planetary circuit for the past three decades.

Since 1978, he has been promoting exhibitions, events, publications and collective projects on Art Networking and net cultures that anticipated the Internet. He also dealt with visual and audio poetry, street art and comics meticulously. I met Vittore in Viareggio, in his house in Via Cesare Battisti, a treasury of wonders for all those interested in the dynamics of the net and creative correspondence, seeing as he collects hundreds of materials, envelopes, stamps, records and works from collective projects accumulated over thirty years of postal communication.

We spent a lovely afternoon together, surrounded by the surprises hidden in his archive that often come back to life in order to pleasantly entertain the many guests who visit Vittore and his family (cat and rabbit included) and we thought about the current dynamics of social networking, relating them to the artistic experiences and practices on the net of the past few decades.

Tatiana Bazzichelli: Do you think that networking platforms defined with the term Web 2.0 (Facebook, Myspace, Youtube etc.) are important in order for younger generations to get more involved with the concept of networks, or are they a mirror of a involution in net practices? What do you think the term “making the net” means today?

Vittore Baroni: Vittore Baroni: First of all I think that we have to accept the fact that there's a new generation of social networks that have sprouted from a constant evolution of technological and communicative instruments. By doing some research it's evident that there are not only the most commonly known social networks, but it's such a vast phenomenon that it's difficult to give an opinion on the value of these and consider them more or less positive compared to the more “traditional” networking practices. In a few words, I believe that the presence of these instruments is useful; what becomes decisive is understanding how to use them and for what purpose. Even Ray Johnson, known as the “father” of mail art, in reality didn't just use mail in his networking activities, but for example he also used the phone, for physical encounters with groups of people based on particular strategies. Networkers are people who don't close themselves in their study in order to make their art; instead their primary objective is the desire to build nets and communicate with other people. The act of communication becomes a work of art.

I find it very useful that there are millions of people who are beginning to approach the theme of networking by connecting with one another. It seems obvious to me that the social networks that have had and will have more success are those where people find a certain amount of practical use. Before the Internet existed, I was part of the music circuits and music collectors, and this network had already expanded worldwide. The Internet, with all it's affiliations defined by the term Web 2.0, is an instrument with enormous potential, but, and this seems impossible, we're still not able to use it fully yet. Every time I come across collective creative projects online, I'm surprised to state that the results obtained are often inferior in terms of networking than what was capable of being achieved with postal art through a simple postage stamp.

There were decades of countercultures and political battles, during which the most common means of communication used was the simple instrument called “mimeograph”. The flyer given to people on the street, during 1968 (which in Italy was actually 1969), the fanzines or punkzines from the punk era, created an efficient and disruptive action in certain circuits. A process such as this should be even more exponential with the Internet, because it is directed to a much wider audience. But I believe that we are still not capable of using the instrument efficiently. Maybe we should wait for Web 3.0? You realise that many of the peer-2-peer networks are still widely used to exchange pornographic material; a large part of the world's population is subject to the digital divide and problems of primary survival; others seem to prefer an “individual” life concept more than a “social” one; I don't think we've gotten to an arrival point and a total maturity of network practices, despite the fact that many think the opposite.

The hope is, as it was in the 1960's when hundreds of thousands of copies of independent magazines per printed, that today new forms of social networks can be developed that are more elastic and really favour creative work. Usually the “inventors” of these platforms are young adults that start doing this kind of thing just for fun, and this is positive. We're still in a very immature phase: to be on Facebook is more like going to a piazza and listening to people chatting, with someone who shouts a little louder once in a while. But the structure of networks is not thought of in order to create a constructive dialogue. If tomorrow social networks made with fewer restrictions and no strict rules will be successful, this will be a step forward and perhaps there could be a new counterculture. In the past these practices arose because the “entertainment” was so restricted that the subversive content would leap up and become evident more quickly. Today we are saturated by data and voices. On the one hand it's positive, but on the other the message becomes diluted and no one knows how to take part actively.

Why was Luther Blisset so right in the 90's? Because we realised that we were missing a certain mythology of attitudes and ways of thinking; what Franco Battiato described as “a permanent centre of gravity” was missing. Once upon a time you would go to see a concert like Woodstock and on the stage you would see “mythological” people who were like lightning conductors and diffusers of energy. Today in the network dynamics we have an explosion of artificial democracy and equality, which creates a total opacity; the subject of individual responsibilities tends to crumble in an undifferentiated mass of fragmented data. Once upon a time people like John Lennon created a song that had meaning because it was created by people like him, but also because it was perceived by an audience that contributed to distributing it and spreading it through people's imagination. If a song of his like “Give Peace a Chance” was sung by millions of people in a piazza during a protest, a virtuous circuit would be created that contained the artist and the public. In the frenzy of equality of Web 2.0 the most satisfied are those who have the power, because the problems are still the same but people have the illusion that there's a full freedom and the possibility for everyone to have their 15 minutes of fame. I think that current social networks are reality shows for everyone. Now we just have to transform the reality show into a cultural program (which is a difficult task!).

Tatiana Bazzichelli: I ask myself whether the network of mail art and the net practices that were inspired by this, much before the Fluxus experience, can find a place in the current generations of social networks. I think of the fact that the mail artists themselves and the networkers can use social networks as a territory for artistic criticism. Do you think these practices on the net are reversible or immeasurable?

Vittore Baroni: The creation of mail art coincided with the diffusion of postage as a means of communication in different circles, like that of the New York Correspondence School founded by Ray Johnson, but also those of visual poets in South America, or artists within the Iron Curtain. The genesis coincided with a practical need: the idea of connecting in the most simple and functional way possible. George Maciunas understood that there was a network of people who shared artistic and creative objectives but they were in Europe, America or Japan. It was no surprise that Fluxus came about through a festival in Germany, spinning a web via the post and telephone between different people who had common interests. There was an intense epistolary correspondence activity behind Fluxus. Ray Johnson the most efficient and economical way to create his artistic network through the post and telephone, but if he were still alive today he would probably use to internet too.

In fact the true primary essence of mail art was not the fact of “using the post”, but to begin sharing projects. No one who practices mail art has an absolute or fetishist attachment to the post as a means, and no one has a refusal toward different means of communication and new technologies. On the contrary, the computer has revealed itself as being very useful for filing archives, for managing large databases, to layout and print your own pages of stamps and much more. A lot of postal artists, like Piermario Ciani, began using the Commodore 64, the first computers, the fax machine, trying to learn the first programming language, mostly to be able to communicate. Some people tried to create “alternative” postal systems for artistic correspondence, like Ulises Carrion and Peter Kuestermann.

When the use of the computer spread, many mail artists began to use email while using traditional mail, in so doing not giving up on the pleasure of the “physical” manufacture, but using email to send invites quickly, for daily communication, etc. Mail art is a non-profit and non-commercial artistic practice, but can be very expensive when you start to communicate to hundreds of people. The natural generational replacement is always moving toward electronic ways of communicating.

To answer your question I believe that these practices are reversible, within the limits of the fact that in some countries the computer has become the most common means for communication. But for mail artists in Africa or China the computer is still an expensive means and so postage is still widely used. In the projects of the past few years, I have tried to send mail art project invites via post but also via the Internet. In this way I saw how many participants I could involve through these different channels of communication. In 2008 I managed a project on the artist's book, based on the theme of Utopia, sending the invites through different art websites, like those dedicated to the continuity of Fluxus, to the creators of stickers or street art. The invite was open to everyone and bounced around different websites and blogs, with the risk of receiving an unprecedented amount of work. I received 170 artists' books in total from 26 countries. Of these, about two thirds came from the mail art circuit that I built over thirty years of correspondence. Not more than 50 came from authors that saw the invite on the Internet.

People on the net are unfamiliar with the mechanism of mail art and perhaps they believe that it isn't possible that everyone can take part in a project and everyone gets free documentation. Perhaps they think that there's some trick underneath it all. There's a strange discrepancy between “analogical” networking and digital networking. I took part in various creative web projects, conceived with a similar structure to that of mail art, and I realised that the number of participants was considerably reduced compared to Internet's potential. In order to create digital networking, paradoxically much more work is needed, despite the fact that there are more potential users. People are used to the fact that web projects are for rapid and of immediate fruition, Internet language is rapid and intuitive. To participate in a web project can be reduced to the fact of writing a simple line, or sending a ready-made image. For mail art there are slower and more personal preparation times, but people seem more inclined to use their time creatively, with a view to the work they will receive in exchange for their own in their letterbox. Mail art is communication, but it is also a gift, a potlatch. The speed of Internet often brings to a weakening of the content of a message.

Tatiana Bazzichelli: How do you explain the diffusion of net art projects in the 90's then?

Vittore Baroni: Thinking about net art, when I go to the various Biennale events or make use of projects on the net, I have the impression that these sharing platforms, that are often conceptually innovative and well-built, are actually used by very few people over the course of time. It reminds me of conceptual art: put side-by-side with great enunciations, the work often seemed a little stale. Often the net art works, after an initial moment of enthusiasm, don't have a future on the net, and “good games” are invented that remain static in the enunciation stage. They aren't used by a vast audience and (perhaps) they only make the net artist look good, or whoever created the work and exhibited it somewhere. The work remains in the history of net art, but is poor in its social use and quickly becomes obsolete and cannot be found on the net any longer.

From my point of view net art is an elitist practice, common in the cultural industry, which must continue to produce catalogues and make imaginary capital. I'm almost happy that mail art was not historicised and studied. Maybe it's not worth much, or maybe there's something uncomfortable in its “openness” and “gratuity”, in its pointing the finger at regal nudity, which is best not to talk about too much... The sum of art + Internet should, in theory, trigger revolutionary projects, which are being delayed and are difficult to concretise.

If we take the computer-generated music field for example, it's been at least 30 years since people like Brian Eno have experimented with robotic music, without having created any masterpieces. We've gotten used to a world that travels at light speed, but maybe cultural paradigms have gestation periods that don't coincide with our consumerist frenzy. Since I was a teenager, I was fascinated by artistic movements and cultural phenomena of opposition, from Dadaism to Fluxus, from the Beat Generation to Hippies, which brought a fertile movement of strong ideas for a change in real life, capable of really giving you something. In the recent years of postmodernism, that I hope are ending, we took elements of modernity and limited ourselves to rearranging them, without really going beyond (post), and without opening ourselves to a new dimension of art thanks to the net.

Perhaps hacking or net art practices have not yet found a way to leave a real “gift” to those who use them. When, as a boy, I looked for underground magazines by sending a few dollars sealed in an envelope to New York, hoping that I would get something in return, the experience enriched me, those materials provoked cultural shocks in me. Until we can create a strong mentality through current media, the conclusion will always be something like Facebook. Lots of people put together, but who exchange poor and superficial content.

Tatiana Bazzichelli: Perhaps what's missing in Web 2.0, which was included in Mail Art, is the fact of creating a “real” exchange and generating a criticism of the medium itself. Perhaps we should try to create strategies in order to move social network users to more “traditional” forms of networking?

Vittore Baroni: Well, it would be strange to go back to mailed fanzines instead of blogs... Actually I think the Historical phase of mail art was over at least a decade ago, mail art has had its time and we cannot go back and take the same route. But mail art can be useful as a Historic memory, as well as the preceding forms of analogical art. What should be favoured at this point in time is an attentive analysis and study of the past of networking, its many small threads that are often hidden, which could give useful advice to those who work with computers today. Like the case of the forty years or more of the History of Mail Art whose interior and humus developed phenomena that few know anything about, like Neoism, Multiple Names, Plagiarism, Impossibleism, Trax, the Luther Blissett project, that represent the tip of the iceberg. We should have the patience and curiosity to study the origins of artistic networking, taking example from those few critics and authors that have triggered a theoretical observation on the subject (Chuck Welch, John Held, Craig Saper, not to mention your book on Networking Art), to avoid to continue to discover what has already been discovered but to also try to comprehend how to develop less superficial sharing mechanisms in digital networks that aren't so connected to commercial frames of mind.

I hope that in the not so distant future platforms like Myspace or Second Life, where you are caged in enforced structures and behaviour – personally I feel like they are “concentration camps” – leave room for other possibilities where you can really feel comfortable. More suitable experiences that are more similar to mail art are for example Flash Mob, which use the web to give life to physical meetings, to live a common albeit brief “aesthetical” experience, a bit like the meetings organised by Ray Johnson. In my opinion, we must overcome the distinctions between art and non-art, between personal identity and artistic work, between worker and work, between individuality and collectives, between virtual and physical encounters. With a few friends I'm trying to move in this direction, through a project that uses the web but needs real life interventions, thought out to involve people who know nothing about net art or hacking or art in general.

The project is called Wandering Places and pushes toward collective exploration, on convocation of the single participants, of concrete places that mean something to these particular people, like a door that opens onto a memory, a dream, a utopia. The first meeting was on top of Mount Borla, in the Alps, in a natural valley where the forest opens up to a circular vision of the sky. These places are documented on a blog on a social network Ning (where Italian mail artists created the extremely active Dododada: http://dododada.ning.com/ ), in so doing creating a kind of geo-psychic shared map, where every participant can suggest new situations for meetings or other “wandering places” suggested by others.

“Creative” social networks should be usable by anyone, not just those who have specific knowledge in the artistic environment. Luther Blissett was created in this way, like a unique “public” icon that anyone could take on, deprived of any specific characterisation in the art world. I think there can only be a new generation of artists/networkers when people begin to find pleasure in taking part in different projects, when they will find a way to enrich themselves in them. There must be something constructive to exchange and share. It's not necessary to always hide behind nicknames for efficient results, the fact of getting together physically without barriers is perhaps the true objective of “making the net”. When an experience is created where we find ourselves alone with other professionals of the field, then we know that something is not working. Even if I am against the star system, I realise tat today we are missing “reference figures” that are used at catalysts in order to coagulate forces.

Tatiana Bazzichelli: In social networks you don't create the platform, but find yourself in someone else home, trying to furnish it as you prefer and producing content for third parties. Why do you think there are so many users on Facebook today, despite the speed and superficiality of exchange, whereas in the BBS's we were always so few, even if talking about ways of thinking and utopia?

Vittore Baroni: Communication on Facebook is very easy and at the same time all social networks allow an integrated way of sharing that was impossible before: with your mobile you can film something and put it on Youtube, then link it to Facebook. All this, at the time of BBS, was unimaginable. The procedure is immediate and easy, you can promote yourself easily and reach a lot of people with one click. On Facebook everyone is curious about what happened to old classmates, or people they haven't seen for a long time, and through word of mouth the number of users has rapidly and excessively increased. People join out of curiosity but they stay because the chatting is company and it's also a kind of authorised voyeurism, but it could also be a nine-days' wonder. As soon as there will be a similar network, but a little more pleasant and useful, the users will move on. Look what happened with Myspace. It had Facebook's function, but now it has become an obligation to anyone who has a band and often the record companies themselves create pages for their artists.

There are a lot of new ideas for Social Networks that are in incubation, waiting to have success or to be abandoned. For example, Arturo di Corinto created a great network with the objective of monitoring Italian politicians, to make the dialogue between voters and politicians as transparent as possible. The doubt is whether the project will really be capable of capturing the interest of people and make them participate, so that the platform can be updated regularly, the truth of information can be verified, etc. Perhaps a social network about a single politician would be easier to concretise, where voters and adversaries alike can confront each other.

Wikipedia is a good example of a virtuous platform, which works with the contribution of everyone and provides a useful service. The system works if everyone uses it correctly, starting from and open source concept, if you feel part of it. In many social networks you feel uncomfortable, you have the sensation that you're a temporary guest. I believe that from the moment we really feel at home, at ease and certain of the possibility of sharing an experience with others without a Big Brother breathing down our necks, then we can really talk about social networking.

Above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1423

The Rise of Art World 2.0, Ted Mooney

Two years into what we seem to have agreed, in full supine position, to call the Great Recession, it is clear to almost everyone that something has indeed taken its course, and that in many respected fields of endeavor things will never be the same. As someone who has pursued with equal commitment two parallel careers throughout my life─one in the art world (as an editor, a writer, and now as an educator at Yale’s graduate School of Art), and another in the literary world (as a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer)─I am struck, if not exactly surprised, by the similarity of the changes the recent financial meltdown has wrought on both fields, changes long in development but only now openly validated. I say changes, but in fact they are paradigm shifts, since both the art and literary worlds are undergoing transformations that will prove to be game-changingly radical. This much is certain: what was before, will be no more. The sooner we realize this, the more options we will have in the future.

Talking about this paradigm shift in regard to the art world is strangely difficult, for the very reason that the term “art world,” so casually bandied about by almost everyone, is most often used to refer to something that is at best a suspiciously convenient myth. No such all-encompassing art “world” exists. Most likely it is this misuse of the word “world” that has left the term “art world” itself open to such a wide range of misunderstandings. But in fact “art world” does have a very specific meaning, one quite different from the fuzzy globalist entity most often summoned up by those who use it so indiscriminately. Simply put, the art world consists of all those involved in the commission, creation, valuation, promotion, presentation, sale, criticism, documentation, and preservation of art. And with that established, many other matters grow a good deal clearer.

While we have always had artists in the U.S., for example, the American art world─one including all the elements listed above─is a much more recent development. Borrowing from the nomenclature of the software industry, I will call the U.S. art world’s earliest incarnation Art World 1.0 and locate its emergence somewhere in the mid- to late 1930s, when a number of forces came together in New York to create it. These forces included the sudden arrival here of European artists fleeing the onset of World War II; the convergence in New York of other European emigré artists who had moved to the U.S. much earlier but now joined their fellow exiles in the nascent art capital; and a similar movement of American artists away from the heartland to the growing artistic ferment in the East. In addition to these historical migrations, the federal Works Progress Administration, at that time the largest employer in the post-Depression U.S., provided substantial support for the arts, allowing, for example, Willem de Kooning (who had reached New York in 1927) to earn more than three times the salary of a typical Macy’s employee of the same period, all while painting public art works for which he was paid with federal dollars. What’s more, several other elements of the art world as I have defined it were already in place: among them Alfred Barr’s then artist-friendly MOMA, such prescient commissioners of art work as Peggy Guggenheim, a handful of important galleries, soon followed by art and culture periodicals like In the Tiger’s Eye, and View—enough of the necessary elements, anyway, to give critical mass to the first genuine U.S. art world.

Money was certainly made within this self-contained enclave, but not very much, and the institutions and collectors who acquired the art works emerging from these artists’ studios did so mainly out of their acute awareness that this was a historic moment, unprecedented in the U.S. Few if any of these collectors imagined that the works they were buying would in a very short time increase astronomically in monetary value, so speculation was a negligible factor. It was sufficient that enough money be circulated through the art scene to keep the artists alive and productive. And with only short periods of stasis, indirection or revolt, the New York art world evolved from that first iteration into what we know today, its characteristic elements continuously shifting in relative importance as the art eco-system grew in volume and self-confidence.

I will leave the reader to decide when exactly the art world’s incremental upgrades occurred─when 1.0 became 1.1, and so on─confining myself instead to a few obviously watershed moments. By the late 1940s and early ’50s, the Abstract Expressionists had became pop-cultural stars whom the average American saw in equal measure as perplexing oddities (“My kid could’ve done that”) and gratifying emblems of postwar American dominance (“Take that, Europe”). Indeed, they became such accepted emblems of a newly prosperous U.S. that the federal government (in the form of the U.S. Information Agency, now known to have functioned abroad as a propaganda arm of the C.I.A.) sent their works on extended worldwide tour as a potent psychological asset in waging the Cold War.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s another major change occurred, as the soul-baring feats of the Abstract Expressionists and their progeny gave way to the cool ironies of artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and all those other artists so hastily lumped together by the media under the rubric of Pop art. I’ll call this moment the arrival of Art World 1.5, since, in my opinion, it brought us halfway to where we are now. With it came a shift in sensibility that suggested a new detachment of artist from artwork, one that allowed the expansion into that same ironic distance of the other art-world elements, those that till now had usually played a secondary role. The valuation, promotion, presentation, and sale of art began to take on more weight, and the normative practices in these areas showed signs of changing and evolving in ways till then unforeseeable.

Simultaneously, a new breed of collector emerged, exemplified by people like Robert Scull, who made his fortune from a Manhattan taxi fleet inherited from his father-in-law, had no real background in art and simply bought what he liked—in quantity. Pricing became more aggressive, promotion took on a glamour of its own, and the social aspect of the art world veered increasingly toward spectacle. Not only did this period mark the peak of postwar prosperity in this country, but it was also a genuinely thrilling time for U.S. art, one as innovative in its way as that ushered in by the Abstract Expressionists. What’s more─and here Warhol is the obvious example─the subject of much of this art was commerce, money, glamour, and popular culture. So for the first time the economic elements of the art world were unapologetically accorded billing equal to the art and the artists themselves. And with this acceptance, the ethos that has brought us to our present pass was unequivocally established.

To be sure, there were those who worked in explicit rebellion against the overall commercial trend of the art world─the Conceptualists, the Earthwork artists, performance artists, and others─many of whom produced art that, though intended in part to be “uncollectable,” must be accounted major work by any standards. But the expansion and increasing commercialization of the art world─punctuated by the booms and busts intrinsic to any market-linked community─continued apace. Among the innovations that contributed to the art world’s rapid development from the 1960s on were the decreasing cost and consequent proliferation of color reproductions in art magazines, the rise of graduate art-school programs (which implicitly presented art as a solid career path, comparable to, say, dentistry, in the security it offered), the increasing acceptance of the nakedly commercial art fair as a legitimate forum for presenting art, the ascension of the artist super-stars of the 1980s, the exploding resale market for contemporary art at venerable auction houses, the construction boom for contemporary art museums as they became more and more widely perceived as tourist magnets that no respectable mid-sized municipality could do without, and, finally, the vastly accelerated exchange of ideas and images that the Internet allowed. By the time the Museum of Modern Art reopened its doors after its lavish renovations of 2002-04, it is safe to say that Art World 1.9 had reached its apotheosis and begun its ongoing decline. Art World 2.0, a complete reset of the original, with consequences only beginning to be known, was taking shape.

Why do I locate this changeover at that moment? It’s tempting to point to the example of the newly expanded MOMA, a grotesquely misconceived distortion of its former self. As far back as the 1970s there had been talk, both within the museum and outside it, of declaring MOMA a historical museum, a museum precisely of modern art, which is generally seen as having come to a triumphant end with Minimalism. Watching MOMA continue to show contemporary art in its ostentatiously corporate, quintessentially modernist quarters seems to many like watching a 75-year-old man (the Modern opened in 1929, the very year the Great Depression began) attempt a kickflip indy at the local skateboarding park─a sight unseemly at best, but in any case a clear indication that all self-awareness has long since departed the scene. That may sound like a cheap shot, but within it lies a kernel of ineradicable truth. Every three generations (and I’m using “generation” to mean the traditional 25 years, not the five to ten years implied by advertisements and over-wrought publicists) the living memory of how the world was “back then,” what its inhabitants at that time aspired to and how they went about getting it, begins to die off. The number of eyewitnesses rapidly diminishes until we become reliant on second-hand accounts, self-serving memoirs, and conflicting rumor to summon up a vision of the original. Soon nothing can be verified with certainty, the “real” past is lost, and it can only carry on as a simulacrum of itself. Not until then, paradoxically, can the genuinely new, brought into being of its own necessity, be born and thrive on its own terms. Now, for the American art world, that time is upon us.

While it must be emphasized that Art World 2.0 remains in its earliest stage of development, it currently seems characterized by a studious rejection, quiet but steely, of the corporatization of art so enthusiastically and profitably pursued during the Art World 1.9 years. Among my grad students and many of their confreres in their mid-thirties or younger, there is a strong preference for art that in one way or another emphasizes “secrecy,” subversion, withholding, ephemerality, word-of-mouth invitation, sub-visible presence, intimate one-on-one interaction between artist and “viewer” and strong artist-to-artist dialogue. Where there’s institutional critique (and there’s a lot of it) it’s unlikely to be cast in the flamboyantly confrontational style of, say, Hans Haacke. Instead it might take place within a chosen “major New York museum”─the default term proposed by some leading museums after the almost Talmudic deliberations of their legal departments─among a group of invited participants, the results to be documented, if at all, by the museum’s security cameras. (It seems significant in itself that “surveillance”—both inside museums and elsewhere--is a hot topic among Art World 2.0 artists, who are acutely aware of the demise of privacy and ingenious in their attempts to resuscitate it.)

In addition, widespread revelations about the recent criminal activities of respected banks and international corporations, crimes that have almost without exception gone unpunished, have made virtually all corporate practice suspect to a sizable proportion of Americans, and to many of the Art World 2.0 artists it is, at least for now, anathema. As they attempt to reclaim for artists the freedom and respect once naturally accorded the best art work, independent of the by-now customary financial indices and career-path signposts, they have begun to seek alternative ways of structuring their art world. And they have learned how to adapt for their own purposes the near-universal corporate response to the recent financial meltdown; they have developed ways to eliminate (or at least minimize) the middlemen.

This strategy is only possible because the old Art World, as well as modernism and the various morbid offshoots that followed its demise, is dead to them. They accept this as a fact, but don’t dwell on it, since the corporatization that marked Art World 1.9’s endgame is of little relevance to them, except as a warning. What most concerns these emerging Art World 2.0 artists from a practical standpoint is regaining control of how their work is presented and, given the ever-greater importance of the Internet, how the reproduced images of that work are disseminated. To those ends, many prefer to avoid long-term gallery affiliation altogether, seeking instead the most suitable venue for each new project as it is completed. By stringing together a series of one-shot appearances in places of their own choosing, they are better able to maximize their freedom and shape their work’s development. This may be seen as a direct response to the financial hysteria of the Art World 1.9 years, which led to the virtual extinction (though always with magnificent exceptions) of long-term, even life-long relationships between gallery and artist. In times not nearly as distant as they now seem, galleries saw it as their role to nurture and develop their artists, eventually to arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome through patience and hard work. But the frenetic financial pace of Art World 1.9─whereby new artists would typically be given two or three shows to demonstrate their financial viability before, if their work failed to sell impressively, being summarily dropped─did away with these nurturing relationships, and Art World 2.0 artists have quite sensibly concluded that their best option is to nurture themselves. This shift in thinking explains the primary emphasis Art World 2.0 artists place on building and maintaining their connections with other artists; they want a mutual support structure that they can depend on. Not only does this preference mirror their widely shared interest in reconnecting with their audience personally, in many cases on an intimate one-to-one basis, but underscores their deep-seated resistance to any form of outside control whatsoever, from any quarter. This insistence by Art World 2.0 artists on setting their own terms is yet another bit of bad news for galleries, who have already begun to see their high-end artists’ new work bypass them altogether, going straight from studio to auction house, where a successful sale can establish an artist’s financial worth much more effectively than a sold-out gallery show, which is by nature not at all transparent. The gallery dealer can and does make use of a whole range of tricks to achieve the desired public perception of a given show’s outcome, including under-the-table discounts, non-existent waiting lists for a particular artist’s work, failure to disclose the prices at which works really sold, and many other sleights of hand. At auction, the process is far more transparent: a work is sold to the highest bidder, conferring on the artist a more certain status and financial validation. Foreign collectors, especially from emerging markets such as Asia, are far more comfortable buying the work of an artist with whom they may not be familiar if that artist has already received the imprimatur of a respected auction house.

Obviously, auction houses are unlikely to accept a consignment from an untested artist, and that fact, along with the innate predisposition of Art World 2.0 artists to avoid entangling commercial alliances, assures that there will be many more artist-organized shows in the future. This polarization of sales venues corresponds, interestingly enough, to the drastically increased concentration of U.S. wealth into far fewer hands, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and grossly accelerated during the Bush years. I have heard more than a few highly informed art-world players speculate pessimistically about the continued viability of art galleries in Art World 2.0. Personally, I think this is more a form of complaint than prognostication, but the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand. At the very least it is a recognition, however indirect, that the reset implicit in the arrival of Art World 2.0 has already occurred.

What direction Art World 2.0 will eventually take cannot, of course, be known at this early date, but its initial aspirations are clear. Precisely because the monetary valuation of art, while based on some established indices, is at base irrational and subjective to the point of arbitrariness, the artist who is alert to these matters can work with a freedom unavailable to virtually all other workers in all other professions. This freedom was highly valued in the early stages of Art World 1.0─not only by artists but also by those composing the other necessary elements of the art world eco-system. Somewhere along the way, however, that freedom was lost to many artists as the art-world “support system” arrogated to itself more and more power, which came to influence artists themselves to an equally inflated degree. Those days may not be entirely over, but Art World 2.0 has arrived with the express intention of reclaiming its freedom and resisting outside influences, especially institutional ones, with all the energy and inventiveness its members can bring to bear.

They have already dismissed any notion of a master scenario for art’s development, simply by virtue of their arrival. They have the tools and weapons to take back their freedom, with its mix of blessings. Now we will see if they have the will.

Copyright © 2010 by Ted Mooney

Author: Ted Mooney was a senior editor at Art in America magazine for more than 30 years and now teaches a graduate seminar at Yale University’s School of Art. He is also the author of three award-winning novels, as well a number of essays and shorter works of fiction. His most recent novel, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 11, 2010, is titled The Same River Twice. A video trailer for this book was created in collaboration with new-media artist John Gara and can be found at http://tiny.cc/TSRT-video .

above copied from: http://artistorganizedart.org/commons/

Image Future, Lev Manovich

Uneven Development

What kinds of images will dominate visual culture a number of decades from now? Would they still be similar to the typical image that surrounds us today—photographs that are digitally manipulated and often combined with various graphical elements and type? Or would future images be completely different? Would photographic code fade away in favor of something else?

There are good reasons to assume that the future images would be photograph-like. Like a virus, a photograph turned out to be an incredibly resilient representational code: it survived waves of technological change, including computerization of all stages of cultural production and distribution. The reason for this persistence of photographic code lies in its flexibility: photographs can be easily mixed with all other visual forms—drawings, 2D and 3D designs, line diagrams, and type. As a result, while photographs truly dominate contemporary visual culture, most of them are not pure photographs but various mutations and hybrids: photographs which went through various filters and manual adjustments to achieve a more stylized look, a more flat graphic look, more saturated color, etc.; photographs mixed with design and type elements; photographs which are not limited to the part of the spectrum visible to a human eye (night vision, X-ray); simulated photographs done with 3D computer graphics; and so on. Therefore, while we can say that today we live in a "photographic culture," we also need to start reading the word "photographic" in a new way. "Photographic" today is really photo-GRAPHIC, the photo providing only an initial layer for the overall graphical mix.

One way is which change happens in nature, society, and culture is inside-out. The internal structure changes first, and this change affects the visible skin only later. For instance, according to Marxist theory of historical development, infrastructure (i.e., mode of production in a given society, also called "base") changes well before superstructure (ideology and culture in this society). In a different example, think of technology design in the twentieth century: typically, a new type of machine was at first fitted within old, familiar skin (for instance, early twentieth-century cars emulated the form of horse carriages). The familiar McLuhan idea that the new media first emulates old media is another example of this type of change. In this case, a new mode of media production, so to speak, is first used to support old structures of media organization, before the new structure emerges. For instance, the first typeset books were designed to emulate hand-written books; cinema first emulated theater; and so on.

This concept of uneven development can be useful in thinking about the changes in contemporary visual culture. Since it beginnings fifty years ago, computerization of photography (and cinematography) has by now completely changed the internal structure of a photographic image; yet its "skin," i.e. the way the image looks, still largely remains the same. It is therefore possible that at some point in the future the "skin" of an image would also become completely different, but this has not happened yet. So we can say at present our visual culture is characterized by a new computer "base" and old photographic "superstructure."

The Matrix trilogy of films provides us with a very rich set of examples perfect for thinking further about these issues. The trilogy is an allegory about how its visual universe is constructed. That is, the films tell us about the Matrix, the virtual universe which is maintained by computers—and of course, visually the images of the Matrix which we the viewers see in the films were all indeed assembled with the help of software (the animators sometimes used Maya but mostly relied on custom-written programs). So there is a perfect symmetry between us, the viewers of a film, and the people who live inside the Matrix—except while the computers running the Matrix are capable of doing it in real time, most scenes in each of The Matrix films took months and even years to put together. (So The Matrix can be also interpreted as the futuristic vision of computer games at a point in a future when it would become possible to render The Matrix-style visual effects in real time.)

The key to the visual universe of The Matrix trilogy is the new set of computer graphic processes that over the years were developed by John Gaeta and his colleagues at ESC Entertainment. Gaeta coined names for these processes: "virtual cinema," "virtual human," "universal capture," "image-based rendering," and others. Together, these processes represent a true milestone in the history of computer-driven special effects. They take to their logical conclusion the developments of the 1990s, such as motion capture, and simultaneously open a new stage. [1] We can say that with The Matrix, the old "base" of photography has finally been completely replaced by a new computer-driven one. What remains to be seen is how the "superstructure" of a photographic image—what it represents and how—will change to accommodate this "base."




Reality Simulation Versus Reality Sampling

In order to understand better the significance of Gaeta's method, let us briefly run through the history of 3D photo-realistic image synthesis and its use in the film industry. In 1963, Lawrence G. Roberts (who later in the 1960s became one of the key people behind the development of ARPANET but at that time was a graduate student at MIT) published a description of a computer algorithm to construct images in linear perspective. These images represented the objects through lines; in contemporary language of computer graphics they can be called "wire frames." Approximately ten years later, computer scientists designed algorithms that allowed for the creation of shaded images (so-called Gouraud shading and Phong shading, named after the computer scientists who create the corresponding algorithms). From the middle of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, the field of 3D computer graphics went through rapid development. Every year new fundamental techniques were arrived at: transparency, shadows, image mapping, bump texturing, particle system, compositing, ray tracing, radiosity, and so on. [2] By the end of this creative and fruitful period in the history of the field, it was possible to use a combination of these techniques to synthesize images of almost every subject that often were not easily distinguishable from traditional cinematography.

All this research was based on one fundamental assumption: in order to re-create an image of reality identical to the one captured by a film camera, we need to systematically simulate the actual physics involved in construction of this image. This means simulating the complex interactions between light sources, the properties of different materials (cloth, metal, glass, etc.), and the properties of physical cameras, including all their limitations such as depth of field and motion blur. Since it was obvious to computer scientists that if they exactly simulate all this physics, a computer would take forever to calculate even a single image, they put their energy in inventing various short cuts which would create sufficiently realistic images while involving fewer calculation steps. So in fact each of the techniques for image synthesis I mentioned in the above paragraph is one such "hack"—a particular approximation of a particular subset of all possible interactions between light sources, materials, and cameras.

This assumption also means that you are re-creating reality step-by-step, from scratch. Every time you want to make a still image or an animation of some object or scene, the story of creation from the Bible is being replayed.

(I imagine God creating the Universe by going through the numerous menus of a professional 3D modeling, animation, and rendering program such as Maya. First he has to make all the geometry: manipulating splines, extruding contours, adding bevels...Next for every object and creature he has to choose the material properties: specular color, transparency level, image, bump, and reflexion maps, and so on. He finishes one page of menus, wipes his forehead, and starts working on the next menu page. Now on to defining the lights: again, dozens of menu options need to be selected. He renders the scene, looks at the result, and admires his creation. But he is far from being done: the universe he has in mind is not a still image but an animation, which means that the water has to flow, the grass and leaves have to move under the blow of the wind, and all the creatures also have to move. He sights and opens another set of menus where he has to define the parameters of algorithms that simulate the physics of motion. And on, and on, and on. Finally the world itself is finished and it looks good; but now God wants to create the Man so he can admire his creation. God sighs again, and takes from the shelf a set of Maya manuals...)

Of course we are in somewhat better position than God was. He was creating everything for the first time, so he could not borrow things from anywhere. Therefore everything had to be built and defined from scratch. But we are not creating a new universe but instead visually simulating a universe that already exists, i.e. physical reality. Therefore computer scientists working on 3D computer graphics techniques realized early on that in addition to approximating the physics involved they can sometimes take another shortcut. Instead of defining something from scratch through the algorithms, they can simply sample it from existing reality and incorporate these samples into the construction process.

Examples of the application of this idea are the techniques of texture mapping and bump mapping which were introduced already in the second part of the 1970s. With texture mapping, any 2D digital image—which can be a close-up of some texture such as wood grain or bricks, but which can be also anything else, for instance a logo, a photograph of a face or of clouds—is mathematically wrapped around virtual geometry. This is a very effective way to add visual richness of a real world to a virtual scene. Bump texturing works similarly, but in this case the 2D image is used as a way to quickly add complexity to the geometry itself. For instance, instead of having to manually model all the little cracks and indentations which make up the 3D texture of a wall made from concrete, an artist can simply take a photograph of an existing wall, convert into a grayscale image, and then feed this image to the rendering algorithm. The algorithm treats grayscale image as a depth map, i.e. the value of every pixel is being interpreted as relative height of the surface. So in this example, light pixels become points on the wall that are a little in front while dark pixels become points that are a little behind. The result is enormous saving in the amount of time necessary to recreate a particular but very important aspect of our physical reality: a slight and usually regular 3D texture found in most natural and many human-made surfaces, from the bark of a tree to a woven cloth.

Other 3D computer graphics techniques based on the idea of sampling existing reality include reflection mapping and 3D digitizing. Despite the fact that all these techniques have been always widely used as soon as they were invented, many people in the field (as far as I can see) always felt that they were cheating. Why? I think this feeling was there because the overall conceptual paradigm for creating photorealistic computer graphics was to simulate everything from scratch through algorithms. So if you had to use the techniques based on directly sampling reality, you somehow felt that this was just temporary—because the appropriate algorithms were not yet developed or because the machines were too slow. You also had this feeling because once you started to manually sample reality and then tried to include these samples in your perfect algorithmically defined image, things rarely would fit exactly right, and painstaking manual adjustments were required. For instance, texture mapping would work perfectly if applied it to straight surface, but if the surface was curved, inevitable distortion would occur.

(I am using "we" here and in other places in this text because I spent approximately seven years working professionally in the field of 3D computer animation between 1984 and 1992, so I still feel a certain identification with this field. At IMAGINA 2003 festival in Barcelona I met John Gaeta and Greg Juby from ESC, who were there to lecture on the making of The Matrix. Slowly it became clear that the three of use were connected by multiple threads. In 1984 I went to work for a company in New York called Digital Effects that at the time was one among seven companies in the world focused on 3D computer animation for television and film. Company president Jeff Kleiser later founded another company—Kleiser- Walczak—where Greg Juby worked for a few years in the 1990s. Juby graduated from Syracuse University where—as we discovered over dinner—he was my student in the very first university class in digital arts I ever taught [1992]. While working at Kleiser's company, Juby met John Gaeta and eventually went to work for him at ESC. Finally, it also turned out that before we turned to computer graphics both Gaeta and I were students at New York University film school.)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the "reality simulation" paradigm and "reality sampling" paradigm co-existed side-by-side. More precisely, as I suggested above, the sampling paradigm was "imbedded" within the reality simulation paradigm. It was common sense that the way to create photorealistic images of reality is by simulating its physics as precisely as one could. Sampling existing reality and then adding these samples to a virtual scene was a trick, a shortcut within the otherwise honest game of simulation.




"Total Capture": Building The Matrix

So far we have looked at the paradigms of the 3D computer graphics field without considering the uses of the simulated images. So what happens if you want to incorporate photorealistic images into a film? This introduces a new constraint. Not only does every simulated image have to be consistent internally, with the cast shadows corresponding to the light sources, and so on, but now it also has to be consistent with the cinematography of a film. The simulated universe and live action universe have to match perfectly (I am talking here about the "normal" use of computer graphics in narrative films and not more graphical aesthetics of TV graphics and music videos which often deliberately juxtaposes different visual codes). As can be seen in retrospect, this new constraint eventually changed the relationship between the two paradigms in favor of the sampling paradigm. But this is only visible now, after The Matrix films made the sampling paradigm the cornerstone of its visual universe. [3]

At first, when filmmakers started to incorporate synthetic 3D images in films, this did not have any effect on how people thought about 3D image synthesis. The first feature film that had 3D computer images was Looker (1980). Throughout the 1980s, a number of films were made which used computer images but always only as a very small element within the overall film narrative (Tron, which was released in 1982 and which can be compared to The Matrix, since its universe is situated inside a computer and created through computer graphics, was an exception). For instance, one of Star Trek films contained a scene of a planet coming to life; it was created using the very first particle system. But this was a single scene, and it had no interaction with any other scenes in the film.

In the early 1990s, the situation had started to change. With pioneering films such as The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), computer generated characters became the key protagonists of film narratives. This meant that they would appear in dozens or even hundreds of shots throughout a film, and that in most of these shots computer characters would have to be integrated with real environments and human actors captured via live action photography (or what in the business is called "live plate.") Examples are the T-1000 cyborg character in Terminator 2, or dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. These computer-generated characters are situated inside the live-action universe (obtained by sampling physical reality via 35mm film camera). The simulated world is located inside the captured world, and the two have to match perfectly.

As I pointed out in The Language of New Media in the discussion of compositing, perfectly aligning elements that come from different sources is one of fundamental challenges of computer-based realism. Throughout the 1990s, filmmakers and special effects artists dealt with this challenge using a variety of techniques and methods. What Gaeta realized earlier than the others is that the best way to align the two universes of live action and 3D computer graphics was to build a single new universe [4] .

Rather than treating reality sampling as just one technique to be used along with many other "proper" algorithmic techniques of image synthesis, Gaeta turned it into the key foundation of his process. The process systematically takes physical reality apart and then systematically reassembles the elements into a virtual computer-based representation. The result is a new kind of image that has photographic/cinematographic appearance and detail yet internally is structured in a completely different way.

How does the process work? The geometry of an actor's head is captured with the help of a 3D scanner. Next, an actor's performance is recorded using three high-resolution cameras. This includes everything an actor will say in a film and all possible facial expressions. [5] (During the production the studio was capturing over five terabytes of data each day.) Next special algorithms are used to align the three images by tracking a number of points on the face in order to stitch three images into one. This new image is then mapped onto the geometry model. The information in the image is used not only as a texture map but also as a kind of bump map to transform locally the geometry of the model, in correspondence with facial movements. The end result is a perfect reconstruction of the captured performance, now available as 3D computer graphics data—with all the advantages that come from having such representation.

This process is significantly different from the commonly accepted methods used to create computer-based special effects, namely "keyframing" and physically-based modeling. With the first method, an animator specifies the key positions of a 3D model, and the computer calculates in-between frames. With the second method, all the animation is automatically created by software that simulates the physics underlying the movement. (This method thus represents a particular instance of the "reality simulation" paradigm I already discussed.) For instance, to create a realistic animation of a moving creature, the programmers model its skeleton, muscles, and skin, and specify the algorithms that simulate the actual physics involved. Often the two methods are combined: for instance, physically based modeling can be used to animate a running dinosaur while manual animation can be used for shots where the dinosaur interacts with human characters.

At the time of this writing, the most impressive achievement in physically-based modeling was the battle in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), which involved tens of thousands of virtual soldiers all driven by Massive software. [6] Similar to the Non-human Players (or bots) in computer games, each virtual soldier was given the ability to "see" the terrain and other soldiers, a set of priorities and an independent "brain," i.e. an A.I. program which directs a character's actions based on the perceptual inputs and priorities. But because Massive software, in contrast to the A.I. of games, does not have to run in real time, it can create the scenes with hundreds of thousands of realistically behaving agents (one commercial created with the help of Massive software featured 146,000 virtual characters.)

Gaeta's method uses neither manual animation nor simulation of the underlying physics. Instead, it directly captures reality, including color, texture and movement. Short sequences of the actor's performances are encoded as 3D computer animations; these animations form a library from which the filmmakers can then draw as they compose a scene. The analogy with musical sampling is obvious here. As Gaeta pointed out, his team never used manual animation to try to tweak the motion of a character's face; however, just as a musician may, they would often "hold" a particular expression before going to the next one. [7] This suggests another analogy—editing videotape. But this is second-degree editing, so to speak: instead of simply capturing segments of reality on video and then joining them together, Gaeta's method produces complete virtual recreations of particular phenomena— self-contained micro-worlds—which can be then further edited and embedded within a larger 3D simulated space.




"Image Rendering": Reality Re-assembled

Such a method combines the best of both worlds: physical reality as captured by lens-based cameras, and synthetic 3D computer graphics. While it is possible to recreate the richness of the visible world through manual painting and animation, as well as through various computer graphics techniques (texture mapping, bump mapping, physical modeling, etc.), it is expensive in terms of labor involved. Even with physically based modeling techniques, countless parameters have to be tweaked before the animation looks right. In contrast, capturing visible reality through lens on film, tape, DVD-R, computer hard drive, or other media is cheap: just point the camera and press the "record" button.

The disadvantage of such recordings is that they lack the flexibility demanded by contemporary remix culture. This culture demands not self-contained aesthetic objects or self-contained records of reality but smaller units—parts that can be easily changed and combined with other parts in endless combinations. However, because the lens-based recording process flattens the 3-D semantic structure of reality, converting a space filled with discrete objects into a flat field of pixels, any kind of editing operation—deleting objects, adding new ones, compositing, etc.—becomes quite different.

In contrast, 3D computer-generated worlds have the exact flexibility one would expect from media in the Information Age. (It is not therefore accidental that 3D computer representation —along with hypertext and other new computer-based data representation methods—was conceptualized in the same decade when the transformation of advanced industrialized societies into information societies became visible.) In a 3D computer-generated world everything is discrete: objects are defined by points described in terms of their XYZ coordinates; other properties of objects such as color, transparency, and reflectivity are similarly described in terms of discrete numbers. To duplicate an object a hundred times requires only a few mouse clicks or typing a short command on a command line; similarly, all other properties of a world can always be easily changed. Just as a sequence of genes contains the code, which is expanded into a complex organism, a compact description of a 3D world can be quickly transmitted through the network, with the client computer reconstructing the full world (this is how online multi-player computer games and simulators work).

Beginning in the late 1970s when James Blinn introduced texture mapping [8], computer scientists, designers, and animators were gradually expanding the range of information that can be recorded in the real world and then incorporated into a computer model. Until the early 1990s this information mostly involved the appearance of the objects: color, texture, light effects. The next significant step was probably the development of motion capture, which during the first half of the 1990s was quickly adopted in the movie and game industries. Now computer-synthesized worlds relied not only on sampling the appearance of the real world but also the recordings of movements of animals and humans. Building on all these techniques, Gaeta's method takes them to a new stage: capturing just about everything that at present can be captured and then reassembling the samples to create a digital (and thus completely malleable) recreation. Put in a larger context, the resulting 2D/3D hybrid representation perfectly fits with the most progressive trends in contemporary culture which are all based on the idea of a hybrid.




The New Hybrid

It is my strong feeling that the emerging "information aesthetics" (i.e., the new cultural features specific to information society) has or will have a very different logic from Modernism. The latter was driven by a strong desire to erase the old—visible as much in the avant-garde artists' (particularly the Futurists') statements that museums should be burned, as well as in the dramatic destruction of all social and spiritual realities of many people in Russia after the 1917 revolution, and in other countries after they became Soviet satellites after 1945. Culturally and ideologically, Modernists wanted to start with a tabula rasa, radically distancing themselves from the past. It was only in the 1960s that this move started to feel inappropriate, as manifested both in the loosening of ideology in Communist countries and the beginnings of a new Postmodern sensibility in the West. To quote the title of a famous book by Robert Venturi et al (published in 1972, it was the first systematic manifestation of the new sensibility), Learning from Las Vegas involved admitting that organically developing vernacular cultures involved bricolage and hybridity, rather than the purity seen, for instance, in "international style" which was still practiced by architects world-wide at that time. Driven less by the desire to imitate vernacular cultures and more by the new availability of previous cultural artifacts stored on magnetic and soon digital media, in the 1980s commercial culture in the West systematically replaced purity by stylistic heterogeneity montage. Finally, when the Soviet Empire collapsed, Postmodernism won the world over.

Today we have a very real danger of being imprisoned by a new "international style"— something which we can call "global style." The cultural globalization, of which cheap international flights and the Internet are the two most visible carriers, erases certain cultural specificity with an energy and speed impossible for Modernism. Yet we also witness today a different logic at work: the desire to creatively place together old and new, local and transnational, in various combinations. It is this logic, for instance, which made cities such as Barcelona (where I talked with John Gaeta in the context of Art Futura 2003 festival which led to this article) such a "hip" and "in" place today. All over Barcelona, architectural styles of many past centuries co-exist with new, "cool" spaces of bars, hotels, museums, and so on. Medieval meets multi-national, Gaudi meets Dolce and Gabana, Mediterranean time meets Internet time. The result is the incredible sense of energy which one feels physically just walking along the street. It is this hybrid energy, which characterizes in my view the most successful cultural phenomena today. [9] The hybrid 2D/3D image of The Matrix is one such hybrid.

The historians of cinema often draw a contrast between the Lumières and Marey. Along with a number of inventors in other countries all working independently from each other, the Lumières created what we now know as cinema—the effect of motion based on the synthesis of discrete images. Earlier Muybridge had already developed a way to take successive photographs of a moving object such as horse; eventually the Lumières and others figured out how to take enough samples so that when projected they perceptually fuse into continuous motion. Being a scientist, Marey was driven by an opposite desire: not to create a seamless illusion of the visible world but rather to be able to understand its structure by keeping subsequent samples discrete. Since he wanted to be able to easily compare these samples, he perfected a method whereby the subsequent images of moving objects were combined within a single image, thus making the changes clearly visible.

The hybrid image of The Matrix in some ways can be understand as the synthesis of these two approaches which for a hundred years remained in opposition. Like the Lumières, Gaeta's goal is to create a seamless illusion. At the same time, like Marey, he also wants to be able to edit and sequence the individual recordings.

At the beginning of this article I evoked the notion of uneven development, pointing out that often the inside structure ("infrastructure") completely changes before the surface ("superstructure") catches up. What does this idea imply for the future of images and in particular 2D/3D hybrids as developed by Gaeta and others? As Gaeta pointed out, while his method can be used to make all kinds of images, so far it has been used in the service of realism as it is defined in cinema—i.e., anything the viewer will see has to obey the laws of physics. [10] So in the case of The Matrix, its images still have a traditional "realistic" appearance while internally they are structured in a completely new way. In short, we see the old "superstructure" which still sits on top of the new "infrastructure." What kinds of images would we see if the superstructure would finally catch up with the infrastructure?

Of course, while the special effects of Hollywood movies so far follow the constraint of realism, i.e. obeying the laws of physics, they are not exactly the same as before. In order to sell movie tickets, DVDs, and all other merchandise, each new special effects film tries to top the previous one in terms of showing something that nobody has seen before. In The Matrix it was "bullet time"; in The Matrix Reloaded it was the Burly Brawl scene where dozens of identical clones fight Neo. The fact that the image is constructed differently internally does allow for all kinds of new effects; listening to Gaeta it is clear that for him the key advantage of such images is the possibility it offers for virtual cinematography. That is, if before camera movement was limited to a small and well-defined set of moves—pan, dolly, roll—now it can move in any trajectory imaginable for as long as the director wants. Gaeta talks about the Burly Brawl scene in terms of virtual choreography: both choreographing the intricate and long camera moves and also all the bodies participating in the flight (all of them are digital recreations assembled using Gaeta's method as described above).

According to Gaeta, creating this one scene took about three years. So while in principle Gaeta's method represents the most flexible way to recreate visible reality in a computer so far, it will be years before this method is streamlined and standardized enough for these advantages to become obvious. But when it happens, the artists will have an extremely flexible hybrid medium at their disposal: completely virtualized cinema. Rather than expecting that any of the present pure forms will dominate the future of visual culture, I think this future belongs to such hybrids. In other words, the future images would probably be still photographic—although only on the surface.







[1] Not all of special effects in The Matrix rely on new process by Gaeta, and of course many other Hollywood films already use some of the same strategies. I decided to focus on his process as it was used in The Matrix in this text because it articulates a new approach to image construction most systematically—and also because in contrast to many others in the special effects industry, Gaeta has extensively reflected on the process he developed, coming up with a number of terms to describe its different stages such as "universal capture" and "image rendering."

[2] Although not everybody would agree with this analysis, I feel that after the end of 1980s the field significantly slowed down: on the one hand, all key techniques which can be used to create photorealistic 3D images have already been discovered; on the other hand, rapid development of computer hardware in the 1990s meant that computer scientists no longer had to develop new techniques to make the rendering faster, since the already developed algorithms would now run fast enough.

[3] The terms "reality simulation" and "reality sampling" were made up for this text; the terms "virtual cinema," "virtual human," "universal capture" and "image rendering" belong to John Gaeta.

[4] Therefore, while the article in Wired which positioned Gaeta as a groundbreaking pioneer and as a rebel working outside of Hollywood contained the typical journalistic exaggeration, it was not that far from the truth. Steve Silberman, "Matrix 2," Wired 11.05 (May, 2003).

[5] The method captures only the geometry and images of an actor's head; body movements are recorded separately using motion capture.

[6] See www.massivesoftware.com.

[7] John Gaeta, presentation during a workshop on the making of The Matrix, Art Futura 03 festival, Barcelona, October 12, 2003.

[8] J. F Blinn,."Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces," Computer Graphics (August 1978): 286-92.

[9] From this perspective, my earlier book The Language of New Media can be seen as a systematic investigation of a particular slice of contemporary culture driven by this hybrid aesthetics: the slice where the logic of the digital networked computer intersects the numerous logics of already established cultural forms.

[10] John Gaeta, a workshop on the making of The Matrix.



Lev Manovich is an artist and new media theorist. He is the author of The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) as well as over fifty articles which have been published in twenty-eight countries. He is in high demand worldwide as a lecturer on new media. Manovich's awards include: Guggenheim Fellowship 2002-2003, Mellon Fellowship from Cal Arts, 2002 Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC Santa Barbara, and 2002 Fellowship from The Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin.


Above copied from: http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/image-future.html