Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito
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Re:Welcome and Introduction - 2006/05/24 12:07
Wendy,
Thanks for your excellent introduction, which for reasons of brevity we're responding to jointly.
New media theorists of the past decade often rejected McLuhan as a technodeterminist. While critics like Paul Grosswiler are now challenging that accusation, we think McLuhan's focus on the social effect of particular technologies remains important even in the Internet age.
That said, McLuhan's metaphors for both technology (amputated limbs, reflecting mirrors) and art (radar, telescopes) are as dated as the media he focused on (television, radio, movies). The broadcast products of 20th-century industrialization only scale linearly; add another TV set or radar receiver, and you only get one more node. In today's electronic networks, by contrast, adding nodes increases the number of connections exponentially.
To accommodate this transition from Sarnoff's to Reed's law, we turned to a metaphor that McLuhan ignored but that reflects the peer-to-peer nature of computational networks. Viruses and antibodies mutate and replicate according to the logic of executable code; they can scale from individual units to the millions in a matter of days, operating by bottom-up revelation rather than top-down instruction.
Now, antibodies exploit a similar mechanism to viruses because it's the only way for antibodies to keep up with the incredibly creative power of viruses. Likewise, the only way for art to keep up with the energetic pace of technology in the Internet age is to adopt many of its functions. Still, there are key differences between art (antibodies) and technology
(viruses).
The main difference is that art is accountable to the social body as antibodies are accountable to the biological one. Neither viruses nor technologies by themselves are accountable to the bodies within which they operate. Viruses originate outside a host organism and are interested in that organism’s surviving only long enough to enable it to infect other hosts. Art, on the other hand, originates in and is symbiotic with the larger social body. Its long-term survival--and, many would say, its meaning-- depends on the survival of the cultures it celebrates or critiques. The goal of an artist, we propose, is not to expend or destroy the social body but to challenge it to evolve in new ways.
And for its part, the social body needs art. As McLuhan anticipated, cell phones, genetic engineering, and global trading networks set in motion entire new cascades of perceptual and philosophical quandaries. At a time of accelerated technological progress, art that tackles such quandaries before they are clearly articulated offers an essential prophylactic against future shock.
Joline & Jon
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