Colonial Ventures in Cyberspace: Introduction








Colonial Ventures in Cyberspace




			            Paul Hertz


		


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In the spring of 1996, as part of a residency in the Departments of Sculpture and Painting at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Valencia, Spain, I curated an on-line exhibition of work by seven artists and critics entitled "The Homestead" (translated as "La Finca" in Castilian Spanish). Created on the World Wide Web as a "colony" in cyberspace, the Homestead (http://omnibus-eye.rtvf.nwu.edu/Homestead/) explores the effects of historical colonization on the technological present and the colonizing effects of technology. "Colonization" is deliberately used here as a provocative term, in opposition to "technotopia"---the idealized vision of technology offered by centers of economic and political power. Colonization implies borders, an "us" and a "them," a degree of violence. Identity is constructed on colony borders. On the border, objects and persons acquire names, differences are constructed. Only a fraction of the world's people have a presence in cyberspace: the rest are outsiders. Will the outsiders eventually participate? Will borders and differences persist in cyberspace? Who decides these issues?

Nearly all the work in the Homestead/La Finca was created digitally during late 1995 and early 1996. Roshini Kempadoo, a photographer from the United Kingdom working with digital imagery, composed a suite of digitally composited images and an essay, Sweetness and Light, in which she examines the history of the plantation system and its possible mappings onto contemporary power structures in cyberspace. Photographer Esther Parada, who teaches in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, contributed a hypertextual essay and series of digitally manipulated images on the scope of historical colonialism and its manipulation of the natural environment. Brazilian artist Rejane Spitz, who had been videotaping people learning to use automated teller machines (ATMs) in her country, used MacroMedia's Shockwave technology to create an ATM with the accents of northern Brazil. Richard Maxwell, who teaches political economy of global media and culture at Northwestern University, created his first hypertextual essay, "The Thicket," with the collaboration of Chris Young, a student in the department of Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern. Chris also provided production support throughout the Homestead project. Basing his project on Richard Dawkins's concept of memes, Steve Wilson, of the Conceptual Design Department at San Francisco State University, used HyperCard to create a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) application that would let people link to pages where new ideas might appear. Torrey Nommesen, a student at San Francisco State University, created a subtly ironic corporate site, "Tri-Angle Corp." Annette Barbier, who teaches in Northwestern University's Radio, Television and Film Department and whose work deals with domestic life, created an audio diary of her skirmishes with telemarketers by recording their pitches, often with hilarious results.

These seven different points of view are wrapped in a hypertextual space designed both to entice and frustrate the viewer. We expressly wanted to create an exhibition environment that would not be merely presentational, but also continuous with the work. In the process of design, Chris Young and I rediscovered the virtues of narrative and its possible superiority to 3D virtual spaces as an instrument of seduction and paradox. The exhibition was complemented by a round table discussion in Valencia with presentations by Madrid electronic media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Roshini Kempadoo and Salvador Bayarri, a lecturer and researcher at University of Valencia. Elsewhere (in Leonardo Electronic Almanac at http://leoalmanac.org/profiles/fincalea/) I have written about the challenges of designing a workable virtual space, here I will briefly consider the ambivalent nature of utopia as portrayed in the Homestead.

Technotopia, the Shining City

Throughout the European colonization of the New World, numerous utopian projects instrumental in opening up new territories sprang up in the hinterlands. Political movements engendered in industrial society also proposed their own versions of utopia. Communal utopian experiments have receded with the frontier, and political utopias have collapsed beneath the rationales of prosperity and economic expansion---but not without spawning countless orphans. Some have found shelter in religion; some in the rituals of popular culture. Technotopia, a future world redeemed by science (or more specifically, by engineering), has emerged as an official orphanage where stray visions may come to roost---provided they behave. The Homestead was established as an unofficial colony to take in the misfits, the ones who answer back, crack jokes, point fingers, poke holes, organize strikes or strike out on their own.

By a curious reversal of causality, the technotopian vision is portrayed as the motor of technological progress, while the relations of production that construct technological society---relations of class, economic dominance and cultural hegemony---sink below the level of social consciousness. This is strikingly clear in relation to the emerging networked communications infrastructure, where a stream of commercial propaganda portrays a world where conflicts and differences will vanish. What better reason to build technology could there be? Indeed, it becomes easier to adopt a visionary attitude with respect to technology than to untangle its infrastructure. Perhaps this reversal is a result of massive commercial hype---commodity fetishism on a grand scale. Yet to the extent that networks represent an extension of the human nervous system, more intimate sources of identity than material possession alone seem to enter into play. In buying into technology we construct our image as consumers, but then technology obligingly casts our transformed image back at us for our further edification. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker refer to this transformation as the "harvesting" of human flesh by technology, where "[our] minds and bodies are reduced to a database for imaging systems" [1]. Like the hallucinatory images desire projects onto the waking mind, the harvested images can masquerade as real experiences, fooling us into accepting virtual representations as objective outcomes. As a totalizing system, utopia functions very well as a paradigm for technological progress, for both derive the meaning of individual actions from a teleological myth. If the realpolitik hidden behind technotopia appears ethically abhorrent, what strategies can artists working with technology adopt to combat or change it?

Clearly the traditional strategies of investigation, analysis, criticism and humor can still work---or so we hope! These are the tools of culture in which we retain at least a secular faith, even in this age of exhausted narratives, where "speaking with irony in a dead style permits speech in a situation where it would otherwise be impossible" [2]. The terrain into which the artists of the Homestead have ventured sits smack-dab in the melancholy swamp of information, where all events become equally trivialized as "data" and knowledge loses all significance. And yet they have raised islands above that flat perspective. One suspects they succeed, in part, by making a pact with a demon exorcised by Modernism, the perverse angel of subjective discourse. These are people with a point of view and the will to express it. They succeed, too, because they reflect upon the limits of their subjectivity. Facile judgments cannot reveal the full extent of alienation. Finally, they point to the vitality of other histories, other cultures and other ideas that fall beyond the borders of the Information State. Even irony is only a device, the edge that holds the work together: one more border to cross. It is time to fall off the edge of the flat world and start living in the round.

References

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1. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, "Code Warriors," in Lynn Hershman Leeson, ed., Clicking In, Hot Links to a Digital Culture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996) p. 256.

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2. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974).

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