Art
Inquiry: Recherches Sur Les Arts, Volume
V (XIV)
Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties
Published by The Scientific Society in
Lodz
Lodz, Poland 2003
ISSN 0459-8954
Societys website: http://www.ltn.lodz.pl
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
The Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties
issue of Art Inquiry is valuable
for giving voice to artist-academics in
Poland, binding their reports and theories
alongside those of similar minds in the
United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere.
The reader learns of work done in Cracow,
Lodz and Poznan, in analyses of software
art effects on seeing and perception,
on VR and cinema, and interactive installations.
Machiko Kusahara provides a useful overview
of Japanese visual entertainments from
the earliest Nintendo games to diversions
available on the NTT mobile phone. Sean
Cubitt is optimistic about "media democracy",
while Geoff Cox and Jessica Krysa cite
Walter Benjamin to locate the work of
recent critical techno-art collectives
into older and broader currents of cultural
history.
Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties
is bookended with essays by Roy Ascott
and by Eduardo Kac. Ascott writes of our
post-biological age and what that implies
for the arts. Ascott is a grand old man
in the field that Stephen Wilson called
"Information Arts", having articulated
telematics theory decades ago that still
informs digital work today. As a visionary
educator as well as an artist-theorist,
Ascott has designed and assembled the
doctoral program at University of Plymouth
(UK), attracting a significant group of
faculty and fellows that endeavor to establish
an Internet-enabled "Planetary Collegium"
linking sibling institutions. Kac's work
demonstrates how biology can be manipulated
for benign aesthetic purposes, among many
others. Kac has explored biological processes
(in a Freudian slip, this reviewer almost
typed "prophecies"), to degrade a scriptural
text on the relation between human and
animal realms, and to create a cleverly
gene-spliced phosphorescent rabbit that
glows an eerie green.
It is good to see such a collection of
essays published in Eastern Europe as
its nations integrate into the European
Union. May this rich issue of Art Inquiry
fertilize and inspire further creative
inquiries, there and everywhere.