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The McLuhan Program is interested in art as metaphor, the art that actually expresses the human implication of the technology rather than its potential or its technical excellence. The word "art" begins where the technology ends, in some ways. Or, alternatively, [you could say] the technology itself is the art. And it's a different emphasis. The emphasis on the art as metaphor is still grounded in a kind of a carrier technology where the technology transports the message or the content, and the ultimate destination of the content is beyond the technology. If the technology itself becomes the content, which is the case of many interactive pieces, other criteria have to be brought to bear for judging the artistic merit of the piece. So that you find artists who fluctuate and hesitate between what their artistic sensibility and training is leading them to do -- which is to do a metaphorical content -- and the engineering capacity within them to actually perform better, a better interaction, a more complex one.
I differ from a lot of criticism of this new form, where they say they have no content. The experience is the content, and the user is the content, the person involved, even the spectator is involved in the content of that, because the spectator is actually going through the intellectual and the emotional experience of the interaction. So, I find that I'm careful of not discounting even some of the experimental work that seems to be more radioscopy and perfect 3-D rendering and hues and glances of light and colour, shadows and things.
The role of the artist is that of the explorer. I think it's always been the role of the artist. Fundamentally, the role of the artist has been ignored as a dominant role in practically all society, since the Renaissance at least. The artist has always been seen as the surface of culture, not a foundation of culture, as part of decoration, the "good life." The best you can say is the pedagogical role of the artist, to improve and elevate your soul, which is the 17th century ideal, or sometimes the political role which is to tell you where the world is going, and trying to put a corrective to it. There are all kinds of roles, but the dominant role is ignored, and that is that the artist is a bridge between technology and psychology.
Every [new] technology disrupts the previous rhythm, and checks and deforms the previous image. All of us carry a number of integrated images of ourselves and our environment: of our world, of the planet, of our neighbourhood. We carry mental maps which allow us to recognize things and get ourselves into space and time. We have mental maps, and we have mental clocks, and we have mental images of ourselves, body images, self images. And the most powerful self image in the western world is one that is typically incarnated by da Vinci's famous icon.
The Industrial Revolution accelerated culture very quickly to the point where it ended up in the First World War. Cultures which were given this sudden [change in] tempo couldn't handle the new rhythm, and [they] precipitated into a war machine, with different responses from different parts of the western world. Basically the First World War was, for me, the result of an acceleration. And the Second World War was a further exaggeration of that movement; hence, the movement from the First to the Second World War comes from acceleration which was fanning fires all over the world, the acceleration of all business, all transactions, and "readification" of human interaction in a military sense. And then it literally blows out by a dynamite charge, as in Hiroshima. It's a very powerful kind of thing that occurred.
Now the artist in this context is completely overwhelmed by this. War is very radical. I have a theory of eruption which accounts for artwork, but it also accounts for warforms, accounts for sudden environment changes in psychology and culture. It's called the Volcanic Theory, where basically the surface of reality, the structure of people's reality acquires a certain level of stability when a certain media configuration has established itself, and where the written is allowed to mature into something that everybody more or less agrees on. What's happening in Bosnia right now is a typical case of different speeds. These are cultures that have been forced to live at much lower speeds than the ones that other cultures were allowed to reach, and this came because of the pressure of the Russians. The Russians themselves are going at much slower speeds than the rest of the western world. It's volcanic because it compares the crust of the stuff of psychology and that kind of reality consensus to the crust of the earth. When too much is going on under the Earth, the crust becomes thinner and thinner and weaker and weaker, and you have an explosion, which is a volcano.
The art side of the Volcanic Theory is that the unconscious, and the pressures of the unconscious which have been accelerated in churning and playing with all kinds of stuff _ suddenly reach a level where they have to emerge, and they emerge in the voice of the artist. And the voice of the artist can be anywhere from angry against technology to espousing technology, but certainly making the artworld very angry. The explosion of a new artform generates fear and loathing both in society and in the established artworld. And the reason the Volcanic Theory works is because as the forms emerge they are hot and they fall and build the mountains, build the cone, and as they build the cone the lava pours out, and then it cools off, and when it reaches the bottom it slows to a halt. And it becomes the institution.
This image is very powerful because it explains the relationship between government, between art institutions, levels of funding, relationships to the larger public, relationships to fine arts criticism, the "edge people" _ the ones who are closer to the heat and somehow can handle it. What happens is that the more accumulation there is, and the more instability there is at the bottom, a new crust is formed, and a new crust is a new psychology. But as you can see the art is literally grabbing the conflicting tendencies that are inherent into the magma of consciousness. Or unconsciousness. I don't quite know what to call it, because right now we're dealing with a social consciousness just as much as we used to think in terms of social unconsciousness. All this stuff is grabbed and given a new shape, then the artist takes off with this new shape and distributes it to the culture.
There is definitely an attempt to recover the sensory modes in their integrity [through new media], and there are reasons for that. One of the problems of the sensorium in representation is that images reduced to text can be reconstructed with the memory of one's own sensory life. But TV, which actually represents that sensory life, had to wait for digitization so that each sense could be interpreted in terms of another one.
Digitization is a fundamental metaphor, in the sense that it is the fundamental translating system, just like the alphabet became the fundamental translating system. And it became common sense, translating of one's sensory life into abstract structure. The alphabet was an early form of digitization. "0,1" carries that way further, and allows to combine; multimedia is nothing but the combination of sound, images, text, any data source. Any sense can pick up data, convert it into 0-1 strings and replay into any kind of display you want. So that kind of translating process is what brings back the senses.
When people talk about visualization I'm concerned about that term because, yes, I think visualization is a very important feature, and it's probably the privileged display. But my question is, is it the privileged display because of biology _ and there are reasons to believe that, because in biology we know that there is more energy going into the eye [than] the ear or the nose or touch, although touch is really complex. Or is it because of the weight of our past experience where we became aware of a dominantly visual culture from the Roman to the Renaissance through perspectives and trying to represent space as is? Or is it that we are still in a transition and that we are going to flip into tactile, because tactility today becomes a more comprehensive and a better depth-perception sensory mode than the visual? What the visual sense does, besides translating all kind of non-visual things into a visual display through digitization, is provide a mirror. It is still da Vinci.
Even 0-1 based images are still representing a mirror form of ourselves. But the mirror is the limit, and you can't cross the mirror, and you can't go beyond it. It's a surface. Touch, on the other hand, and all interfaces from the arts, can go much much further. I see that today what we're doing is replacing the "point-of-view" of the Renaissance as the foundation of political and social and psychological subjects by the "point-of-being" which is our only reference that we can actually trust.
We may not trust it for long because we have telepresence, allowing us to touch things at a distance, but it still happens that however far you go, the actual reference point of any of the telepresence relationships remains that proprioceptive reality that you contain within yourself. And I feel that it is more reliable now than the point-of-view, the classical point-of-view of the Renaissance. So the point-of-being replaces _ or doubles _ the point-of-view, allowing us to be in touch with the whole world at once. It's ecumenical to the extreme, it's very globalized, and at the same time very localized. There's only one place where you are, and yet you can reach everywhere. And it is statistical, in the respect that you can deal with large numbers, and very deep distances, and have different levels of sensitivity to the various parts of the world that you are reaching. So I see a new sensibility there too, and I see that it would be most interesting to see art take the direction of the explorer.