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Cyberart and Cyborgs:
The significance of Cyberart and an analysis of the changing relationship between body and media that this engenders
 


by Jeremy Young 

All Rights Reserved © Jeremy Young and Deep South
Deepsouth v.6.n.3 (Spring 2000)

 
The Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Art Museum in New York is a yardstick for contemporary trends in American art. Alongside the traditional object-based art media and the more recent inclusions of the Film and Video categories, the 70th exposition which showed between March and June 2000, and simultaneously online at www.whitney.org, marked the inauguration of the Cyberart category.1
 
 
The rapidity with which this new art form has gained institutional acceptance and tacit recognition as 'art' is remarkable,2 particularly given the constituent contradictions posed by Cyberart to the traditional values ascribed to art. It is not made clear at the exhibition exactly how Cyberart has been reconciled to the established canons of art, and its inclusion is not indicative of a universal critical acceptance of Cyberart. A methodology is needed to deal both with Cyberart and traditional art, which in turn provokes the need to reassess our fundamental methods of conceiving art and to develop a new ideological relationship with art.
 
 

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan reprioritised form above content in his Understanding Media of 1964. This emphasis upon the form of the medium provides a methodology to engage with traditional and cyber forms of art simultaneously. I will approach Cyberart by considering it in terms of the relationship that it engenders between the medium and the body, and how this contrasts to art which has preceded it. For this purpose, medium will be understood as an intervening substance, and an agency for transmitting or communicating information3 which is, furthermore, a cultural communication device incorporating the elements of time, space, and sensory perception. In this way, the body will be seen as something ideologically constructed by nature of the ideals that are inscribed upon it.4
 
 

McLuhan claims that the medium is the message. By invoking this claim in the situation where the medium is a machine, the examination of Cyberart in terms of the medium/body relationship provokes a consideration of the enmeshment of man and machine.5 The integration of these two elements has been facilitated by a number of factors, particularly that in the electric age as a consequence of the increased speed of the medium it is now possible for media to keep pace with the body, and there is the new potential for the art medium to engage a wider spectrum of the viewers' sensual experiences. While Walter Benjamin had considered this sensual experience of film, with Cyberart there has been an evolution from a hot, mechanised art medium to a cold, automated medium that has been accompanied by a change to a non-rational mode of organisation that permits a new commensurability with the intuitive manner in which the human brain alone can function.6 There has also been a withering of the "aura" (to borrow Benjamin's term) surrounding art which allows a greater possibility for the conveyance of the body with media. However, while the medium here is machine, and while these factors all engender an internalisation and enmeshment of man and machine, Cyberart operates to preserve the authority of man over machine. Man is prevented from ultimately being posited as Cyborg, or a mere automaton, as Cyberart functions precisely by engaging and preserving the faculty that asserts the ascendancy of man over machine, that of creativity, imagination, and originality.
 
 
 

To understand Cyberart's balance between medium and body, it is useful to trace Cyberart against previous art forms to consider the changing emphases in the relationship between the form of the medium and the content of the medium.
 
 

Pre-Renaissance art was primarily concerned with conveying narrative, particularly in religious art. Sacral art sought to communicate with the "illiterate" population, and this had little concern for the medium of art. This disregard for the medium developed into an elaborate denial of the medium under the perspectival system of spatial organisation that Alberti developed in 1435. As this view remained unchallenged in mainstream Western art for the following centuries, the illusory three-dimensional representation solely of the visual sensation rendered the art medium transparent and enforced the distancing and incommunicability of the viewer. As McLuhan noted, the 'content' of the art medium here was another medium,7 which distracted our attention from the original medium. While twentieth-century Cubism later revoked this denial of the medium and opened up the possibility for art to elicit sensations beyond the visual,8 the development of the Modernist abstraction of the New York School in the 1950s went to the contrasting extreme of demanding a purity of medium such that content was eliminated.9 In the previous decade, however, Cyberart has established a balance between medium and content such that there is a pervading awareness of the medium, and also an exploration of the content of the internet medium. While Post-object performance art had grappled with the medium-content balance in the 1970s,10 Cyberart succeeds where it failed because of its constituent ability to be global, contemporaneous, interactive and perpetuating. The retention of the awareness of its medium permits Cyberart to develop the relationship between the medium and the body, creating the potential for Cyberart to operate as a whole-body, multisensual extension of man.
 
 

Illustration of this and examples of how the internet medium of electronic communication is explored can be seen in the works featured in the internet category of the Whitney 2000 Biennial, (http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/2kb_fs.html.)11 Sampling Broadway, by Annette Weintraub12 is an example of a work in which the artist has examined the full range of possibilities available in this cyber medium to create an evocation of place, with a result which is significantly denser and more compelling than has been previously possible. While a painted image may perhaps only capture a single, isolated view, locked into a particular moment and time,13 Sampling Broadway constitutes a virtual tour that allows viewers to actively negotiate their passage through five Broadway locations such as 'pandemonium', 'hegemony' and 'respite' by drawing upon live video footage, text, voice-over narration and audio clips of street noise. This creates an experience that simultaneously appeals to a variety of senses and, unlike traditional art, (which is a finite, structured experience), cyberart is a living, contemporaneous experience, which commences, evolves and concludes in direct response to the physical involvement of viewers at their computer screen. Rather than representing Broadway at the moment when the artist was involved with the work, (much as a painted portrait takes a snapshot only of one visual representation at the single moment the artist and subject were unified), this work provides a real-time experience in which the content breathes in unison with the viewer. Instead of a single location, a fluid transition between five disparate arenas is possible in this environment. In this context, both the ritual function of art which Benjamin discussed, and the art medium itself are that of communication. Here there is a compulsion for the viewer to become physically involved with the work of art, and with the corresponding withering of the aura surrounding the artwork, the viewer is no longer discouraged from becoming involved with the work of art. This allows the final elimination of any distance intervening between the two.14

 

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1 http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/2kb_fs.html
2 Cyberart is barely a decade old, whereas video art had existed for twenty years before it received such recognition. 
3 Definitions 3-4, Collins Concise English Dictionary.
4 Gerstner, D.A., Film 301, 2000, Lecture 12 'Gender and the Re-Writing of Media Practices' 
5 McLuhan argued for a promotion of form above content in Part I of Understanding Media, and then used Part II to apply this to a broad range of media, ranging from print, to radio, photography, games, telephonic and movies. However, as McLuhan did not extend this thesis of 'the medium is the message' beyond advertising and photography to a consideration of art, I will do this here. This idea of media as an extension of man was also raised by Andy Warhol, who talked of having an 'affair' with television, and 'marrying' his tape recorder Andy Warhol Philosophy p.26.
6 Several theorists, such as Hugo Munsterberg, made similar claims about film in 1916.
7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (MIT Press, 1964), p.8. With the example for religious art, the content is speech, or the representation of the spoken word of God.
8 For example, this allowed the possibility for Surrealism to explore the world of the mind rather than the physical world, or Futurism to explore the relationship between machinery, movement and speed in the machine age.
9 Of course such scholars as Anna Chaves and Michael Leja argue that the 'content' is not eliminated from these works.
10 Post-object art attacked the primacy of the art-object, the commodification and elitism of art, and the monetary and ideological concerns which are associated with this. The emphasis was instead upon a return to a conceptual basis of art. By instead utilising a performance medium. Post-object art intended to achieve a more democratic art which invited viewer participation, and which removed any sense of elitism. However the extreme nature which characterised this art often shocked, alienated, and created psychological discomfort for the viewers, as was the case with New Zealand examples such as Crucifixion Performance by Andrew Drummond (1979), and Peter Roach's Suspension Piece (1978). In addition to this alienating nature, this art was also limited by its localised, and impermanent nature, which are all problems which Cyberart has overcome.
11 I will restrict my examination of Cyberart here to the works selected for the Biennial. The proliferation of Cyberart on the internet is vast, and the definitions are broad. www.lastplace.com offers 72 definitions of Cyberart, (most of which emphasise ideas of communication and shared community), and an exploration of what, precisely, constitutes Cyberart is beyond the scope of this exercise. The Whitney selections are taken as representative of the current mode of Cyberart as these have been selected by a respected institution and posited as art alongside what examples of what is traditionally perceived as art. The re-evaluation of the idea of the 'work of art' in the cyber-context which I make here will subsequently provoke questions as to the exact definition of Cyberart, and whether, for example, www.ruckus.com constitutes a work of art.
12 http://www.turbulence.org/Works/broadway/index.html
13 This is a characteristic of perspectival organisation.
14 The idea of distancing the common person from art was manifested by bourgeoisie ideas of art and elitism. However as Cyberart is mediated by computers, the use of which for many is now an everyday activity, the viewer is more comfortable engaging with the art, and more likely to experience Cyberart in the home or office, instead of in a more intimidating, elitist environment such as a museum. The greater comfort interacting with the art contributes also to the reduction of distance between the viewer and the art.