IDEAS OF PLANETARY CREATIVITY
The College Art Association tackles networking

by Ray Gallon

On February 15 last, as part of the 1990 Annual Conference of
the College Art Association, amid sessions about painting,
sculpture, photography, etc. a single evening offered a colloquy
with the title, "Towards an Aesthetic for the 21st Century:
Networking, Hypermedia and Planetary Creativity." The session
was co-convened by New York video artist Tom Klinkowstein, and
British media artist, Roy Ascott. The session lasted about 4
hours, with too many speakers to outline in detail here. So I
will give detailed summaries of one or two of the most
interesting presentations, and a quick overview of the rest.
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Roy Ascott, whom we hope to have as a presenter at the 1990 ENA
conference in San Francisco, gave the keynote presentation - one
which, to my mind, was the most well thought-out, cogent, and
important presentation of the evening. He began with the thesis
that the convergence of art, technology, and new philosophy
leads to a rupture in contemporary culture. The idea of
aesthetics, he said, was a relatively new one, and represented
an attempt to make order of the essentially unreasonable. This
led to the concept of what we call Fine Art - art which is above
all other kinds of art. In the 21st century, says Ascott, there
is not likely to be enough common agreement for there to be an
aesthetic. Theories, schools of thought, "isms" etc. can not
survive the pluralistic environment which the convergence of
computers and telecommunications (called "Telematics") will
force on the arts.

In the old, Fine Art model, the artist creates art, and the user
receives it. In the new telematic model, the user of art *must*
be a participant in the creation of meaning. The new art is
interconnected, interactive, and the result of new group
processes which will leave the old concept of "collective"
creativity behind in the dust, just as surely as it leaves the
idea of the singular creative demi-god behind.

Interlinks, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Intelligence,
coupled together, provide no end to interconnectivity possible
in the telematic model of creativity. This new model has room
to include both personal, individual values, and cultural
differences, interacting together in a "telematic embrace" that
Ascott likens to the scientist James Lovelock's concept of Gaia
- i.e. that the planet functions *as if* it were an intelligent
organism to maintain the conditions for life. Ascott suggests
that there is so much information traveling around our growing
networks, that a PLANETARY CONSCIOUSNESS may emerge, as people
are now able to interact without problems of place or time.

The installation, "Aspects of Gaia," which was presented at the
1989 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria (see the article
in this NETWEAVER issue for an overview) is a 2-level
schematization of this telematic Gaia. One level is presented
in tents, with computer graphic images contributed by networkers
around the world, and which can be further manipulated by
participants in the tents. Each tent provides a "Bird's-Eye"
view from above, with different kinds of interaction. The
second level is a tunnel, representing the inner earth.
Participants propel themselves, on their backs, on a small
rail-car, down a tunnel which presents thoughts, comments, and
ideas about the earth on LED signs, which have been submitted by
networkers from around the world. These signs can be
ever-changing as networkers continue to input new ideas. We hope
to be able to present the tunnel portion at ENA in San
Francisco.

In sum, Ascott said, we must be willing to re-construct,
redesign, and rename our culture. We must reject the singular,
isolated, unconnected creative act in favor of the amplification 3,3
of mind in a network, i.e. interactivity. He went to great
pains to explain that this did not mean a rule-based set of
operations, but rather a structure that evolves, breaks into
chaos, and reforms and breaks again, naturally, with never any
finality or solidification into an art object. In doing this
work, the artist is freed from the limitations of museums,
galleries, festivals, colleges, and the art market.

The second presentation which caused me to sit up and take
notice, came from Mel Alexenberg, of Pratt Institute of the Arts
in Brooklyn, New York. His work is based on cross-cultural
linguistic patterns, and seeks the connection between the
electronic media and the spiritual nature of human beings. He
pointed out that the agricultural and industrial revolutions
were extensions of the muscular activity of people, of
quantitative effort; while the electronic revolution represents
a change of quality, an extension of the central nervous system,
and therefore quite unique. He believes that telematics
represents the most far-reaching of all revolutions, and leads
to an inherently spiritual character. He points out the seeming
mysticism of the basic truth that in the room, at that moment,
hundreds of events were happening simultaneously, contained in
radio waves traveling through the air of that space, and that
many of the new ways of experiencing and experimenting in art
work were akin to mystical traditions.

The Biblical Hebrew term for art, Alexenberg asserted, means
"thoughtful craft" and is a feminine word form. He decided
once, to see what it might be if changed into a masculine form,
since he was a male artist. It turns out to mean, in modern
Hebrew, "computer angels." He then went on to explain that
artists are angel-makers, creators of images and ideas which
fly, without material substance, into the universe. So
Alexenberg took images of Angels from the work of Rembrandt, and
transformed them into traditional high-touch media, such as
prints, etchings, etc. - reproducible media which have modern-
day equivalents in photography, photocopying, etc.

To honor the 320th anniversary of Rembrandt's death, Alexenberg
decided to make his angels fly: by fax. He began at the Philip
Johnson-designed AT&T headquarters in New York (center of
telecommunications) and sent very large images of angels, in
pieces, to a fax machine located on top of Rembrandt's original
etching press, in the Rembrandt Museum in Holland. The angel
then flew by satellite to a fax machine in the Israel Museum
(the Biblical land), and thence to Tokyo (where fax machines are
manufactured), to Los Angeles (The City of Angels) and back to
New York. In making this journey, the angel went through a
time-warp. It started in New York on a particular "today,"
crossed the dateline into "tomorrow" in Tokyo, and returned to
"Yesterday" in New York. Back at the AT&T Building, Alexenberg
pasted the elements of his images on the wall as they came in by
fax, each showing the history of its time-warped journey in the
time/date stamps on each panel of the fax, from each location
which the angel had visited!
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Alexenberg's work, which is all concerned with such whimsical
connections between the mystical, the spiritual, and the
technological, is very much based in his personal exploration of
the Judaic tradition, numerology, and a wonderful sense of
humor, all of which combine to make the audience understand just
how profoundly *human* this world of networking and art really
can be.

Among the other presenters were co-convener Tom Klinkowstein,
who presented some of his own work - an attempt to personalize
some of the kinds of ideas presented by Roy Ascott, but which
seemed more self-indulgent to me than communicative, and perhaps
a bit culturally naive; Sarah Dickenson of the MIT Media Lab,
who described work she is doing with Seymore Pappert and
Hispanic children in the Boston area, making logo-based images
and exchanges with children in Costa-Rica. Her presentation was
unfortunately not well assembled, but it seems that she was
doing very important work.

Peter D'Agostino of Temple University gave an overview of work
he is doing with interactive videodisc, touchscreens, and
non-linear media (which he distinguishes as very different from
Video Art). He seeks a metaphoric connection between art and
science, such as the connection between field forces (light,
gravity, etc.) and personal life experiences (he used the
documentation of the growth of his own daughter) which can be
selected by touchscreen in any order by a viewer - creating
his/her own experience by intervening with the computer, by
touching it. He sees this as analogous to the ancient oral
tradition of communicating a society's ideals and mores.

Bruce Breland, who was a presenter at ENA '89, sees a profound
connection between telematics and the work of Black Elk, the
native American shaman and artist. His description and
presentation were almost unsummarizable, so intertwined were his
ideas, concepts, and constructions with the manner and substance
of his talk. He did make the point that the assemblyline method
was in conflict with the multiple perceptions (simultaneity) of
present-day society. We are looking into the future, he said,
with the eyes and ears of our industrial past, and in danger of
being the last of an exotic tribe (like Black Elk) whose time is
ending. He closed by quoting Marshall McLuhan, who said that we
can not see the new culture which is coming, because we have no
tools with which to perceive it.