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Telepresence & Bio Art

The University of Michigan Press

Contents

I. Telecommunications, Dialogism, and Internet Art...................................................................................................11. The Aesthetics of Telecommunications (1992).......................................................................................................32. The Internet and the Future of Art (1997).........................................................................................................593. Beyond the Screen: Interactive Art (1998).........................................................................................................884. Negotiating Meaning: The Dialogic Imagination in Electronic Art (1999)............................................................................103II. Telepresence Art and Robotics....................................................................................................................1255. Toward Telepresence Art (1992)....................................................................................................................1276. Telepresence Art (1993)...........................................................................................................................1367. Telepresence Art on the Internet (1996)...........................................................................................................1558. The Origin and Development of Robotic Art (1997)..................................................................................................1689. Live from Mars (1997).............................................................................................................................18710. Dialogic Telepresence Art and Net Ecology (2000).................................................................................................191III. Bio Art.........................................................................................................................................21511. The Emergence of Biotelematics and Biorobotics: Integrating Biology, Information Processing, Networking, and Robotics (1997).....................21712. Transgenic Art (1998)............................................................................................................................23613. Genesis (1999)...................................................................................................................................24914. GFP Bunny (2000).................................................................................................................................26415. The Eighth Day (2001)............................................................................................................................28616. Move 36 (2002)...................................................................................................................................295Biographical Note....................................................................................................................................299Index................................................................................................................................................301

Chapter One

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, but particularly since the early 1980s, increasing numbers of artists around the world have worked in collaborative mode with telecommunications. In their "works," which we shall refer to as "events," images and graphics are not created as the ultimate goal or the final product, as is common in the fine arts. Employing computers, video, modems, and other devices, these artists use visuals as part of a much larger, interactive, bi-directional communication context. Images and graphics are created not simply to be transmitted by an artist from one point to another but to spark a multidirectional visual dialogue with other artists and participants in remote locations. This visual dialogue assumes that images will be changed and transformed throughout the process as much as speech gets interrupted, complemented, altered, and reconfigured in a spontaneous face-to-face conversation. Once an event is over, images and graphics stand not as the "result" but as documentation of the process of visual dialogue promoted by the participants.

This unique ongoing experimentation with images and graphics develops and expands the notion of visual thinking by relying primarily on the exchange and manipulation of visual materials as a means of communication. The art events created by telematic or telecommunications artists take place as a movement that animates and sets off balance networks structured with relatively accessible interactive media such as telephone, facsimile (fax), personal computers, modems, and slow-scan television (SSTV). More rarely, radio, live television, videophones, satellites, and other less accessible means of communication come into play. But to identify the media employed in these "events" is not enough. Instead, one must do away with prejudices that cast off these media from the realm of "legitimate" artistic media and investigate these events as equally legitimate artistic enterprises.

This chapter partially surveys the history of the field and discusses art events that were either motivated by or conceived especially for telecommunications media, attempting to show the transition from the early stages, when the telephone and radio provided writers and artists with a new spatiotemporal paradigm, to a second stage, in which new telecommunications media, including computer networks, became more accessible to individuals and artists started to create events, sometimes of global proportions, in which the communication process itself became the work.

Telecommunications art on the whole is, perhaps, a culmination of the reduction of the role of the art object in the aesthetic experience epitomized by Duchamp and pursued worldwide by artists associated with the conceptual art movement who embraced mass media. If the object is totally eliminated and the artists are absent as well, the aesthetic debate finds itself beyond action as form, beyond idea as art. It founds itself in the relationships and interactions between members of a network.

Art and Telecommunications

One must try to understand the cultural dimensions of new forms of communication as they emerge in innovative artworks that are not experienced or enjoyed as unidirectional messages. The complexity of the contemporary social scene permeated by electronic media, where the flux of information becomes the very fabric of reality, calls for a reevaluation of traditional aesthetics and opens the field for new developments. In other words, to address the aesthetics of telecommunications is to see how it affected and affects more traditional arts. It is also to investigate to what extent the context for a new art is created by the merger of computers and telecommunications. The new media that artists will be working with more and more must be identified, then, in the intersection between the new electronic processes of visual and linguistic virtualization brought irreversibly by telecommunications and the personal computer (word processing, graphic programs, animation programs, fax/modems, satellites, teleconferencing, etc.) and the residual forms that resulted from the process of...