Josephine Berry: Human, all too Posthuman?

[anna balint]

[from the tate website and undercurrents. net.art in defense? perhaps it is time to review
the most interesting art works on syndicate too in this last year, 
greetings, ab] 

'Human, all too Posthuman? Net Art and its Critics'
by Josephine Berry, Deputy Editor, Mute

As Net Art has begun to shrug off its ghetto character and step into the 
revealing light of mainstream culture, it finds itself increasingly subject 
to accusations of institutional complicity, technophilia, neo-liberal social 
engineering, even racism. When Net Art first emerged in the early 90s, it was 
often identified as a defiant art form which targeted the nepotism, 
materialism and aesthetic conformity of the gallery/museum/publishing power 
complex. It was hailed as an 'art glasnost' which, for the first time since 
the cold war, was forging a truly international art movement. Thanks to the 
efforts of the extravagantly wealthy patron George Soros and his Open Society 
Foundation, which set up a string of new media labs throughout Eastern 
Europe, artists living in the post-communist bloc were at last able to 
participate in international (pace: North American and Western European) art 
discourse. As the Russian Net artist Alexei Shulgin put it, recollecting life 
before the Internet, 'When I was just an artist living in Moscow, whatever I 
did has always been labeled as "eastern", "Russian", whatever'. The globality 
of the net, its disregard for geographical distance and national boundaries, 
apparently made it possible for anyone, anywhere to become a (net) artist 
with a potentially massive audience with no need of institutional 
endorsement. The 'immaterial' nature of the medium and the ease of 
maintaining anonymity within it, helped fuel dreams of an identity 
unconstrained by corporeality - the disembodied utopia of the posthuman. For 
all these reasons and others, Net Art was celebrated as a radically 
democratising art form; the ultimately horizontal plane on which everyone 
could be an artist, and identity could become another material of creative 
experiment.

Despite the obvious crassness of writing about 'Net Art' as if it were a 
singular entity - a trait as present in early eulogies as in its more recent 
denunciations - there are undeniably common themes and tendencies which 
emerge collectively at certain points in time. The trick is to recognise 
these without reducing the whole field of practice to a handful of axioms and 
stereotypes. Surely one of the most important potentials of information 
networks is precisely their ability to cultivate myriad currents of thought 
and activity which challenge the monologism of state/corporate culture. But 
conversely, the lightning speed of information flow also creates sudden mass 
convergences of thought, interest or activity. In just such a convergence, 
Net Art has recently come in for a many sided attack on the basis of its 
reputed negation of the specifics of embodied and site-related subjectivity 
or identity. Although the post-colonialist and feminist mailing list, 
Undercurrents, established this February by Irina Aristahrkova, Maria 
Fernandez, Coco Fusco and Faith Wilding has been a fulcrum of this critique, 
the same issue seems to be cropping up all over the place. In this round of 
their Emerging Artists/Emergent Medium Net Art commissions, for instance, the 
Walker Art Gallery which prides itself as being on the cutting-edge of net 
culture, will be selecting artists' whose proposals explore the difference 
between so-called McGlobalization and the 'translocal'. Even the big 
instituions are jumping on the situated identity bandwagon! So what is this 
debate and why is Net Art, rather than art per se, being so singled out for 
attack?

It seems that the crux of this problem lies in the technology itself and the 
highly esoteric consequences of medium-specific investigations. Indeed, just 
as the self-referentiality of modernist painting and sculpture met with its 
deconstruction and rejection in the 1960s and early 70s with social, 
political and contextual concerns of Fluxus, Performance and Conceptual art, 
so too is Net Art's supposed 'techno-formalist' variant undergoing heavy 
critique. In some ways, this critique is connected to a wider rejection of 
posthumanism and its insistence on the indistinction between humans and 
machines, animals and humans and, perhaps most crucially, the physical and 
the non-physical. Spearheaded by Donna Haraway and her pioneering mid '80s 
text 'The Cyborg Manifesto', posthumanists claimed that, contrary to 
customary Leftist critiques, identity within techno-scientific societies is 
not becoming more rigidly dualistic but rather undergoing a general 
disintegration of its unitary forms due to developments such as b
iotechnological engineering, computer science, quantum physics 
and chaos theory. Within the crucible of a techno-scientifically driven 
identity meltdown, the opportunity had supposedly arisen for the wholesale 
reinvention of identity - both threatening and liberatory by turns. This 
would be a world without gender, race, 'oedipal narratives', even embodiment. 
Net artists in the early '90s often combined an avant-garde rejection of the 
author's individuality and originality with the possibilities provided by 
computer mediated communication (CMC) to generate anonymous, parodic, 
shared, multiple and inauthentic identities. In other words, the possibility 
of being 'whoever you want to be' in cyberspace combined with the ongoing 
deconstructions of authentic identity endemic to postmodern culture. 
Likewise, the viewer's boundaries were radically reconceived in early Net 
Art, now understood as prosthetically extended via personal computers and 
networks. As the Dutch/Belgium art duo Jodi remarked: 'When a viewer looks at 
our work, we are inside his computer. And we are honoured to be in 
somebody's computer.'. 
So, despite the wide gulf separating net artists from the most 
extreme proponents of a crude posthumanism (such as the West Coast 
'Extropians' who believed that identity could be downloaded into cyberspace, 
the flesh jettisoned and immortality attained), the radical insertion of 
computer technology into the heart of identity, and hence the aesthetic 
experience, certainly aligns them very strongly with posthumanism.

It is this radical insertion which is viewed by many critics as problematic 
even dangerous due to its unbalanced optimism. In the preface to her recent 
book The Bodies That Were Not Ours, artist and theorist Coco Fusco expands 
the term 'digital divide' to refer to an inequality far deeper and more 
historically ingrained than the mere question of access:

While western artists and posthumanists celebrate the open-ended 
possibilities of boundary confusion, the majority of the world's population 
encounters them more as violations, in the form of the toxic side-effects 
from working on electronic assembly lines, salvaging parts from the computer 
scrap dumped in the third world and the worsening conditions of casualised 
labour and migratory capital within CMC-accelerated globalisation.

In light of these everyday horrors, it is tempting to dismiss the 
medium-specific investigations of net artists as excessively formalist or as 
perhaps unwittingly supportive of the agenda of neo-liberal globalisation. 
The first accusation is perhaps easier to reject than the second. Where one 
might legitimately argue that the self-referentiality of Greenbergian 
modernism created a quasi-spiritualist transcendence and/or evasion of the 
massive, global fallout of the post-war situation, it is harder to argue the 
same of Net Art. Even if one were to ignore the countless artworks that 
address the social dimensions of information technology head-on and merely 
focused on the handful of works which play with the materiality of code and 
the aesthetic and behavioural conventions of Graphic User Interfaces in a 
highly abstract way, one would be hard pushed to sustain this position. This 
is because paint and canvas during the 1940s and '50s represented anything 
but the revolutionary medium that CMC did in the 1990s. Unlike the age old 
medium of paint on canvas, the unfathomable productive power of information 
technology and its electronic networks were transforming the world before 
most people were even able to grasp their most basic processes. To 
investigate the insidious representational conventions of a handful of 
standard interfaces or to reveal the hidden layers of programming beneath the 
smooth face of software packages was not, therefore, a purely aesthetic 
gesture (if there ever could be such a thing). By redeploying functionality 
(such as Olia Lialina's use of the location bar to load poetic text in Agatha 
Appears, Jodi's relocation of low-level programming languages such as C++ or 
Basic into the high-level browser window, or Alexei Shulgin's initiation of 
the Form Art Competition in which people created abstract, interactive 
patterns using standard form interfaces and buttons), artists created a sense 
of the malleability of the technology, its openness to invention, alteration, 
and non-utilitarian ends. Works such as these imply that the huge productive 
power of the internet, whose transformation from an enthusiast's domain to 
the engine of the 'new economy' was being engineered throughout the '90s, is 
nevertheless still up for grabs. They provide an important counter to the 
depressing spectacle of the net's colonialist takeover by Microsoft & Co for 
corporate ends - yet another example of social wealth appropriated by private 
hands.

But Fusco's point about the obfuscation of the real digital divide still 
seems pressing. Even if one considers the info-political nature of a work 
such as 0100101110101101.org's project Life_Sharing, in which the Italian art 
collective made their entire hard-drive accessible via their website as a 
gesture of defiance in the face of escalating electronic surveillance and 
associated paranoia, the concerns and gestures involved remain highly 
abstract. If the politics of information's production, circulation, access 
and control is a central concern for many net artists, the medium-specific 
nature of their artworks often push them outside the frame of many people's 
experience and understanding. For instance, it is not hard to grasp the fact 
that we are living in an increasingly surveilled society, and yet for those 
uninitiated in the operations of the Web or the codified territory of open 
source or free software, a brief trip to 0100101110101101.org's website would 
doubtless yield little insight. Although Conceptual art has long posed the 
dilemma of the viewer's required initiation into art history and aesthetic 
theory in order to equate its often quotidian materials and gestures with 
art, there is no doubt that Net Art often makes even greater demands of its 
viewers. Not only is a familiarity with conceptualism essential, but so is a 
familiarity with the protocols of the Net. Beyond this, the viewer also needs 
the requisite PC operating system, software and plug-ins etc. to be able to 
view much of the work in the first place. In this sense the implied viewer of 
Net Art is nearly always the privileged western subject even if the subject 
matter is explicitly its excluded other, as in Heath Bunting's project 
BorderXing Guide, now viewable as part of the Tate's new Net commissions.

But to condemn Net Art on this basis would be an unfair admonishment. The 
weaker defense against this judgment is that Net Art is hardly very different 
from a great deal of so-called Postmodern art and culture which operates the 
truism of post-industrial culture's ultra-mediated hyperreality - a cultural 
experience by no means shared across the unequally developed globe. One must 
ask if, merely by virtue of its explicit use of information technology, Net 
Art is any more blinkered from the realities of global experience than most 
of the exhibits in western contemporary art spaces. But the stronger defense 
of Net Art to accusations that it covers over the true inequities of real, 
embodied, experience around the globe is that such accusations conversely 
imply identities and experiences reducible to the molar determinants of 
nationality, gender, class and race. They claim to speak on behalf of various 
groups and in so doing distort and reduce lived experience to a set of 
formulas, in much the same way that politicians do within representational 
democracies. If anything, net artists' material investigation of the unruly, 
mutagenic quality of information networks comes closer to grasping the 
irreducible nature of identity within the irreducibly complex strata of 
global social existence. As sociologist Tiziana Terranova has recently 
pointed out, the shift from old to new media, or from the 'Set' to the 'Net' 
is indicative of a conflict between two different types of cultural force, 
'the culture of representation and the spectacle and the culture of 
participation and virtuality'. Terranova, in line with writers such as Negri 
and Hardt, also argues that the Net materialises the 'non-representational' 
nature of social reality through its ability to network together a vast 
spectrum of divergent ideas into a collective assemblage or 'general 
intellect'. Looked at in this light, it is possible to conclude that Net 
Art's simultaneous failing and achievement is that it avoids the vicarious 
representation of techno-industrial globalisation, its hugely divergent 
experience, in favour of a more open-ended investigation of the material 
conditions of social possibilities. In this respect, Net Art explores 
'virtuality' in its true sense; not the drift of disembodied avatars through 
computer-generated space, but the convergence of social and technological 
forces in a constantly unfolding horizon of possibility.

See also:
Josephine Berry, "The Thematics of Site-Specific Art on the Net", 
unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester 2001