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Timothy Druckrey

Missing Links

I.

In 1852, lamenting the cynicism and lack of support for the Difference Engine,
Charles Babbage wrote of his critics: "If you speak to him of a machine for
peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible; if you peel a potato with it
before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a
pineapple." This kind of oscillation, between incredulity and disavowal, recurs
with almost every technological innovation. Indeed, the search for the universal
machine represents a kind of utopian dissatisfaction that comes with a teleology
of technology fueled by constant adaptation and driven by shaky notions of
absolute necessity. Babbage's work (along with that of Darwin and Lovelace)
straddled the disciplines of industry, technology, and information in a way that
was only to mature slowly. Yet the crucial bond between these spheres is still
at the core of an understanding of the electronic age. In many ways, the
aspirations of Victorian science still inflect the post-industrial era-where
neo-luddite discourse, vague neo-age theology, and utopianisms (of all kinds)
share an elaborate discourse with unrepentant corporate futurologists, virtual
visionaries, and increasingly cyborg-theologies. In short, a situation in which
cataclysmic transformation is joined with deeply flawed notions of progress and
increasingly situational ethics.

But while the era of Babbage's mechanical calculator developed a persuasive
relationship with statistics that would lead toward a numerical "mastery of
nature," the public technologies of the 19th century focused on light, image,
and transmission. The dazzling array of projection, recording, and transmission
devices that matured or were invented stand at the core of any coherent
understanding of modernity's relationship with scientific and popular forms of
representation. And it is no coincidence that technology and modernity were
maturing on parallel tracks in a culture inebriated by ocular consumption. The
characterization of the 19th century as that of "the scopic regime," as Martin
Jay asserts, or as obsessed with "the frenzy of the visible," as Jean Louis
Comolli suggests, seems to identify a rather startling realization concerning
the relationship of the visual with the intelligible. The fusing of knowledge
and identity with the experience of representation was a defining factor of 19th
century experience.

No small matter, the involved development of increasingly public forms of
technological representation form the core systems that matured (sometimes
wildly) in the late 19th and into the 20th century and involved inscription,
transmission, reception, and systems of exchange. In Discourse Networks,
Friedrich Kittler established the reciprocity between technologies of
representation and archaeologies of information. The discourse network can
"designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given
culture to select, store, and process relevant data." Clearly, Kittler's work
realizes the limits of rhetorical theory unmediated by technology itself.
Practices of information exchange plagued the culture of modernity-as they would
its economic practices. Writing, that process of inscription aligned with data
transfer, rooted catastrophic shifts in the relation between developing
technologies and culture. By 1900, "the ability to record sense data
technologically shifted the entire discourse network... For the first time in
history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data. The
technological recording of the real entered into competition with the symbolic
registration of the Symbolic." More pertinently, the strained continuity of
exchange exposed the semiotic constitution of both the mechanisms and meanings
of information: "To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves
reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network
that requires 'an awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense
experience from the other,' transposition necessarily takes the place of
translation."

And while the crucial issues of an historical discourse analysis is vital to a
critical approach to contemporary media (and its art), specific histories (and
techniques) are often pivotal. Too broad an issue to tackle in detail in this
essay, a few hints and references can stand as pointers. In Kittler's
magisterial Gramophone, Film, Typewriter he establishes the links between the
technical 'apparatus' and the 'psychic' apparatus as they are contextualized in
the sweeping effects of technology. Writing on the phonograph, Kittler writes,
"Thanks to the phonograph, science is for the first time in possession of a
machine that records noises regardless of so-called meaning… the epoch of
nonsense, our epoch, can begin."

This view is complemented by Siegfried Zielinski's distinguished Audiovisions:
Cinema and Television as Entre'actes in History. A sweeping assessment of the
history of audiovisual technologies beginning with Magic Lanterns and extending
to the network initiatives of Knowbotic Research, Zielinski brings considerable
cogency to the development of the visual culture industries. "The first seventy
years of the nineteenth century," he writes, "gave expression to the growing
need and technical ability to grasp and appropriate the visible surface of the
world through its re-visualization and the ability to play around with it: the
cinematisation of the eye and of perception as a counterpart and complement to
the extensive acquisition of natural and technical processes for other areas of
the production of commodities and meaning." The "culture industry has reified
the audiovisual discourse in a number of arrangements, which thus also possess
the characteristic features of a dispositif. From a media studies perspective,
these arrangements are better comprehensible and explain more than considering
isolated types of apparatus."

II.

By the late 19th century experiments in the transmission of images evolved along
with the emergence of both cinema and the commercialization of electricity.
While the spectacles of cinema provided the nascent entertainment industry with
projected - and increasingly narrative - illusions, the pioneers of image
transmission were setting the stage for the tele-technologies of the 20th
century. "Living pictures," "televisor," "phototel" and ultimately the
"phonoscope," "radiomovies," and a spectacular range of other techniques, were
enveloped by telegraphy, telephony, and radio where images were being
transmitted as harbingers of television. Indeed by the 1920s, John Logie Baird
patented and demonstrated "mechanical television." "In the first week of
October, 1925, Baird obtained the first actual television picture in his
laboratory. At this time, his test subject was a ventriloquist's dummy, "Stooky
Bill" which was placed in front of the camera apparatus. Baird later
recollected, "The image of the dummy's head formed itself on the screen with
what appeared to me an almost unbelievable clarity. I had got it! I could
scarcely believe my eyes and felt myself shaking with excitement."
<http://www.chumcity.com/mztv/pioneers.html> "In 1927," as Zielinsky writes,
"the Scot achieved the first really spectacular results with his experiments.
Over a standard telephone line, he sent images from London to Glasgow which were
able to be decoded by a receiver there. It really was tele-vision. Further,
Baird addressed for the first time the transitory nature of the televisual
process with a system that at the same time highlighted the poor quality of
reproduction of the mechanically produced visions. He constructed a 'video-disc
player,' the first device for television he called the Phonoscope. On a wax
disc, like those used for sound recording, the fluctuations of light converted
into electrical signals were engraved and could be viewed on a tiny mirror when
the disc was 'played' - a process that was only practicable because the amount
of information stored was very small: the images consisted of only 30 lines at
12.5 pictures/second. 'Bottling up television' was what the contemporary popular
press called this early creation in the genesis of the video recorder."

Surely it is clear that the whirling technologies of the 1920s and 1930s-the
maturing cinema industries, the invaluable (for better and worse) radio,
commercial sound recording, and television-were paralleled by the first serious
considerations of mass psychology, propaganda, and cultural theory (particularly
the Frankfurt School). The 'culture industries' were certainly the effect of
technologies at the deepest level. Yet technology also found its experimenters
in the realms of art in broad forms. Dada, Surrealism, Music, experimental
cinema… all assimilated the potentials of media as crucial to encountering the
frontiers of creativity and, in many cases, to sabotage or celebrate, the
'mechanization of the world picture.'

III.

Norbert Wiener, the pioneer researcher in cybernetics wrote, in The Human Use of
Human Beings, that "every instrument in the repertory of the scientific-
instrument maker is a possible sense organ." But the difference between
instrumental recording and sensing are not wholly synonymous, even if the
extension of the perceptual field is enlarged by technology. Vilem Flusser
writes that "electronic memories provide us with a critical distance that will
permit us, in the long run, to emancipate ourselves form the ideological belief
that we are 'spiritual beings', subjects that face an objective world... Our
brain will thus be freed for other tasks, like processing information." He
continues on the benefits of electronic memory that "A person will no longer be
a worker (homo faber) but an information processor, a player with information
(homo ludens)," and that "we shall enhance our ability to obliterate
information... this will show us that forgetting is just as important a function
of memory as remembering." (On Memory). Situational knowledge, contingent
expression? Perhaps the aftereffects of the eradication of legitimate canons of
artistic, literary, even political narratives, has created a circumstance in
which the meaning and usefulness of experience is wholly related with its
engaged relationship with the present. And it comes as no surprise that so-
called new media demands a level of participation in the flow of information,
intention and technology but does not, necessarily, imply unreflective
experience.

Enveloped by pieties of all sorts (ontological phantasies, epistemological
illusions, post-traumatic psychologies, pathologized theatricalities, anecdotal
embodiments, over-dramatized technical reason, excessive allegories of
'otherness' ), the field of electronic media has been cast as a sphere of
managed interactions and programmable subjectivities. Hounded by expectations of
flawless computational performance and sustained by extravagant allegories of
'being digital,' the philosophical mystifications and intellectual presumptions
of interactivity, virtuality, or cyberspace compel an acknowledgement of
imperfection, failure, error.

Mystifications of the 'universal machine,' a 'culture of bad science,' a 'flight
from reason,' the compulsion to reproduce, etc., come as stark reminders that
urgent issues envelop a culture reeling in the effects of technology. So many of
these issues revolve around the transformation of evolving representational
systems (in so many forms) and increasingly ephemeral notions of individuality
and collectivity, experience and behavior. Perry Hoberman's work, for example,
acknowledges-indeed celebrates-the fallacies, falsehoods and faults of
algorithmic approaches to the ubiquitous efficiencies of technology while
refunctioning them as a repository of miscalculation and obsolescence. His essay
"Mistakes and Misbehavior: Tantrums in/Tampering with Cyberspace" opens with the
following: "A few definitions: "Immersion:" the willful ignorance of the very
apparatus that immerses me. "Virtual:" a tacit agreement to stay on my best
behavior while immersed. "Interface:" an impenetrable surface, a shiny shell
containing nothing but a hollow void. "Cyber:" mind sans body, pure thought
without substance or support."

The willing misinterpretation and refunctioning of media could easily be misread
as luddism or technophobia. Yet it is clear that an assault on the 'triumphs' of
technical reason, can expose more than the imperfections of technology. It can
extend the defacto, normative, and blissfully functional ideology of technology
into destabilized, ruptured, and absurd systems more laughable than logical,
more possible than rational.

IV.

"When Sontag celebrated camp, and when Warhol, around the same time, elevated
soup cans into art, they crossed the once-forbidden line separating high and low
culture. Three decades later, the line is gone, and so is any sense of irony.
Today's pop devotees seem weirdly sincere -- and that's what makes them so
compelling." Deborah Salomon: In Praise of Bad Art (NYTimes, 1/26/99)

Claims for the death of irony often come ornamented with the pompous forms of
sanctimony, moral hypocrisy, or reactionary aesthetics that typify times of
social instability. Indeed, pious sincerity characterizes the end of the
millennium in a way that seems oddly compulsive, distinctly pathetic, and as
much a signifier of anxious righteousness as it is one of unlikely stability.
How else can we conceptualize the astonishing turns characterized by the attempt
to retrieve aspects of a century whose sheer destructiveness is paralleled by
unprecedented disorder. Indeed, the cumulative effects of 20th century modernity
is surely the topic for a massive reflection on the century that began with the
split of the atom and ended with atomic sculpture. It also ends with a kind of
rendezvous with speculative digital technologies, rhetorically destined to bring
fruition to computational or algorithmic life.

Salomon's essay, In Praise of Bad Art, hailed a reactionary trend in the U.S. to
celebrate schlock mediocrity and emerged as a kind of apology for the
misunderstanding of tastelessness for meaninglessness. But a capitulation to
"bad art" is a ridiculous form of retreat. But the attitude represented by the
Salomon article, and particularly the phrase "weirdly sincere," strikes a kind
of oxymoronic chord that is supported by an avalanche of unfortunate electronic
metaphors and outlandish virtual interpretations in a time in which the
boundaries between the imagination and technology crumble in strained artistic
posturing, pained curatorial narratives, and tortured -if not preposterous-
notions of "variable media."

So instead of "variable media" how about viable media, media not drowned by
artistically useless demands for upgradable usability, not hounded by
domineering state-of-the-art implementations, not 'normalized' by institutional
imperatives for stable performance, not limited by demands that they be on the
web or not in line, on the screen or out of sight, or not "reduced," as Kittler
notes, "to surface effects, known to consumers as interface."

The drive to continue developing resistance to an over-hyped 'necessity' to root
contemporary media art on the web or find persuasive alternatives to the managed
ideologies of so many institutional-new-media-initiatives is a continuing saga.
Too broad an issue to develop here, suffice it to indicate that resistance media
has shadowed mainstream media for generations. Often instantiating their
possibilities, assimilating their available techniques and equally often
parodying their optimisms, resistant media often serves as both caution and
possibility, evolving a critical relationship with a field fueled by relentless,
often reckless, and generally unconceptualized development. Suffering from
mainstream marginalization, this so-called 'alternative media' has become the
centerpiece of many initiatives in the territories of electronic media. This has
led, after decades of substantial consideration, to a burgeoning discourse of
media archaeology in an attempt to rethink marginalized or abandoned
technologies eclipsed by the corporate spectacles of cinema, television, IMAX,
etc., etc. Easily rationalized as "retro," the more pertinent understanding of
this move to retrieve and utilize "dead media" could be understood as a
willingness to counteract the drive to ubiquitous and incessant obsolescence and
an unwillingness to sustain the imperatives of corporate R&D's desperate
interest to market innovation. As evident in web media as it is in the music
scene, the ability to outdistance crumbling marketing models is revealed by the
inconceivable over-valuation of virtualization so evident in the media biz.
Circumventing this system is one of the most potential after-effects of current
media.

"As a hybrid of different technologies, VinylVideo™ reveals and connects a
variety of media history alignments, combining art, science and technology, low-
and high-tech and analog and digital elements to create a new vision (a
breaking-open) of the limits of a medium, of consumer technology and of the
artifacts of everyday life that quotes the contemporary renaissance of vinyl at
the same time that it questions the expiration of technologies." Video, encoded
as sound, is pressed onto vinyl records. A "black box" between the record player
and a conventional TV interprets and plays the video. Usable as an element of a
home entertainment system, VinylVideo™ can be understood as a gadget that can
redeem archaic analogue playback while integrating itself with notions of the
set-top-box and its intimations of interactivity. Yet the use of the system is
also linked with the use of scratch techniques in current music. Part
subversion, part

Posed as a "fake archeological relic of media technology," VinylVideo™ provokes
a range of questions around the expectations of "a fictitious technological
past" (as Charles Gute suggested), the faux-status of innovation, the ploys (and
plots) of advertising, the quotidian benefits of aesthetics, the esteem of media
theory, the vacuous venture of investment, and the participation of artist
collaborators producing editions of "records" (Heimo Zobernig, Oliver Hangl,
Annika Eriksson, Monoscope, Harald Hund, Visomat Laboric/Gereon Schmitz, Cut-Up/
Geert Mul, Vuk Cosic/Alezej Shulgin, Andrea Lumplecker, Peter Haas, JODI,
Lampalzer-Oppermann and Olia Lialina).

Already widely exhibited and promoted (in a kind of performercial, on video, and
now on the web >>www.vinylvideo.com<<) VinylVideo™ augments the disruptive work
of the ASCIIists working on the web into the margins between the home, gallery
and festival. Its Infomercial is parodically revealing. Some excerpts:

[ILLUSTRATION…]
picture: Living room, corner seating group, VinylVideo unit, moderator

dialog: Hi, my name is Karen Coarsefit, i am the vice president of VinylVideo
Homesystems Incorporated. Welcome to our program. Right now, with the help of
our experts, I'm going to let you in on the secret of how to have a lot more TV
viewing pleasure. Aren't you tired of only being able to enjoy one showing of
your favorite programs on TV? Aren't you fed up with the same old boring shows,
night after night after night? Wouldn't you just love to simply put together
your own TV viewing line-up? Have you gotten to the point where you've even
considered buying one of those expensive video recorders? You know what I mean
... one of these bulky gadgets that cost a fortune ... and ... I mean, just take
a look at the size of the instruction manual ... you probably have to be a
rocket scientist to figure out how to work the thing. With VinylVideo, that's
all a thing of the past, because all that you need for VinylVideo's picture
display is already right there in your home. You might find this incredible, but
all you need for VinylVideo is your old turntable that's probably been gathering
dust for years on your hi-fi rack, your normal TV set ... AND! ... our
VinylVideo home kit that you can order right now. But that's not all. We at
Bestbefore guarantee not only that you will immediately begin having more fun
watching TV, but we also offer you a one-of-a-kind opportunity to invest money
in art that can mean big profits for you. How does it work? Just stay tuned!

[ILLUSTRATION…]
Element 09 User testimonial - long version 1

picture: found footage - infomercial (couple on couch)

sound:
She: VinylVideo is really a great invention. You know, in the past, the evenings
we spent together watching television were...how shall I put it...often somewhat
tiring. But now, with the exciting new possibilities offered by VinylVideo,
we've put an end to boredom once and for all.
He: Yeah, and with this great trashpeg technology, you just round up your
favorite disks, get the ol' needle jumpin‚ and just scratch together your own TV
viewing line-up. We love it. Really. She: Now, he's a regular little video
artist. (chuckles)

[ILLUSTRATION…]
Element 12 Media theorist

picture: found footage Deleuze

dialog: I would like to present to you several considerations from the
perspective of media and communications theory with regard to VinylVideo as an
interface linking digital and analog technology which could mark a paradigm
shift in theoretical and practical aspects of recording and playback media.
Throughout the long history of the moving picture, the orientation of that
movement with respect to time, as well as the feasibility of intervening in the
direction of that movement, has always been constrained by the linearity of the
particular medium as determined by its corresponding technology. If--for example
in the case of video technology--there existed the theoretical possibility of
intervention in the area of slow motion/freeze frame, then the acceleration of
the images and soundtrack proved to be a somewhat more complicated matter. And
it was absolutely impossible to abbreviate time sequences by simply skipping
over them. By means of digital technologies, a realm of possibilities emerged
here which raised the specter of such applications--the fragmentation or the
dissolution of this constant space-time vector. To be sure, the possibilities of
intervention in this area have been limited until now, since physical action was
determined by the programming of zeros and ones. Like every new technology, the
numerous components which have been combined to produce the innovative core
behind the VinylVideo label also open up a vast array of new possibilities. But
there is one highly decisive element which constitutes a tremendous advance
beyond any model introduced to date. Here, for the first time, a real
manipulation of time--its transcendence, as it were--becomes possible by means
of a seemingly simple physical-mechanical act. What is paradoxical about this
development seems to be its external form, which has borrowed two of the most
highly representative products from the history of audiovisual artifacts and
synthesized them into a revolutionary new application. The liberation from space
and time combined with the simultaneous feedback link-up to a control instrument
consisting of the manifestation of a technological phase thought to have been
lost or terminated--or, in any case, completely obsolete--is, in fact, a
conception of such bravura that generations of poets, philosophers and
scientists could formulate only in their wildest dreams and fables, so that a
realistic assessment of the possibilities associated with it remains a highly
problematic task at the moment. The inherent potential opened up to us by this
new technology and its possible applications seem to be virtually unlimited, and
the realization of this potentiality promises to bring with it radical breaches
and reformulations of our previous listening and viewing habits as well as, in
any case, an expansion of our senses, although this should not be interpreted as
an attempt to obscure the fact that, in the final analysis, the uses and the
radicality of a technology still remain dependent upon the form and the content
of its applications. Moderator: Well, uh, thanks, Gilles. I really don't know
what I could possibly add, that was really incredibly interesting.

In his 1991 essay, Black Box S-Thetix: Labor, Research, and Survival in the
He(Art) of the Beast, Jim Pomeroy wrote: "In its more constructive aspects,
techno-art is a powerful and appropriate vehicle of cultural confrontation and
discursive commentary upon the technological religion of our times. Because it
embraces the contradictions of our technically advanced society, and amplifies
those very tendencies that expose the contradictions, it raises the specter of
our extreme hopes and fears…techno-artists have long been busy building up their
own store of technical knowledge necessary for survival. Better that than
artists once again being left with the task of scrawling the hieroglyphics upon
the walls of the temple and the tomb."

And the final word to Raymond Bellour:

"So the point would rather be to make this commonplace but necessary
observation: there is no visual image that is not more and more tightly gripped,
even in its essential, radical withdrawal, inside an audiovisual or
scriptovisual (what horrid words) image that envelops it, and it is in this
context that the existence of something that still resembles art is at stake
today. We are well aware, as Barthes and then Eco have been pointing out for
some time now, and as was so admirably reformulated by Deleuze with an
extraordinary emphasis on the image, that we are not really living in "a
civilization of the image" -- even though pessimistic prophets have tried to
make us believe that it has become our evil spirit par excellence, no doubt
because it had been mistaken for an angel for such a long time. We have gone
beyond the image, to a nameless mixture, a discourse-image, if you like, or a
sound-image ("Son-Image", Godard calls it), whose first side is occupied by
television and second side by the computer, in our all-purpose machine society."



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