New Media from Borges to html

My second example of similar aesthetic strategies re-appearing more than deals with the development of moving image technology throughout the nineteenth century, and the development of digital technologies to display moving images on a computer desktop during the 1990s. In the first part of the 1990s, as computers' speed kept gradually increasing, the CD-ROM designers have been able to go from a slide show format to the superimposition of small moving elements over static backgrounds and finally to full-frame moving images. This evolution repeats the nineteenth century progression: from sequences of still images (magic lantern slides presentations) to moving characters over static backgrounds (for instance, in Reynaud's Praxinoscope Theater) to full motion (the Lumieres' cinematograph). Moreover, the introduction of QuickTime by Apple in 1991 can be compared to the introduction of the Kinetoscope in 1892: both were used to present short loops, both featured the images approximately two by three inches in size, both called for private viewing rather than collective exhibition. Culturally, the two technologies also functioned similarly: as the latest technological “marvel.” If in the early 1890s the public patronized Kinetoscope parlors where peep-hole machines presented them with the latest invention — tiny moving photographs arranged in short loops; exactly a hundred years later, computer users were equally fascinated with tiny QuickTime Movies that turned a computer in a film projector, however imperfect. Finally, the Lumieres' first film screenings of 1895 which shocked their audiences with huge moving images found their parallel in 1995 CD-ROM titles where the moving image finally fills the entire computer screen (for instance, in Jonny Mnemonic computer game, based on the film by the same title.) Thus, exactly a hundred years after cinema was officially "born," it was reinvented on a computer screen.

Interesting as they are, these two examples also illustrate the limitations of thinking about new media in terms of historically recurrent aesthetic strategies and ideological tropes. While ideological tropes indeed seem re-appearing rather regularly, many aesthetic strategies may only reappear two or three times. Moreover, some strategies and/or tropes can be already found in the first part of the nineteenth century while others only make their first appearance much more recently.⁶ In order for this approach to be truly useful it would be insufficient to simply name the strategies and tropes and to record the moments of their appearance; instead, we would have to develop a much more comprehensive analysis which would correlate the history of technology with social, political and economical histories of the modern period.

So far my definitions of new media focused on technology; the next three definitions will consider new media as material re-articulation, or encoding, of purely cultural tendencies – in short, as ideas rather than technologies.

6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or Through Other Technologies.

A modern digital computer is a programmable machine. This simply means that the same computer can execute different algorithms. An algorithm is a sequence of steps that need to be followed to accomplish a task. Digital computers allow to execute most algorithms very quickly, however in principle an algorithm, since it is just a sequence of simple steps, can be also executed by a human, although much more slowly. For instance, a human can sort files in a particular order, or count the number of words in a text, or cut a part of an image and paste it in a different place.

This realization gives us a new way to think about both digital computing, in general, and new media, in particular, as a massive speed-up of various manual techniques that all have already existed. Consider, for instance, computer’s ability to represent objects in linear perspective and to animated such representations. When you move your character through the world in a first person shooter computer game (such as Quake), or when you move your viewpoint around a 3D architectural model, a computer re-calculates perspectival views for all the objects in the frame many times every second (in the case of current desktop hardware, frame rates of 80 frames of second are not uncommon). But we should remember that the algorithm itself was codified during the Renaissance in Italy, and that, before digital computers came along (that is, for about five hundred years) it was executed by human draftsmen. Similarly, behind many other new media techniques there is an algorithm that, before computing, was executed manually. (Of course since art has always involved some technology – even as simple as a stylus for making marks on stone – what I mean by “manually” is that a human had to systematically go through every step of an algorithm himself, even if he was assisted by some image making tools.) Consider, for instance, another very popular new media technique: making a composite from different photographs. Soon after photography was invented, such nineteenth century photographers as Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar G. Reijlander were already creating smooth "combination prints" by putting together multiple photographs.

While this approach to thinking about new media takes us away from thinking about it purely in technological terms, it has a number of problems of its own. Substantially speeding up the execution of an algorithm by implementing this algorithm in software does not just leave things as they are. The basic point of dialectics is that a substantial change in quantity (i.e., in speed of execution in this case) leads to the emergence of qualitatively new phenomena. The example of automation of linear perspective is a case in point. Dramatically speeding up the execution of a perspectival algorithm makes possible previously non-existent representational technique: smooth movement through a perspectival space. In other words, we get not only quickly produced perspectival drawings but also computer-generated movies and interactive computer graphics.

The technological shifts in the history of “combination prints” also illustrate the cultural dialectics of transformation of quantity into quality. In the nineteenth century, painstakingly crafted “combination prints” represented an exception rather than the norm. In the twentieth century, new photographic technologies made possible photomontage that quickly became one of the basic representational techniques of modern visual culture. And finally the arrival of digital photography via software like Photoshop, scanners and digital cameras in the late 1980s and 1990s not only made photomontage much more omnipresent than before but it also fundamentally altered its visual characteristics. In place of graphic and hard-edge compositions pioneered by Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko we now have smooth multi-image composites which use transparency, blur, colorization and other easily available digital manipulations and which often incorporate typography that is subjected to exactly the same manipulations (thus in Post-Photoshop visual culture the type becomes a subset of a photo-based image.) To see this dramatic change, it is enough to compare a typical music video from 1985 and a typical music video from 1995: within ten years, visual aesthetics of photomontage undergone a fundamental change.

Finally, thinking about new media as speeding up of algorithms which previously were executed by hand foregrounds the use of computers for fast algorithm execution, but ignores its two other essential uses: real-time network communication and real-time control. The abilities to interact with or control remotely located data in real-time, to communicate with other human beings in real-time, and control various technologies (sensors, motors, other computers) in real time constitute the very foundation of our information society -- phone communications, Internet, financial networking, industrial control, the use of micro-controllers in numerous modern machines and devices, and so on. They also make possible many forms of new media art and culture: interactive net art, interactive computer installations, interactive multimedia, computer games, real-time music synthesis.

While non-real time media generation and manipulation via digital computers can be thought of as speeding up of previously existing artistic techniques, real-time networking and control seem to constitute qualitatively new phenomena. When we use Photoshop to quickly combine photographs together, or when we compose a text using a Microsoft Word, we simply do much faster what before we were doing either completely manually or assisted by some technologies (such as a typewriter). However, in the cases when a computer interprets or synthesize human speech in real time, monitors sensors and modify program’s based on their input in real-time, or controls other devices, again in real-time, this is something which simply could not be done before. So while it is important to remember that, on one level, a modern digital computer is just a faster calculator, we should not ignore its other identity: that of a cybernetic control device. To put this in different way, while new media theory should pay tributes to Alan Turing, it should not forget about its other conceptual father – Norbert Weiner.

7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia.

The approach to new media just discussed does not foreground any particular cultural period as the source of algorithms that are eventually encoded in computer software. In my article “Avant-garde as Software” I have proposed that, in fact, a particular historical period is more relevant to new media than any other – that of the 1920s (more precisely, the years between 1915 and 1928).⁷ During this period the avant-garde artists and designers have invented a whole new set of visual and spatial languages and communication techniques that we still use today. According to my hypothesis,

1. The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, and simulation.

2. The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material.
My concept of “meta-media” is related to a more familiar notion of “post-modernism” – the recognition that by the 1980s the culture became more concerned with reworking already existing content, idioms and style rather than creating genially new ones. What I would like to stress (and what I think the original theorists of post-modernism in the 1980s have not stressed enough) is the key role played by the material factors in the shift towards post-modernist aesthetics: the accumulation of huge media assets and the arrival of new electronic and digital tools which made it very easy to access and re-work these assets. This is another example of quantity changing into quality in media history: the gradual accumulation of media records and the gradual automation of media management and manipulation techniques eventually recoded modernist aesthetics into a very different post-modern aesthetics.
8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post WWII Art and Modern Computing.

Along with the 1920s, we can think of other cultural periods that generated ideas and sensibilities particularly relevant to new media. In the 1980s a number of writers looked at the connections between Baroque and post-modern sensibilities; given the close linked between post-modernism and new media I just briefly discussed, it would be logical if the parallels between Baroque and new media can also be established.⁸ It can be also argued that in many ways new media returns us to a pre-modernist cultural logic of the eighteenth century: consider for instance, the parallel between an eighteenth century communities of readers who were also all writers and participants in Internet newsgroups and mailing lists who are also both readers and writers.

In the twentieth century, along with the 1920s, which for me to represent the cultural peak of this century (because during this period more radically new aesthetic techniques were prototyped than in any other period of similar duration), the second culturally peak –1960s – also seem to contain many of new media genes. A number of writers such as Söke Dinkla have argued that interactive computer art (1980s -) further develops ideas already contained in the new art of the 1960s (happenings, performances, installation): active participation of the audience, an artwork as a temporal process rather than as a fixed object, an artwork as an open system.⁹ This connection make even more sense when we remember that some of the most influential figures in new media art (Jeffrey Shaw, Roy Ascott) have started their art careers in the 1960s and only later moved to computing and networking technologies. For instance, in the end of the 1960s Jeffrey Shaw was working on inflatable structures for film projections and performances which were big enough to contain a small audience inside – something which he later came back to in many of his VR installations, and even more directly in EVE project.¹⁰

There is another aesthetic project of the 1960s that also can be linked to new media not only conceptually but also historically, since the artists who pursued this project with computers (such as Manfred Mohr) knew of minimalist artists who during the same decade pursued the same project “manually” (most notably, Sol LeWitt).¹¹ This project can be called “combinatorics.”¹² It involves creating images and/or objects by systematically varying a single parameter or by systematically creating all possible combinations of a small number of elements.¹³ “Combinatorics” in computer art and minimalist art of the 1960s led to the creation of remarkably similar images and spatial structures; it illustrates well that the algorithms, this essential part of new media, do not depend on technology but can be executed by humans.

Although modern computing has many conceptual fathers and mothers, from Leibnitz to Ada Lovelace, and its prehistory spans many centuries, I would argue that the paradigm that still defines our understanding and usage of computing was defined in the 1960s. During the 1960s the principles of modern interactive graphical user interface (GUI) where given clear articulation (although the practical implementation and refined of these ideas took place later, in the 1970s at Xerox Parc). The articles by Licklider, Sutherland, Nelson, and Engelbart from the 1960s included in the reader are the essential documents of our time; one day the historians of culture would rate them on the same scale of importance as texts by Marx, Freud and Saussure. (Other key developments that also took place in the 1960s – early 1970s were Internet, Unix, and object-oriented programming. A number of other essential ideas of modern computing such as networking itself, the use of computers for real-time control, and the graphical interactive display were articulated earlier, in the second part of the 1940s and the first part of the 1950s.)¹⁴

The first section of the reader takes us to the end of the 1970s; by this time the key principles of modern computing and GUI were already practically implemented and refined by the developers at Xerox Parc but they were not yet commercially available to consumers. The second section “Media Manipulation, Media Design” covers the late 1970s and the 1980s. During this period Macintosh (released in 1984) popularized GUI; it also shipped with a simple drawing and painting programs which emphasized the new role of a computer as a creative tool; finally, it was the first inexpensive computer which came with a bit-mapped display. Atari computers made computer-based sound manipulation affordable; computer games achieved a new level of popularity; cinema started to use computers for special effects (Tron released by Disney in 1982 contained seventeen minutes of 3-D computer generated scenes); towards the very end of the decade, Photoshop, which can be called the key software application of post-modernism, was finally released. All these developments of the 1980s created new set of roles for a modern digital computer: a manipulator of existing media (Photoshop); a media synthesizer (film special effects, sound software), and a new medium (or rather, a set of new mediums) in its own right (computer games). New Media Reader collects essential articles by computer scientists from the 1980s that articulate ideas behind these new roles of a computer (Bolt, Snheiderman, Laurel and others).

As computing left the strict realm of big business, the military, the government and the university and entered society at large, cultural theorists begin to think about its effects, and it is appropriate that New Media Reader also reprints key theoretical statements from the 1980s (Turkle, Haraway). I should note here that European cultural theorists reacted to computerization earlier than the Americans: both Lyotard’s The Post-Modern Condition (1979) and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations (1981) contain detailed discussions of computing, something which their 1980s American admirers did not seem to notice.

The last section of the reader “Revolution, Resistance, and the Web’s Arrival” contains to weave texts by computer scientists, social researchers, cultural theorists, and critics from the end of the 1980s onward; it also takes us into the early 1990s when the rise of the Web redefined computing one again. If the 1980s gradually made visible the new role of a computer as a media manipulator and an interface to media – the developments which eventually were codified around 1990 in the term “new media” – in the 1990s another role of a digital computer (which was already present since the late 1940s) came to the foreground: that of a foundation for real-time multi-media networking, available not just for selected researchers and the Military (as it was for decades) but for millions of people.

In the 1960s we can find strong conceptual connections between computing and radical art of the period, but with the sole exception of Ted Nelson (the conceptual father of hypertext) no computer scientist was directly applying radical political ideas of the times to computer design. In fact these ideas had a strong effect of the field but it was delayed until the 1970s when Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox Parc pursued the vision of personal computer workstation that would empower an individual rather than a big organization. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, we seem to witness a different kind of parallel between social changes and computer design. Although causally unrelated, conceptually it makes sense that the end of cold War and the design of the Web took place at exactly the same time. The first development ended the separation of the world into separate parts closed to each other, making it a single global system; the second development connected world’s computers into a single networking. The early Web (i.e., before it came to be dominated by big commercial portals towards the end of the 1990s) also practically implemented a radically horizontal, no-hierarchical model of human existence in which no idea, no ideology and no value system can dominate the rest – thus providing a perfect metaphor to a new post Cold War sensibility.