kyle /danm 201 /danm 201 /journal 1

Muddled thoughts on "Ten Dreams of Technology" by Steve Dietz

Steve Dietz's "Ten Dreams of Technology" (in Leonardo vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 509-513) has neatly summed up ten of the biggest myths about technology in art. That he has done so under the guise of yet another fluff piece should not prevent us from examining these myths (here labeled as 'dreams'...) so that we can unpack the underlying assumptions of artists/technologists working in our field.

Dietz holds up Perry Hoberman's Cathartic User Interface as a 'compelling and cathartic' example of technological artwork forging a 'dream of the future'(509). I don't see how he can claim that. I liked that piece when I saw it, but I see very little seed of utopianism in it. If Hoberman's piece was indeed cathartic for some folks, I suspect that it was for the very reasons that Hoberman claimed; the ever-increasing frustration of being "shackled to a neo-fascist data terminal" (http://www.perryhoberman.com/). That piece was fun, in my view, because it was playful commentary on our contemporary distopian situation, not because it did much to "dream the future".

In Dietz's 'Dream of World Peace', he begins with a wise disclaimer that "there is no communications technology that assures world peace... (T)echnologies have not had any effect on humanitiy's penchant for destruction" (511). He means, more or less, that the internet hasn't stopped many wars. Deitz does not even begin to examine here, however, the closely knit relationships between communications technologies and genocide. It is commonplace, of course, to note the internet's incubation within the Pentagon; less noted is that the surveillance technologies initially associated with US Military operations are now readily available to any and every third-world dictator. In short, technologies may HAVE had great effects on 'humanity's penchant for destruction'; they may actually have served to whet our appetites for wars. I'm no technological determinist, however, and would welcome discussion of how artists in technologies are reshaping the social ground in ways that deflate our global capacities for war. But that isn't what Dietz does here either. Rather, his claim is that Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz's work building electronic cafés harbors a dream of world peace by linking (socially, presumably ethnically) diverse communities. Inter-community dialog MAY go a long way towards addressing the relationships of privilege and power that form the circuitry along which class warfare flows, but it is not self-evident to me that simply addressing power relations can create 'world peace'. I'm not saying that such projects DON'T foster better understanding and, maybe, 'peace', but I'm reluctant to take it for granted that they DO.

The most glaring exclusion from Dietz's list is the 'dream of progress' (read here as 'myth of Progress'). Not only do progress naratives form the backbone of how viewers interact with technological art (hence the tendency to want to 'figure out' the ghost in the machine... and ignore the conceptual ramifications of a work--that is to say, experience it as (s)he might a newly released techno-gizmo) it also forms the assumptions of how artists imagine their work and their lives. Despite all our pretenses to postmodernity or post-postmodernity or whatever, most working artists seem to imagine themselves engaged in attempts to build the 'cool new thing' (a shadowy stand-in for the modernist myth of genius and originality which was so closely related to the emergence of capitalist progress narratives in the first place...). If our relationships to our own art-activities is always-already formulated in terms of capitalist innovation and supposed 'progress' toward an ill-defined and ever-elusive goal, it should come as little surprise that viewers experience our works as snoody versions of the techno-toys they see at trade shows.

I must no doubt sound here like a real grump and a bit of a neigh-sayer. On the contrary, I think that the works that Dietz addresses, and the theoretical connections that he begins to suggest (in the most uncritical of language) reflect precisely the negative utopianism that we must foster if we are to start conjuring the dreams that Dietz claims to see in the nightmarish world of today.

All that said, I really liked some of the art that I didn't already know about. The _åda'web_ project that he mentions in dream 9 I found especially compelling. It didn't escape my notice that the project is hosted by the Walker Art Center-- presumably during the time that Deitz was running their New Media arm... I stumbled on this project on åda'web and still feel pretty intruiged by it... This stuff is kinda old and hokey now (all in javascript I think) but I like it a lot.