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Click
here to connect to the online component of Telematic Connections:
The Virtual Embrace.
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Since at least
the 1970s, the combination of telecommunications and computing
- what the French writers Alain Minc and Simon Nora coined telematique
- have been connecting the planet in an ever-tightening virtual
embrace. For just as long, artists have been using the same technologies
to explore both the utopian desire for an expanded, global consciousness
and the distopian consequences of our collective embrace, willing
or not, of computer-mediated human communications. Telematic
Connections: The Virtual Embrace brings together both classic
and new works, installations and online, within an historical
context, to give viewers a visceral and synoptic sense of this
emergent telematic art.
Telematic Connections is not, fundamentally,
about technology. Nor is it an attempt to define a new genre of
art practice. It is about what MIT computer scientist Michael
Dertouzos calls "the forces of the cave"- the eternal human traits
that have never left us, including desire to connect, even to
merge with another-but in the contemporaneous context of ubiquitous
computing and global networking. Yet, when Roy Ascott, one of
the prime early theoreticians of this field, famously asked in
1990 "Is there love in the telematic embrace," he was also acknowledging
a general question about the new media. Is there substance alongside
the flash? What is the real content? Is there a there there?
Telematic Connections presents hybrid
works that all use the network and computing to explore some kind
of mediated embrace between distant parties, whether human to
human, human to machine, machine to machine or even human to nature.
Simply put, what the visitor/participant does in the galleries,
whether in one of the 8 artist installations or via a terminal
interface to selected online projects, affects/is affected by
someone or something somewhere else, in physical space. Some of
these works are "classics" of telematic art, such as Eduardo Kac's
"Teleporting an Unknown State" or Paul Sermon's "Telematic Vision,"
and others, such as the Bureau of Inverse Technology's "BangBang,"
Victoria Vesna's "Community of People with No Time," Steve Mann's
"SeatSale" and Maciej Wisniewski's "Netomatheque" are world premieres.
Telematic Connections consists
of four zones: The Tele-Real, Datasphere, Tube Telematics, and
the Victorian Internet. Together, they comprise installations
that allow the gallery visitor a visceral experience of the global
embrace of telematic connections in a hybrid reality, Web-based
works, popular visions of the telematic future, and an "open source"
timeline of groundbreaking telematic art.
Guest
curator Steve Dietz is the Director of New Media Initiatives at
the Walker Art Center and curator of Gallery 9, its virtual exhibition
space.
