New Book on Digital Art

Christiane Paul, one of the most experienced new media curators in the US, has written a book for Thames & Hudson's canonical 'World of Art' series on Digital Art. There have been a number of books recently trying to pick themes out of the heady world of new media culture over the last 10 years, including Lev Manovich's 'Language of New Media' (Lev! stop using frames!) and Noah Wardriup-Fruin's 'New Media Reader'.

Christiane's book focuses on art, rather than the broader impacts of new media, and is a pretty good survey, starting with some context from Nam June Paik and Marcel Duchmap (of course...). Its a broad sweep of work, covering net.art, networked installation, online performances and 'tactical media'. There's also mention of mobile projects, including 'Speakers Corner', a project I was involved in.

I'm glad Christiane included that project, as its one of the things I'm most proud of, despite the protracted development and extended rebuild. It also means Jaap de Jonge gets a credit in the index - he deserves to reserve a place in the historicising of new media art, as he has created some of the most compelling, and accessible public art pieces of the last 10 years. And it also means that a corner of the canon of digital media will be forever Huddersfield...

;-)

Britain in 2020

Forethought, a Labour thinktank on the future, have published a report on how they think Britain will change by 2020. I'm about halfway through the report, and most of the assumptions are not that radical - aging population, increased consumer expectations from public services, decline of manufacturing sector and rise in importance of ICT. But there is one statistic that has stopped me in my tracks:

"all of the phone calls made in 1984 are now made in less than a single day"

Annoyingly, they don't give a reference for that statistic, or say whether they mean the UK or global communications market. But assuming its true, thats an amazing statistic - in 17 years, the amount of phone calls we make has increased 365 times. Its one of those stats that gives you an almost vertiginous perspective on the progress of technology. What did we do with all that extra time in 1984? What are we doing with all those extra calls? There is no analysis of whether they include internet access in the stats, but even so, that wouldn't account for an increase of that scale.

It illustrates how communication technology changes society in subtle ways. We don't end up with jetpacks, food pills or homes under the sea, but instead our lives change gradually, then exponentially, until we can't remember what life was like before those technologies existed, even if this was less than 20 years ago.

In a previous job, I had to sort through the archive of a photography gallery, including carbon copies of all the gallery's correspondence with artists in the 1970's and 80's. These conversations would take place over days, even weeks, as letters were sent and replies drafted. Nowadays, the same conversations would happen in a day, at most, using email. But we still ran the same number of exhibitions every year, with roughly the same number of artists, in 1997 as they did in 1977. What did the gallery staff in 1977 do with all their time? And what were we doing in 1997 with all our calls, emails and faxes?

Perpetual Futures

I was looking at this timeline of potential futures, and the bit on virtual reality and consumer robotics struck a nerve. People have been talking about VR taking off for over 20 years now. It made me think about certain ideas that asymptotically extend into the future, never seeming to actually get any nearer in real life. These ideas all seem to exist at the extreme edges of scenarios, either utopian or dystopian.

Technologies, like VR, that fall into this category often have technical or form factors that prevent them from catching a hook into the dynamics of real life. By existing mainly in labs, they don't get the chance to get misused and abused by real users, and so never quite touch down on the street.

Other more conceptual ideas about the future are often just manifestations of rapture-like fantasies about cataclysmic change caused by some unstoppable force. These type of fantasies are closely linked to our insecurities about the limits of human agency, and take many forms depending on the belief systems of the author. Perversely, they are as much about reassurance as threat, as they imagine an event that shows all our beliefs about controlling our environment or destiny to be hollow illusions. If you're struggling to make sense of your life, thats a reassuring thought.

But anyway, lets not go down that route. I started this post intending to write a list of 'perpetual futures' and their distance from real life:

Reality being replaced by VR - 15-20 years
Sentient Robots - 20-30 years
Curing all illnesses - 20-40 years
Living under the sea - 20-50 years
Colonising other planets - 50-100 years
Uploading consciousness/escaping the biological body - 50-100 years
Time travel - 100-500 years
World Peace through impact of technology - 100-200 years
World War through impact of technology - 100-200 years
World Peace through intervention from divine being - 1-1000 years
World War through intervention from divine being - 1-1000 years
World Peace through intervention from extra-terrestrials - 50-500 years
World War through intervention from extra-terrestrials - 50-500 years
Boston Red Sox winning the World Series - infinity

Any other suggestions?

[Thanks to thingsmagazine for the link]