[Reader-list] Art of the Future

[Monica Narula]

When the website anthology-of-art.net began to ask the following 
question, Nancy Adjania replied with the essay below.
"What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future Art?"

Take the Fast with the Slow
Nancy Adajania, editor ArtIndia Magazine
(www.anthology-of-art.net)


In an age of fatal de-sensitisation, when the horrific and the 
terrible are routine, it is almost inevitable that I should choose to 
start with an apocalyptic vision of the future: this vision will be 
less of a celebration and more of a cautionary tale. In the future, I 
suspect, art will undergo a comprehensive process of 'de-matting'. I 
am employing this financial metaphor, drawing it from the realm of 
stocks and shares, to push to the extreme the idea of a 
de-materialised and de-localised art of the future.

  In the scenario that I will outline here, such conventional art 
institutions as galleries and museums will perhaps become defunct (as 
the cyber-artist Jeffrey Shaw notes playfully, discussing his 
installation, 'The Virtual Museum', the telematic living room of the 
future will be occupied by "sedentary travellers in a simulated 
world" with world-ranging access to art holdings at their cybernetic 
fingertips). Theoretically, at least, technology
will ensure that the process of production, access and reception of 
art will be fully democratised. Art, therefore, will be vehiculated 
through telematics: this will transform not only its form, but also 
its content, in radical ways.

  'De-mat art', as I will call this telematics-based art of the 
future, will function in a constantly changing virtual landscape that 
is trans-time and trans-space. Rapid advances in the field of 
telematics (especially the increasing use of computer systems in the 
former Third World) will ensure the sustenance of such a 
de-materialised art, and also facilitate the entry into this new 
space of art of impulses that were not formerly regarded as 
'art-worthy': we will have a further democratization here, an 
opening-up of the terrain of art-making to constituencies that were 
not formerly regarded as art-makers, or whose experiences have not 
been recognised by formal art institutions as a valid basis for art. 
The monopoly of academy-trained artists will be challenged by 
citizens at large, empowered by cybernetics.

  Correspondingly, with the dismantling of the conventional art 
infrastructure (or, at least, its marginalisation in favour of 
telematics-based art venues), the users of de-mat art will no longer 
belong to the traditional community of art-gallery viewers. New 
constituencies of users -- let us call them cybernauts -- would 
emerge.

  Here comes the caveat, however: even as the process of art-viewing 
becomes de-hierarchised, art may run the risk of becoming 
indistinguishable from entertainment, sharing a hyphenated 
relationship with fashion and commerce, it will always be topical. We 
must reflect on whether it would not, in its very novelty, cease to 
have a determinate bearing on the textures and directions of our 
lives, if it is constantly ephemeral, spasmodic, if it
scintillates briefly before our eyes and is gone? This momentariness 
of the new de-mat art experience will, perhaps, negate the values of 
more conventional art-works: those of contemplative energy, poised 
presence,
critical subversion and robust affirmation. Will de-mat art sacrifice 
substance to speed?

  Discussing the harmful effects of speed and movement in a telematic 
environment, in Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles, the 
cultural theorist Paul Virilio asks, "And what if the primary goal of 
travel was not
to 'go' somewhere, but simply to no longer be where one is? What if 
the aim of movement has become like that of military invasions or 
sports records: to go faster while going nowhere, in other words to 
disappear?"

  This phenomenon of "going fast, but going nowhere" can be described, 
in the context of virtual art, as the art of the fast lane (as 
against the slow lane of conventional art, based on the display of 
physical art-works). In a speed-saturated virtual art scenario, 
artistic expressions would become even more aleatory and fractal than 
today. At the culmination of de-mat art there would be a total 
disintegration of the image.

  Let us, polemically, accentuate this alarmist vision of the art of 
the fast lane. Here, technology augments the role of human agency so 
that the mind-body functions through prostheses. With so much free 
play on offer, the
possibility of aleation, coupled with the sheer availability of 
visual and textual content, makes the viewers/users forget what they 
were looking for in the first place. When the viewer/user is 
clicking/jumping from one hypertext to another, s/he is always on the 
move, but motion is not movement, just as speed is not a guarantee of 
arrival, or even of discovery. Motion and speed become goals in 
themselves, and this is a dangerous development.

  Eventually, this situation would lead to an atrophy of the senses. 
The producers and receivers of art will no longer function as 
autonomous beings within their mind-bodies; they would be handicapped 
without their machines.
And now, with advances in biotechnology that may change our faculties 
through implants rather than prostheses, the enslavement to 
technology, and especially to telematics, would be complete, 
insidious, and binding. In this,
dromomanic environment (in Virilio's phrase; the word comes from the 
Greek 'dromos', meaning a race, a pursuit of speed) we may become a 
superhuman species, but we would lose the possibilities of wonderment 
that go with being human.

  Telematics, a product of globalisation, is no longer just an option: 
it is a condition. Speaking for my own country, India, it has been 
estimated that there will be 4 million Internet users by 2003, to be 
followed by an exponential growth in their numbers. Already, after 
the opening-up of the Indian economy through the 'liberalisation' 
policies determined by the International Monetary Fund, we have 
witnessed the installation of several thousand roadside cybercafés 
across the country. Dromology has changed the pace, space and 
architecture of the Indian street, and the emergence of a 
cyber-community cutting across traditional boundaries of class, 
caste, gender, region.

  Two Indian cities, Hyderabad and Bangalore, are considered the 
dream-destinations of the software industry. Consider Hyderabad, for 
instance: it was once the feudal capital of the Nizami kingdom and it 
became the capital of the province of Andhra Pradesh after 
independence. Today, it has been transformed by software dromomania 
into a postmodern city of virtual finance, high technology, 
spectacular entertainment and accelerated consumption.

  Not surprisingly, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu 
Naidu, is a dedicated Netizen. Recently, a popular magazine ran a 
story about his administration willing to respond to citizens' 
grievances sent by email. But
what of the illiterate, the disempowered, those without access even 
to the usual channels of justice, leave alone a PC terminal or a 
lease-line? How do these people (who number in the millions) reach 
the Chief Minister at his
email address?

  In rural Andhra Pradesh, outside the capital Hyderabad, poverty and 
undernourishment are endemic conditions. Impoverished weavers, broken 
by the failure of the cotton crop and the lack of insurance, continue 
to commit
suicide. Maoist guerrillas continue their armed struggle for the 
rights of the impoverished peasantry, and are engaged in a brutal war 
with the police, but Chief Minister Naidu would not embellish his 
website with such details: the website, like the entire image of 
techno-savvy, is driven by the redemptive vision of global capital; 
it is meant to attract foreign investment to the province. One need 
not spell out, therefore, that cyber-access has become a simulation 
of democracy in this case: an ersatz advertisement selling 
technological progress as democratic progress!

  Neither cyber-access nor a nascent cyber-community translates 
automatically into emancipation. Commenting on the unequal geography 
of access in electronic space, Saskia Sassen talks of a new 
"geography of centrality and
one of marginality." ("The Topoi of e space: Global Cities and Global 
Value Chains", posted on Nettime, 28 October 1996, also available in 
the Sarai Reader 01, and at www.sarai.net/journal.reader1.html) Can 
the dromological architecture of cyberspace be made truly democratic? 
Can it become a virtual venue for artistic and political activism? 
This is where artists can, in the future, work as ethical and 
political agents of change by setting up counter-republics in virtual 
space, dynamising the dispersed cyber-community of the present into a 
coherent public force.

  So that speed does not result in an implosion of space, these 
republics should aspire to being truly res publica, "things of the 
people". Take the fast with the slow, galvanise speed towards action 
and not passive reception.
We should not allow technology to shape us. We should shape its 
contours and make it more humane. If we do not want technology to 
take over public spaces of protest and resistance, we will have to 
alter the dromological
architecture of telematic space. Artists will have to explode the 
one-way lanes of image-consumption and articulate broader political 
and social needs through artistic strategies that enter public 
debates laterally. Artists
will, perhaps, have to form alliances with activists, architects, 
scientists and cultural theorists.

  They would have to set up multiple interfaces, getting out of even 
the singular interface between the gallery and street which 
fascinates so many artists today: already, it has become played out, 
become an aestheticised act
without political edge. In formal terms, artists can use the device 
of interruption, which, as Virilio put it (in conversation with 
Sylvere Lotringer, in 'Pure War'), acts as punctuation to the 
existent dromomania: "Interruption is the change of speed".

  When art becomes dromomanic, as we have seen, the image, which is an 
irreducible unit of all art-works, becomes less dynamic, and gets 
dispersed and fragmented. Fast-lane art has yet a few things to learn 
from the
old-fashioned slow-lane art: the image in the slow lane, by reason of 
its slowness, can develop substance, assert ethical weight and 
determinacy. Being a physical entity, to be approached in space and 
time, it provides within
itself a pause for reflection, revelation and contemplative attention 
to the art-object. What it lacks in terms of reflecting the 
accelerated momentum and dizzying transformations of the telematic 
age, it makes up for in these ways.

  The lesson that the slow lane offers the fast is this: the freedom 
promised by telematics will be realised only if there is actual 
material empowerment: telematic freedom must be positioned within a 
robust understanding of the
political economy, or else it is doomed to being mere fantasy-play. 
Salvation lies neither in speed nor in inertia, then, but in their 
creative re-working. The art of the future will be modulated between 
the slow and the fast lanes,
especially for former Third World countries; for us, indeed, such a 
modulation will be far saner than a plunge into the no-holds-barred, 
no-upper-limit traffic of the fast lane, enticing as it is. After 
all, artistic freedom without responsibility is like driving blind.

  And finally, so that art does not become a 'no-exit' situation, we 
should embrace the Gandhian model of political resistance. Art, 
whether material or de-mat, should be inspired by the strategy that 
Mahatma Gandhi described as
satyagraha, a truth-offering, resistance that gives the self 
autonomy, not by isolating it within ideological judgements, but by 
inviting the world to share in the experiment of dialogue.
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net