Digital library (interview) RAI Educational

Derrick De Kerckhove

Roma, 13/01/96

"Art and science on the Net"

SUMMARY:

  • The Internet is the latest phase of electronic development which began with the telegraph. Means of communication, whether literacy, the radio or television, influence the development of human behaviour. Radio and television created a mass culture, a one-way form of communication, where the viewer is active only as consumer. The computer is the enemy of television; television threatened the world of books, but with the computer the book returns (1).
  • A network such as Internet may mean the end of television, unless it returns to its real function of addressing the public and forming public opinion (2).
  • Italy is a great consumer of television but has so far ignored the information networks. The Italian government has a responsibility towards creating access to the new media and ensuring that the cost of access to the Internet is not artificially inflated (3).
  • Regarding the relationship between art and digital technology, there is a noted desire among artists to create interactive systems which constitute variations on the theme of tactile possibilities. Many of these artistic experiments can be applied to everyday problems, for example, helping the handicapped (4).
  • Art will play an important role in developing the relationship between man and computer (5).
  • We are witnessing an unprecedented blurring of the boundaries between art and science, as well as a move away from the art of the creator to that of the consumer, who can intervene directly in a meta-project in which all the virtual possibilities have already been included by the artist (6).
  • In the field of literature, the new technologies have led to the creation of the hypertext and challenged the concept of linearity (7).
  • However, virtual reality will not replace the text, which is the only means of communication which gives us identity; networks give us power but not identity (8).
  • Contrary to appearances, the body is becoming more, not less, important, but the way we use our body is changing (9).
  • In today's world of global communication, the Catholic Church can no longer claim to have the same centralised authority. Virtuality should promote a new tolerance (10).
  • All technologies act as a filter between the individual and the collectivity and, therefore, change the nature of spirituality (11).
  • The old ideologies of left and right have failed and the new generation has little respect for them. Government is still an important structural element in any society, but communication networks will lead to new forms of political aggregations (12).
  • as well as new social aggregations based on interests and affinities, free from limitations of place. The fragmentation of power will not lead to chaos, but to new combinations and configurations of power.(13) (14).

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INTERVIEW:

Question 1
Some say that we are at the beginning of a new era in computing where the network is the main part of the new computing. What do you think about this big change ?

Answer
I think it's true. It is really one last stage in electrical development beginning with the telegraph. You've got to look at the telegraph, at radio, telephone, television, computers and now networks because they are different phases of a continuous, unfolding kind of electronic development that is basically replacing the mental processing of the book world by a physiological and extended processing of the nervous system. Basically, electricity is the nervous system. What is happening is the ultimate phase of externalisation and we're going to bring it inside. TV and radio created a mass culture, one-way communication, distribution to the outside from the head office and very little return. No interactivity at all. That's why TV hates interactivity. Expensive content, used only once, except for reruns and not properly stored, with no rights to anything. A waste of human energy for years. The civilisation of television is a wasteful civilisation. It likes to produce and consume and make more consumption, and encourage more consuming. It's the mother of advertising; it creates a barrage of services for a population that simply has to sit there and buy it. Not that the spectator is passive. But the activity of the spectator, the principal activity of the spectator is to pay, to buy products or to vote for people who continue to suit that system. The computer is a big enemy of TV. It comes on and it creates a civilisation of speed and of extended books. TV was threatening the world of books, the old rhythms of books, the personality of books, the identity, the critical world, all that TV was threatening. Books come back--Boom!--with computers. A computer is really an electronic book; it's the first electronic book. It creates powerful acceleration of mind, it creates acceleration of a lot of processing. But unless and until the computer is connected to the telephone, it's a small revolution. It's only an attack on TV, which it did. Computers screwed television, possessed television, retuned television's market, retuned television's technology. Computers invaded television technology and then computers tried to completely swallow TV by bringing interactivity to it. But TV has successfully resisted interactivity. The new society is the society of networks. It's a civilisation of communication. It's the ultimate form of mind extension, hence making that mind extension collective for the first time. It's the first time in the history of the world that we have a tool that can make us personal and collective, private and public, oral and archived, and single and many at once. It's the first time we have the tools to multiply human intelligences and make them connect in a way in your mind that intelligence works with many, many different parts that are used for other things when it's finished. Look at the difference. TV - expensive content used once. Networks - cheap content used and reused and reused and reconfigured. It's an unbelievable difference. And that is an economic factor that has not even begun to be thought by people. A completely new kind of economy. TV hates interactivity

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Question 2
Can you analyse the relationship between TV and interactivity?

Answer
IThe relationship between TV and interactivity is that TV doesn't want it. And when it gets it, it doesn't really work and it is not meant for it. Television has to be to a great extent a kind of one-way broadcasting medium. If you make it a narrowcasting medium where the person who watches it takes part in it, then you haven't got TV any more. You're into multimedia, you're into Internet, you're into an on-line situation because you have to be on-line to do this interactivity to a certain extent. It's the end of television. So television has a job to do. When you say that a medium has taken over from another medium, what you are saying is not the end of the first medium, it's the edge of that medium. How does television look today that computers have taken over and networks have taken over ? What is the real meaning of television ? The real meaning of television is public mind, public address, unity of thought and purpose by one medium that assembles. One good thing about TV that Mr Bloomberg said very well yesterday is that you know you're on TV with a bunch of other people who are all watching the same program. That unity of purpose of people around their TV set is a fundamental service of television. But once you make TV interactive, it's over. It becomes an educational tool, it becomes an entertainment machine, it's a videogame, it's not itself.

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Question 3
In this world of communication in transformation, what role do you see for Italy with its culture...

Answer
Italy is an oral culture. There is a sense that you have to be in oral context, in real time with people in Italy much more so I think than in the northern countries. Italy has a fantastic experience with television. Italy loves television, knows television. Italy is one of the most powerful exploiters of television, so no wonder it is still very committed to television as the principal medium. But of course it's not the principal medium. It cannot stay the principal medium in the economy that's being shaped now. What I see Italy as having is a 5-year window of opportunity during which other countries will do the obvious, which is to wire, to switch their cable, and here there is no cable. Why would the Stet cable 10 million people ? I would use the existing cable, the infrastructure is very good. If it's not symmetrical, forget it. You've just wasted a great deal of time. I think that right now there is a big money to invest in increasing and creating partnerships and so on the satellite communication, on the wireless communication. There is lots of money to invest in educating the teachers and then using the kids who know to educate their fellow students and educate their own teachers, which is what's happened. Education is priority number one in terms of this network business because it's an education that pays all the time, even if it doesn't pay directly in terms of users of the system, it pays in terms of creators and information providers, which is unbelievably important right now in terms of the economy that's coming up. So that's an investment to do. The other investment, I would say, is in liberalising some of the very obsolete kind of regulation and so on. There has to be some deregulation, there has to be the protection of the competitivity. I believe that there must be some way by which you can guarantee unity of purpose to all the service providers, but at the same time allow for proper competition among those service providers. Canada is studying that very closely. Canada is a good place for Italian legislators to look at because we are not like Americans for full, open and right now swallow-it-alive deregulation. We are in fact for a mediated kind of place-by-place, point-by-point. We were very slow before. We are going a little faster now and that's a good thing. If the information highway means anything, it means the responsibility of governments to provide it as public space for their population. It doesn't mean just throw it to private enterprise and throw it to the big corporation and the business world, because the business world - we know the business world - you can't even blame them for it, they will make money. That's what they'll make. They don't make society. So I believe that a government plus business makes a society and so the government shares the responsibility of making the public of Italy accessed, cognitive access, technical access, financial access. Do not let STET charge ten times or one hundred times more per second to use the Internet than other states. That is not the way to go.

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Question 4
What do you think is the future of artistic languages in connection with new technology and especially virtual reality?

Answer
Well, we did some work with VR at the McLuhan Program. We found it was more exciting to explore interactivity and its interface. Every interface is like an extension of touch. A funny thing is that we come from a civilisation since the Renaissance of visual dominance. With the new environments of simulated sensory life we are coming back to a tactile culture and people don't see that but we see that. So artists are asked to do interactive systems and each one of the interactive systems is a variation on tactile possibilities, electronically-assisted tactile possibilities. So we have a dancing system for example, which is quite beautiful, where you dance in front of a camera and your image is digitised into a computer and that computer sends information to a MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), to a synthesiser and then the sounds created by your movement are completely controlled. The computer records and can even remember and predict certain types, can start to average your movements and predict certain kinds of movements to create your music. We're doing something very scientific, artistically scientific in that what we do is precise, it relates to absolutely real movements and has a kind of direct connection with the computer. One of our people in the McLuhan Program created something called the Virtual Garden. You are a bee and you land on a flower and you just stay on a flower and you look and explore the flower, and then you go on to another flower and you pick something digital from the first flower and you connect with the second flower and you make, because of mixing the two flowers and the time you've spent with them, you make a third flower, which is the result of hybridisation. Hybridisation--that's very nice virtual thinking. We like that kind of virtual stuff. We also like stuff that can help. For example we use art and technology to help handicapped people, people in hospitals who have problems with movements and, you know, they have all this, so we've used some technologies to enable them to enjoy more exercises of movement like, for example, creating music, the one I said before. We used this system for paraplegics who are creating and over a period of ten months, which we have tried, the improvements were so radical that they were published in specialised journals. It really was working. We also used another system to enable a woman to actually read and write by connecting with a camera and creating all kinds of patterns to allow her to connect with a computer. We've enabled this woman, who had a law degree but had had an accident, to continue her work and her studies. We like these artist-based innovations that can be applied in real life.

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Question 5
So do you think that artistic culture will play a role in the development of future interfaces between human and computers and between human and human mediated by computers ?

Answer
Yes. The human and human is different from the human and computers because the human and human is the Net. That's the first base where you talk about human and human or person-to-person interaction. It takes indeed a certain kind of art to deal with that. I was part of a jury of Art on the Web for Ars Elektronika in Linz, in Austria, last year. Nobody had criteria for this. What is art on the Web ? What is specifically relating to art ? Not just homepages with nice little designs - anybody can use a paintbox and throw it on the Net and say: here's my art. No. We thought, if it's going to use the Net, what is the principal aesthetic criterion for the Net ?. It is the interconnectivity, the complexity, the fruitfulness, the elegance, all the aspects of the interconnectivity that are aesthetic. What do you find? You find brilliant software, like Ringo, which allows you to know the taste of everybody in music in a certain way so that you create a community of similar tastes and you have a whole portrait of it. We gave the first prize to Idea Futures. You put an idea, you put money to your idea, you post it. The next day other people look at your idea, they put money in and they refine your idea. And over a period of two months or two weeks or two days, your idea has grown in value and it has grown in quality, in applicability. Maybe one day it will become a business plan. It's brilliant! Another way is to connect in conversations on-line. I'm very fond of the idea of hypermail, although it doesn't really work but I like the idea that you and I and you have across the world a dialogue on the Net about certain things on a Web site. Everything you say has its own links and it's automatically linked to everything I say that connects with the same kind of key words or correlations. We don't have to go linearly, we can go into a topic area like a hyperindex. This is brainy stuff. We find that "Webby". We find that worthy of an aesthetic sensibility. There is an artist from Paris who with MIT has created a system where a microphone receives your words, those words are turned into text, that text is in English, meets a translator, which turns that text into a French text, then you hear a computer speak in bad French. For us that's really artistic. It's a highly technical thing; it's also something that you really want for business. It's something that surely if we do it right, will have a tremendous future. But it comes from an artist, it comes from the artistic sensibility of the translation of one modality into another modality and from one language into another language and back into the original modality but this time computer-assisted. We find thinking by artists in those directions. The "Fileroom" by Antonio Muntadas is another fantastic innovation. All the files from the time of Nefertiti to today that were of artistic materials censored by their government are made available in a file on the Net. It is like in the KGB, little tables and lamps and all these filing cabinets but all you see in front is the Internet and on the Internet, of course, are all the files that people are actually accessing. People are absolutely fascinated with this particular site. That's webness, that's intelligence, all the repressed material of memory brought back and made available to the people. And people can add their own gripes about censorship and they can show their own evidence. There's no limit to the possibility. But imagine that as a way of dealing with cognition, memory, censorship, collectively.

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Question 6
Can we say that we are growing a new paradigm of aesthetics.

Answer
Yes, of course. First of all, we are finding the limits between aesthetics science and applied science. There is interpenetration of the artistic and the scientific domain more than ever. There's also a deplacement of the art from the creator to the user. Today, design is meta-design. It's not finished objects, it is finished design parameters to create the finished object, meaning that the real creator, the actual creator is the user. The virtual creator is the artist. The real creator of any instance of art is the user, the one who dances and creates the music. But the virtual creator, the one who has created all the virtual possibilities of the meta-design, is the artist.

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Question 7
Don't you think that hypertext narrative is somehow a contradiction because when you read something, you just want to be led by the author. Hypertext doesn't succeed in this. You have the choice, so there is no possibility to reconstruct the fiction and the sensation of a story.

Answer
Linearity is in question in hypertext, not readability. The printed word and the alphabetic written word are based on linearity just for the processing of the reading itself. It's not just that text is linear, it's that each word is uniquely linear and has to be read with a beginning and a middle and an end, so that the appearance of alphabetisation, the translation of human language in text reinforces the innate linearity of spoken language. For example, the programs in your body, in your nervous system, to prepare a sentence are programs of hyperlinearity as well. But when this linearity appears in front of you in the writing system, then linearity, narrative, continuous narrative with even the difficulty of flashback. At the beginning it was difficult to introduce flashbacks in texts. You'd have to always make them very clearly presented by somebody who was really saying, A long time ago, just like the old film world. All the transitions from one shot to another in the film were very explicit. Well, linearity has come with texts and it goes away with electricity. Electricity is simultaneous. It is non-linear access. You have a memory database and you explore it at different levels. If you see the McLuhan Program homepage, which is now on a Beta site we've made a very big observation: that when you see a text on the Web, you don't really want to go and press on each highlighted word in the text. What we have done is to divide the page in two: a large right side for the text and on the left side highlighted all the points that you might want to explore that are sensitive, but that you don't have to explore, that you don't feel are interrupting your reading process. Also, we have made our homepage horizontal, not vertical, so when you travel in the page, you travel with the cursor to the right and it's infinite. But it's always like reading. So we feel our homepage is an homage of the Internet to the book.

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Question 8
Do you think that the experience in VR will take the place of the experience of reading?

Answer
There's no way you can replace the experience of reading. To have your mind free, you need a fixed stage. The world has to be fixed for you to be free. If the world is moving, you're not free. You're moving with it. So interactivity is not identity-building. It is empowering; it gives you more power but it doesn't give you more identity. The text is the only known communication medium today and in the history of our culture that gives you identity. We will never abandon the text. Processing information is taking control of a language. Television is taking control away from the individual control of language, radio is taking the control of language away from the individual and gave it to dictators who were putting their private agenda and making them public, whether it was the hero of Rome or it was Hitler or it was Stalin. These people were making their personal agenda the public domain, the public mind. TV, at least, is more honest. It is more public. But to control yourself, your own language, to be possessor of your own words, which is your condition for identity, you have to have the text. There is no other medium- not film, not media on-line.

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Question 9
The digital era proposes an environment in which the body is of lesser importance.

Answer
No, that's not true. The body is much more important now that ever. First, because it's being discovered properly. We now know how touch, vision, hearing, all our senses work. Science because of virtualisation has studied all of that. In the book era, the Renaissance, the world is a theory and you are a point of view. And your point of view is the place where you are. It's behind the eyes, between the ears, in the head, sometimes related to the heart but less and less in the history of the West. Today this doesn't work anymore because you are distributed all over the planet. You can reach anywhere that you don't see. And now on the Internet it doesn't matter what image you project because it's all a fiction. So the only thing that really becomes you is your body. It's a physical habeas corpus, the body evidence. The body of evidence is becoming fundamental. It's not just a technical or a or theoretical or a technological development of the body understanding, it's also a legal, personal, psychological repositioning of the body. Thirdly, the body thinks. The Western mind was: body under, head above. People start smoking because they cut the relationship between their physical response and their mental one. I think that body has been considered as stupid and as dumb. Today we're discovering that if you don't have a body that works with you, you have nothing. So we are using our bodies differently. We're understanding it differently, it is identifying us differently and I don't believe anything that is said by those people who say we are losing our bodies.

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Question 10
Let's change the issue. You have studied the phenomenon of virtual religion. Can you tell us what it is? What will TV preachers change?

Answer
No, I talked about televangelism, which is TV religion. But that's different. Virtual reality and TV are very different. I have not seen virtual reality used by religious. There is a program called "Worlds, Inc." You can use a Worlds, Inc. program to create a virtual church and have people go there. I don't think that that's the interesting part of virtual reality or religion. What's interesting about religion is something else: at the Jubilee in the year 2000, the Catholic Church will assemble 60 million people through various means in Rome for the celebration. Is it legitimate for the Church of Rome today to make itself the unique central reference for all the Catholic world now that we have this global communication and everybody is in contact with everybody else. The answer is actually quite interesting. It is the passageway. Rome has been the body. Rome is the body of evidence. Rome is the place where the history has taken place. That is the legitimisation. On the other hand, it cannot claim in this environment the same kind of authority, it cannot abuse the authority of centralised distribution. So the virtualisation of faith or spirituality is something that actually can only treat discreetly the specificities of each religion and in fact recognise a new tolerance. There is an absolute need for a new form of tolerance. Just as tolerance was the conquest of individual freedom against the Middle Age church, today a new kind of multicultural tolerance, multilingual tolerance will be part of any serious religious or spiritual venture.

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Question 11
So you think that new technology will produce a new kind of spirituality?

Answer
All technologies have changed spirituality. They have changed access routes. They haven't changed the foundations because that is impossible. Spirituality is very, very fast mind. It's a very much faster integrator than all the integrators that we use at an ordinary level. The mind is very fast, but spirit is infinitely faster than mind. We haven't got technological supports for the speed of spirit, but we have a lot of technological support for the speed of mind and memory. So we don't know how to handle this, so let it handle itself. Every medium is a filter between self and collective in the spiritual realm. Every medium is a filter and the first effect of the alphabet was to kill hundreds and thousands of people in the Hundred Years War. So it's not exactly good news to have a fundamental change of medium in terms of religion.

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Question 12
What do you think is the future of political aggregation in the service environment of the network. I mean will there be a displacement...

Answer
Actually, I have a lot of problems with this political issue because I think that what's happening right now is that the young people of today are very diffident of the old ideologies. The best that could happen to politics is to become a service provider. The ideologies have all failed, they're all being discarded one after the other. You need government. I'm not like George Gilder or many other people saying we don't need government. Government is an important structuring device for a society and for the world societies. But what you need is government that's structured. The politics of right and left are completely obsolete. It takes two wings to fly. If you only fly with the right wing, you fall; if you fly with the left wing, you fall. You've got to have them both.

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Question 13
Do you think there will be a different kind of aggregation of community?

Answer
Yes, a community based on interests and based on affinities. Why would you be limited by space or even sort of professional affiliation when you can connect more and more with people of like interest ? Mind you, that's also dangerous because of the pressure groups. People who are today assaulting the congress and assaulting the capitol (the US Congress) in Washington to express their desire and so on have because of the new communities created by the networks a form of power that even the capitol (the US Congress) cannot really handle.

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Question 14
A kind of a new form of activism.

Answer
It's a new form of activism and it's also very much more powerful. It's amplified and also the whole world of polling has been amplified. The more acceleration there is between a statement and its feedback, the more in some ways powerful the statement originally can be made to be. Spin doctoring has become natural because electricity is always spin. There are some serious problems with the powers that be. But ultimately, the real event is the redistribution of power. Ridotta said that the forms of power that are divided and redistributed create a stable society. The more people share property or share an interest in a common cause, the more stable a society is. And I think that this is where the network society is really going, where people are going to have more say, more power and more relationship and that redistributes and re-equilibrates. Fundamentally, what he said was fragmentation is not chaos and disaster; it's a form of recombination, reconfiguration. That is where the society is going today, so political ideologies are not really relevant anymore.

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