As the tech-sector of the economy collapses around us, one may assume
that the vision of computer technology which fueled the tech-based stock
market boom of the late 1990s must also vanish into the past. But was
there anything
even remotely visionary about
that
techno-vision? What did it ever have to do with the arts? It had
well-nigh everything to do with the
Nasdaq. Sadly, to this day for many Americans the
face of computer technology remains the face of two businessmen, Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs, respectively the founders of Microsoft and Apple
Computers. Indeed, Bill Gates became a mythological figure. Not only was
he the richest man in the world, but during the brief period dubbed by
media pundits as the "Information Age,"
Gates embodied the darkness surrounding the computer
industry, with Microsoft
looming like some
ravenous cyberbeast, feasting on the
entrails of other
tech-companies through its
proprietary software.
Think about it. By the turn of the 21st century software became an
integral part of
everyday life. Yet until the proliferation of
personal computers in the early 1980s the word "software" had
resonated as mere tech-jargon.
If Steve Jobs appeared a knight in shining armor it was only in
comparison to Bill Gates; for while the Macintosh may be a sublimely
elegant tool, it is
mass-produced and can no more be
pushed
beyond the box than a Microsoft-driven PC.
Elegance scarcely translates into artistic freedom.
In the end, both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs treated computer media as
seamless extensions of traditional media, and this
goes
a long way toward explaining why the Web, that ultimate means of
expression for digital artists, finds itself in a
fuzzy
period of transition, leaving behind a dotcom graveyard littered
with
virtual corpses and entering a
randomly derezzing techno-forest where
one can't see the technology for the tech.
In terms of describing our present situation I can only draw an analogy
to that old adage about trying to fit a
square peg into a
round hole. At one end of the spectrum the Web
masquerades as traditional media (radio, television, magazine/newspaper
publishing, etc.) and at the other end art galleries masquerade as
living spaces wherein someone plops down in front of a personal computer
to experience "web art" not really on the Web. It's rare to see computer
technology/software used for the purpose of harnessing the Web as an
entirely unique means of combining/distributing imagery, text, and music.
SHARE parties, held
Sundays at
the
Openair Bar in
New York City's East Village, are a step in the right direction.
SHARE is run by
Lloop, Geoff GDAM, and Newclueless.
Is
"party" the right word to describe what goes on every
Sunday at Openair? I asked Lloop.
Lloop: I always end up saying ";Yeah
I host a party on Sunday evenings." People don't understand it when
you just say "PowerBook Club."It sounds like a lot of card tables and
fluorescent lighting.
At SHARE parties programmers sit with their laptops at low tables in a
smallish back room or at Openair's bar located in an equally snug room.
Not everyone comes with a laptop. Folks hang out,
have beers, mill around, check out what's going on, ask questions of the
programmers
demoing their audio and video software. Original
mixes play over the sound system. Video, fed from a
laptop in the back room, plays on a large rear-projection screen in the
bar. There are also monitors in the back room showing video feeds from
sundry laptops. Plus, of course, audio and video stream out live over
the Web from the SHARE site.
I ask Lloop if SHARE has a longer-term goal, either through becoming a
commercial distribution entity or by evolving
(de-evolving?) into a more traditional new media
gallery space à la
Location
One in Soho? Or is SHARE content to be what it is?
Lloop: I don't know, there's a lot of trading and
little bubbles of communities on the web. My reasons
for wanting to start SHARE were pretty selfish: live
audio performance, which isn't really happening on the web, because
it's
not live if you're not in the room anymore, and it's more fun to interact with people through more than a
chat box. It's been an amazing experience for me, mainly because I
am rewarded as SHARE itself grows. Everyone involved is kind of selfish. They bring their own interests, which they are seeking to
promote and enhance. It's like a magnet for people with similar interests, and the
more people come the more rewards for everyone. Long term goals would be for
things to develop out of SHARE. I don't think we would "pack it all up
and move it to the big city," you know...Trenton.
Which brings us back to the Nasdaq and
hard times for technology stocks. The tech-induced
late 1990s stock market boom resembled the California gold rush of 1849.
In both instances greed redefined a landscape in an
unexpected fashion. In 1849 prospectors flocked to
California hoping to discover gold. Alas, there was precious little gold
to be found, and so the majority of folks who made money off the gold
rush were in the service industries: i.e., supplying the suckers seeking
gold with their daily needs. Nevertheless, the prospectors and service
industry workers triggered a population boom in California. Prospectors
become farmers, service industries expanded, California attained
statehood in 1850, and the greed which spawned the gold rush ghosted
into an analogy to similar outbreaks of greed like the
"irrational exuberance" of the late 1990s when, due
to a
near hallucinatory take on Web-based companies,
people
invested wildly in dotcoms until the bottom fell out
from under the stock market. Yet by the same token that the gold rush
led to California gaining statehood, investment in Nasdaq tech-stocks
caused the Web to flower.
The Web's flowering had everything and nothing to do with money; for
while
AOL,
Amazon, and
E-Bay made billions of dollars, these companies were
fully dependent on
mirroring their markets on the Web. In order to make
money they had to bend with the market. Truly, it can be argued that the
only reason AOL, Amazon, and E-Bay
survived the tech collapse is that to various extents
they understood that the real impact of having oodles of money invested
in dotcoms was that it made it
possible/affordable for millions of people to go
online,
browse the Web, and - albeit unbeknownst to
themselves -
in the process of browsing delineate the
Web's parameters.
My first contact with the Web was as an import. The Pseudo Online
Network imported me from radio to produce and host an online radio show.
However, before going further I must confess that my attitude toward
communications media has always been one of
amused
detachment. I'm fascinated by the
manner
in which new mediums feed on older ones. Thus when Pseudo beckoned I
was intrigued. Pseudo fit the
mold.
Back when cinema was young it fed on theater, importing stage directors,
playwrights, stage designers, and stage actors to make films. Eventually
cinema found its
own aesthetic, and in later years "stagy" became a
pejorative designation. In its infancy radio too fed on stagecraft,
striping drama and comedy of visuals in favor of a
"theater of the mind;" but for me, listening today to
tapes of old radio broadcasts, I clearly hear an aesthetic transition -
specifically a transition in tone - from actors seemingly speaking lines
before an audience on stage to DJs spouting DJspeak straight into
microphones and newscasters reciting lines in newscasterspeak.
Television combined, then shed,
aspects of radio and cinema. The first television
shows were stagy adaptations of old radio shows, to an extent
incorporating cinematic technique, but, because early television was
presented live, only the most primitive kind. Ultimately, television
found its aesthetic through an
almost surreal rendering of
unreality which
peaked with so-called
"reality shows." The
reality of television lay in its
realization of unreality.
It made perfect sense that Pseudo would initially imitate radio and that
later, as bandwidth allowed, it would imitate television. And it was
inevitable that Pseudo, along with other dotcoms of its ilk, should
fail. Which brings us back to SHARE.
SHARE exists in a magical vacuum at the divine ass end of the Web. The
divine ass end of the Web reduces itself to
nuance. That SHARE streams audio and video jams
during its Sunday parties is somewhat incidental to what SHARE is about.
SHARE is about being there,
observing...
detecting nuances. It has nothing to do with
killer
applications, although some of the programmers
strutting their stuff may think it does. SHARE
transcends programmers - no, rather, it transcends any of their
programs, but not because the programs aren't any good. Some of the
programs I saw demoed were exceedingly cool. It's just that the
human element is where magic resides. SHARE serves as
an alchemical laboratory wherein software demos inspire a flow of ideas.
SHARE made me think about why computer software and the Web had become
such vital parts of my life. In so doing it forced me to question the
complexity of my tools, and here is the
humble insight I gleaned:
Sitting at the Openair bar drinking a beer,
mindlessly ogling imagery
pumping on the low-rez rear-projection
screen, I vaguely felt like the Jeff Bridges
character in the science fiction film "TRON," the first film in which a
character was visually represented in cyberspace. In
"TRON" cyberspace proved
totally cartoonish. Once
enveloped within it, Jeff Bridges' character became
cartoonish himself. No, I didn't feel like a cartoon character, but I
did become
deeply aware of a
certain low-rez cartoon ambience emanating from the
computer-generated visuals
glistening in the
darkened three-dimensional space I sat in. What I was
looking at wasn't being streamed over the Web yet in
its low-rez essence it proved an
exquisite mock-up of a Web presentation
veering just at the edge of science fiction without
quite stepping over the line into fantasy.
It had
both nothing and everything to do with cyberspace, which, in
my mind's eye, came
into focus, only to
evaporate. The notion of cyberspace died -
obviously the notion, not the reality, since
cyberspace was never real. Science fiction writer
William Gibson came up with the term.
How real is
digitized graphical information
seen a step removed from the way it's ordinarily
viewed on a computer monitor?
Real enough to
spark an
epiphany.
Graphics took on a
formative quality,
tremulously separating the environment I found myself
in from the video technology delivering imagery to me. It dawned on me
that
graphics functions like a
virtual honing mechanism, inexorably determining our
our eyes' path scanning a computer monitor. So the
reason that via links I
peppered this article with images from the
QuickHoney site is that there are no images on the
Web which
better illustrate my point. I believe that
Nana Rausch and Peter Stemmler, the two artists
behind QuickHoney, are
kindred spirits to the sort of artists who attend
SHARE parties. Yes, I should mention that SHARE is every bit as much
about
art as it is about
software and programming.
Which,
finally, brings us right back to Bill Gates and Steve
Jobs, neither of whom would fit in particularly well at SHARE parties.
However, Steve Wozniak would fit in. Wozniak co-founded Apple Computers
with Steve Jobs. Woz was the techie, Jobs the
businessman. Because Woz was a practical techie who
appreciated imagination, he'd get off on watching
young programmers struggling to push their Mac PowerBooks
beyond the box.
© 2002 Peter Schmideg
