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ON-LINE & IN THE STREETS   return to project description Jim Costanzo, REPOhistory "Art can cease to be a report on sensations and become a direct organization of higher sensations. It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not the things that enslave us." Guy Dedord, Internationale Situationniste 1, June 1958. The World Wide Web represents a new paradigm comparable to the invention of the printing press and photograph. It has the potential to increase and accelerate communications in a new, more democratic, interactive environment. While interesting artistic and social/political developments have occurred, will this translate to "the utopian promise of cyberspace" or will it be the consolidating factor for global capitalism's new virtual mall? Working in conjunction with the hegemony of Euro/U.S. models of artistic production is the dominance of American popular culture. For the electronic information society, vehicles of control are information and cultural. Art, music, movies, Nike and McDonald's make the world safe for international capitalism. Identification with products, celebrity icons tied to unattainable life styles feed primal longings. Mythology's power for projection and transference has only increased with technological sophistication. A "Star Wars" prequel, a presidential impeachment, the death of Princess Diana can set in motion media driven, psychological feeding frenzies. As a form of resistance, the artist collective REPOhistory will launch CIRCULATION, a new public art work for New York City and the World Wide Web. CIRCULATION explores the city as body by examining the flow of blood through New York; blood as both a physical entity and as a metaphor for identity. Our strategy is to create post cards, magnets and other items which will 'circulate' through the city. All items will be tagged with our URL, www.REPOhistory.org. The site will allow viewers to post images and text on-line along with work created by REPOhistory artists. Since the Web is a privileged space, REPOhistory has contacted public institutions to improve access. By contacting individuals and groups from around the world, we hope to transform a public art project into an interactive global art work. Will the Web provide a forum for democratic, cross cultural dialog; will it reinforce existing power structures; will it create new forms of hegemony? Walter Benjamin wrote that Fascism gives people the right to express themselves without the ability to change the distribution of wealth. In this light utopian promises of unlimited communications must be carefully scrutinized. Marshall McLuhan "... myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes." "Electric technology is directly related to the central nervous system. Its ridiculous to ask Œwhat the public wants' played on its nerves. Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous system to those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't have any rights left. ...it is like giving common speech to a private corporation or giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly..." College Art Association Panel 2000 Crossing Boundaries in Cyberspace? The Politics of "Body" and "Language" after the Emergence of "New Media" Chairs: Ursula Frohne, Center for Arts and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and Christian Katti, Independent scholar This session - designed for theorists and artists who are engaged in the critical examination of historical and current implications of "media" - investigates the changing notions of "body" and "language" under the impact of new technologies. (Art) Historically "body" and "language" gained new significance with the emergence of action, performance, and conceptual art. Retrospectively they can be considered preliminary impulses for the introduction of such "new media" as video, interactive installations, Internet and virtual reality. Although "body" and "language" are rarely considered primary media, they continue to be major issues: The "body" as a virtual projection screen for the utopian promise of cyberspace, "language" as the embodiment of unlimited communications in the global community. The questions arise: Can we come up with a critical concept of "media"? And regarding "new media politics": How are art, life, and the public and private spheres junctured in the cultural discourse? And is the rhetoric of evolutionary gain through a "technology of worldwide inclusion" symptomatic of increasingly rigid border politics, hovering behind the compensatory version of a unified "mediated" society.

 

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