Ten Dreams of Technology

Abstract

This article presents the ten dreams of technology that frame the author/curator's selection of ten new media artworks. The "dreams" or themes presented by the author have been developed and/or questioned by artists throughout the history of the intersection of art and technology. This history emerges through artworks that the author describes as containing a "compelling vitality that we must admire." The collection of dreams includes: Symbiosis, Emergence, Immersion, World Peace, Transparency, Flows, Open Work, Other, New Art, and Hacking. The author notes that these dreams of technology have a future, even if it is not yet determined.

Tom Stoppard, in his play Arcadia, states, "The future is disorder.... It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong." From Richard Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk and Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto to Nam June Paik's "electronic highway" and Jaron Lanier's virtual reality universe to Roy Ascott's "vegetal reality," the history of the intersection of art and technology is one of the prognostications of an irrefutable, inevitable, and even immanent future that never comes to pass-at least not exactly as we thought it might [1].

This is not to deny that Douglas Engelbart or Alan Kay or Marc Weiser, or even Brenda Laurel and Purple Moon "predict the future by inventing it" [2]. Arguably, however, "technological art" is always less fulfilling than when the technology on which it is based becomes more or less invisible-a tool like a pencil, as John Baldessari would have it. The ultimate demonstration may have been Engelbart's mouse-a spellbinding vision of a future few others could even imagine at the time. But it is Perry Hoberman's Cathartic User Interface that is the most compelling and cathartic statement of where that future has dumped us [3].

In between the invention of a technology and its quotidian disappearance are the manifestoes, declaimed and implicit. Janet Murray has suggested the notion of "incunabular" media. In this stage we can imagine the outlines of Shakespeare and the very idea of a written literature in the magical, mechanical reproductions of the early printing press. We can also imagine something beyond the incunabular RPG and shooter video games.

In either case, these dreams of a certain future have such compelling vitality that we must admire them, even as we quibble about their navel-gazing mediumness and complain about how simplistic and complex they are. We must then acknowledge their inability to change humankind into the likeness of their vision.

Here, in no particular order, are ten dreams of technology that have a future, even if we do not yet know what it is and despite the certainty with which it is predicted [4].

1. The Dream of Symbiosis

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

-J.C.R. Licklider, 1960 [5]

Norbert Wiener is credited with coining the term "cybernetics" from the Greek word "kybernetes," or steersman. This research on controlled feedback loops-interaction between humans and machines-postulated that by allowing each to learn from the interaction with the other, both could evolve to higher levels of functioning. Many artists have dreamed the dream of what Wiener's younger contemporary, J.C.R. Licklider, referred to as man-machine symbiosis, from Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza (1966) to Ken Rinaldo's Autopoiesis (2000) [6].

At the same time, as David Rokeby suggests, "Interaction is banal. We talk to each other on the street. We breathe in air, modify it chemically, then breathe it back out to be breathed in by others. We drive cars. We make love. We walk through a forest and scare a squirrel. I am looking forward to a time when interaction in art becomes as banal and unremarkable ... merely another tool in the artistic palette, to be used when appropriate" [7].

Rokeby's Giver of Names...