Transnational Digital Imaginaries

Erik Barnouw, one of our founding figures in the arenas documentary and mass communications history, recently argued that "All new technologies in our century --film, radio, television, 16mm film, video, and now digital--have been greeted with equal measures of hope and despair, of optimism and pessimism." ¹ Taking Barnouw's observations as a structural paradigm, our inquiry into the social, political, and aesthetic complexities of digital culture is organized not on one unitary, linear argument, but as a sedimentary layering of seven contradictions that we hope underscore the necessary disorders circulating within and around the digital new world orders. We see these contradictions as provisional and salient, but not all exclusive, conclusive, or totalized.

I. Introduction: Amnesia and Its Alternatives

Currently, much debate over the concepts of the transnational and the national has arise as the new world media order reshapes the globe (Time Warner/CNN, ABC/Capital Cities, Bertellsman). Simultaneously, nationalist passions (see the Amnesty International web site, http://www.amnesty.org/) dismember its Others in brutal ways (Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, China, Kosova, Chiapas). ² Zillah Eisenstein traces how globalization rethreads ethnic violence into a gendered and racialized hatred that is fueled by cannibalizing its others, a fantasmatic constructions of otherness. ³ (See Axis of Life web site, http://lois.kud-fp.si/quantum.east/text.html).

In economic terms, the transnational era refers to the period of global capitalism where capital knows no home. (See the Corporate Watch web site, http://corpwatch.org) Manufacturing increasingly disperses. Labor becomes ever more mobile and maquiladoras proliferate. Amorphous networked communities disavow body-time corporate loyalties. Corporations earn more money than 95% of all nations. Mergers across industries create convergences that redefine media economics. Information has come to matter more than bodies or things. ⁴

For some, the nation state lies groaning on its deathbed. Other observers see it undergoing a rapid metamorphosis into a solely economic form, shedding its roles in nation-building, history-making, culture-preserving, identity-forming. Although the nation may survive as some mutant leftover from a James Cameron film, or as an organizer and provider of military and politce services to the highest bidder, it more and more desires to delete history and memory from its hard drive as hangovers from the old world orders. ⁵ The transnational corporate operating system is based on amnesia. Yet history and memory, always incomplete and unfinished, refuse to be expunged. They reappear with new faces and interfaces, a hard drive against amnesia.

Transnational digital imaginaries are suspended somewhere in-between the material realisitive of the current political era and our collective ability to radically reimagine different ways of thinking about, producing, and interfacing with visual works. They rewire some of these circuits of control, power, dismemberment, and amnesia, sketching out adversarial responses to the transnational as collaborations of difference(s). In adversarial transnational digital imaginaries, there are no immigrants, no border patrols, no closed-off national fantasies, no monolithic linear narratives, no English only, no high tech/low tech divides. ⁶ (See Guillermo Gomez Pena and Robert Sifuentes web site, "Temples of Confessions," www.echonyc.com/~temple/) These plural and hybrid practices--dedicated to what some have dubbed electronic disturbance--recuperate by and for radical politics three troubling terms: history, the transnational, and convergence. ⁷

Digital artists and activists shoehorn history back into the immediacy, spontaneity, and collapse of time and space so often identified with the digital zeitgeist. Their works arrest what Paul Virilio has called "dromology" and what Mark Dery has termed "escape velocity" ⁸ with a reconfigured history splicing new historical links/hyperlinks to reconnect amputated tissues. ⁹

In radical digital work, historical modalities and future imaginaries morph together to repair this dislocation of space and time but refuse full restoration of its previous linear analog configurations. These recombinant structures--part history, part future--are always provisional and nomadic, always moving and reforming. A confluence of the past and the future, these digital imaginaries invoke Raymond...