Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (review)

"Networking invites personal disclosure" (p. 186). And there can be few artists more networked than Roy Ascott, whose 40-year career as teacher, theorist and pioneer of networked art is celebrated in this handsome volume of his essays.

Two modes of writing meet in this one book. Eddie Shanken contributes a characteristically authoritative historical and analytical account of Ascott's life and work, an addition to the editor's welcome and growing historical project to recover the earlier critical discourse of cybernetic and technologically mediated art. Shanken makes you want to read on: to dig out your dusty copies of Jack Burnham and Radical Software. Ascott's essays are quite different in tone. They make you want to stop reading and respond.

As my own department goes through a modestly radical reorientation, I find myself dropping the book to make notes on institutional redesign (in response to Ascott's mercurial and inventive program for the Ontario College of Art) and communication between disciplines. Or I drop the pen and e-mail a colleague with annotations for a joint essay on media education in the 21st century, fired up by Ascott's student projects at Ealing and Ipswich. Or I contact a friend in Scotland about our project to rebuild the reputations of the 1960s generation of conceptual, performance and media artists disowned by the U.K.'s hyper-conservative curatorial establishment (who thought Francis Bacon was somehow contemporary in the 1990s, and still prefer Lucien Freud). Or, as now, I compose myself enough to write a review for Leonardo, many of whose readers already know Roy Ascott, having collaborated with him, studied with him, met him at exhibitions, conferences and colloquia or on-line.

The single most important thing to remember about Ascott is that he is an artist. We cannot ask of him the same kind of rigor we would ask of a Ph.D. student. There are ellipses and leaps of imagination here, and lapses of taste, appeals to mutually contradictory authorities, strange admixtures of shamanic visions and cybernetic logic. But that is precisely the point. Ascott was never so much a prophet as someone who already lived in the future. To that extent, his work—as a teacher, an artist and an essayist—is held together by utopianism. It is not as if he does not know this, or ignores the accusatory tone with which the word can be pronounced. In one of his most significant essays, "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?" he responds, perhaps slightly disingenuously, that his "cultural prospectus implies a telematic politics, embodying the features of feedback, self-determination, interaction, and collaborative creativity, not unlike the 'science of government' for which, over 150 years ago, André-Marie Ampère coined the term 'cybernetics'" (p. 242). Published in 1990, this passage betrays the loneliness of the intellectual path Ascott elected to follow. On the one hand, the fashionable judgments of the art establishment largely continued to ignore the visionary and technopoetic discourse of the technological arts. On the other, Ascott had held aloof from the discourse of semiotics, Marxism and psychoanalysis that, though exhausted perhaps by the 1990s, had provided a serious oppositional discourse for photography and film, for example, in the work of Victor Burgin and of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Nor is there much sign of a brush with postcoloniality.

There is a sense in which Ascott has been proven right. Neither the World Wide Web as a mass medium, nor email as the killer application that brought the Internet into common use, responds well to the traditions of critical modernism. And the semiotic tradition has been all the weaker for following Saussure instead of Chomsky, and Derrida instead of Maturana and Varela. The lack of information theory in artistic discourse has been something of a weakness all around, though whether symptom or cause of...