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

If the definition of a good book is that one feels intellectually provoked during its reading and leaves the volume with the certitude of being more intelligent than at the start, then Telematic Embrace is the book one might be looking for. And if one is not hesitant about the old seductions of style and, most of all, that impossible thing called the "personality" of its author, this book provides even more than one could ask from a vast collection of essays in the problematic (because it is too overtly fashionable and therefore too easily outmoded) field of theory on art and electronic culture. In the case of Roy Ascott's writings, those two elements—the visionary force of his thinking on the one hand and the personal qualities of his style on the other—may seem a little contradictory, since few authors have made such strong pleas in favor of "distributed authorship" and against the mirages of the traditional (romantic, ego-centered) art world, yet the very example of Telematic Embrace, which presents an extremely useful, highly representative and carefully edited anthology of Ascott's scholarly work, proves one of the basic theses of the author, that the leap towards global connectiveness through cybernetics and telematics does not exclude the human factor or prevent people from liberating themselves when abandoning the traditional domains of the humanities.

Most books and essays on the relationship between art, science and technology represent either a synthesis or a "snapshot" of what their authors have been thinking or are thinking on the subject. In both cases, their writings are homogeneous: In the case of a book, the previous phases of reflection are integrated in a kind of global survey that camouflages internal contradictions and transforms previous hesitations and errors into stepping stones on the long path leading to final insights; in the case of an essay, which normally gives just a cross-section of the author's thinking at that specific point of time and place, the lack of a global framework is not always considered a flaw, and contradictions with later texts are part of the game (e.g. "This was what I was thinking in 1984, and this is what I am thinking now, and tomorrow I may appear to think something else . . ."). The exceptional merit of Ascott's work as a theoretician of the relationships between art, science and technology is that it in spite of its often shattered and overtly "visionary" character, it is not just a succession of speculations in which new links replace or destroy the previous ones. Although they have not been rewritten for this publication, the texts gathered in Telematic Embrace span a period of more than three decades (1964-1993) and reveal indeed an exceptional coherence (and maybe even a kind of master narrative, yet this word may have too many negative connotations).

This coherence is not the result of the mere application of a pre-established, teleological program or of a single, all-explaining and stubbornly-adhered-to theoretical paradigm. The coherence of Ascott's thinking and writing develops almost spontaneously along some basic lines, which the author never renounces but which he always adapts following his own principles of feedback and interactivity. If one had to summarize Ascott's evolution, one might say that he gradually moved from cybernetics to telematics, and from telematics to an overall view of connectedness at both an electronic and a biological level. In the late 1950s and during the 1960s, Ascott pioneered the interaction of art and the emerging science of cybernetics, defined as "the study of control and communication in living and artificial systems" (p. 331). He then realized with the cyberneticians themselves that such a study missed an essential point, namely the fact that the observer had to be considered part of the system studied. This brought him to second-order cybernetics, which...