Hypermediated Art Criticism

Technological media catapults our perception into what Marshall McLuhan called "new transforming vision and awareness."¹ As our lives become more and more immersed in such technologies as television, film, and interactive computers, we find ourselves inundated with a heightened sense of mindfulness—an aesthetic experience made possible through such computer technological characteristics as hyperlinks, hypermedia, and hyperreality. In these terms, the prefix "hyper" represents various linking devices inherent to computer technology that allure and transport us between, above, below, and toward vast areas of information, places, and peoples. Hypermediacy, according to Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver, is "an entirely new kind of media experience born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies. Its raw ingredients can be brought together in any combination. It is a medium that offers random access; it has no physical beginning, middle, or end."² In other words, there is no set or static structure inherent in technological media. It is not so much an "anything goes" apparatus as it is an "anything is possible" system. The seemingly vast possibilities inherent to technological media offer us many and alternate views of the world.

Just as technological media encourage multiple means of viewing the world, no single approach to art criticism can be considered dominant, as several methods, methodologies, and approaches exist for responding to works of art. We conceive of art criticism as a complex means of making meanings about works of art and communicating those meanings to other people. Following the lead of art educator Terry Barrett,³ art criticism hinges on the four activities of describing, interpreting, judging, and theorizing about art. Barrett suggests that, although all four overlap, interpretation is the most important and most likely the most complex aspect of art criticism. Although interwoven with description, analysis, and judgment, interpretation of the meanings of individual works of art is of foremost concern in contemporary art criticism. Similarly, we situate hypermediated art criticism as a synthesis of our descriptions, interpretations, judgments, and theories—both verbal and visual—with the various ways in which computer technology facilitates the simultaneous existence, representation, storage, and presentation of these and other forms of meaning making about works of art.

Hypermediated art criticism is built upon our own technological abilities to both create and follow divergent paths, ideas, and beliefs according to our choices. Hypermediated art criticism is inclusive of the ways that our choices change daily depending upon our situation, role, and purpose, or simply as a result of what we witness or experience in a moment. In the hypermediated criticism process, our ways of seeing and knowing change from a linear to multilinear perspective, from single to multilayered, and from static to mutable perception. Indeed, the disparate ways of seeing and knowing made possible through technological media and hypermedia provide us with an expansive and personally reflective approach to art criticism.

Personal Reflection and Art Criticism

Michael Joyce, known for his poetic approach to computer hypertext theory and fictional writing, says, "We are who we are. Layered and overlaid, we make a world within our bodies."⁴ Possibly now more than ever that world within our bodies can be represented, re-presented, and re-invented right before our eyes through technological media. Digital ethnographer Ricki Goldman-Segall refers to this technological world as a learning constellation in which "we are each composed of many selves, all of which interact with each other as we learn. . . . With the use of new computer technologies, we extend not only our technological abilities, but also our various personae—the societies of our minds—in the form of new objects for others to think with."⁵ In the classroom, hypermediated art criticism generated through computer technology functions just this way—as new objects that we, and our students, use to help us extend the ways in which we think about works of art.

Contrary to the antihumanist approach so often associated with computer technology theory,⁶ our discussion of hypermediated art criticism—the symbiotic relationship of art criticism and technology—begins with the basic assumption that a primary purpose of...