Exploring the Technological Imaginary

BOOKS REVIEWED: Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000. Timothy Druckrey, ed. Ars Electronica: Facing the Future. A Survey of Two Decades, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999. Mary Anne Moser with Douglas MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996.

In the history of twentieth-century aesthetics, poststructuralism has not been alone with its grandiloquent wager that mankind will one day cease to exist, washed away like the outline of a face in the sand. Indeed, the disappearance of the subject has been a theme intrinsic to modernism and its many emanations.

"Body outlines extend and break here—The stretching membrane of the skin dissolves," writes William Burroughs, poet and cartographer of our technological imaginary, as he describes an experiment using an immersion tank where sound and light have been withdrawn. The effect is to break down the subject's sense of inhabiting its body. Participants report feeling that another body is floating half-in and half-out of their body. Marines flip out, Burroughs preens, leaving no doubt that the subject's discomposure announces its allegorical emancipation from the programming of the "control machine."

The latest version of modernity's primal scene of the human subject effaced in the encounter with technologies comes from theorists of the new media. Three recent titles from MIT Press address this theme, bringing together poststructuralist theory and new media practice in response to the digitalization of art and culture. Taking a cue from the deconstructionist's pursuit of the infinite play of meanings as traces without origin and control, these books register the displacements performed by electronic culture on the ideology of the subject. Gone are the conventional terms guaranteeing the subject's sovereignty: knowledge, consciousness, experience, memory, and history have been replaced by information systems, telematics, virtual reality, digitalization, and the computerization of technology. These terms function as indices for our future designations of the present—even though "new media" may not be so new. The extent to which our technological imaginary continues to be occupied and enabled by the tropes of modernity is the question these books approach in writing about new media.

Talk is of transcending the body and its ethnic and sexual identities in Mary Anne Moser's Immersed in Technology, a collection of essays and statements by theorists and artists from the Art and Virtual Environments Symposium and the Fourth International Conference on Cyberspace at the Banff Centre, held in May 1994. The book explores the implications of virtual environments, or cyberspace, on the constitution of our subjectivities, and seeks to generate, its editor writes, a discourse capable of dealing with issues around virtual reality (VR). Writers and theoreticians like N. Katherine Hayles, Frances Dyson, and Avital Ronell precede artists' statements by figures like Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland, or Perry Hoberman and Ron Kuivila. The result is a multi-faceted reading of technology, in which the languages of contemporary criticism (psychoanalysis, feminist theory, deconstruction, and cultural studies) combine in pursuit of a common notion—VR—which is a system dependent on classical tropes of representation, imagination, identification, and the sovereign subject. It calls into question concepts of embodiment, community, space, reality, and authenticity. In the absence of these concepts the book's authors seem to propose a future in which community would be based on the fractured subjectivities of cyberspace. "Beyond poststructuralism lies the posthuman," writes Hayles, "the posthuman represents the construction of the body as part of an integrated information/material circuit that includes human and non-human components."

While a number of essays in Immersed in Technology invest quite heavily in the dream of bodily transcendence through technology, Moser's collection also contains essays like Erkki Huhtamo's discussion of the "archaeological approach" taken by some new media artists. It is at this point that the book begins to reflect on modernity's...