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Reviewed by:
  • Technoetic Arts
  • Soh Yeong Roh, Director
Technoetic Arts by Roy Ascott. Edited and translated into Korean by Yi Won-Kon. Yonsei Univ. Press, Yonsei, South Korea, 2002. 226 pp., illus.

It is a very happy occasion for the Korean media arts community that Roy Ascott's book has been published in Korean. This book is a collection of essays from his early writings (1968) to the very recent(2000). Consistently throughout his writings lies Ascott's clear vision of media art. This is a book of artistic vision, one that is unique and powerful, urging contemporary media artists into action.

Ascott's world view resonates with influences from new sciences, such as Ross Ashby, Fritjof Capra and Peter Russell, among others. Also, Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theory seems to have opened his eyes to the immense possibilities that computers can offer to art. The artist in Ascott is particularly interested in how meanings are created through interactions in cybernetic systems. Beyond Newtonian determinism, Ascott envisions "worlds" that are created through interactions between people's minds; worlds that are inherently fluid, transitory and emergent; worlds where there can indeed be creative syntheses of science and art. In networked art, or "telematic art" as he calls it, Ascott saw the possibility of constructing such new worlds as early as the late 1960s, when most people had hardly heard of cybernetics or even computers.

Ascott makes it plain that the task of 21st-century art is to construct new realities by bridging minds and consciousnesses around the planet. They are the worlds (and realities) where diversity, artistic creativity and democratization of meaning are respected. In these worlds, human exchanges reach the level of consciousness, thereby creating global, collective consciousness. In this Chardin-like utopian vision, global communities can be formed where truth can be pursued, not by manipulating discourses, but through free associations of ideas, interweaving of images and direct experiences.

With the advances in biosciences from the 1980s onward, Ascott added another dimension to his creative synthesis of art and sciences: that is, artificial life. His dry silicon cybernetic art thus became "moist" experiments in artificial life. He now envisions the "re-materialization" of art, combining telematic art with biotechnology. In his celebrated article, "Museum of the Third Kind," we can see that his vision for new art has expanded and been fully integrated into his vision for a new art institution. This new art institution has a strong metaphor in artificial life, [End Page 404] as in his description of the new museum as a "garden of hypotheses," where we plant ideas, grow forms and images, and harvest meaning.

Art for Ascott is an open-ended process that requires active participants, rather than passive audiences. It is a process that aims to transform isolated individual consciousness into an elevated state of collective consciousness, as is so eloquently espoused by him in "Is There Love in Telematic Embrace?" (1990). This collective consciousness, like the spirit of Gaia, might steer us from the paranoia of the industrial age into the "telenoia" of the post-biological age (see Ascott's "Telenoia," 1993). Fundamentally Ascott's aesthetics presuppose a relentless faith in human creativity and good will, not only on the part of the artist but on the participant as well.

One could accuse Ascott's view of the world as being unrelentingly utopian. However, his unique aesthetics for media art stem from a breadth of knowledge spanning over ages, cultures, various sciences and arts. This intellectual dynamism, along with his uncanny insight into nature/culture, man/universe and technology/art, is manifest in his writings throughout the book. Ascott is an action-oriented artist and theorist who is passionate about creating new worlds, rather than analyzing or critiquing existing worlds.

This book, newly translated into Korean, will no doubt influence young Korean media artists who are exploring new aesthetics of media art. The role of the artist for Ascott is in designing the context, rather than the content, of the new symbiosis of art and technology. It is indeed a daunting task to design, rather than prescribe, the new human conditions of our times. Ascott makes it clear: media art is not...

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