Art and Education in the Telematic Culture

Art and Education in the Telematic Culture A t was Simon Nora who coined the term tekmatics to describe the new electronic technology derived from the convergence of computers and telecommunications systems. His report to the President of France, LYnfmmatisation de la Sociitt?,published in 1978,is perhaps one of the most influential documents in this field to have been published in Europe-influential in that it led to the swift establishment by the French government of the Programme Tihatique, which has resulted in the transformation of many aspectsof French culture. This process of telematisation is most dramaticallyseen in the ubiquitous and rapid spread of Minitel, the public videotex system that enables widespread interaction between users and databases across an enormous range of services. Nowadays on the Paris Metro, for example, it is enough to see a poster of an island in the sun, a new household appliance, or racehorses pounding the turf, inscribed with a seven-figure sequence of numbers, to know that another Minitel service is being advertised.At home, at one’s Minitel terminal (distributed by the F I Tin place ofvolumes of telephone directories previously provided) one can interact in electronic space with friends, colleagues, institutions and organisations of all kinds. Artists, too, have not been slow to assimilate the medium. Interactivity is the essence of the videotex system, as it is of all telematic systems, giving us the ability to interact in electronic space,via computer memoryand beyond the normal constraints of time and space that apply to face-to-face communication. The concept of interactivity also has an important place in recent theories of communication, in contrast to the one-way linearity of older models. The new approach is found, for example, in the network analysis of Rogersand Kinkaidand in research into biology and cognition by Maturana and Varela. Neither of these studies is centrally concerned with electronic systems or telematic technologies. Both, however, deal with human interaction, language, meaning and memory, which is of value in our understanding of the potential of telematic systems to enrich visual culture. Let me quote from both of these studies: Communication research in the past has almost always followed a linear ‘components’model of the human communication act. Such research mainly investigated the effectsof communicationmessagesfromasourcetoareceiver,in aoneway , persuasivetype paradigm that is not consistentwith our basic conceptionof the communication processasmutual informationexchange ,assharingmeans,asconvergence.[The new approach] is guided b y a convergence model of comR O Y k o t t , 64 Upper Cheltenham Place, Montpelier, Bristol,BS6 5HR. England This paperwas preparedfor the UNESCO Regional ExperimentalTrainingWorkshop on the Use of audicwisualtechniques as instrumentsof creativity,Ofenbach (F.R.G.) 6 1 1 December 1987. ROJAscott munication based on a cybernetic explanationof human behaviourfrom a systems perspective [ll. According to the metaphor of the tube, communication is somethinggenerated at a certain point. It is carried b y a conduit (ortube)andisdeliveredto the receiverat the otherend. Hence there is something that is communicated,and what is communicated is an integral part of that which travelsin the tube. Thus, w e speak of the ‘information’ contained in a picture, an object, or, more evidently,the printed word. According to our analysis,thismetaphor is basically false.It presupposesa unity that is not determinedstructurally,whereinteractionsare instructive,as thoughwhat happens to a system in an interaction is determined b y the perturbing agent and not b y its structural dynamics.It is evident,however,even in daily life, that such is not the case with communication:each person says what he says or hearswhat he hears accordingto hisown structuraldetermination...communicationdepends on not what is transmitted, but what happens to the person who receivesit. And this is a verydifferent matterfrom ‘trans mittinginformation’ [2]. In both caseswe see that meaning is created out of interaction between people rather than being ‘something’ that is sent from one to another. If there is an author of this ‘meaning’ then it may be the system of interaction itself, in all its particulars, that should be described asthe author,or, we might want to refer to a ‘dispersedauthorship’ covering all those involvedin negotiating for meaning in a given context . Where the context includes artificial memory in a telematic system, the...