Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications

EDITORIAL CONNECTIVITY: ART AND INTERACTIVE TELECOMMUNICATIONS tematk systems have brought us to the edge ofanother virtual reality. The last one, conjured out of the thinking of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, presented a world of certainty and determinacy in which subject and object, mind and matter, art and science were all quite clearly defined, separated out and neatly categorised. That world is in many ways crumbling; we see now that it was not the world after all. It was a virtual world-necessary to combat superstition, sufficient in its mechanistic determinism to feed the dream of reason-but virtual nonetheless. This certainty and solidity seemed at the time to be the real thing. For centuries artists seemed to think so too. But "all that is solid melts into air" [1]. The real was only virtual after all. Now we have a different paradox to deal with-actually to celebrate: the virtual is becoming real. With computermediated systems of perception, memory, intelligence and communication, we are redescribing and reconstructing the world; we inhabit increasingly what is essentiallya dataspace, a telematic environment, a virtual reality. We know it to be virtual, a telematic construction, yet we live its reality. This is so because we see that, everywhere and at all times, reality has always been constructed and mediated by the ultimate technology-human language-in all its varied philosophical , cultural and technological configurations. Interactive telecommunications -telematic technology-is language before it is anything else. It speaks usthat is, gives us new language-and in doing so at our human best, it speaks a language of cooperation, creativity and transformation. It is the technology not of monologue but of conversation. It feeds fecund open-endedness rather than an aesthetics of closure and completion. Interactive telecommunications is a technology that empowers the individual to connect with others. This paradox of the virtual as real, real as virtual, once a topic of hot debate for philosophers and aestheticians alone, now permeates our everyday thinking. The question it poses is one of human presence, of being there. This question, which seems to have caused such phenomenological angst to Husserl and Heidegger, for example, is being treated with sublime creativity by artists using the media of new telecommunications technology. It is with such matters, with the creativity of presence and the presence of creativity in electronic space, that this publication is concerned. The new telematic systems of computerised communications are giving rise to a new, felt quality of human presence, a fascination with presence, an eroticism of presence. Simply put, this is a quality of being both here, at this place, and also there, in many other places, at one and the same time-both here-and-there or here-or-there, simultaneously or asynchronously. The play is with presence, place and time-the intermingling of presences, of space and time. This is a strange experience, new in the repertoire of human capabilities. To meet others in dataspace, mind to mind, virtually face to face, at no matter what geographical© 19911SAST Pergamon Press pic,Printed inGreat Britain, 0024.Q94X/91 $3,00+0,00 LEONARDO, Vol. 24, No.2, p. 115-117, 1991 115 116 Edilorial location, or in multiple, dispersed locations, in real time or in computer-mediated asynchronous time, is exhilarating. It is also demanding. For the artist it demands new insights into creative work, into imaginative interactivity ; it demands new insights into the nature of art. Art in dataspace, in the electronic telecommunications continuum, is always incomplete, indeterminate, in flux, in flow. To interact with it, to interface with it, is in part to define it, to create it. In telematic art there is no creation without participation, there is no participation without distribution. This publication, then, is about interactivity in art, as art: culture as connectivity. To be both here and there, in a state of distributed telepresence, whether mediated by computer networks, interactive video, slow-scan television, fax, digital image transfer, videotex, teleconference, videophone or online communications by means of telephone, cable or satellite link, has huge implications for art, for its institutions, its protocols, its markets, its makers and its consumers. The status of both art and artists changes radically...