V-Chip Culture

V-Chip Culture COLIN IVES World Wde Web In this work, I use the V-chip as a metaphor for the cultural current towards censorship that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 represents. V-chip technology is more than a clever weaving together of circuits and microprocessors: It is a cultural technology that integrates politicians’ need to take a stand against sex and violence and many parents’ feeling that they cannot control what their children see. This rhetorical position is present in the Telecommunications Act, both in the bill’s call for the chip to be installed in televisions and in the push to make Internet service providers responsible for what is posted by their users. Before a single V-chip-equipped television has ever been sold, the rhetorical chip has been hard at work, serving politicians on both sides of the aisle. The rhetoric surrounding these issues is self-serving for politicians but very dangerous for artists and everyone else using the Internet. The Databank of the EvetyuLy takes as its subject the real, everyday uses of The Databank computers in OUT culture: storage, transmission, dissemination, and filtration of bodies of information.The work reflects on what media-from photography to computers-have always attempted to do: represent the t r u t h of life and organize it into well-defined categories. Photography, for example, begins and ends of the Everyday NATALIE BOOKCHIN Interactive CD-ROM its history with the idea of the catalog, from William Fox Talbot’s inventories to the recent proliferation of electronic image banks. 7996 Picking up where photography left off, Databank provides a conclusive catalog of an ordinary life. It models itself after commercial databanks with their generic, all-encompassing categories such as “People at Leisure,” “Flowers,” ‘Nine to Five,” and “Nature.” Databank‘s categories are no less all-encompassing and include ‘Wasting Time,” ‘Nervous Habits,” “A-Z,” and “Antonyms.” Databank proposes that everyday life consists of a series of loops performed by the body, much like the simple loops performed by a computer program. The ordinary body is like an imperfect machine, flawed in its efficiency by its desires, habits, and compulsions. Databank can be thought of as a catalog of 5awed movement studies of the everyday standing in opposition to the historical movement studies of Muybridge and others. Movements performed include scratchmg a thigh, eating a potato chip, flushing a toilet, clicking on a mouse, shaving a leg, watching W ,slamming a door. The primary graphical interface of Databank is a loop that spins as users move between sections , giving access to the data in different ways. Featuring the latest in amplified fin-de-siicle rhetoric, Databank vehemently perpetuates the current hysteria surrounding new technologies. Again, we are witness to a revolution, and again we hear loud claims about the universality of the change and the transformation of everyday life. (History, as we know, also repeats itself like a loop.) Thus, in keeping w i t h the tradition and in compliance with early twentieth century avant-garde movements, Databank heralds its very own twenty -first century manifesto. As digital media replace f i l m and photography, it is only logical that the computer program’s loop should replace p h o t o p phy’s frozen moment and cinema’s hear narrative. Databank champions the loop as a new form of digital storytelling, one with no true beginningor end but only a series of endless looping repetitions,halted only by a user’s choice or a power shortage. Digital Salon, Artists’ Statements 409 ...