The Leonardo Gallery

COLONIALVENTURES IN CYBERSPACE In the spring of 1996,as part of a residencyin the Departments of Sculpture and Painting at the Universidad Polit6cnicade Valencia in Valencia, Spain, I curated an on-line exhibition of work by seven artists and critics entitled “TheHomestead” (translated as “LaFinca” in Castilian Spanish). Created on the World Wide Web as a “colony”in cyberspace, the Homestead () explores the effects of historical colonization on the technological present and the colonizing effects of technology. “Colonization”is deliberately used here as a provocative term, in opposition to “technotopia”-the idealized vision of technology offered by centers of economic and political power. Colonization implies borders, an “us”and a “them,”a degree of violence. Identity is constructed on colony borders. On the border, objects and persons acquire names, differences are constructed . Only a fraction of the world’s people have a presence in cyberspace: the rest are outsiders. Will the outsiders eventuallyparticipate? Will borders and differences persist in cyberspace?Who decides these issues? Nearly all the work in the Homestead/La Finca was created digitallyduring late 1995and early 1996.Roshini Kempadoo, a photographer from the United Kingdom working with digital imagery, composed a suite of digitally composited images and an essay, Sweetness and Light,in which she examines the history of the plantation system and its possible mappings onto contemporary power structures in cyberspace. Photographer Esther Parada, who teaches in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, contributed a hypertextual essay and series of digitally manipulated images on the scope of historical colonialism and its manipulation of the natural environment. Brazilian artist Rejane Spitz,who had been videotaping people learning to use automated teller machines (ATMs)in her country,used MacroMedia’sShockwave technology to create an ATM with the accents of northern Brazil. Richard Maxwell,who teaches political economy of global media and culture at Northwestern University,created his first hypertextual essay, “The Thicket,”with the collaboration of ChrisYoung, a student in the department of Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern. Chris also provided production support throughout the Homestead project. Basing his project on Richard Dawkins’sconcept of memes, SteveWilson, of the Conceptual Design Department at San Francisco State University , used Hypercard to create a Common GatewayInterface (CGI) application that would let people link to pages where new ideas might appear. Torrey Nommesen, a student at San Francisco State University,created a subtly ironic corporate site, “TriAngle Corp.”Annette Barbier, who teaches in Northwestern University’sRadio, Television and Film Department and whose work deals with domestic life, created an audio diary of her skirmisheswith telemarketers by recording their pitches, often with hilarious results. These seven different points of view are wrapped in a hypertextual space designed both to entice and to frustrate the viewer.M f e expresslywanted to create an exhibition environment that would be not merely presentational, but also continuous with the work. In the process of design, ChrisYoung and I rediscovered the virtues of narrative and its possible superiority to 3D virtual spaces as an instrument of seduction and paradox. The exhibition was complemented by a round table discussion in Valencia with presentations by Madrid electronic media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer,Roshini Kempadoo and SalvadorBayarri,a lecturer and researcher Q 1997EAST LEONARDO,Vol. 30, No.4, pp. 249-259, 1997 249 at University of Valencia. Elsewhere (LeonardoElectronicAlmanac, ) I have written about the challenges of designing a workable virtual space; here I will briefly consider the ambivalent nature of utopia as portrayed in the Homestead. TECHNOTOPLA, THE SHINING CITY Throughout the European colonization of the New World, numerous utopian projects instrumental in opening up new territories sprang up in the hinterlands. Political movements engendered in industrial society also proposed their own versions of utopia. Communal utopian experiments have receded with the frontier, and POlitical utopias have collapsed beneath the rationales of prosperity and economic expansion -but not without spawning countless orphans. Some have found shelter in religion; some in the rituals of popular culture. Technotopia, a future world redeemed by science (or more specifically,by engineering), has emerged as an official orphanage where stray visions may come to roost-provided they behave. The Homestead was established as an unofficial colony to...