CultureMap

438 Digital Salon Artists’ Statements ANDY DECK CultureMap Like many Web sites that depict the constantly changing character of the stock market, CultureMap (http:// artcontext.org/cultmap/index.html) represents fluctuations and serves as a tool for examining changes and biases. But the focus is different: CultureMap concerns itself with cultural evolution, showing the rise and fall of different types of Web content. It is easy to speculate that terms associated with electronic commerce are becoming more prevalent, but CultureMap makes such trends visible as time-lapse movies. Interpretation of the Internet is complicated. Responding to the popular desire to visualize it, CultureMap offers a simple graphic presentation of search engine “hit” totals. Because of the tendency to use portals as entry points for navigation, people experience a Web filtered through a matrix of commercial interests . CultureMap juxtaposes the interested presentation of information by portals with a more impartial, diagrammatic view of Web content. The picture of Web content that emerges is different than the categorical grid offered by portals, which have strikingly similar entry points like “Finance,” “Sports,” “Entertainment,” and “Shopping.” Given such terms, CultureMap compares the quantity of Web sites that mention each. It samples several search engines each day to find the number of hits reported for a variety of search terms. Although these numerical totals are not a strictly objective measure of Web content, they are undoubtedly a significant reflection of what is present in millions of Web pages. With the Internet changing so fast, and given its enormous real and potential power, it is unwise for would-be cultural leaders to ignore the network’s emerging characteristics. The Internet’s future potential is closely related to people’s conceptions and misconceptions about the network today. Even as the Internet is being misrepresented, coopted for marketing, and retrofitted to suit corporate imperatives, there remains a euphoria about its boundless potential and the diversity of its content. Consent to media mergers, monopolies, and imposed technical standards has its foundation in these beliefs about the evolution of media. In the absence of suitable metaphors—fueled by Hollywood, hype, and alarmist reporting —the popular imagination of the Internet is charged with illusions. The mounting complexity of visualizing and measuring the Internet lends power to this imaginative dimension. At the crossroads of abstraction, representation, and scientific visualization, CultureMap appeals to popular fascination, while at the same time attempting to provide clear and useful indications of the character of the Web. It is an image system capable of taking on many shapes in response to the development of new content and the disappearance of old content from the Web. Although mapping Web content is both subjective and complicated , CultureMap reminds us that provisional observations can be made. The Web is not an immutable object; rather it is a symbolic system in constant flux. Notwithstanding the similarity of the portals, the Internet has qualities that they obscure. Artists can work in modes that contribute to a popular understanding of the new digital media. Considering the important role such media now play in the formation of social ideas, values, and expectations, it is critical that artists and intellectuals concern themselves with how people find information. Despite their present visibility, there is no guarantee that the fragile autonomous zones that have emerged online will be easy to find in the future. CORINNE WHITAKER The Vanishing Human This is indeed a unique era. The human body is a battlefield littered with dismembered pieces, as science, medicine, and cybertechnology alter what it means to be human. Pig livers and baboon hearts have violated the purity of our corpus. The ageold myth of our bodies as unique and unchanging is crumbling. You don’t need a body to move around in cyberspace. In fact your physical body becomes an impediment. We are faced with a major paradigm shift as the body escapes its gravitational chains. Maybe the body will become a meaningless vessel. Maybe human beings will become an army of disoccupation. Confronted with these profound philosophical and physical dislocations, we respond with dismay. We are obsessed with the body and its functions. Perhaps it was Nijinsky who started it off by masturbating onstage as the final...