Creative Interlocutors: A Manifesto

Creative Interlocutors: A Manifesto Art today, redefined by its relationship to technological innovation, changes both its meaning and its many functions in the all-pervasive communications culture. Creative inspiration derives from many sources; we can no longer speak about imagery singly as art or design or communication. It is no longer a question of film versus video or painting versus photography. We can only conceive of the postmodern image as a child of multimedia that reflects the spirit of our time, without hierarchies and authoritative voices. This vision marks a new generation of artists sensitive to a multitude of possibilities for exploration in a media-conscious society. The best of them, inventive and politically and socially aware, will serve as creative interlocutors of our culture. The following are some maxims one might think about when engaging with the imagery and art of the computer age: 1. We want to believe that art is only output, that it consists of replaceable artifacts of the great evolution of image in the body of thought. But art is, in essence, process. 2. The digital world tells us unequivocally that not only is there no one-to-one correspondence between the image and the scene, but there is no original. 3. Originality resides with the receiver. 4. Creativity rests in exploring the potential and the consequences of this new geography of the imagination. 5. Imagery is the ectoplasm of our existence. 6. Cybernetics is the biosphere of the elastic mind. 7. The field of creativity resembles the collective metabolism of all human bodies. 8. We are now in an age of enlightened, enabled image-handling. 9. By our intervention in the image, we are made aware of the plasticity of our universe . lo. We cannot accept that imagery only records. We must comprehend that the virtual world is valid circumstance. 11. Scrutiny will bear witness to new truths. Fiction is its counterpart. 12. All we can really know of truth is our own reality. The language of the computer-including the Internet, interactive multimedia, and other new digital forms and spaces-is a shared language for all of those who choose to partake in the discussion. There really is no longer a single artist, but rather a web of connections being woven that continually redefines a kind of collective creative genius. Talent, innovation, the avant-garde, and the cutting edge no longer define an elite. The new vision is defined by the simple notion that all communication from previously defined components of cultural interchange-sound, music, word, text, drawing, photograph, file, folder, icon, symbol, metaphor, or image-are reduced to the same common denominator: the digit. At present what we are receiving as the product of the computer artist is a kind of primary experimentation and exploration. We are still in the most elementary stages of a great revolution, not only in communication, but in thought and creativity. Our culture has yet to fully understand the references and icons that are being defined and redefined before our very eyes. They are new and repetitive, reconfigured, relative, and emerging. As our collective memory embraces them instead of rejecting them, we will be able to reach into the great depth and potentiality of hypermedia, virtual reality, interconnectivity, and new meaning. But this can only be accomplished by being informed, and that means understanding the historical antecedents that form culture, language, and image. The charge here is to those engaged in the arts and humanities to embrace the technology, not with skepticism, Charles H. Traub, Creative Interlocutors 393 ? 1997 Charles H. Traub but with the desire to enlighten it. The past celebrated great minds who reached outside the boundaries of their given disciplines to invent and relate to a larger field of human endeavor. The recent age of specialization has produced an elite practitioner and an impenetrable jargon that seals informational content off from the rest of the world. Meaningful creative practice should help to open the dialogue to all inquirers. The technology itself must be a reflection of a creative culture constantly seeking to integrate knowledge. Technology is not just a tool, though we must initially approach it as one in order to learn it and...