~ HISTORY OF DIGITAL ART 101 ~

Chapter 2

***

CybeRevolution
Basic History of Digital Artforms and Cyber Culture

By Iona Miller, 4/04

Revolution in Resolution; Digital Artforms; Pomo Media Studies;
Hypermedia; “Know Brow” Technoshamanism;
Multimedia; Telematic Embrace; Becoming Virtual

“A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.” ~ Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy

“When art leaves the frame and when the written word leaves the page – not merely the physical frame and page, but the frames and pages of assigned categories – a basic description of reality itself occurs, the liberal realization of art….Each dedicated artist attempts the impossible.  Success will write Apocalypse across the sky.  The artist aims for a miracle, the painter who wills his picture to move off the canvas outside of the picture, and one rent in the fabric is all it takes for pandaemonium to sluice through.”  ~ William Burroughs, Introduction to Apocalypse

“Works of art provide new experiential gestalts and, therefore, new coherences.  From the experientialist point of view, art is, in general, a matter of imaginative rationality and a means of creating new realities.  Aesthetic experience is thus not limited to the official art world.  It can occur in any aspect of our everyday lives – whenever we take note of, or create for ourselves, new coherences that are not part of our conventionalized mode of perception or thought.” ~ Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

“It is debatable when exactly the history of digital art began. Artists have been experimenting with computers at least since the 1970's... As in the evolution of photography and video art, this new medium was often considered a threat to traditional art forms... Over the decades, art making use of digital technologies has taken many forms, and even today, the question of how exactly digital or new media art can be defined is still being debated.” ~ Christiane Paul, New Media Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, FotoFest 2002 Catalogue Introduction

Revolution in Resolution

Media oracle, Marshall McLuhan became a pop culture figure in the 1960's with his seminal works, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) and The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (with designer Quentin Fiore, Random House, 1967).  The information revolution had begun.  We entered an era governed by information (IT), signs (semiotics), and cybernetic technology.  Ownership of information is the real process of control (Miller, 2004).

Famous for coining the phrases "The medium is the message" and "the global village," McLuhan’s prescient insight also touched deeply on the nature of creative process and creative freedom in the electronic era.  He was the prophet of cyber culture, and the digital lexicon.

He suggested artists are the cultural antidote to relentless technological future shock, which simultaneously dominates and emancipates us.  Art is the institutionalization of out-of-the-box or nonlinear thinking, and lets us know what that is like by embodying the geist of the era.  For example, artists inoculate us against futureshock by introducing technological innovations long before they mainstream.

Art jolts us out of our commercially programmed trances and mass-media social conformities, by exposing the ‘spectacle.’  The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.  The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws.

The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an abstract general equivalent of all commodities. But whereas money has dominated society as the representation of universal equivalence — the exchangeability of different goods whose uses remain uncomparable — the spectacle is the modern complement of money: a representation of the commodity world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do.

There is a qualitative difference between being a consumer of the mind-numbing spectacle of mass-media or a free-radical developing content as a digital artist, game designer, art lab or consortium using new media as tools.  The software code penetrates cultural and social development.  Digital art has made composing retinal lyrics possible.  Digital animation brings them to life as a multimedia “Hallelujah Chorus”.

New media makes different use of established channels and createsextraordinary works that fall outside of any conventional aesthetic definition.  It’s a huge, active field with no single aesthetic line.The burgeoning new art culture is independent of the gallery system and infused with the spirit of innovation.  It “entertains fantasies, not audiences,” according to performance artist Genesis P-Orridge.

Digital Artforms:

Media products have a social dimension and varying degrees of immersion and connectivity with the physical environment.  Their temporal structures are driven interactively.  Each modality, some listed at the head of this chapter, has its own vernacular.  In each case it is the medium that makes the difference in the quality and texture of the experience.  As MM said, “All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.”

The ‘user’ is shaped by the interface and becomes an iconic and metaphorical entity created for the benefit of the IT industry, with its social and cultural control models.  New interpretative paths can be traced which connect findings from several disciplines, such as complex systems, architectural, video and sci-fi experiments, beginning with their original channels, assumptions, forms, and perspectives. 

All media are complementary, forged in complex patterns of interconnection. Opposition between screen and page or canvas is false; both articulate the human drive to encompass the cosmic pattern. Proclaiming the superiority of one medium over another takes us nowhere, because both are human artifacts, extending different senses.  E-media are brimming over, immediate -- glowing wild -- they are whirlpools within whirlwinds, a chaotic media maelstrom, which homogenizes to white noise.

Changing media demands a change in the arts.  When photography revolutionized the traditional arts, painters stopped depicting literal scenes and began revealing an inner creative process in expressionism.  Art moved from outer matching to inner making, according to MM. Today’s techno art challenges us to reach even deeper within our imaginations for a new form of expression, a novel response.

Recalling Blake's bard in the Songs of Innocence, who sees the past, present and future in unison through the imagination, McLuhan projected this perceptive condition on participants in the global media theatre.  John Cage pointed out that “theatre takes place all the time wherever one is.  And art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.”

E-media makes history now right in our living rooms, (emphasis on the word “living.”) But he delighted in pointing out that we face forward with our ‘eyes wide shut.’  Meanwhile, official culture still relentlessly pressures the new media to do the work of the old.

All works of art are ‘painted’ against this cultural canvas, the deep background of society.  Culture is a set of learned ways of thinking and acting that characterizes a decision-making human group.  The biggest decision culture makes is deciding what reality is – consensus.  It determines our paradigms, worldview, values, and aesthetics. 

Our cultural landscape is morphing and art is morphing with it, and in many cases leading the way with artists as pathfinders.  Media is the environment or cultural ground of 21st century life.  It is a ground that is at once personal, social, global, corporate, and political.

Pomo Media Studies

During the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard was dubbed the new McLuhan, the most advanced theorist of the media and society in the so-called postmodern era. Though he originally dissented, McLuhan's formula eventually became the guiding principle of his own thought.  Pomo existence means individuals surmount repressive forms of identity and stasis to release libidinal flow, to become desirous nomads in a constant process of becoming and transformation.

The pomo guru’s theory of a postmodern society rests on a key assumption that the media, simulations, and what he calls "cyberblitz" constitute a new realm of experience and a new stage of history and type of society. Baudrillard revisioned radical social theory and politics considering complex developments in consumers, media, information, and technological society. 

Modernity centered on the production of things --commodities and products -- while postmodernity is characterized by radical semiurgy, by a proliferation of signs (the domain of semiotics). Furthermore, following McLuhan, Baudrillard (along with Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari) interprets modernity as a process of explosion of commodification, mechanization, technology, and market relations.

Desire fills the gap between consciousness and being.  This philosophy has penetrated literary arts, architecture, visual and design arts, photography, popular culture and music, popular culture and music, film, video and television.  But the deconstructionist and minimalist position has arguably crested, and restless artists await the next wave of exploration.  In fact, they are not waiting at all, but moving inexorably forward with their unnamed movement into the dynamic era.

Postmodern society is an implosion of all boundaries, regions, and distinctions between high and low culture, appearance and reality, pleasure and pain, and just about every other binary opposition maintained by traditional philosophy and social theory.  Simulations and simulacra, media and information, science and new technologies, and implosion and hyperreality become the constituents of a new postmodern world.  Content has dissolved into form.

Baudrillard's analyses point to a significant reversal of the relation between reality and representation. Previously, the media were believed to mirror, reflect, or represent reality. Now the media constitute a (hyper)reality, a new media reality -- "more real than real" -- where "the real" is subordinate to representation leading toward ultimate dissolving of the real.  Modernism’s love of pure form (such as Rothko’s) has become transcendentally embodied in new media and its appropriations, cynical recycling, allegorical styles, and hyper-organic creations.

Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Mary Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Jasper Johns, Ron B. Kitaj, Sole Le Witt, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Christo, Rasheed Araeen, Carl Andre, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Schnabel, and David Salle have been associated with the postmodern aesthetic and ethos.  But postmodernism is not a ‘school’ as much as a tendency in visual arts that is encouraged in training.  Bored with minimalism and abstraction, it is radical and reactionary art produced after the philosophical “death” of modern art in the late 1960s.

The language of art, as well as its vernacular, has changed.  A cross-disciplinary field, media studies uses techniques from philosophy, psychology, art theory, sociology, information theory, and economics. The development of multimedia and performance art has been greatly influenced by media studies.  Media serve as active "metaphors" that have powers to translate experience into new forms, new formats with enhanced flexibility.

Media function as transducers of psychic energy.  Metaphors help us describe what experiences are like in emotionally charged concrete terms.  They carry several meanings simultaneously, and “work” when they are appropriate to the context.  Thought and image harmonize.  They enrich meaning by implying added dimensions.  They can be empathic, expressing feeling or judgments, intensifying our awareness, and strongly restating a theme while creating a memorable image.

There is no magic for discovering metaphors, no formula for creating them.  They can arise from inside or outside.  We use metaphors to describe things we can’t see or aren’t readily apparent, to describe vaguely sensed processes.  We most easily comprehend those from our own experiential base, but metaphors also help us move from the known to the unknown. 

Jose Ortega y Gasset said, “Metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities.  Its efficacy verges on magic and it seems a tool for creation which God left inside His creatures when He made them.”  Allegory is metaphor extended into a narrative structure.  Allegorical works cross aesthetic boundaries, blurring them with enigma, impermanence, hybridization, and impulse.  They may be critical, political, or discursive.

Metaphors help us extend, explore and expand our understanding.  They are systematic correlates of our experience.  Metaphor pervades everyday life as language, thought and action.  Our conceptual system, how we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical.  It helps us define everyday realities.  Metaphors condition how we perceive, think, and act.  They unite physical and cultural coherence and create values. 

Functioning as containers or nexus points, metaphors form coherent systems or networks with one another.  They express imaginative rationality describing one kind of experience in terms of another, creating coherence by uniting dimensions of experience.  New metaphors create new understandings, and therefore new realities – new gestalts of color, shape, texture, sound, etc.

Helping us discover what we know and how we know it, metaphors help familiarize the strange.  They yoke us to reality by joining diverse experiences, the ephemeral and literal.  Cultural metaphors are propagated by ritual; there is no culture without ritual. The postmodern ritual is booting up; its drumbeat is groove music.  There is a new spatial grammar for the electronic age, and the digital artist is the pioneer or cybernaut exploring this new media frontier.

Understanding media is to understand the forms of media and to analyze the effects of media -- the content is mainly irrelevant. McLuhan meant the medium has an intrinsic nature and will do what it does regardless of the content conveyed.  Certain perceptual systems will be enhanced and others suppressed. 

New media reverse the relationship between "figure" (a new or conspicuous feature of the environment) and "ground" (the familiar environment).  Digital technologies are the new medium; they are the new ground.

The approach in every study of any medium, once identified, is examining its shape or contours and discovering its underlying meaning.  Successive media rise and fall.  This holds true in the realm of digital arts – the electronic media.  We must remain informed about the subtle nature of new media – the electronic palette -- from which our works emerge.

For the digital revolution in art, the computer is one such expressive medium that is transforming culture in a variety of ways, both educational and on the production end – in both ‘input’ and ‘output.’  It has become a virtual Temple of Living Light that is subject, tool, and medium with the aesthetics ofthe database, the algorithm and the code facilitating self-exploration and collaboration.

In McLuhan’s altered frame of reference, TV broke up the linear thinking of print culture, then “video killed the radio star,” moving us toward the electronic age wherein digital has killed analog culture.  Digital artists have led this revolution in art, while most conventional artists have lagged behind this fundamental change in thinking.  The subliminal, processed world of electronic technology will soon play out in unrestricted space. 

Hypermedia

Multimedia means a convergence of media, communications technologies, art, design, visual effects, and culture—an “intermedia.” Many believe that multimedia is a "new media;" but this is perhaps mis-stated. Many of the elements of multimedia--interactivity, artificial reality, performance, storage, etc – are well established with their own compelling histories. Technology, communications media, and culture use the history and context of interactive art and design as a framework.

In the digital world, film, design, animation, and hypermedia become new media, entertaining dissent.  The historical context for interactivity includes the surreal, fluxus, and situationist movements of the 20th century, as well as the history of artificial reality.  New media visions of the future will affect our sense of identity and what constitutes our physical bodies.

Individualist thinkers, artists are at the forefront of this technological revolution. Whether designing intermedia, computer games, producing web sites, writing software, or working on intelligent systems, artists work on a daily basis consuming and producing electronic cultural artifacts.

In new media art, a collaborative process and model is almost a necessity. This applies not only to the collaboration between curators and artists but also to collaboration among artists on specific projects. Some pieces require a whole team of programmers, designers, researchers, et al. In other projects, an artist sets certain parameters and collaborators create different (visual) manifestations of the work within these parameters.

New media art is more participatory.  The work process of the artist who “employs” people to build components etc. is very different from the one required for new media works. In some new media projects, artists become “producers” who work with a whole team of collaborators. In most of these cases, the collaborators aren’t playing the role of contractors but are very much involved in aesthetic decisions. New media art is a very hybrid medium and often demands expertise in very different fields, which one individual alone can hardly acquire. (Paul).

Digital technology has had a major impact on the production and experience of art during the past decade and a half. Not only have traditional forms of art such as printing, painting, photography, and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques and media, but entirely new forms such as net art, software art, digital installation, and virtual reality have emerged as recognized practices, collected by major museums, institutions, and private collectors the world over.

There is a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art.  Themes addressed by and raised by the art include viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks, augmented reality, networked performance, and telepresence, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation, and preservation of digital art, the virtual museum, ownership and copyright.

The history of new media in art must include discussions of film making, video, digitally manipulated photography, virtual reality, installation and performance by video artists such as Nam June Paik, Laurence Gartel, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramowic, Pipilotti Rist, Bill Viola <http://www.billviola.com/biograph.htm> and others whose seminal works have radically transformed the world of art with border-breaching unruliness. 

Artists use the computer as subject matter, production tool and artistic medium, sometimes all at once.  Today’s artwork is a coherent fusion of accurate observation with incisive expression of peceptions and emotions. Art photography was one of the first media to cut through the aura or mystique of traditional modes.  Sherman, Kruger, Levin, Burgin, Rosler, Rauschenberg, and Simmons are notable examples of the new authenticity.

We can get some insight by following the early arc of digital artist and filmmaker, Laurence Gartel (see http://www.gartelmuseum.com for illustrations):

Gartel is a founding "pioneer" or Godfather of the Digital Art movement. He could also be considered the father of the ‘Paintbox’ era (circa 1986), actually starting this technique 10 years prior to any software being written for painting and photo-manipulation. He used digital synthesizers, TVs and then output photographically as a dyesub & Polaroid prints, 10 years before Warhol did his Amiga prints of Deborah Harry.

His early works represent a time of pure experimentation. In 1975, Gartel was at Media Study/ Buffalo, an experimental nonprofit organization funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Here, artists were able to experiment with rudimentary electronic equipment to produce works of art. Most of the works were crude videotapes that required large and cumbersome 1-inch reel-to-reel machines. There were no storage devices as we know them today, and ways of capturing ephemeral images were created “on the fly”.

While working at the Center, Gartel met video guru, Nam June Paik who thought Gartel’s work was highly “avant garde.” While everyone else was making moving works of art, Gartel saw the still image as a way to capture the “motion.” He therefore set up a camera on a tripod, and photographed the video screen. Technically speaking, this was a difficult thing to do: the motion of the scan lines on the refreshing monitor has to be synchrononized with the shutter speed of the camera, to avoid big lines across the image.

Gartel used several innovative machines, including the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer, named after its designers: Steve Rutt and Bill Etra. This apparatus bent images electronically. The Paik-Abe Synthesizer, named after Paik and Shuyasha Abe, also modified images. The Paik-Abe Colorizer stripped in color on otherwise black and white images. In other words, various gray values were exchanged for different colors.

”Metamorphosis” was a collaborative series of sepia toned images created purely as an experimental session. In the late '70's, the only creative equipment available was embryonic. As an artist, one didn't know what the potentialities were. It was all new.  Gartel was experimenting with merging two video cameras together, while working a special effects generator to achieve unique forms. He merged positive and negative images together, manipulating dials on the generator, turning up chroma values to see what would happen. The resultant images were photographed directly off the monitor using a still camera. To this day, this series still seems fresh and interesting. Subject matter has a lot to do with the longevity of how an image is received and appreciated.

After 1978 Gartel returned to upstate New York for grant-funded work at the Experimental Television Center, in Owego, New York. The facility there was similar to Media Study, except there were different machines such as the Jones Keyer/Jones Colorizer, Wobulator, Voltage Control Amplifier.

Only in 1981, was the first digital computer, the Cromemco Z-2 available. This computer had a 12 inch floppy disk with 2K of memory. In later years (1985) the Center added a Commadore Amiga Computer. Gartel created work at the Experimental Television Center from 1978 to 1986. The Center itself is still in existence with updated digital computers and editing facilities.  Gartel discloses some particulars of his third decade in the medium:

“1992 SERIES:  The year 1992 was indeed a mélange of many software programs. I was experimenting with many different pages. There was the incorporation of 3D forms from Stratavision as in the piece called "The Pedestal." I also used the first Kodak DCS 200, a two-megapixel camera that was as heavy as a tank. The Gartel image, "Birth" was the first digital birth picture.  It sounds so rudimentary today, but back then, it was almost inconceivable. "Flower Face" was another Gartel that was unique at the time.  I incorporated pictures from Canon’s 570 Still Video Camera and then used the program “Illustrator” to make the outlined face on top of the flowers.  "Love Child" used a program called “Typestyler” which is the backbone today of “Photoshop's (version 8)” type enhancement tools. "Castle" is an image that utilized the software program “Infini D” and another program called "Oasis" from Time Arts.”

Cybertechnologies have created responsive environments, new contexts for human interfacing, shaping and understanding culture. Teresa de Lauretis claims, technology "shapes our perception and cognitive processes, mediates our relationships with objects of the material and physical world, and our relationships with our own or other bodies."  Like it or not we are now immersed in the dynamic field of computing arts.

There are historical, theoretical, aesthetic, conceptual and technical challenges presented by the relatively recent collision of art, culture and computing power. Through envisioning information as popular media, science fiction, computer games, marketing tools, and artist's projects, technology has been and will continue to be a key component of culture rather than just a digital wasteland.  Art itself can be a powerful communal stimulant.

“Know Brow” Technoshamanism

‘Know Brow’ art is the product of new media – ars electronica -- that transcends the dichotomies of high and low brow.  More than “consumable” commercial media, it is digital art that stands the test of time.

Know Brow implies the knowledge, attitudes and skill sets necessary to produce art with highly technical processes, but also the visionary capacity to see multiple layers of meaning through direct experience.  This knowing uses “knoware” for its discovery process, a seeking, a gnosis that cuts a path through the mindscape of the ‘now’ toward the future that remains perpetually undefined.    The future “pulls” these artists forward.

We commune with the past to inform our present, not just as a homage, but to gain initiation to that transtemporal way of knowing and honoring our cultural roots. For example, in his latest series (2004), “Slashers: A Cultural Commentary on Today's Political and Economic Climate”, <http://www.gartelmuseum.com/slasher1.html>, Gartel created a suite of techno-portraits (with complementary audio voices), which in retrospect reminded him of the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana.  They let us see the chaos that lies below the surface of the persona.  But this work is not about the past.  The content is strongly reflective of the present, the NOW:

Defining the ‘hidden curriculum’ in media schools makes a strong statement about the missing element of art history in technical art education, and the silent blocks in the system to its fulfillment.  More traditional institutions have been remiss in honoring the rightful place of digital fine art as the wave of the future. 

‘Know brow’ art, as a movement, encourages the active, constructivist acquisition of artistic knowledge and openness to new forms and media, as well as technical capacities. We want to inspire more than digital “factory workers” or proficient craftspeople. 

We want to enable the student to make, shape or organize with a telos, a meaningful purpose that has deep psychic rootedness: one who invents, not adopts; who shapes not copys; who builds not assembles; who is capable not merely competent; who is efficacious not just efficient; who experiments not just conceptualizes.  There is a bliss that comes from within one that energizes the human desire to enact, to enable, to engage, to outwork it, i.e. to transform oneself and the world (bizarre and grandiose as this may sound).

Art is a discipline of consciousness, whose ecology is to recycle itself.

The Postmodern era ushered in a hodge-podge of styles harking back to bygone eras.  Postmodernism began in the 1970's, when the dominant styles of art - Minimalism and Conceptualism - seemed to no longer fit in a world struggling with a myriad of social problems. As a result, a plurality of styles developed. Some Post-modernists forcefully expressed a desire to do away with art that seemed to have no meaningful content, and began to turn back to figurative art and the establishment of meaning.

Other Post-modernists attempted to extend modern art in new ways by appropriating earlier styles, which they modified. Due to the sheer variety of sources and styles it is difficult to categorize Post-modern artists with the same ease of earlier styles or movements.  The post Postmodern era saw the development of new media, such as digital fine art, digitally modified photography, digital animation, multimedia, holography, computer generated imagery (CGI), interactive gaming, even virtual reality, etc., with styles all their own.

Computer enhanced images are produced with a stage of manipulation in digital language using computer software. It can be applied to other media, such as photographs or scans of traditional media, or 3-D objects.  This awesome technology is used by photographers, filmmakers, the advertising industry, web designers, graphic designers and increasingly available to fine artists. 

Museum quality prints can be made by the enhanced giclee or other processes. (Giclee [zhe-clay]; literally means little squirt in French.  It is the latest digital printing technique enabling "print on demand". Originally it was a term used by Iris printers but rapidly became the generic term for top quality digital prints using archival quality inks on heavy weight paper or canvas.)

Suddenly, the entire history of art became fodder for a raw-image-hungry medium that gobbled up, digested, and spat out a pot pourri of historical, fantastic, and futuristic iconography in the digital vernacular.  Rapid cut clips are the visual equivalent of ‘sound bites.’  We see the familiar old images – here a Michelangelo reference, a Van Gogh homage, or a Duchamp pun -- but they have become virtually meaningless in the new context…a fractal blur.

There is nothing new under the sun, the saying goes.  In art, it means there is rarely anything truly innovative, and that most imagery is a rehash of previous work, in which the statement was perhaps more succinctly embodied.  Virtually any work can be considered derivative or deconstructed by its critics.  The exceptions are works of genius, milestones in the history of art.  They foresee the future, hunting it down in the forest of kaleidoscopic potential creations.

Gauguin said, “There are only two kinds of artists  -- revolutionaries and plagiarists.” 

Revolutionary work marks a transition in a civilization’s worldview.  The CybeRevolution marked such a transition.  Arguably, today’s marriage of art and science is embodied in new media: digital and electronic arts.  Highly technical media have made new images possible through programs that render images virtually as fast as we can think them up.  But it requires a lifelong learning curve that is daunting and unrelenting.  It requires we continuously update our skill and knowledge base to realize our creative dreams.

Experimentation with new compositional programs can yield surprising results moving artists into heretofore-unexplored territories in their work.  Still, even new media’s novel appearance can echo the iconography, moods and textures of past eras and their styles.  It is the same in fashion where looks and eras are recycled deliberately but interpreted in today’s fabrics and cuts.  It all depends on how you accessorize it.

Innovation requires more than sampling and restyling.  It requires a personal archaeology that means digging up that unique portion of our human depths that wants to come to birth through you…that which comes to be through a conspiracy of necessity and coalescence.

One must commit to the image and let it speak for itself in the now, with little or no thought to the past or future.  When one opens to the moment, to the process, a flow emerges.  Serendipity and synchronicities require fluidity of imagination, an inner eye for what could be important to incorporate, as well as fluency in technical procedures. 

Style emerges as the result of habitually reiterating creative choices and recycling favored elements.  The same ideas roll around over and over, evolving into variations on a theme.  Some artists stake their career on this rather uncourageous course instead of evolving further.  It may be less a desire to maintain commerciality or please their public than simply lack of fresh inspiration.  That inspiration can be rekindled by immersion in new exciting fields of imagery, new mindscapes, new places, new media, great art.

Just as our prehistoric ancestors painted their own reflections on the walls of Lascaux – history comes full circle, or as T.S. Elliott wrote in the Four Quartets, "my end is my beginning."

Next:

Chapter 3:

REFERENCES

Ascott, Roy, The Architecture of Cyberception.  In Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 2, N8, MIT Press Journals, August, 1994.

Ascott, Roy, Is There Love in Telematic Embrace? (K. & P. Stiles (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. University of California Press, January, 1996.

Ascott, Roy, Nature II, Telematic Culture and Artificial Life.  In Convergence, Vol. 1, No. 1, Libby, London, 1955.

Ascott, Roy (ed), Reframing Consciousness: Art, Mind and Technology, 1999.

Baudrillard, Jean,  L'echange symbolique et la mort, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976.

Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967). Translated by Ken Knabb.

Gartel, Laurence, "Laurence Gartel: A Cybernetic Romance", Gibbs Smith: Utah. Introduction by video guru Nam June Paik, 1989.

Gartel, Laurence, "GARTEL: Arte & Tecnologia" (1998) published by Edizioni Mazzotta:       Milano, Italy. Introduction by noted art historian and critic Pierre Restany. 250 pages over 400 color plates.

Kroker, Arthur, “Digital Humanism: the Processed World of Marshall McLuhan”.

Leary, Timothy, Chaos and Cyber Culture, Ronin Publishing: Berkeley, California, 1994.

M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Toronto: McGraw-Hill,   1964.

M. McLuhan, Counter Blast, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969.

M. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage. (with Quentin Fiore), New York: Bantam,1967.

M. McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

M. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, New York: The Vanguard Press, 1951.

Miller, Iona, “Deep Background: The Digital Revolution and Media Ecology; Reflections on Marshall McLuhan’s Influence in Digital Fine Arts and Media.”  Subcutaneous: Phoenix. 2004.

Miller, Iona, “Virtual Magick: Speculations on Practice in the Electronic Astral Plane.” OAK: Grants Pass, 1992. http://zero-point.tripod.com/vrmagick.html

Miller, Iona and Burt Webb, “Virtual Therapy: Speculations On A New Modality,”  OAK: Grants Pass,1992.

McNeil, Russell (1999), “Is the Medium Still the Message?” Malaspina University-College, March 29, 1999.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Transdisciplinarian, Iona Miller is a writer, hypnotherapist and multimedia artist, living in Southern Oregon, USA. She has developed extensive groundbreaking work on the relationship of chaos theory and negentropy to emergent paradigm shift or worldviews in philosophy, cosmology, biophysics, medicine, experiential psychotherapy, creativity, art, and society.  Many of these articles are collected in her annual journal Chaosophy, available on her homepage.