Notes on Telecommunications Art: Shifting Paradigms

Autor: Dana Moser
Rok vydání: 1991
Předmět:
Zdroj: Leonardo. 24:213
ISSN: 0024-094X
DOI: 10.2307/1575301
Popis: T here is a general principle regarding the use of technological innovations in the arts: initially new forms will be used in ways that imitate old ones. For example, early photographs were sometimes made to look like paintings and drawings; early films were made by simply pointing a camera at a stage play. Early telecommunications artworks often were thought of as video installations: the work of artists for a passive audience in a gallery. Increasingly, artists' energies in this medium are turning to a different paradigm: the participatory network. Below, I describe two telecommunications art events that are representative of this shift in my own way of thinking about the medium. I believe these works were in many ways typical of artists' use of the form in the early 1980s-in the years before the existence of electronic networks such as the WELL or Art Comn. Art that makes use of telecommunications (satellites, telephones, fax machines, computer networks, etc.) has a unique potential: it can operate on a scale so large that individuals are connected noticeably through time as well as space. Across time zones a single event can happen on different days. Another aspect of such works is the quality of 'assumed authenticity'. By this, I am referring to what is commonly experienced as heightened attention generated by the caption, 'LIVE' at the bottom of a television screen. If something is happening 'live', it is perceived to have greater possibilities than that which has already been edited. It might appear to be more 'real', more exciting. It might permit real-time interaction. It might let one witness a terrible mistake. It is, in fact, this quality of 'liveness' that is essential for works of telecommunications art. Part of the thrill of this medium is the experience of opening up an experiential window in space and time and then looking through it. From a political perspective, there is another profoundly important dimension to the presentation of such works. It has to do with epistemology and the quality of assumed authenticity. In essence it is this question: How much can we really know about what we are seeing when looking through the space/time 'window' opened up by telecommunications? [1 ] The two works described here were conceived in part as different ways of exploring this question. Both employed telecommunications technology known as slow-scan television (SSTV). SSTV treats digitized video imagery in much the same way that a standard computer modem does text. Pictures are modulated as sound information, which is then transmitted in a variety of ways (telephone, ham radio, etc.) to a receiver that demodulates the signal, reconstituting the video image. It is distinguished visually from normal video in two important ways
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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