This week’s readings brought together the early understandings of new media theory while also articulating some of its more problematic assumptions as this seemingly neutral technology is distributed across borders, class, and race. Are the juxtapositions of these readings meant to open up a new geneology of digital media theory that can hold these issues together?
Digital media provides a powerful aura for these authors, and that aura comes with all sorts of excitement and perils. For Manovich, it’s an ambitious project that will elevate the computer scientist and the software or game designer to the level of the artist, pushing aesthetic expression in new directions. For Stone, it radically reorients our conceptions of space and embodiment, simulating intense affective experiences of speed, power, and disembodiment. For Gómez-Peña, the computer is full of the contradictions of modernity. His “unwillingness” to become a techno-artist challenges Stone’s idea of the virtual space as one created by communal agreement (Gómez-Peña 2, Stone 2). Manovich describes new media art on the fringes of acceptability. Unfunded by the government and high art institutions, it has to turn elsewhere. Yet, Gómez-Peña’s article shows us that there are other center/periphery distinctions to be made here. These virtual spaces have become ubiquitous, but perhaps they have always had their own interpellative power by virtue of their relation to cybernetics (Manovich 22).
The similar set of questions arise: whose bodies are freed? What does freedom even mean in these contexts? Why does this particular group so desperately want to break free from their bodies? Why did the psychologist in Stone’s opening anecdote take on that particular identity in order to elicit intimacy? Why was he so caught off guard by the realization that women possess emotional depth? We could spend a long time unpacking just that one story.
Stone’s article is interesting, though I think the juxtaposition to the other readings and hindsight show some of its limits. For example, the central character of Neuromancer, a central text for Stone’s piece, repeatedly expresses disgust at his human body and its meatspace needs. When he’s denied access to cyberspace, he resorts to drugs in order to induce anything close to the same rush of jacking into the net. But, why do the console cowboys so desperately want to escape their bodies? Or, in other words, why is cyberspace so sexy? I’m not particularly satisfied with the psychoanalytic answer and would probably prefer a sociological one.
(posted by Alex on behalf of Dan Lark)
Digital media provides a powerful aura for these authors, and that aura comes with all sorts of excitement and perils. For Manovich, it’s an ambitious project that will elevate the computer scientist and the software or game designer to the level of the artist, pushing aesthetic expression in new directions. For Stone, it radically reorients our conceptions of space and embodiment, simulating intense affective experiences of speed, power, and disembodiment. For Gómez-Peña, the computer is full of the contradictions of modernity. His “unwillingness” to become a techno-artist challenges Stone’s idea of the virtual space as one created by communal agreement (Gómez-Peña 2, Stone 2). Manovich describes new media art on the fringes of acceptability. Unfunded by the government and high art institutions, it has to turn elsewhere. Yet, Gómez-Peña’s article shows us that there are other center/periphery distinctions to be made here. These virtual spaces have become ubiquitous, but perhaps they have always had their own interpellative power by virtue of their relation to cybernetics (Manovich 22).
The similar set of questions arise: whose bodies are freed? What does freedom even mean in these contexts? Why does this particular group so desperately want to break free from their bodies? Why did the psychologist in Stone’s opening anecdote take on that particular identity in order to elicit intimacy? Why was he so caught off guard by the realization that women possess emotional depth? We could spend a long time unpacking just that one story.
Stone’s article is interesting, though I think the juxtaposition to the other readings and hindsight show some of its limits. For example, the central character of Neuromancer, a central text for Stone’s piece, repeatedly expresses disgust at his human body and its meatspace needs. When he’s denied access to cyberspace, he resorts to drugs in order to induce anything close to the same rush of jacking into the net. But, why do the console cowboys so desperately want to escape their bodies? Or, in other words, why is cyberspace so sexy? I’m not particularly satisfied with the psychoanalytic answer and would probably prefer a sociological one.
(posted by Alex on behalf of Dan Lark)
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