Should we be surprised that as the new
computer-based media expand throughout the world, intellectual horizons
and aesthetic possibilities seem to be narrowing? If one scans
Internet-based discussion groups and journals from London to Budapest, New
York to Berlin, and Los Angeles to Tokyo, certain themes are obsessively
intoned, like mantras: copyright; on-line identity; cyborgs;
interactivity; the future of the Internet. This follows from the
Microsofting of the planet, which has cast a uniform digital aesthetics
over national visual cultures, accelerating the globalization already
begun by Hollywood, MTV, and consumer packaging: hyperlinks and cute
icons, animated fly-throughs, rainbow color palettes, and Phong-shaded
spheres are ubiquitous, and apparently inescapable. So, given its intellectual traditions, totalitarian experience, distinct twentieth
century visuality (a particular mixture of the Northern and the Communist,
the gray and the bleak), and finally, its continuing pre-occupation with
the brilliant avant-garde experimentation on the 1910s and 1920s, can we
expect a different response to new media on the part of Russian artists
and intellectuals? What will -- or could -- result from
the juxtaposition of the Netscape Navigator web browser's frames with
Eisenstein's theories of montage? It would be dangerous to reduce
heterogeneous engagements to a single common denominator, some kind of
unique "Russian New Media" meme. Yet a number of common threads do exist.
These provide a useful alternative to the West's default thematics, while articulating a distinctive visual poetics of new
media. One of these threads is the attitude of suspicion and
irony. Moscow's Alexei Shulgin writes of the excitement generated by
interactive installations (and I quote from the website): "It seems that
manipulation is the only form of communication they know and can
appreciate. They are happily following very few options given to them by
artists: press left or right button, jump or sit." He views artists as
manipulators employing the seductions of the newest technologies "to
involve people in their pseudo-interactive games obviously based on
[the] banal will for power... [The] emergence of media art is
characterized by transition from representation to manipulation." (1) Shulgin
views interactive art and media as creating structures that are
frighteningly similar to the psychological laboratories the CIA and the
KGB operated during the Cold War era. I was born in Moscow and grew up
there during Breznev's era, so I find his thoughts not only logical but
enthralling. Yet my investment in his conclusions doesn't blind me to the
limitations of his analysis, or rather, its cultural specificity: it takes
a post-communist subject to frame interactive art and media in such stark
terms. For a Western artist, that is, interactivity is a perfect
vehicle both to represent and promulgate ideals of democracy and
equality; for a post-communist, it is yet another form of manipulation, in
which artists use advanced technology to impose their totalitarian wills
on the people. Further, Western media artists usually take technology
absolutely seriously, despairing when it does not work; post-communist
artists, on the other hand, recognize that the nature of technology is
that it does not work, that it will necessarily break down. Having grown
up in a society where truth and lie, reality and propaganda always go hand
in hand, the post-communist artist is ready to accept the basic truisms of
life in an information society (spelled out in Claude Shannon's
mathematical theory of communication): that every signal always
contains some noise; that signal and noise are qualitatively the same; and
that what is noise in one situation can be signal in another. In
this spirit, Moscow conceptual artist and poet Dmitry Prigov organized
a performance during the International Symposium on Electronic Art in
Helsinki (1994) in which he used business traveller's software on one of
Aleksander Pushkin's nineteenth century poems, translating it from Russian
into Finnish, and then from Finnish into English. For Prigov, the final
product was not a miserably misbegotten translation, twice removed from
the source, but a new poem, its originality indebted --
however ironically -- to the operations of the lowest level of
artificial intelligence. Like Prigov's performance, Shulgin's
own new media projects can be described as meta-art. In contrast to many
of his western colleagues who feel that they have to colonize and
appropriate the Web through a distinct category of "artists' web
projects," Shulgin proceeds from the assumption that Web "is an open space
where the difference between 'art' and 'not art' has become blurred as
never before in XXth century." In this spirit he established the WWWArt
Medal to be awarded to "web-pages that were created not as art
works but gave us definite 'art' feeling." Visitors check links to a
variety of "found" Web pages (importantly, not a single one of them is an
"artists' web project"), which have been singled out for "flashing,"
"moderation" and "valiant psychedelics," among other categories. Like
Prigov's poem, another of Shulgin's sites, "Remedy for Information Disease" , functions as a noise generator, implying that
the cure for data overload is to shift from receiving to
broadcasting. Prigov and Shulgin exemplify how the conceptualism
which has recently dominated the Moscow art scene offers a valuable
strategy for approaching new media. Another strategy positions Russian new
media within a larger historical tradition of "screen culture." For
Russian thinkers, the meaning of the screen expands far beyond its
function as a surface displaying an image originating from elsewhere: it
is also a bridge across two spaces, one physical, one imaginary; a link
between a human subject and an audio-visual stream; and a rectangular
window which opens onto alternative (virtual) reality. So understood, the
"screen" is that which unites old and new media, still and moving image,
analog and digital culture. The emphasis on the screen as a space
that opens onto an alternative reality is echoed in much modern Russian
art which remains firmly committed to the tradition of easel painting. In
contrast to the West, where artists gave up on illusionistic pictorial
space in favor of the notion of a painting as a self-sufficient material
object, many Russian artists, both representational and abstract, continue
to conceive of a painting ("kartina") as a parallel reality which
begins at the picture frame and extends towards infinity. Thus, Eric
Bulatov has described his paintings as windows onto another, spiritual
universe, while Ilya Kabakov conceptualizes his installations as a logical
expansion of pictorial traditions into the third dimension -- a
materialization of reality models previously presented by painting. (2) Young
Russian media artists are using the computer as an excuse to re-think
basic categories and mechanisms of screen culture, such as frame, montage,
and illusionistic space. Thus, rather than representing a radical break
with the past, the computer screen becomes, for them, a re-articulation of
the models which have defined screen consciousness for centuries. "My
boyfriend came back from war!" is a Web-based work by the young
Muscovite Olga Lialina. Using the web browser's capability to
create frames within frames, Lialina leads us through a series of pages
which begin with an undivided screen and become progressively divided into
more and more frames as we follow different links. Throughout, an image of
a human couple and of a constantly blinking window remain on the left part
of screen. These two images enter into new combinations with texts and
images themselves engendered by the user's interaction with the site. In
this way, Lialina creatively bridges principles of traditional parallel
montage, as it existed in the cinema, and the evolving possibilities of
interactive hypertext. St. Petersburg-based Olga Tobreluts uses a
computer to expand the possibilities of cinematic montage in a different
way. In "Gore ot Uma" (1994), a video work based on a famous play written
by an early nineteenth century writer Aleksandr Griboedov and directed by
Olga Komarova, Tobreluts seamlessly composes images representing radically
different realities on the windows and walls of various interior spaces.
In one scene, two characters converse in front of a window which opens up
onto a shock of soaring birds taken from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds";
in another, a delicate computer- rendered design fades in onto a wall
behind a dancing couple. Because Tobreluts bends composited images to
follow the same perspective as the rest of the shots, the two realities
appear to inhabit the same physical space. The result is a different kind
of montage for digital cinema. (3)
Which is to say, if the 1920s avant-garde, and MTV in its wake, juxtaposed
radically different realities within a single image, and if Hollywood
digital artists use computer compositing to glue different images into a
seamless illusionistic space (for instance, synthetic dinosaurs composited
against filmed landscape in "Jurassic Park"), Tobreluts explores the
creative space between these two extremes. Lialina and Tobreluts'
projects offer a vision of how Russian new media artists can negotiate
between the extreme materialism of Western computer art practice and the
historicism and conceptualism characteristic of their country's art. The
question remains, however, will Russia be able to stop the march of Bill
Gates' aesthetic imperialism, the way she previously froze out the armies
of Napoleon?
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