Who’s provocateur; Who’s the seduced?

In Techno-Seduction the provocateur and the seduced are interactive. One impersonates the other, and vice versa. Sensually charged and enticing, the show’s electronic media technologies allure the senses, particularly vision and perception. They also provoke the intellect via the images and concepts they project. Through this permeability of the boundaries between the provocateur and the seduced, the personal emerges. Reflecting late twentieth-century electronic culture, the works address themes related to self, sexuality, and identity. For as Naomi Scheman observes, if “you’re talking about the personal these days, the erotic is on the scene--if not by its explicit presence, then by its conspicuous absence.”¹ Here information and telecommunications are not limited to the sphere of these technologies per se. On the contrary, as described by McGinns and Hannay in The Anatomy of Modern Technology, “technology becomes a form of cultural activity devoted to the production and transformation of material objects, or to the creation of procedural systems,”² thus expanding the range of human possibility. In Techno-Seduction, technology enlarges and transforms the power of the personal.³

Techno-Seduction also includes photographic works--a turn-of-the-century technology that has been continually reinventing itself since its inception. Despite the dissimilar technologies used by the forty artist included in this exhibition, all the participants are reconguring subjectivity through radically different processes that, in turn, leads to novel art forms. Simultaneously exciting and stressful, this new subjectivity ignites a diversity of social, cultural, and political responses.

Under the influence of an innovative “techno-imagination,” to use French critic and author René Berger’s term for the “ever- encroaching intervention of the machine and technology in all of our activities,”⁴ communication and telecommunication technologies, with their capacity to undermine a succession of conventions (space-time, earth consciousness, or public-private demarcations), offer a new mode of representation in art. In many cases this fresh capability has prevented contemporary technology-based artists from falling under the spell of the machine age as did the Constructivists and Futurists. Nor have these artists followed the same path as those working with kinetic art. Instead, they utilize technology in a subjective, symbolic, and not always illustrational way, allowing presence and absence⁵ to suggest that “the evolution of deconstruction is not yet finished.”⁶

Spurning the subtle, complex, and rigid hierarchies of Western thought and culture, Techno-Seduction exhibits a new landscape in art and technology--in short, a novel nonmachine aesthetic. It displays signs and messages that break through the boundary lines of consciousness separating the provocateur and the seduced--perimeters that are “disappearing through the skylight.”⁷ Since the emphasis today has shifted from specialized “how to” to “what for” knowledge, this nonmachine aesthetic contains a variety of potential meanings. They are based in imagination, philosophy, content, and ideas, which are many times powerfully influenced by elements of mass culture. In Techno-Seduction, the utilization of media technologies demystifies the idea of progress and contradicts concepts of homogenization, ultimately denying communication media’s assumed power to destroy personal and cultural barriers.

Contrary to customary aesthetic approaches to technology, the techno-imagination of this nonmachine aesthetic establishes links to the public in a fictional space where imagination and reality merge. This fictional locale reflects contemporary fragmentation of the world/individual, the desire for a dematerialized state of art, and the search for an alteration in the relationships between the viewer and the work, the artist and the art market, and the provocateur and the seduced.

Today, in a world ceaselessly disturbed by innovations, where technology contributes immensely to this transformation, and progress is a delusion, the current techno-imagination is far from being just experimental, as it was two or three decades ago. Neither visualized by the 1960s era reunion of art and science, emotion and reason, nor captivated by the telecommunication and video revolution of the succeeding decade, the advanced media technology (interactive or not) in today’s art provides a way for postmodernism to bargain with its own environment.⁸ Encompassing more than just a machine “that is too complicated for us to understand,”⁹ this conceptual perspective gives to technologically based art an added dimension--a powerful system that permeates the entire individual.

In The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Italian scholar Renato Poggioli sees technology as a “sequence of creations, adoptions, and liquidations of technical forms.”¹⁰ Radically different from the classical or traditional attitude, this viewpoint provides new ways of seeing and understanding changes that have occurred in established aesthetic concepts. In the world of 1997 it is already a truism that a “machine-in-the-garden” will not bring paradise. After all, technology is tied to the history of change in consciousness, not just to the history of machines. Within this new ecology of information, technology in art should facilitate the rejection of obsolete traditions and beliefs. Although it is still premature to affirm that all these shifts will produce a major new direction for art, it is possible that they will open structures in a participatory way.

Today, technology and science influence art and aesthetics in four basic ways: 1] by creating new media and improving old media; 2] by inspiring artists with new physical or conceptual constructs; 3] by communicating art forms through sound, media telecommunications, or data processing devices allowing, among other things, instantaneous exchange; and 4] by altering the way art is conceived, presented, and criticized.¹¹

Derrick de Kerckhove from the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto has identified this effect to a movement for co-opting technology in order to recover control--a movement that could expand limits, relax fixed assumptions, and create symbols mapping the techno-imagination of contemporary art and society. In this situation both the provocateur and the seduced, working in a symbiotic and interactive relationship, project expanded subjectivities derived from human and technological links.

There is nothing alarming in this situation. Instead, there is the possibility of creating a strong connection among mind, body, and psyche--a connection already investigated by the French feminist critics and theorists Luce Iragary and Julia Kristeva. As viewers, should we adjust our psyche when confronted by the variety of artistic and aesthetic representations delivered to us by today’s technological culture? Or should we ignore this invitation and remain in a “negative space,” refusing the creative paradigm of a nonmachine aesthetics, which Nell Tenhaaf terms a “new machine consciousness,” with a “new order of transcendence attached to it”?¹²

To accept this invitation is to accept the fluidity between the provocateur and seduced.

¹ Naomi Scheman, “ On Waking Up One Morning and Discovering We Are Them,”in Jane Gallop, ed. Pedagogy--The Question of Impersonation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 106.

² Quoted in Jane Gallop, “The Teacher’s Breasts,” in ibid., 79.

³ See Jack Ellul’s Technology System, where he describes technology as “an apparatus of organization, memorization, and preparation for decision-making, to replace man in a huge number of intellectual operations,” 25.

⁴ René Berger, “Art and Space Age Communities,” in René Berger and Lloyd Eby, eds., Art and Technology (New York: Paragon House, 1986), 394.

⁵ In the words of Nell Tenhaaf, psychoanalytic discourse has framed the feminine subject “with a history of absence, overdetermined by the body and yet not fully present in it.” Tenhaaf claims that “cyberspace implies a feminization of the symbolic order and of subjectivity.” See Nell Tenhaaf, “Mysteries of the Bioapparatus,” in Mary Anne Moser, ed., Immersed Technologies (Cambridge: MIT press, 1996), 52.

⁶ See N. Katherine Hayles, “Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture,” in Moser, Immersed Technologies, 1 1/N 28.

⁷ Disappearing through the Skylight is the title of a book by O.B. Hardison, Jr., in which he discusses culture and technology in the twentieth century.

⁸ In fact, science, technology, and industry have continually influenced artistic inventiveness. Under the banner of science, art has become a suitable channel for propagating industrial opulence and national wealth. Illustrations of factories, iron bridges, railroads, and, more recently, the automobile have replaced the “living work,” lavishly represented in antiquity.

⁹ Louis G. Tornatzky and Mitchell Fleischer, eds., The Process of Technological Innovation (Massachusetts/Toronto: Lexington Books, 1990), 7.

¹⁰ See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 131-147.

¹¹ See E. R. Mueller, The Science of Art (New York: John Day Company, 1967), 34.

¹² Tenhaaf, “Mysteries of the Bioapparatus,” 51-61.