Timothy Druckrey
versión en español
Timothy Druckrey
versión en español |
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The passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the data seizures by prosecutors in Munich, the powerful regulations for internet use by the Chinese government, etc., will reverberate through the network as far more than the growing pains of the most potent communications system in the history of civilization. They will stand astride the incorporation of the network as the circulatory system for economic development and targeted international audiences. The twin issues of the deregulation of competition and the regulation of bevavior, language, and images makes it clear that the network has profound possibilities for unmediated communication and that the re implementation of cold war tactics of "repressive tolerance" in terms of command, control and communication are in operation in a far more insidious ways. Indeed, the end of the millennium has brought a dazzling array of reactionary responses ranging from "crash" literature, cinema, media, and technology to the attempt to re-legitimate the authoritarian models of broadcast politics in a kind of telephobic modernity lurking in the "liberal democratic" correctness of little annoyances like the "v-chip," "Surfwatch," and background "guardian" surveillance systems scrutinizing e-mail and web based communications. Conjoin the utopian assumptions about the era of "being digital" and the "city of bits" with the politics of communication technology, the libertarian "ideals" of the cyber-paradise, the linking of computing and biology, and the imperialistic infrastructural initiatives of service providers, and the complexities of the allegedly "autonomous" network are revealed.
Into this mix emerge knowbots (as useful for surveillance as for research), an ethics of virtuality ambiguously modeled on the speech as act theory, and a veiled "social" space in which power is as omnipresent as it is invisible. It cannot be a surprise that the panoptic metaphors of Bentham and Foucault are re-invented in the cybersphere in the guise of "agents" and filters. No doubt much of the problem is rooted in the reinvention of McLuhan's work in the often erratic inebriation of wired culture. No patron saint, McLuhan's iridescent assessments of imperialism as globalization mirror the multinational development that grounded the merging media of the 1960s. Joining televisual and informational technologies was the basis of a social transformation in which broadcast media seemingly swept across the 'global village' at the same time providing what Hans Enzensberger rightly called a "reactionary doctrine of salvation." But the McLuhanization of media did not then and will not now, salvage the imperatives of the collapse of Modernity so much as it serves as a patch linking utopic dispersions of media with the broad corporate and political objectives in which these technologies were developing. Indeed the absent discourse of McLuhan was that of politics, a discourse so cryptically present in the net criticism and theory of the 1990s. The effects of the dispersal of information, power, coherent politics, the redirection of military research and development into cybertechnologies has led to renewed chaos in which virtualization supplants illusion and in which the deployment of technologies is masked as an communications revolution.
The conflation of the looming finale to the millennium and the crescendo of technologies, anxieties, and excesses of the past decade (let alone the past century), has opened the floodgates of everything from calculated rumination to desperate illusion. This presentation will attempt to link the seductions of "crash" culture with the emerging electronic crisis in which dispersion, disavowal, the disappearance of the public sphere, the disembodiment of the self, are contained in a deeply regulated system in which consensus, representation, and politics are happily abandoned in favour of tele-presence and fallacies of ubiquity.
Biography: |
Timothy Druckrey is an independent curator, critic and writer concerned with issues of photographic history, representation, and technology. He lectures internationally about the social impact of digital media and the transformation of representation and communication in interactive and networked environments. He co-organized the international symposium Ideologies of Technology at the Dia Center of the Arts (an co edited the book available from Bay Press: Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology) and co-curated the exhibition Iterations: The New Image at the International Center of Photography and edited the book published by MIT Press. As a theorist of contemporary media, he has curated exhibitions and has contributed extensively to numerous publications, including San Francisco Camerawork, Afterimage and Views. He is American Editor of Ten.8 and Perspektief, a founding member of MergedMedia (a collective for new media), and co-founder of Critical Press, publishing monographs on issues technology and identity in postmodern culture. He is currently writing a study of the relationships between technology and photography called Photography, Technology and Representation (forthcoming from Manchester University Press), editing Electronic Culture collecting essays on the social impact of digital technology, and working in curatorial collaboratives for exhibitions in Austria (Technical Visions), Germany (Photography After Photography), Great Britain (Digital Diaspora), Luxembourg (Telepolis), and the US (The Interactive Media Festival). |