"New Media Art" and the Emergence of the Artist as a "Specific" Intellectual

In the early 1990s we have seen the increased popularity of a new disciplinary area within the visual arts. Sometimes referred to as "new media art," "emergent technology art" or (at worst) "computer art," this area incorporates the use and critical examination of a range of new media, tools, and technologies that have become available with the advent of per­sonal computing and the decrease in costs for anything electronic. "Net art," "interactive art," and "robotic art" are just a few of these recently emerged and newly categorized subfields. Whereas art since modernism has always had members who actively engaged in reexamining and expanding their forms and means of expression (from land art to fluxus, installation art. video art. sound art, etc.), the incorporation of digital technologies represented a shift of significant enough magnitude that entire programs, and by now even departments (rather than just isolated "special topics" classes), dedicated to the examination and expansion of these areas have been established.

Obviously, the willingness of universities and other institutions of higher education to invest in these areas did not stem merely from intellectual curiosity, but from the identified need to educate a generation of students versatile in both the technical and the aesthetic aspects of digital media. Equipped with these skills, they would be able to become active participants in the ever-expanding information society under capital. Parents who might previously have been opposed to supporting education in the arts, a field with dubious career options and a questionable placement record for economic pros­perity, were suddenly willing to send their offspring to art school with the hope that their loved ones would one day stake a claim within the digital media and related industries.

Luckily, only a small subsection, if any, of the art faculty engaged in emergent tech­nologies are in the business of educating the next generation of new media entrepreneurs. Rather, most faculty still attempt to equip their students with the same critical abilities that have been part of artistic education for decades. These include not only the rigorous examination of the qualities inherent in any media, but also their current use and status in society outside the realm of artistic production.

For digital technologies this presented a very interesting proposition. After all, students were trained to use, appropriate, and take apart the very machines and their electronic subsections that were in the process of transforming our society with great force and speed. Whereas some simply used their new abilities to further the expansion of artistic disci­plines and their attached formulas for aesthetic expression, others attempted to redefine the very site of art itself.'" In some cases, "site" simply implied venue. The World Wide Web has become one of such newly acquired venues for the arts. In other cases, however, the usage of digital technologies has meant the exploration of topical areas and social phenomena intimately linked to the status and functionality of these very technologies themselves. Activities such as data categorization, (electronic) information distribution, electronic surveillance, collective action facilitated (at least partially) by electronic media, and collaborative information accumulation and distribution all have become "sites" for artistic investigation and action.

Obviously artists were not the only people present at these newly found sites. Program­mers, activists, information theorists, academics, engineers, journalists, and others were involved in exploring and shaping instances of these newly available information technolo­gies. Sometimes members of these fields would work together, at other times in competition, but everyone was certainly fueled by a sense of novelty and excitement.

What emerged among the more politically inclined early explorers of information technologies was a sense that previously established models of "DIY" media' had just obtained a whole new tool kit ready to be explored and expanded. Early listservs such as Nettime were dedicated not only to building a new platform for "open" communication, but also to specifically using this arena to facilitate discussions to examine new capitalist formations made possible through the World Wide Web and to exchange information and ideas for potential subversion of this power at play. Other discussion forums and listservs focused on topics such as feminism in the digital age (faces) or postcolonial developments under global capital (undercurrents), to name just two. We also saw the formation of independent media outlets, such as Indymedia'' enabling the growing move­ment of citizen journalism to flourish.

A culmination of this shift in information acquisition and distribution, and thereby the construction of knowledge itself, was the framework developed for Wikipedia. Albeit not capable of hosting direct exchanges among people, Wikipedia, composed of articles by self-declared experts in given fields, collectively rewritten and edited by other individuals who declare themselves to be the same, is by now one of most frequently consulted ency­clopedias of our time. While the contributions in Wikipedia may look similar when com­pared to its more "official" precursors, the open contribution platform—and thereby its contributor profiles—certainly don't. Wikipedia has changed the nature of collaboration with respect to knowledge production and greatly challenged the notion, definition, and status of the "expert." What a difference from the carefully nominated contributors to the Encyclopedia Britannica, often carrying the weight of a Nobel Prize or similar award of distinction!12 Whereas opinions regarding the usefulness and/or the positive impact of Wikipedia certainly vary (celebrated by some, fiercely disputed by others), one thing is for sure: a resource that has become the one-stop reference for thousands of students and professionals (as well as other individuals) around the world has to be looked at seriously.

Much in the tradition of the "computer hobbyists" and analog electronic artists of the 1970s and 1980s, artist/engineer teams started building their own electronic hardware tools as well as designing software programs and platforms. In this case the task is slightly more difficult, at least with respect to distribution. The open source approach used in many software initiatives doesn't translate as well into the world of resistors and diodes. The common black box, with its abilities to send software packages anywhere, is suddenly-missing. However, as communicative objects, hardware tools and projects have been shown to he very effective.

The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT) was one of the early groups to explore the powers a functional tool could hold when being developed for the purpose of raising awareness around social injustice, rather than for commercial exploitation. The BIT Suicide Box15 consisted of a motion detection video system designed to capture vertical activity. Once it had detected an object falling in front of its lens, it would trigger record­ing of the motion. The Suicide Box was installed on the Golden Gate Bridge in 1996, one of the most prominent suicide locations in the United States. Another example was the BIT rocket. It was designed to provide a clear video stream at six hundred feet altitude to a ground receiver. Launched from the ground, BIT rocket was used to document crowd attendance during demonstrations at a time when sanctioned news and media outlets appeared to have "accidentally" forgotten to undertake these estimates themselves.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) is another group invested in developing artist/activist inspired tools. GraffitiWriter, the project that launched the group's public visibility, was a first instance of exploring the notion of a "contestational robotics." It consisted of an enhanced remote-controlled car equipped with spray cans, a microcon­troller, and a type pad. Any message up to sixty-four characters could be typed in, and would be sprayed onto the street at a desired location, without its human controllers being present at the locale. Action could thus be undertaken removed from the eyes of authority and, even more important, individuals who might have had little interest in expressing their opinions publicly in the form of graffiti became involved through mere fascination with this new and unusual interface. For groups ranging from Girl Scouts to police officers, GraffitiWriter was successful in its mission to expand participant demographics and promote the notion of a contestational robotics.

So let us look at what lessons might have been learned by the "political technoscience artist in becoming" from the developments described above. On the one hand, we see increased sophistication in the use of digital and electronic technologies. Skills such as software development and electronic board design, commonly associated with disciplines other than the arts—namely, computer science and engineering—have suddenly become part of the artistic tool kit. With that have come not only an extension of possible media for artistic projects but also a shift in status for the artist herself. The disciplinary families of engineering and computer sciences enjoy a stronger economic foothold in our society than the arts traditionally did, and with that foothold comes a superior power base. Artists working between these disciplinary areas now had a choice, if they desired to obtain their piece of the economic pie; a career within the digital and media industries became a lucrative option. This is rather different from the "starving artist" life and the never-ending hope to one day turn one's creations into highly traded commodities within the commercial gallery world. 

However, for those individuals interested in employing their newly obtained skills in a different manner (which is most likely the case for our "political technoscience artist"), other opportunities were opening up. Armed with the lessons learned from public inter­ventionist art practices of the 1970s and 1980s, artists now realized that with a shift in technology came the increased ability to create new forms of independent project and information distribution. This time not confined in museums or carefully selected sites for "public" art, but artists could infiltrate the very mechanisms designed to be the new interfaces between knowledge production and society outside the arts. In the end, it doesn't matter if Indymedia or Wikipedia had been brought into existence by artists or not. What matters is that they could have been. And many initiatives and artistic projects emerged on the basis of this realization.

We could argue, then, that artists were put on the path of approaching the role of the "specific intellectual" characterized above. Rather than performing the role of an individ­ual in search of a higher truth that will eventually be revealed and distributed to "the masses" in the form of paintings, sculptures, and other works, artists were now in the position to serve as interdisciplinary "experts" in an area that was considered to hold high economic status.