vital information was written as an introduction to my participation in 'The Next Vision; A Digital Odyssey' panel discussion, at Hunter College, NewYork, on 19 October 1995. Panellist were Jan Avgikos, Regina Cornwell, the late Tibor Kalman and myself. The discussion was moderated by Stuart Ewen in front of an audience of 60 design students and peers.

jouke kleerebezem



Vital Information; Information Reputation for the Arts

With disregard of the new media hype, created both by the powers that be and by new powers that emerge with infectious ambition (whether they are commercial or cultural, corporate or institutional), we are witnessing major cultural change.

New technologies laid out new media before us: the digital revolution is fundamentally changing the poetics and politics of the way we experience and act. Beyond the simple, daily practice of digitizing information that we are all involved with (like when using a credit card, a fax machine, a pager, regular and cellular telephony, CD players and other audio and audio visual equipment, etc.), beyond these primary communicational and economic practices, we are engaged in an ever increasing response of information disposal and retrieval.

This response to new communication technologies and media I shall call the Information Habit: an information habit should form, in which a culturally and socially unsettled human being acquires the organizational and communicational skills to improve his condition and literacy. We are facing a not to be underestimated or trivialized learning challenge, which will require all available intelligence and creativity.

The cultivation of an information habit is both a private and a public event. It demands both individual and collaborative action. It demands a critical stand towards the institutions and industries that build an information infrastructure—for purposes other than our own.

The global Internet is its model, this 'Mother of all Networks', a connectivity of computer networks, that was originally developed in the military and academic sphere—soon after which it was embraced by a grassroots technology-savvy and politically active underground, that made it accessible to everyone of us, very quickly. This so called hacker community prepared for the global anarchic use of the Internet as we know it today, with its explosive use and abundant resources of cultural diversity. But already we see the contours of a different direction: a next stage of commercialization of 'information that wants to be free' (as it is described so ideologically correct by the hacker community), the development of a consumer network which' achievements will make the '500 channel' television nightmare seem like an oasis of informational peace and calm.

The other day, at a panel organized by the Center for Communication, which was ironically called 'The Golden Age of Bitcasting ;-)', evaluating on the entertainment industry's challenges, one of the panellists compared the shaping of new media with the shaping of the early automobile: by the looks of the first automobile, one could tell whether the manufacturer had been making bicycles or wagons before venturing into this new product. The new media industry players today distinctively show their computer industry or television entertainment heritage, in the direction that they develop and present their products. For me, television is about the remotest cultural phenomenon to serve as a model for the development of computer enhanced communication and information media.

In order to develop a network that can channel and mediate 'information that wants to be free' to a large community, in order to build a truly egalitarian, user-friendly many-to-many information environment, in order to express the astonishing
richness of cultural diversity and abundant creativity, the artist has to grab the opportunities that were made available to us over the past years, without hesitation or delay. This means a true Odyssey, a search for settlement in media of unprecedented ubiquity, in technologies that are all engaging. Laurie Anderson recently warned for the commercialization of the Internet and its flagship, the World Wide Web, and called for cultural action. To my perspective, cultural action within new media, today involves a commercial, or at least economic decisiveness by the artist, in order to gain independency from consensus reality and a connectivity to a supportive environment that will use the artist's vision for its own cultural identity. New media afford the artist not only to produce digitally, but also to address his or her public digitally, to distribute his or her product on the basis of a person-to-person relationship with an audience, and to present creative work largely independent from the institutionalized middleman art market, that is in such global crisis.

To me, the building up of new media literacy is a major challenge for the arts. It involves the learning of new skills on two levels.

The first level is of course the upgrade to new tools that are modelled after old media. We will learn how to use (hardware and) software instead of ink, paint, stone, wood, plastics, metal, film, and brushes, chisels, hammers, glues and solids and liquids of all kinds. Our images will be digital, and computer enhanced. Even when the final output remains material, an object, the design and, to a large extent, the production of it will be software based. The manipulation of our images and objects will be through digital media, as much at our own disposal, as at the disposal of the recipient of our work. Together we will control an artistic output, which brings me to the second level of change.

The second level of change will be most influential: learning how to perceive and interpret images, both objects and digital information (work that does not leave the virtual worlds of computer networking: in other words, will not exist in the real world—at least as long as we consider the material world the real world). This second level of development of new media literacy, or an Information Habit, shapes reality and community within and outside of the arts. The artist will have to come to terms and be inventive on such different issues as copyright and the valuation of intellectual property, the distribution of his/her work against the backdrop of data immersion, the omnipresence of imagery, the explosive growth of possibilities to present to an audience which, in its turn, is informed through new media and will have a totally different appreciation of creative work.

So the environment or context of the arts changes. The private and public sphere of cultural production will relate in different ways. When an information infrastructure enables the artist to access a new public arena, select a niche for his or her work, communicate possibly on a subscription basis, with his or her recipient, build new 'sites' for the presentation of the work, evaluate the work in an interactive way—only when the artist will regard these new media 'affordances' equally, as 'tools of the trade', then the cultural influence on information reality will be most effective.

Let me illustrate some of these hypotheses. I publish my work on the Internet. It can be retrieved by an audience of currently 70.000.000. Each one of them can copy my images or texts or information structures without loss of quality. Each one of them can reintroduce this work in a possibly manipulated state, as digital information, even as material output. It can be printed or manufactured in any form. It can be reproduced in any quantity. It can be hacked and squatted, without further notice. I might run into it sooner or later. I will be surprised by the honor of its reappearance through another persons' mediation, in a different context. I would be pleased at the effort and curious at its new status. I would contact its new source and congratulate him or her on the job done. I would download a copy of a next generation of my work and file it with the original. I would maybe reconsider or reconceptualize it and produce my own, now differently 'informed', piece. When it would be somehow inaccessible to me, protected by encryption for example (and probably price tagged), I would call my lawyer. He wouldn't know what to do about it.

My next work then would also be tagged. It would contain a visible or invisible software agent that would report to me whenever someone 'out there' downloaded, copied and manipulated, probably again uploaded my work on the network. All addresses on the Internet connect, so I am connected to anyone of those 70.000.000 forgers or hospitable hosts of my work. I would take action as soon as my agent returns to me with the details of the intervention in my work. Or, depending on how it was programmed, the agent might transfer me a fair amount of money, depending on the nature of manipulation on my work, the duration at which it was studied, the amount of copies that were made, the redistribution of it, etc.

Imagine now the creation of databases where my work as an artist—text, audiovisuals and still imagery—is banked, together with the work of my peers. Instead of cluttering up in my studio, I would upload my work to my bank-of-choice, as soon as it is ready for distribution. At the bank, I could choose from several options. I could commission the bank to have the work interact with other work that was tagged by my peers to do so. New generations would develop and be reported to the original creators. This could be done privately or publicly, monitored by an audience or interest group that probably pays me a small fee to let them. Or the work could be directly and in unaltered state available to this audience, again at a modest fee.

The bank would be a collaborative studio, an industry—or a bar, a meeting place, a true place of exchange, a public, private or semi-public or semiprivate place. The bank would be a museum, a market, a social space where one is informed and entertained. The bank would be a park, or a playground. It would be a community, an economy. The bank would extend into the material world through publications, performances, potlatches, social interaction and cultural production: through old media. The bank would connect creators and recipients in yet unexpected ways and foster cultural identity.

When I as an artist, or content provider, creator of information, want to act in the new public spaces of information reality, I must consider options like these: they are, at a very basic level, part of my work as an artist. I am interested in the reception of my work. I hate the institutionalization of an art market that is commodity based. I love to communicate with and through my creative work. I love to discuss the meaning of it, I want to evaluate feedback and inform the progress of my understanding of my own and other people's public activity. I want my work to change over time.

But I too have to admit that Art is not on the cutting edge of cultural production since quite some time. Art is not all that informative at all, on issues other than its own discourse. Most of this hang-up shows 'on-line' as clearly as 'on-site'. We should not make the same mistakes over and over again. The artist this time (again) will have to be as courageous and critical on current developments in media and the public sphere, as he or she can be. The artist will have to perform and address issues of change on a very conceptual, fundamental level. In order to do so he or she will have to venture outside the art context, in order not to loose contact with what is going on 'out there'—really.

Information media, laid out by digital technology, afford me to produce, present and distribute my ideas—they allow me to upgrade them, to perform them. I can get organized with any third party out there. From my personal interest as an artist/curator/publisher/critic, I would choose to team up with my colleague artist, or curator, or publisher, or critic—rather than with any institution. But the changes affect all of us, affect all public 'servers' inside and outside the arts. So my work could also be made in commission, for a different audience. It could support any (alternative) specific cultural, social, even corporate or institutional interest group. We will have a choice, once information media are implemented and accessible to an audience that is as fed up with centralized one-to-many media as we are ourselves today.

New media technologies promise empowerment of individual creators and recipients, and a new complicity between them. But from their very introduction these technologies should be tested and experimented by creative intelligence. As much as the possibilities currently offered to us may seem astonishing to the average Photoshop, or Macromedia, or QuarkXPress or Netscape user: they are modelled after old media, like early automobiles were modelled after bicycles and wagons. Now they drive almost by themselves but they still hobble in the same direction, where the roads were laid. And these roads are in such bad shape that hardly any community wants to live along them and be dependent of them for the supply and distribution of their vital goods, or information.

No Odyssey goes by well-paved roads alone. In order to make significant creative and intelligent work, that has a meaning to a community that will be empowered by new means of communication, we ourselves, with these communities, will have to improve the vehicles and the tracks. In doing so, we will find abundant reference and knowledge in a material, `old media', world. We will find abundant intelligence and beauty in the history of art, we will find abundant metaphors in a real world that too, still, is 'out there'. We will find people out there, who want to share new concepts of cultural identity. But there is one significant difference with the original Odyssey: there will be no home to return to, no patient Penelope's Home Page... for the vagrant new media artist.

18 October 1995