Sandy Stone, despite being highly conscious of the dangers of periodizing ages, closes, and dawns, gave way to temptation and proclaimed that we had entered “the virtual age.”5 This was by nature of the human trends toward interiority and textuality in the face of virtual technologies, characterized by increased self-awareness, physical isolation, spatial displacement, and use of “prosthetic” communication.
In the United States in the 1990s, new technologies were assimilated much more rapidly than in Europe and elsewhere, where there was more skepticism and costs were higher: domestic Internet connection was charged by the minute rather than the low monthly fees of the United States. But the comparatively minimal level of government support for the arts in the United States meant that there was quicker and more wide-spread development of experimental new media arts elsewhere, particularly in Europe, Australia, and Japan. While America led many commercially driven new media devel-opments within popular entertainment areas such as film special effects and theme park experiences, non-mainstream digital arts flourished in Europe. This was supported through the establishment of major publicly funded institutions such as Germany’s ZKM (Zentrum Für Kunst und Medientechnologie/Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe (1989), the New Media Institute in Frankfurt (1990), and the Netherlands’ Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA, 1990).
But for most countries outside the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan, the digital revolution did not take place. When Kim Dae-jung, the president of South Korea, opened the FIFA World Cup Football Competition in May 2002, he began his address with the words: “Citizens of the global village.” His words underlined and promoted South Korea’s status as a leading IT developer in the world (especially mobile phones, Internet connections, and digital television), and the invocation of McLuhan’s famous phrase reflected the general belief that the Internet and digital technologies are global. In reality, of course, they are not remotely global or omnipresent. Even the huge audience of 500 million for this mammoth televised event comprised only 12 percent of the total world population, and the television set is markedly more widespread than the computer console, which is currently estimated to reach no more than 5 percent of the world’s population.
The digital revolution, and in particular the Internet, is always assumed to be global because its signals instantly travel around the world. But that does not mean those signals can necessarily start or stop anywhere without vast investment in infrastructure, which is out of the reach and finances of many nations. The Internet also happens to be consider-ably more global if you speak, and spell, American English. The inequalities of “the digital divide” between the industrialized nations and the “third world” are even more startling when the essential skill of literacy becomes part of the equation. Africa for example, which has the highest illiteracy rates worldwide, is also consistently the lowest Internet user, so low in fact that some Internet traffic-flow charts simply choose not to list Africa. The ability to purchase essential facilities is equally disparate: of the world’s six billion people,
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three billion are estimated as living on less than the equivalent of two U.S. dollars a day, and half of those on less than the equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day. Another frequently cited statistic is that 70 percent of the world’s population has never used a telephone. To describe computing as a global facility thus lies somewhere between gross exaggeration and wishful thinking, and a perhaps more accurate description might be highly exclu-sive, disuniting and partisan. Statistically, the computer remains a luxury device for a small percentage of devotees within the most advanced industrialized nations.
Artist activists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña have given effective and valuable voice to issues around the digital divide. Gómez-Peña effectively crossed the artistic border from being highly suspicious of digital technologies to using them extensively, yet his message retains a familiar solidarity with “border groups” and outsiders:
Like the pre-multicultural art world of the early 80s, the new high-tech art world assumed an unquestionable “center,” and drew a dramatic digital border. And on the other side of the tracks, there lived all the techno-illiterate artists, along with most women, Chicanos, Afro-Americans and Native Americans in the US and Canada, not to mention the artists living in “Third World” coun-tries. Given the nature of this hegemonic cartography, those of us living South of the digital border were forced to assume once again the unpleasant but necessary roles of webbacks, undocumented cyber-immigrants, digital viruses, techno-pirates, and virtual coyotes (smugglers). We were also shocked by the benign or quiet (not naive) ethnocentrism permeating the debates around art and digital technology, especially in California.6
The Borders of Cyberspace
Within theater and performance, the “border” metaphor has long symbolized fundamen-tal concerns, not least between the audience and stage; and between different worlds and realities.7 The digital divide presents a more concrete border for the third world, while Western digital theory tells its own border tales and presents potent new border terrains, most popularly discussed in relation to thresholds between the material and immaterial, the absent and present, the virtual and the “real.” “Digital borderlands,” to use Johan Fornäs’s term, are frequently conceptualized in such distinct binaries, or in relation to what Peter Lunenfeld calls The Digital Dialectic (2000). But border consciousness in digital theory relates not only to lines of division and demarcation but also to new forms of space and territory, particularly what Ryan calls the “new frontier” of cyberspace.8 In a report summarizing the 1995 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, David Bollier notes:
In many ways, cyberspace represents a new frontier that should be understood in terms of the famous
“frontier thesis” put forward by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. . . . Turner proposed that the American character has been indelibly influenced by the existence of a frontier—a place where anyone could stake their own claim to a free land, revel in a loosening of civilized standards and institutional authority and celebrate an extreme individualism. The tension of “taming” the
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Western frontier and incorporating it into “civilized society” resemble the challenges now facing us in cyberspace.9
The Wild West frontier metaphor was taken up by many writers, and digital pioneers were equated with settlers and cowboys—Paul Saffo, for example discusses VR luminary Howard Rheingold as “one of those trappers in the Old West who helped open up the territory.”10But the idea of cyberspace (or at least, the World Wide Web) being a virgin, open landscape akin to the Wild West actually lasted only a very short time after its emer-gence in the early 1990s. It was quickly colonized and overpopulated. The first, pioneer-ing “cowboy” settlers were soon crowded in by swarms of sightseers, small businesses, multinational conglomerates, pornographers, rip-off artists, and what seemed like the world and his wife eagerly marking out their territories with rickety, hastily erected home-steads (called “home pages”).11
Economist Harry Cleaver’s essay “The ‘Space’ of Cyberspace” examines the politics of cyberspace’s frontier metaphor, arguing their inextricable link to ideas of territorial resis-tance and non-surrender. This is because the initial free spirit of pioneering cyberspace colonists has been inexorably threatened by corporate capital, which “tries either to enclose their spaces by commercializing them if they look profitable, or crushing them if they look dangerous.”12But according to British writer Oliver August, the Wild West analogy is a specifically American conception, and cyberspace itself offers an ultimately hollow return to the lost nineteenth-century adventure:
Britons still think of computers as a tool. Partly out of contempt for soulless machines, partly out of Luddite fear, computers have not taken centre stage in our consciousness. But in America “cyber-space” has filled the spiritual void created when the Wild West was conquered and irrigated. Cyber-space is the new frontier . . . the chance to follow their forefathers, to trek into uncharted territory, taking destiny into their own hands . . . from the comfort of their living rooms.13
Gómez-Peña adopts a comparably cynical view, dubbing cyberspace “a sanitized version of the pioneer and cowboy mentalities of the Old West (‘Guillermo, you can be the first Mexican ever to do this and that on the Net’).”14As we discuss in chapter 20, he bril-liantly satirizes the supposed “politically neutral/raceless/genderless/classless ‘territory’ ”15 through his Internet bulletin board projects, which expose online bigotry and racism, as well as through his droll, self-parodic performance persona El Mexterminator, an “unwill-ing . . . techno-artist and an information superhighway bandido.”16But for other perfor-mance artists, such as Phil Morle, the digital borderland offers a deep and resonant metaphor that is at once performative and metaphysical:
In between the spirit world and the living, human beings are always within and between; between a state of embodied materiality toward which we act and a state of disembodied transcendence
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toward which we extend ourselves. We never reach either point—cast into the limen forever, ecsta-tic, emergent and alive. This paper introduces my position within the limen—a personal experi-ence generated in the virtual spaces that I am within—through my actions as a performance worker;
as a cyberspace cowboy and; as an experience-maker.17
Lingua Excluda
As already noted, language provides another major border that extends the digital divide.
Moreover, English is not only the lingua franca of the web, but also of much artistic and academic networking, communication and publication. Native English speakers (not least the British) have a generally poor reputation for acquiring the languages of other nations and thus, for example, work wholly undertaken in French may remain largely unknown in the United Kingdom, even though France is physically only twenty-two miles from the United Kingdom at its nearest point. Algerian Louis Bec creates impressive digital life-forms, but his work remains relatively unknown in the United Kingdom and the United States primarily because he lives and works in France and, more significantly, pub-lishes mostly in French. Outside of a German-speaking public, the same problems affect the robotic work of Munich-based Nicolas Anatol Baginsky; the net.art and associated events of Austrian artist Konrad Becker; and the Internet sci-art of Richard Kriesche who exhibited at the 1995 Venice Biennale.
Digital arts and performance have nonetheless flourished in numerous and unexpected non-English-speaking countries, and Slovenia provides an interesting case in point. Marko Peljhan’s work with the Slovenian Space Agency brought the nation some international artistic attention at the 2003 Venice Biennale, but for many years Slovenia had been a dynamic center for digital arts experimentation. Its Digital Media Lab had run an open-access new media laboratory and supported numerous initiatives in net.art and robotics, including operating a guest program presenting international and local artists.18During the 1990s, the journal Maska (founded 1920) undertook a significant body of interviews with key digital performance practitioners including Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Philip Glass, Bill T. Jones, Stelarc, Survival Research Laboratories, and Robert Wilson. Some extraordinary digital performances were developed at the Media Art Lab, including Darij Kreuth and Davide Grassi’s brain and eye-scanning activated performance Brainscore (2000), which we discuss in detail later. Slovenian venues and galleries such as the Galerie Kapelica sponsor and promote installations, presentations and extreme body performance events including the development of Stelarc’s Extra Ear project in 2004 (figure 8.1). The Multimedia Center Kibla in Maribor, run by Peter Dobrila and Aleksandra Kostic, organizes International Festivals of Computer Arts and has promoted and supported highly innovative work. This includes Eduardo Kac’s Teleporting an Unknown State (1998), where light was “teleported” via webcams and the Internet from Chicago, Vancouver, Mexico City, Paris, Antarctica, Moscow, Tokyo, and Sydney to permit a seed to grow in a darkened gallery over a period of two weeks (figure 8.2). Slovenian net
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Figure 8.1 Stelarc’s designs for implanting an Extra Ear (2004) with integrated technologies to access computer networks. Developed at the Galerie Kapelica in Slovenia. Photo: Ionat Zurr.
Figure 8.2 Eduardo Kac’s Teleporting an Unknown State, developed at the Multimedia Center Kibla in Maribor, Slovenia in 1998.
artist/activist Vuc Cosic has also brought the country to attention by controversially laying a wreath of flowers at the German ZKM media museum to mark the death of net.art (the very genre he famously named) because it was becoming increasingly a museum exhibit.
Later as part of his Net.art per me (2001) at the Venice Biennale, he issued a statement warning “historians of net.art not to fall into unjustified glorification of Slovenia or Eastern Europe as a natural basin for net.art” As Cosic suggests, digital artists from Eastern Europe have made a significant impact, and several artist networks have emerged such as the “Syn-dicalists,” involving more than five hundred artists who live and work in Eastern Europe.
Japan holds a particularly interesting and unique position in the global picture of digital applications; a highly industrialized nation that is arguably the world’s major developer and manufacturer of computer hardware, software, robotics, and computer games. Every month, some of the world’s leading companies, including Sony, Sharp, Samsung, JVC, Fujitsu, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Nintendo, sell electronic goods worth
$18 billion.19Yet because it preserves its own cultural traditions, as well as its own alpha-bet and language (websites, for example do not “travel well”), Japan can appear to remain curiously private, and relatively few of its artists have received significant critical atten-tion from western naatten-tions. Japanese artists have therefore had to rely upon travel to exhibit their work more widely, for example to major international conferences and festivals such as Ars Electronica and SIGGRAPH, and to European new media venues such as ZKM, where Japanese performance artist Ikue Mori’s elaborate drum machine sculptures were used in live performance during his stay as artist in residence in 1998–99. At the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz in 1996, there were exhibits from Virtual Reality installation artist Kazuhiko Hachiya and pioneering interactive artist Masaki Fujihata, who received a Golden NICA prize for his networked art piece using global positioning systems, Global Interior Project (1996).
One of Japan’s leading multimedia artists, Naoko Tosa, has exhibited her fascinating work extensively, including Talking to Neuro Baby at the 1993 Ars Electronica, which posed the question: “Is Neuro Baby a toy, a pet, a new form of intelligence or a strange life form?”20 For her Interactive Poem (1996), a computer was programmed to recognize emotions and mood in speech and to instigate a type of “dialogue” by generating images and sounds according to the speech inflections it heard. In Unconscious Flow, shown at SIG-GRAPH 1999, a computer mapped the heartbeats of two participants who are instructed to touch hands, with the resulting signals generating images of two mermaids dancing onscreen, who interpolate the signals received.
Code
The code is necessary but unavailable except as a symptom; alien to life in three dimensions, but present; the medium of community that has no place and exists only each time it is iterated: it has no potential. The iterations of code are performances without theatre.
—alice rayner21
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The advent of computing necessitated a new vocabulary, and during its rise in popular-ity during the 1980s and 1990s, much of the new terminology it brought in its wake remained a mystery to a majority of the population suddenly confronted by a strange new language and orthodoxy. Initially for many, even the distinction between hardware and software was not self-evident, and there were literally thousands of specialist terms and acronyms. Some were new such as bytes, DOS, and RAM, while others sounded familiar but had specific meanings in this new language: attachment, card, crash, directory, drag, floppy, menu, virus, and code.
The word “code,” in the context of information technologies, is particularly intriguing.
As well as meaning information written succinctly in an appropriate language, it also carries strong associations of secrecy: from Morse Code and the coded messages of spy thrillers to the World War II German Enigma code, whose “cracking” by Alan Turing and others necessitated the construction of one of the first computer systems. The computer has more recently been used to decipher scripts from early civilizations to reveal the intri-cacies of their culture and social systems.22Simon Singh’s The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (2000) explains in great detail how codes have been both constructed and cracked throughout history, from the hieroglyphics of Egyptian tombs (a sign system that has only become seen as a secret code because our ability to interpret them has been lost over time) to the betrayal of Mary Queen of Scots, whose plots were suddenly revealed. An indication of the West’s overriding obsession with embedded code at the turn of the millennium was the so-called Bible Code (or “Torah Code”), which claimed that predictions of future events are codified in the Christian Holy Bible, and on publication The Bible Code (1997) book topped the best-selling lists. A few years earlier, a photograph that circulated widely on the Web, presumed to be genuine, showed an unkempt youth on the sidewalk proffering a piece of torn cardboard to camera on which were scrawled the words “Hungry!—can code HTML for food”.
Notions of “protocol,” another word redefined for the digital age, were also invoked through code’s associations with rules of etiquette and conduct: dress code, professional code, code of practice, and so on. The particular notion of code as a digest of rules by which a community lives stems from Roman law as well as the codex, effectively the first books with pages bound down one side, which superseded the more labor-intensive scrolls that had to be wound through to find the appropriate section. “Code” in its etymologi-cal sense thus suggests an arrangement of information into recognizable and easily acces-sible pieces, a paradigm that is eminently transferable to the operation of computer code.
Codes that invite interpretation are nothing new to theater and performance studies, and semiotics has been a cornerstone of performance criticism for at least the past quarter of a century. Keir Elam’s seminal study The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980) traced a history of semiotic approaches from Sausurre’s linguistic analyses of the early twentieth century to the Prague Structuralists’ examinations of the theatrical sign in the 1930s, to late-twentieth-century theories of theater, language, and the sign. Thereafter, works of
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theater criticism that adopted a semiotic code-breaking stance became legion, including Patrice Pavis on the language of the stage;23 Jean Alter on text, actors, production and reception;24 Marvin Carlson on deconstructing theatre architecture;25 Elaine Aston and George Savona’s student guide to the theatre as sign system;26Erika Fischer-Lichte’s The
theater criticism that adopted a semiotic code-breaking stance became legion, including Patrice Pavis on the language of the stage;23 Jean Alter on text, actors, production and reception;24 Marvin Carlson on deconstructing theatre architecture;25 Elaine Aston and George Savona’s student guide to the theatre as sign system;26Erika Fischer-Lichte’s The