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The Rhetoric of Digital Utopia after Sade: Utopian Architecture and the Static Subject of Digital Art

2010; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dis.2010.a426890

1522-5321

Eyal Amiran,

Cinema and Media Studies

The Rhetoric of Digital Utopia after Sade:Utopian Architecture and the Static Subject of Digital Art Eyal Amiran (bio) A line of thought popular in new media theory still sees web space as a liberatory not-place (ou-topos) where boundaries collapse or disappear. Since its early days, cybernetics has had the objective to erase the divide between matter and code, the archive and the interface.1 Jay David Bolter endorses a claim that is commonly made—a truism since Jean-François Lyotard on information in The Postmodern Condition—when he writes that "[t]he open architecture of the Internet and the World Wide Web" grants access to every place or site on the net equally.2 The speed with which simultaneous information is available through networks "suggests that everything can be represented," to give a variant of this point.3 Richard Lanham cites as a given the notion that free circulation is "natural to electronic notation."4 As Rita Raley comments, "[T]he IT network … promises to go anywhere and allow everyone access."5 "The network is our contemporary intuition of infinity," writes Alan Liu.6 While these writers are interested in the real politics of digital media, including the ways digital artifacts engage different kinds of borders (as in Raley's "Border Hacks"), their interest in the "open architecture" of the net points to a significant assumption in the field. Media theorists often agree with a vision articulated for [End Page 186] example by Miwon Kwon, whose One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (2002) celebrates the "liberating effects" of the deterritorialization of sites and argues that the differential spacing of places allows them to be understood as part of a synchronic system.7 As Jennifer González explains, "The apparently neutral space of the Internet is viewed as a potentially progressive domain for overcoming barriers that otherwise obstruct or restrict ideal forms of participation in the public sphere."8 Even the Marxist reading of the virtual age offered in McKenzie Wark's Hacker Manifesto holds that the increasing flows of information under the rule of the "vectoralist" class, which exploits information as capitalists exploited capital, turns place into homogenized space, and turns nature into a virtual geography where anything "may be brought together with any other thing."9 Wark continues this line of thought in a more recent project on gamespace: In gamespace, the very possibility of utopia is foreclosed. It is no longer possible to describe a shining city upon the hill, as if it were a special topic untouched by the everyday, workaday world. No space is sacred; no space is separate. Not even the space of the page. The gamelike extends its lines everywhere and nowhere.10 Here Wark opposes the closed model of traditional utopian space in favor of an absolute openness that constitutes a new digital utopia. This view of digital environments affirms an impossible (and vague) openness whose ideological effect is ultimately conservative, a kind of heaven beyond the conditions of possibility. In virtual worlds, objects are said to have no commerce with and supposed not to depend on analog environments, a totalizing vision against which some critics have cautioned.11 As Mark Taylor sums up the position, "[T]he net wires the world for Hegelian Geist."12 This view of the Internet is often applied to the ontology of computer-based art, though the two are different and separate topics. Alan Golding provides a comprehensive summary of the trend in new media theory to celebrate digital media's "liberatory immateriality" and to see traditional media like print as "confining."13 Instead of multiplying examples, I consider as an extended example the work of Mark Hansen. In a series of articles devoted broadly to the challenge that digital images pose to older media, Hansen argues that dynamic properties of digital images make them simultaneous with their object, eliminating temporal and spatial barriers that characterize other art. This body of work is particularly challenging because Hansen's larger project argues for the work of the body in the production of information, and in this sense it does not favor unbounded ontology. Hansen rightly objects to Lev [End Page...