NEW MEDIA AND THE MODENIST CONCEPT OF PROGRESS

New media and the modernist concept of progress the full aesthetic potential of this medium will be realised only when computer artists come to the instrument from art rather than computer science. Today the kind of simulation envisioned requires a $10 million Cray-1 supercomputer, the most powerful computer in the world.

The manufacturers of the Cray-1 believe that by the early 1990s computers with three-fourths of its power will sell for approximately $20,000 less than the cost of a portapak and editing system today. Finally accessible to autonomous individuals, the full aesthetic potential of computer simulation will be revealed, and the future of cinematic languages will be rescued from the tyranny of perceptual imperialists and placed in the hands of artists and amateurs (Youngblood 1999).

In the name of ‘progress’ our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old. (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967)
In order to conceive a properly genealogical account of new media histories we need not only to take account of the particular teleologies of technohistory above but also the deeply embedded experience of modernism within aesthetics. Commentators on new media, like Gene Youngblood, frequently refer to a future point in time when their promise will be realized.

Thought about new media is replete with a sense of a deferred future. We are repeatedly encouraged to await the further development of the technologies which they utilise. At times this takes the simple form of the ‘when we have the computing power’ type of argument. Here, the present state of technological (under)development is said to constrain what is possible and explains the gap between the potential and actual performance (see for example, our discussion of virtual reality). Related to views of this kind, there are some which embody a particular kind of theory about historical change. It is not technological underdevelopment per se that is blamed for the failure of a new medium to deliver its promise; rather, the culprit is seen to be ingrained cultural resistance.

Here, the proposal is that in their early phases new media are bound to be used and understood according to older, existing practices and ideas, and that it is largely such ideological and cultural factors that limit the potential of new media. The central premiss here is that each medium has its own kind of essence; that is, some unique and defining characteristic or characteristics which will, given time and exploration, be clearly revealed. As they are revealed the medium comes into its own.

This kind of argument adds ideas about the nature of media and culture to the simpler argument about technological underdevelopment. Such a view has quite a long history itself, as will be seen in the example from the pioneering writer on ‘expanded’ cinema, Gene Youngblood, quoted at the beginning of this section. Writing in 1984, in an essay on the then emerging possibilities of digital video and cinema (in Druckery 1999), he looks forward to the 1990s when he foresees affordable computers coming to possess the kind of power that, at his time of writing, was only to be found in the $10 million Cray-1 mainframe supercomputer.

Then, in a clear example of the modernist argument that we have outlined, he adds that we must also look forward to the time when the ‘full aesthetic potential of the computer simulation will be revealed’, as it is rescued from ‘the tyranny of perceptual imperialists’ (in Druckery 1999). Such imperialists being, we can assume, those scientists, artists and producers who impose their old habits of vision

New media and new technologies:

A perception upon the new media in a more recent example, Steve Holzmann (1997) also takes the view that most existing uses of new media fail to ‘exploit those special qualities that are unique to digital worlds’. Again, this is because he sees them as having as yet failed to break free of the limits of ‘existing paradigms’ or historical forms and habits. He, too, looks forward to a time when new media transcend the stage when they are used to fulfil old purposes and when digital media’s ‘unique qualities’ come to ‘define entirely new languages of expression’. As Bolter and Grusin have argued (1999), Holzmann (and Youngblood before him in our other example) represent the modernist viewpoint.

They believe that for a medium to be significantly new it has to make a radical break with the past. A major source of such ideas is to be found in one of the seminal texts of artistic modernism: the 1961 essay ‘Modernist Painting’ by art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg. Although the new, digital media are commonly understood as belonging to a postmodern period, in which the cultural projects of modernism are thought to have been superseded, Greenbergian ideas have continued to have a considerable pull on thinking about new media.

Clearly, the point of connection is between the sense that new media are at the cutting edge of culture, that there is an opening up of new horizons and a need for experimentation, and the ideology of the earlier twentieth-century artistic avant-garde movements in painting, photography, sculpture, film and video. We meet these modernist ideas whenever we hear talk of the need for new media to break clear of old habits and attitudes, the gravity field of history and its old thought patterns and practices. It is also present when we hear talk about the essential characteristics of new media; when the talk is of the distinctive essence of ‘digitality’ as against the ‘photographic’, the ‘filmic’ or the ‘televisual’. Greenberg himself did not think that modern art media should or could break with the past in any simple sense. But he did think they should engage in a process of clarifying and refining their nature by not attempting to do what was not proper to them.

This process of refinement included ditching old historical functions that a medium might have served in the past. Painting was the medium that interested him in particular, and his efforts were part of his search to identify the importance of the painting in an age of mechanical reproduction – the age of the then relatively ‘new’ media of photography and film. He argued that painting should rid itself of its old illustrative or narrative functions to concentrate on its formal patterning of colour and surface. Photography was better suited to illustrative work and showed how it was not, after all, appropriate to painting. Painting could now realize its true nature.

Greenberg also made his arguments in the mid-twentieth-century context of a critique of the alienating effects of capitalism on cultural experience. He shared with other critics the view that the heightened experiences that art had traditionally provided were being eroded and displaced by a levelling down to mere ‘entertainment’ and popular kitsch. He argued that the arts could save their higher purpose from this fate ‘by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not obtained from any other kind of activity’ (Greenberg 1961, in Harrison and Wood 1992). He urged that this could be done by each art determining, ‘through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself.

By these means each art would exhibit and make explicit ‘that which was unique and irreducible’ to it (ibid.). The task of artists, then, was to search for the fundamental essence of their medium, stripping away all extraneous factors and borrowings from other media. It is often thought that this task now falls to new media artists and forwardlooking experimental producers. However, the manner in which a new medium necessarily adopts, in its early years.

Conventions and ‘languages’ of established media is well known. There is the case of the early photographers known as the Pictorialists, who strove to emulate the aesthetic qualities of painting, seeing these as the standards against which photography as a medium had to be judged. In Youngblood’s terms they would be examples of ‘perceptual imperialists’ who acted as a brake on the exploration of the radical representational possibilities afforded by photography as a new medium. Similarly, it is well known that early cinema adopted the conventions of the theatre and vaudeville, and that television looked for its forms to theatre, vaudeville, the format of the newspaper, and cinema itself. As we have seen, Bolter and Grusin’s theory of ‘remediation’ (1999) deploys a Foucauldian historical perspective to argue against the ‘comfortable modernist rhetoric’ of authentic media ‘essences’ and ‘breaks with the past’ that we have discussed here. They follow McLuhan’s insight that ‘the content of a medium is always another medium’ (1999).

They propose that the history of media is a complex process in which all media, including new media, depend upon older media and are in a constant dialectic with them (1999). Digital media are in the process of representing older media in a whole range of ways, some more direct and ‘transparent’ than others. At the same time, older media are refashioning themselves by absorbing, repurposing, and incorporating digital technologies. Such a process is also implied in the view held by Raymond Williams, whose theory of media change we discuss fully later.

Williams argues that there is nothing inherent in the nature of a media technology that is responsible for the way a society uses it. It does not, and cannot, have an ‘essence’ that would inevitably create ‘effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. In a closely argued theory of the manner in which television developed, he observes that some 20 years passed before, ‘new kinds of programme were being made for television and there were important advances in the productive use of the medium, including some kinds of original work’ (Williams 1974). Productive uses of a new medium and original work in them are not precluded, therefore, by recognising their long-term interplay with older media.

We need, then, to ask a number of questions of the modernist and avant-garde calls for new media to define itself as radically novel. Do media proceed by a process of ruptures or decisive breaks with the past? Can a medium transcend its historical contexts to deliver an ‘entirely new language’? Do, indeed, media have irreducible and unique essences (which is not quite the same as having distinguishing characteristics which encourage or constrain the kind of thing we do with them)? These seem to be especially important questions to ask of new digital media which, in large part, rely upon hybrids, convergences and transformations of older media.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

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