By Glenn Kurtz ©1997
URL: http://www.glennkurtz.com/pubspage.html
Multimedia is a revolutionary art form, appearing at the end of a century
of revolutionary art forms. Consequently, the relation between digital
media and modern art will likely remain unclear, since it is currently
so difficult to define "multimedia," and since our century's relentless
questioning of "art" has been so successful that we no longer know what
the term means. Yet this lack of clarity in the terms "art" and "multimedia"
may provide an angle from which to explore their relation. The dissolution
or diffraction of "art" under the intense scrutiny of modern artists is
an example of how, by looking closely at a concept, we can make it disappear.
"Art" no longer functions as a unified concept because its meaning depends
on how, from where, and by whom it is viewed. For multimedia, this multiplicity
of perspectives is not revolutionary but only a starting point. Although
multimedia technology enables sophisticated composite images and collage
effects, its significance will emerge only when it changes how we see,
when it changes what we understand by an "image." To be revolutionary,
multimedia must be more than a new technology, it must become a new conceptual
art.
The recent history of music offers an example of what I mean by conceptual
art. The development of magnetic recording tape in the 1940's transformed
Western music far more radically than the abolition of tonality earlier
in the century. Recording tape gave musicians an instrument capable of
reproducing and manipulating sounds that were not, strictly speaking,
notes. With this, the very material of "music" changed, leading rapidly
to confusion over the difference between "music" and "noise." But this
confusion is conceptual and does not depend on the new technology. In the
1957 article "Experimental Music," John Cage put his challenge to "music"
this way: "For in this new music nothing takes place but sounds: those
that are notated and those that are not."
"Nothing takes place but sounds." This sentence effectively ends a
central concern of Western music, which carefully distinguished between
the tones of a violin and those of a cellophane wrapper. By including
non-notated sounds in his aesthetic, Cage made all sounds into "music"--
at least potentially so, since the listener must still grant these sounds
a certain kind of attention to hear them. Cage's music is as much about
this attention, about listening and the categories we impose on the sounds
we hear, as it is about the production or reproduction of the sounds themselves.
His medium, more than the range of sounds, is the scale of our attention.
Cage redefines "music" by teaching us to listen more closely, to hear what
takes place in the silences, the gaps between what previously seemed continuous.
Opening our ears, we discover what has always been there, although we never
heard it.
According to Marshall McLuhan, a transformation in the scale of our
attention--a shift in the boundaries of what we consider "music" or, more
broadly, "information"-- is characteristic of a new medium. The medium is
the message, he writes in Understanding Media, "because it is the medium
that shapes and controls the scale and form of human understanding." But
while this shift is often associated with a new technology--in the case of
music, the tape recorder--it is primarily conceptual: coughs in music are
not new, only the inclusion of coughs in "music" is new.
A more penetrating analysis of the relation between technology and
the scale of our attention can be found in Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin uses
the metaphor of psychoanalysis to describe the perceptual shift brought
about by the development of film. "Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue
passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed
dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its
course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things
have changed. [Freud's] book isolated and made analyzable things which had
heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For
the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the
film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. [...] With
the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. [...]
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to
unconscious impulses."
With Benjamin, as with Freud and Cage, the act of perceiving--the methodology,
the technology of perception--defines the objects or events perceived.
The lesson amounts to this: What we see, what we understand of what we
see, depends on how, from where, how fast, and with what tools we look.
And often, looking more closely at something makes it disappear. By shifting
the scale of our attention, we open up what previously seemed continuous.
The texture of reality becomes suddenly porous and, like the scientists
in "Fantastic Voyage," it is as if we pass through the surface to explore
the hidden depths.
I say it is as if we pass through the surface, because the tools we
use to change scale--psychoanalysis, film, the telescope and microscope--do
not simply penetrate a crude covering to encounter the true detail. These
tools introduce a multiplicity of scales of perception. We do not discover
the "real" meaning beneath the deceptive surface, but find instead a potentially
infinite nesting of different surfaces, different orders of information.
For the creator of multimedia, multiple orders of information are a
fundamental resource. In a restless telescoping and microscoping through
the how, from where, and how fast of perception, multimedia could create
an aesthetic of multiple scales similar to Cubism's aesthetic of multiple
perspectives.
Software such as Adobe's Photoshop begins to demonstrate this, although
we do not generally notice it. Artists have tended to use Photoshop to create
smoothly manipulated images; they have understood the software as a smart,
digital paintbrush. But the technology should be allowed to redefine what
we understand by an "image."
In Photoshop 4.0 there are 31 different scales on which to view an
image by zooming in and out. These different views provide a crash course
in modern art. A representational painting--something by Jacques-Louis
David, for example--remains representational only briefly when its scale
is altered. Zoom in a few times and the smooth surface begins to dissolve.
Although hands or faces may still be recognizable, the illusion of realism
is broken and we see instead a composition with fields of color. On this
scale, David is an impressionist. Zoom in again and the fields of color
crystallize into abstract patterns of rectangles; what was a hand now resembles
a late painting by Klee. Zoom in once more and the rectangles no longer
form patterns, but are large juxtaposed blocks of color. David, looked at
closely, imitates Rothko. These transformations are possible because all
digitized images derive from Seurat; pixels are electronic pointillism. But
Seurat--like most artists currently producing images on the computer--created
for a single scale, that of the unaided eye. For us, however, the unaided
eye is no longer the measure of what we can see, just as a single perspective
no longer defines our conceptual relation with the world. On different scales,
the image is many images. Thought of as part of the image, these multiple
scales may already constitute a new art form.
By including the functionality of software in our conception of the
image itself, multimedia artists could begin exploring the infinite nesting
of different orders of information that together compose the world that happens
to appear on our particular scale of perception. If we are then unable to
provide a single, unified definition of the "image"--or of "multimedia"--this
failure may be a significant insight into the emerging aesthetics of the
new medium.