Page 11 - Cyberculture and New Media

2 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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new casting aside the old in the incessant feast that is this pattern of
innovation and obsolescence. We might, because of the persistence of
cyberculture’s incipient reconfigurations—often deployed through new
technology—easily locate in any major moment within twentieth century
historiography markers of the passing of one age and, simultaneously, glints
of the one in advent. And so, there is, not entirely surprisingly, one
inconspicuous occasion, from a time that we might call the intellectual
prehistory of contemporary art, when a succinctly worded letter inscribes a
moment in the dialogue between two worlds in the person of two artists, each
a sovereign of his own medium:

Dear Stieglitz__
Even a few words I don’t feel like writing.
You know exactly what I think about photography
I would like to see it make people despise painting
until something else
will make photography unbearable__
There we are.
Affectueusement,
2
Marcel Duchamp

Dating from 1922, this letter, resonating in the uncharted freshness
of photography’s early conceptual age, is a pithy riposte to Alfred Stieglitz,
who, nurturing concerns about posterity, had stirred Marcel Duchamp in
previous correspondence by posing a more transcendental question, “Can a
photograph have the significance of art?” It would be neither the first nor the
last time that questions would hover at the interface between the historical
dawn of a medium and an atemporal, universalizing category, something on
the order of absolute status, or to choose Stieglitz’s more personal term,
significance. What makes the question permanently relevant is the premise,
summarily anticipated by Stieglitz, that the standing of any medium will not
merely relate to contemporary concerns and their practical necessity, but
additionally occupies a manifest place in time from which scholars may
construct social, scientific, and cultural retrospectives – which is to say,
construct histories and world views. Equally relevant to the contemporary
media arts today is that, what in 1922 is asked about photography, a medium
without, at that time, a developed place or canon in art, is what is being
similarly asked now about the computer game. Since, for Stieglitz, it is not
the medium’s continued existence that was in question—this was already
assumed by his escalating level of commercial production and breadth of
photographic work—the tightness of the embrace, measured via heightened
social status, of technology’s relationship to a society’s arts need a new line
of explanation.