Page 17 - Cyberculture and New Media

8 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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tasks, new varieties of professionals surface; those whose language of
specialty is that of formal, uniform, formulaic, formalistic interaction:
information workers, knowledge engineers, scientists, researchers.
Accompanying machine-assisted cognition is humans’ surrender to
technology, and with it, the terms that characterize thinking: terms that can
only be approached allegorically as the semblance of identity.
In the sphere of relations comprising the cybercultural, two strands
exhibit particularly extensive levels of growth. The first appears through an
insistent translation of social and communicative signs from one context onto
another. Given that any cyberculture’s foundations are technological, more
enduring values, those connected to a personal sense of being, must derive
from activities that traffic within them – art and religion provide examples for
such recodification. Problematically rooted in pre-modern and early
modernist references, symbols and messages of these expressive dimensions
have transmuted through the rational analytic gaze of technological means
and media and pressed into service in postmodern frames of expression. The
allure of old world obscurities is exposed and questioned anew through the
gridlike circumstances of a standard model pulsing to the pace of electronic
language. Meaning once richly construed through organic, intimate, and
localised connection to production–the tilling of land, the tending of
livestock, securing a mode of subsistence that is not distinct from the place of
existence–is now derived from the widespread and exact manipulation of
tools designed to reduce time and space.
But there is another sense in which it makes sense to look at the
bridge between Stieglitz, standing as the last pre-modernist of the developed
image, insisting that photographs “look like photographs”, and Duchamp, the
first conceptual artist, for whom purity of form was anathema, as portal to the
concerns of cybercultural signification, layered and multiply codifying. For to
the extent that signs with variable meaning populate the cybercultural
interface (now that there is no longer an unproblematic modernist landscape),
identity, activity, and presence are all brought into focus through the measure
of another benchmark crucial to these two artists, though for opposing
reasons: that of the image. Here, in the emblem of the image, of imaginal
construction, of imaginary virtuality, of the basis for the process of the
interface, cybercultural mediation is defined, encapsulated. The image is
more than an object, it is a verb, a reagent for representation, and thereby,
also for reception. In this, and long before Guy Debord translates the
connotational susceptibility of the image to its unmitigated collective
commodification as spectacle, Stieglitz’s viewfinder charts a range of
imagery that relates intimately to human experience without artifice, either
retrograde (informed by painterly façade) or postmodern (supporting cynical
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second readings) . For Stieglitz, in a manner never possible for Greenberg,
the image culminates as the source of reflection that Bergson pursues, while