Page 21 - Cyberculture and New Media

12 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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with another, pluralized across time, space, and culture, a transhistorical
isthmus of worlds comes into view. It is a space otherwise unable to
harmonise one culture whose embryonic spiritual roots deliver transcendence
but sacrifice relativism, with another, innervated by continual flux but limited
to material reality. As similar to the work of Marsching and Durant, the
album, replete with transcendental, conceptual and aesthetic significance,
functions within a rare ethos in which the modern work of art is pressed into
service as landscape surveyor scanning through an expressive field of
ancestral moments and energies.
Even so, this is not the only compound tension induced through
technological postmodernity. There is, in addition to the transhistorical
colligation of epochs, another tension that cyberculture’s overlaying
multiplicities have provoked. Rather than manifesting in the temporal
dimension, its encroachment marks across the spatial axis, for which reason it
is transformal. By this term I mean not only the substitution of form with
mode, but specifically the process by which that exchange has been realized,
such that form and shape now operate more as enunciative verbs than as
static substances. This alteration appears most discernibly in art practices that
now transcend all singularity of medium (and thus of form), yet retain the
kind of pure formalism that one might have felt irrelevant to the
deconstructive character of contemporary art. The theatre on which this
transformal action takes place is, as I have mentioned, that of the image, but,
insubstantially present only as projection, the image now assumes the
dimensionality of a material support that extends beyond the two dimensions
of a projection screen. Of this fusion of image and space, which may assume
the name filmic sculpture, several examples indicate the transformal case for
cybercultural encoding in spatial appearance.