Page 26 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 17
______________________________________________________________
longer predominantly manual. And the perception of that distance, which
locates the act of creation as something far removed from the immediate
hand, was the major crisis for art and for culture, a point of simultaneous
material, economic, and political transition at the turn of the last century.
Cultural production, no longer an immediate craft, becomes
mechanized and industrialized into a new phenomenon that compels broad
deciphering of social and technical codes. In this dual cipher, with production
newly accompanied by and gradually supplanted by reproduction is the
semantic etymology of cyberculture, the historical moment in which a
conglomeration of signs produced both by humans and technology defines a
turbulent sea on whose waves of innovation everything new instantly, virally,
reproduced is continually rendered obsolete by further novelty, improvement,
or replacement. Drawing closer to perception, this restless cultural language,
manifest in the neologistic adoption, substitution, and convergence of art,
system, craft, and language, is a sign of cyberculture’s perpetual “until
something else”.

Notes

1
The essays in the present book evolved from presentations at the 3rd Global
Cybercultures Conference held from Thursday 11th August - Saturday 13th
August 2005 in Prague, Czech Republic. In the interdisciplinary spirit of the
conference, the essays are wide-ranging in scope; yet they trace one of two
tributaries, mirrored in the two sections of the book. The empirical essays
present data to build a portrait of human action through digital media, while
the aesthetic essays look at new media as a field of expressive practices—
visual art, film, literature, and electronic games—central to human
engagement.
2
Naumann, F., M. and Obalk, H. (eds.), Affectt Marcel: The Selected
Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. Jill Taylor London: Thames &
Hudson, 2000. The typographic configuration shown is Duchamp’s.
3
Schjeldahl, P., The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter
Schjeldahl, 1978-1990, (Lannan Series of Contemporary Art Criticism, No 2,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. p. 187.
4
See Jones, C. A., Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005.
Jones documents this reduction, and through the question, “What was it that
Greenberg took to be modern, such that an artist could emerge as either
premature or ‘pseudo’ in relation to it?” (p.150) reasons its roots to be
centered in a formalism of abstraction, one in which the body does not figure
(as it were) and which conversely resonates with technology. Her further