Page 270 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 261
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never ceasing and teleologically fulfilling its journey as a media history.
Instead, an afterword sounds more appropriate way to take a final look on to
this what we have defined as a breakdown of binary opposition between
classical, traditional and modern media modes. Nevertheless we ought to be
careful; Spivak says in the preface for Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” that the
desire of deconstruction has also the opposite allure. Deconstruction seems to
offer a way out of the closure of knowledge. By inaugurating the open-ended
indefinites of textuality – by thus “placing the abyss” (mettre en abîme), as
the French expression would literally have it – it shows us the lure of the
abyss as freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with a
much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting
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bottom.
Deconstruction’s impact on the research of media art has been
minimal. One reason for this might be, as Spivak reminds us, that
deconstruction can never be a positive science. Dixon is ready to argue that
Derrida’s linguistic plague darkens, divides, and undermines notions of
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meaning and truth. But we are also about to notice that by creating new
categories of information modes we never can say it is the final
categorization of the media modes but a humble start in a search for more.
Here Lacoue-Labarthe’s mimesis can be interpreted as a positive concept: not
as conceptative and sheltering, not as radical and resisting, but as a logic that
always works “in-between” these polarities to overcome, for instance, the
discontinuities of modernist art and the very negation proposed by the
modern.
Discussions informed by the grounding of the myth of the modern
hint at the presence of oscillation in art, constrained by the specific media of
the period. The idea stretches back at least far as the Renaissance but
surprisingly little attention has been paid to it. Certain features of new media
have been found here, features such as the geometry of space being a space of
several traces left by different media art modes such as participative and
recording modes and that promulgate not binary oppositions but rather an
ungeometrical space of being.
We have seen how in specific mises-en-abyme of media art, or of the
machinery of media art, the tension between binary oppositions like truth-
false and absence-presence have collapsed into an abyss of infinite reflections
of identity work what we can describe as hyperbologic.
We have read assumptions towards hyperbological mode of media
art (for Krauss it favours solublution between the poles) and technology
(Bolter and Grusin) but these openings haven’t been sufficiently satisfactory.
As mentioned, not even deconstruction, as a method of investigation, can
present us with sufficient interpretation of media art works; rather,
deconstruction can erect questions concerning the mode of media and its
ethical impacts in terms of mimesis, in terms of questioning how media can