Antipodean Views
Subjective sketches of an artistic approach to media
Heiko Daxl, 1992
"... the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful....We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art." (Paul Valery)
It is not necessary to stand on one's head to get an idea of the 'antipodean use of modern media technology for artistic purposes but the phenomenon can sometimes turn one's ideas upside-down. Especially artists feel and express the awareness that the changes in the electronic era of our days are strongly affecting the way one thinks, works and sees.
Media reality is always an artificial reality, transmitted through a technological filter. After the initial shock caused by Lumiere's films, our media socialisation has made us ever more accustomed to regarding pictorial reality as the reality and the truth. Our picture of the world is produced by the technical systems of the world-wide media company networks, which deliver the myth of opening a window onto the world- As news and entertainment become increasingly interchangeable at an international level, these companies are developing stereotyped codes which eliminate the difference of space and thus, its qualities. The recently released software Plots Unlimited for storyboard-writers shows profoundly this perspective.
The intention of social usefulness is undermined by the so called populist thinking of high rates in reaching a large number of viewers/consumers. Reaching a high rate does not just mean do reach a large audience, but also to exclude a large number of people, which have other reasons to use the medium and choose for the purpose of interest. The task to be an informative, educational and critical medium is just alive outside the prime-time programmes in late-night niches where the frequentation of viewers is almost not measurable. Tins is a Circulus Diabolus, while it gives new arguments, that these programmes do not reach enough audience.
Through this, the antipodean view on the world, blurs into the global abolishing the contrasts between 'here' and 'there'. The world is not just becoming a global village in Marshall McLuhan sense of the word, but even worse, it becomes a global suburb, without centres, without stories and without history. The audio-visual environment of the modem communication technology creates by industrialising the view a crisis of meaning, not only in personal life but also in the production and experience of culture as a whole.
There is life and there is 'TV: Let's turn on the TV to see if it's raining. Media are an assault on the concept of the self as the centre of a single reality with a single viewpoint. "What has been added is an artificial reality capable of making us lose of ourselves between the private self and an artificial representation of life." (Margot Lovejoy) The lack of experience and individual ability of taking part in the creation of the media society leads to an real unreality.
The re-realisation of current reality, by merging modern tools with the individual experience could become an artists' respond to the clichés and the postmodernist deconstruction strategies of the media-society. By understanding "Art not as the reflection of reality, but as the reality of that reflection," as Jean-Luc Godard once said, art could get to the antipodean character, which provokes questions and does not try to give answers, where there are no questions. "We are in the midst of a vast process in which (literary) forms are being melted down, a process in which many of the contrasts in terms of which we have been accustomed to think might loose their relevance." (Walter Benjamin, 1928)
A changing world needs changes in thinking and practice and not just the sale of old wines with new labels. In spite of the widespread approvement technology and media do not lead to increasingly objective statements and information. Media cause more irrationality through the growing lack of being able to make distinctions between reality and fiction with the fiction pretending to cite from reality as the example and ideal: the recipient feels his reality to be inferior to a projected reality e.g. TV-fiction, and tries to adjust his ideal to the reality of media. On this way irrationality becomes the basis of an identity of reality and fiction.
The idea to handle a more and more complex environment with pre-fabricated explanations, commentaries and images is going to fail because these models might work in economic but not in human relations. Franz Kafka said already in the 20ies that "cinema puts the eye into an uniform."
What You See Is What You Get, the slogan for promoting desk-top computing should be answered in the case of mass communication and media with a quotation by the young Roiling Stones '"You can't always get what You want .. but if You try sometimes, You can get what You need-" With the need of a different experience than what is offered one might get a different view. Or to say in the words of Hans-Peter Duerr: "Only who climbs over the fence, knows about what is inside."
Cross-over art-forms are developing. One should carefully regard the most different forms of presentation and supporting media not isolated from each other, but in their mutual conditions and influences. Between the languages of experimental media art, fine arts and technical innovations secret channels have always existed. "Our best ideas are often those that bridge between different worlds." (Marvin Minsky) Their inherent forming may turn out to be different when being looked in a superficial way, but they are just varied modifications of the reflection of reality, which outside of conventional visual patterns and narrations withdraw from the ruling media ideologies and thus gain political relevance by fusing content and form into a new interpretation of culture and society.
In contrast to 'classical art', media artworks elude the grasp of traditional concepts of art, and questioning existing aesthetic categories. Media art should and will not dominate already existing art, but can stimulate cultural discourses about space, time and sense on a non technical level. For when the systems and their methods are no longer in the forefront, when the asking of ontological questions again plays a role in determining how we deal with the world, art, too, is "beyond machines". (Vilem Husser)