Advanced EV + Critique

Network As Metaphor inscribes an art history in terms of media theory. Aware of recent changes in global electronic art, Network As Metaphor uses a contemporary technological and theoretical lens to examine media in terms relevant to the media art historian. The circuit begins with global communications memesis in postal history as media theory as delineated in Creation of the Media by Paul Starr, Spreading the News by Richard R. John and the Postal Age by David Henkin, as well as other, newer literature on the subject. The relationship between global migration, transportation and communication are explored through thinkers such as James W. Carey and Harold Innis while borrowing visual and political metaphors from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. To visualize global information networks of the past, is to recreate a conception of  efficiencies in how and why we communicate everything from power to aesthetics. These issues figure in various movements such as Fluxus and relational aesthetics. The changing Western conception of art is addressed in the century of modernism as a method of limiting the discourse to address the fixed delineation of time and space as an anchor in the century of technological progress, unique to our time. This provides a backdrop for examining a recent rise in literature on mail art and telematic art in Art at a Distance by Norie Neumark, Telepresence and Bio Art by Eduardo Kac, and Art and Electronic Media by Edward Shanken and others. The confluence of telematic media and new conceptualizations of art occurs at mid-century at the height of Western hegemonic power. Looking at divergent directions of late modernism and the beginnings of postmodernism through Pop Art and Fluxus, Network as Metaphor interrogates the early successes and failures of conceptual art and the very project of interdisciplinary modernism. This essay explores conceptual art and cybernetic theory as the grounding wellspring of emergent patterns in contemporary art. Informing discourse surrounding the interdisciplinary nature of critical theory, an interdisciplinary media theory is proposed as a blend of media theory, art history, and technology history. Examples are given from Dialogic by Mikhail Bakhtin, The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich and others. Using the aforementioned postal history as an ideational base (and reformulated as the antecedant to all things Internet), virtual telematic networked 3D worlds are addressed through their postal cousins, artistamps. Jack Childs’ Miniature Messages is mined here, as well as other literature specifically on the subject of artistamps at the intersection of public and private art. Echoing thinkers such as Bruno LaTour, Galloway and Thacker, Network As Metaphor reaches the conclusion the complexities of our age require us to reexamine McLuhan’s rear view mirror and apply the Laws of Media towards a new global vision for art.