nettime: abroeck/ about Druckrey: Electronic Culture

[abroeck@v2.nl (Andreas Broeckmann)]

Duration/Reflection


Electronic Culture
Technology and Visual Representation
edited and introduced by Timothy Druckrey
New York: Aperture, 1996


Newsgroups and mailing lists have the advantage of making the path between
writing and reading short and fast, thus creating the possibility for a
form and intensity of intellectual discourse that can rival the
journalistic exchanges in Paris in the 19th century, or those of Weimar
Republic Berlin. The Nettime ZKPs are the fast condensations of the debates
held on this list, and they are good examples of how the old Gutenbergian
medium will slow down and substantiate the same words and ideas that
previously sped across the wires as data packets. In analogy to the recent
discussion of 'Englishes' it might be well worth reminding ourselves of the
different reading habits and forms of intellectual appropriation associated
with the various material forms in which we experience texts.

The New York photography publishers Aperture have just published a volume
called 'Electronic Culture. Technology and Visual Representation', edited
and introduced by Tim Druckrey. The book contains 31 essays by European and
North American writers and spans half a century of critical writing about
culture and technology. For me it was a welcome reminder of the historical
dimension of current discussions about culture and technology, and I would
here like to just very briefly point to its content which I feel is a very
valuable contribution to a slowing down and substantiation of our
considerations of digital culture.

The volume is divided into four main sections (History; Representation:
Photography and After; Theory; Media/Identity/Culture) and deals with a
broad spectrum of issues of technology, media and representation. Roughly
speaking, it starts where Walter Benjamin broke off, i.e. where the image
becomes associated with digital rather than analogue reproduction, and
where technology moves from the industrial into the post-industrial age of
cybernetics. And it finishes with the theoretical and cultural impact of VR
technologies and electronic networks whose aesthetic impact remains as yet
largely unexplored.

Given Druckrey's own and Aperture's special interest in visual
representation and photography, the collection places a clear emphasis on
digital imaging technologies, from post-photography to VR environments.
However, Electronic Culture succeeds in placing digital imaging in the
wider contexts of the histories of science theory and technology, of
cybernetics and the social and political usages of technology, so that it
offers not only useful analyses of theories of representation in the
digital age, but contributions to a social and technological history of
contemporary (visual) culture. On the whole, it is more interested in the
art, science and technology complex than in popular culture, and its
greatest achievement might lie in making available a series of media
theoretical texts that show that there is a significant tradition of
thought in this field that does not need McLuhan as its patron saint. It is
worth noticing that more than half of the authors in this book are
Europeans. In practice, this means that there is very little MIT-style
techno-positivism, and a lot of historical and theoretical scrutiny.

Two minor complaints: an alphabetical index would have been useful, as
would have been quoting the dates of the original publications, not least
because it would have created a stronger sense of the chronological
parameters of this most recent development in the history of visual
culture. However, the book still communicates a clear sense of the
historical depth of thinking about the impact of digital technologies in
the 20th century, and unlike many of the hype-driven compilations that are
hardly more than thematic special issues of art and culture magazines, this
is a book that looks beyond the immediate interests of 1996, and that will
last. It also makes us curious to read on, to follow certain thematic
currents and authors, and to pay more attention to the interrelations
between technology, culture and visual representation in an historical
perspective. Slowing us down in this way could be a useful, humbling
exercise which, if practised more widely, would probably save us from a lot
of the intellectual redundancy created because of a lack of historical
consciousness.

(Texts by Sandy Stone, Vannevar Bush, Martin Heidegger, Hans Magnus
Enzensberger, Arthur I. Miller, Jean-Louis Comolli, Bill Nichols, David
Tomas, Kevin Robins, Roy Ascott, Raymond Bellour, Kathy Rae Huffman, Kim H.
Veltman, Lev Manovich, Vilem Flusser, Florian Roetzer, N. Katherine Hayles,
Siegfried Zielinski, Slavoj Zizek, Erkki Huhtamo, David Blair, Louise K.
Wilson/ Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Peter Weibel, Sherry Turkle,
Pierre Levy, Hakim Bey, Anne W. Branscomb, Geert Lovink, Critical Art
Ensemble.)


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