'Time is no longer related to movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it: this is the first great Kantian reversal in the Crtitique of Pure Reason' . Gilles Deleuze.

   The 'revolution' generated by the shift from analogue to digital media has not come with a unified aesthetic theory. Rather, the accumulating effects of electronic media have transformed and dispersed many of our assumptions about the making of art and its relationship with communication, technology, media, distribution, and temporality. Over the past decade, a range of works has matured to the point where some serious re-evaluations are necessary. Computer animation, digital video/sound/imaging, electronic books, hypermedia, interactivity, cyberspace the terms of a new discourse with the electronic need to be integrated with a shifting aesthetic discourse reeling in the aftermath of critical theories of representation and postmodern experience. The merging of technology and art raises some key questions concerning the way in which experiences will be articulated.
Encompassing literature, cinema, entertainment, and the arts, technology has become the driving force accelerating the emergence of what we might call telesthetics.

   The ramifications of this accelerated shift are difficult to assess. No cultural transformation has occurred without a corresponding technology. Networks, expert systems, artificial intelligence, immersion, interactivity, biogenetics, etc., are forms in which many of the creative practices of the future will doubtless be grounded. How much this relates to the relationship between computers and representation is pivotal to grappling with the development of hyper, interactive, cyber, virtual, and networked media. Indeed, the development of digital media, networks, and technology form much of the basis for social communication. And, if the development of technology succeeds in creating a universal digital system of exchange (as seems likely), then a far-reaching critique of communication will be necessary, one that would account for the cultural meaning of technology in terms of the meanings it forms aesthetically and politically. Revamping representation in electronic culture is a key to tracking the complexity and subtlety of the emerging configurations of communication.

   Several key challenges face the development of digital technologies: adequately to account for the shifting histories of technology in terms of its relationship with cultural theory and experience; to create a critical forum for elucidating the form these changes take; to integrate social and aesthetic issues into the discourse of technology; to develop initiatives for the support of independent production; to find and identify means of distribution for creative projects; and fully to contextualize the long and deeply consequential history of electronic art.

   Emerging from digital media, there is a kind of transformation of several traditions: montage, narrative, temporality, a rethinking or extension of the issues surrounding the simple semiotic constitution of the image, and a concern with the 'temporalized-space' of electronics.

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   In electronic media, a new range of problems is developing that invokes not merely formal issues of juxtaposition and association, but also hose of the interplay (or collision) of text, image, and sound in spatial and temporal layers. Instead of resolving as a singularization, the flow of associations emerges as a fragmented temporal narrative. In many ways, hypertext (for example) has developed away from a simple text-based media into a polyvalent one. Instead of the textual cross-referencing of hypertext, works engaged in dynamic media collapse many of the limits between text, sound and image, and situate the user in the midst of assimilation and feedback. The effects of this are to suggest a field characterized by transition and not resolution, in which experience teeters between epistemic presence and temporal contingency.

   What seems so interesting about works confronting the shift from linear-causal models to relativistic ones is that the creative process becomes a reciprocal system rather than a signifier of narrative mastery. Grounding much of this experiential approach is an evaluation of collapsing boundaries between discourses of space and time in the realm of electronics. As Virilio writes: "The measure of extension and of movement is now almost exclusively that of a technical vector, a mode of communication or telecommunication that desynchronizes the time from the space of the passage." Yet, the blurring of spatial and temporal is less a communicative problem than a cultural one in which reconfigured subjects navigate in virtualized systems whose hold on the laws of physics is not "measured" in material temporalities and whose despatialized effect is not a loss of presence.

   Indeed, the interplay between history, memory, fiction, and discourse poses essential questions about the meaning of electronic media. Rather than approaches that equate the formation of linkages in thammatic forms, approaches emerge that structure material as episodic. One might draw on the development not only of literary theory to account for this but also on cultural studies, particularly the works of Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari. Foucault established the relationship between information and power in terms of the archive, and posed the methodology of archaeology to address it. "Archaeology," he wrote, "tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline; it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be allegorical." [Archaeology, p. 139]

   Episodic, or arrayed, information is created in forms that suggest that the metaphor of the unified image or text cannot serve as a totality, but rather that events are themselves complex configurations of experience, intention, and interpretation. In this sense, the narratives of electronics are non-linear and kinetic rather than linear and potential. They suggest transition and not resolution. Indeed, the language being used to describe these works is telling in its implications: navigation, hyperlinks, archive, database,

archaeology.

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   Deleuze and Guattari have found in the metaphor of 'a thousand plateaus' a way of theorizing experience in digital media, the rhizome."The world," they write, "has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its subject...A system of this kind could be called a rhizome...The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing...Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways."

   These 'entryways' are linked by an associational network in which causal leaps are superseded by temporal connections. So instead of cross-referencing, many of the works of electronic media collapse the limits between text, sound and image, and situate the user in the midst of assimilation and feedback. Episodic, or arrayed, this information is created in forms that suggest that the usefulness of the unified image, text, space, or time, cannot serve as a totality, but rather, that the coupling of events are themselves complex configurations of experience, intention, and interpretation. In this sense, the narratives of electronics are non-linear and kinetic rather than linear and potential, as both representational practice, and as a measure of production emerging as an essential discourse in the extension of ideas in the 'sphere' of the experietial.

   A recent book by Regis Debray, Media Manifestos, outlined a broad framework for characterizing the social meaning of media: Logosphere, Graphosphere, Videosphere, each corresponding to a different 'regime' represented as 'after writing,' 'after printing,' and 'after the audiovisual'. And while there are problems in such historical characterizations, Debray identifies significant cultural issues concerning the image. "Thus", he writes, "the artificial image would have passed through three different modes of being in the Western brain- presence (the saint present through his effigy); representation; and simulation (in the scientific sense), while the figure perceived exercised its intermediary function from three successive, inclusive perspectives the supernatural, the natural, and the virtual". This kind of reflexive model conforms with what Debray admits as the work of mediology rather than historicism. Yet, the scope of the issue extends beyond the limitations of these two disciplines into the realms of social epistemology, experiential psychology, and scientific methodology. Nevertheless, the outline serves to suggest that the virtualization of the image has a history rooted in the symbolic even if Debray does not account for the technologies forming these images nor the encounter with the epistemological impact of representation.

   The issues raised by the relationship between the development of technology and the imagination pose stunning challenges to the traditions of culture. It is clear that systems theories of communication, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, cyborg identity, virtual collectivity, or electronic democracy, will not fully suffice to encompass the meaning of electronic culture, no less of electronic art. Instead, theories of communication will need to be reconfigured in terms of interactivity, dispersal, and technological representation. Zealously promoted, these technologies seem to offer remedies for the uprooted cultures of modernity and confrontations with the return of stability of political affiliation and discursive collaboration. As much concerned with ideology as with identity, the technosphere is more than a new cyber-sociological issue. It stands as a possible location for the establishment of historical identity in terms of the conditions of dispersed affiliation and contingent power.

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   The network breaks the grip of point-to-point limitations of telephony and shatters the dominance of broadcast media. In their place is a dynamic system in which the abandonment of location is not a signifier of placelessness, and in which representation is not a sign of the loss of the real.

   Indeed, while issues of space and time dominated discourses of modernity, the related issues of interface and duration have come to stand within postmodernity as signifiers of a far more intricate situation. Worn traditions of the public sphere, the sociology of post- industrialization, the discreteness of identity, have been supplanted by a form of distributed imbeddedness or better, the immersion of the self in the mediascapes of tele-culture which must generate a communicative practice whose boundaries are not mapped in physical space. Instead, the technologies of new media map a geography of cognition, of reception, andof communication emerging in territories whose hold on matter is ephemeral, whose position in space is tenuous, whose temporality is not mapped in decontextualized moments, and whose presence is measured in acts of participation rather than coincidences of location.

   New York, November '96

   Timothy Druckrey.