[…] The word telematic derives from “tele-communication” and “Informatics”. It addresses our world-wide, instant connections through machines. That connectivity has led, and continues to lead to the emergence of new patterns of communication, new power structures, and new ways to realize values. […]
[…] The digital city - as a model for describing common processes within a global telematic society - does not any longer exist in the form of extensive residential areas, industrial plants and skyscraping office towers but in software programs on computers all over the globe. […]
[…] The same could be said of the telematic society, or number of social-monetary acts inside the telematic network of cheque-invoices. […]
[…] Decades ago, the philosopher Vilém Flusser also dreamed of a similarly linked ‘cosmic brain’; he drafted a positive vision of a ‘telematic society’. Apparently, the fascination with the concept of a ‘global brain’ knows no national borders, and it finds its supporters in a wide spectrum of different scientific disciplines. […]
[…] “...cyberculture has become synonymous with the so-called ‘new edge’ of the subcultural avant-garde; a bricolage of technoculture, neo-‘60s psychedelia, transcendentalism, designer ‘smart’ drugs, modern primitivism and ‘strechnology’ (the do-it-yourself street ethic of finding a use for things). In a much more specialised sense, cyberculture is associated with cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is equally difficult to adequately define. However, most accounts tend to portray it as the wired successor of the punk sensibility of the late 1970s... Cyberpunk is a lifestyle, a way of living in a telematic society, as well as an attitude towards it. It is a hybrid blend of info-tech obsession, Situationist politics, poststructuralist savvy and liberterian utopics.” Darren Tofts, Memory Trade […]
[…] Ten years after his death, the reputation of Vilém Flusser as one of Europe’s most original modern philosophers continues to grow. Increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America, the Prague-born intellectual’s thought has until now remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world due to a lack of translations. His innovative writings theorize-and ultimately embrace-the epochal shift that humanity is undergoing from what he termed “linear thinking” (based on writing) toward a new form of multidimensional, visual thinking embodied by digital culture. For Flusser, these new modes and technologies of communication make possible a society (the “telematic” society) in which dialogue between people becomes the supreme value. […]
[…] What Europe lacks is imagination. It will not come from politicians. In the universities it is starved by lack of funding: research scientists, artists and academics are being abandoned to so-called market forces. Throughout Europe, institutions of higher learning are either chasing the favours of international corporations or aspiring to their manner of operation. The problem with this is that their sights are fixed on old corporate structures, failing to recognise that Business is undergoing radical change and transformation. The more advanced corporations are becoming more fluid, re-structured from the inside out rather than outside in, bottom up rather than top down. Top down institutions are doomed to extinction. Without a real understanding of the nature of network struuctures in a telematic society, universities will be doomed also. […]
[…] But these new insights and this new technologies of cognition, perception and communication are not merely additions to the repetoire of human behaviour, they are actually transforming human behaviour in important ways. The impact, for example, of telepresence and interaction in virtual reality have incalculable implications for the way we live, just as hypermedia and multimedia systems, as they develop, will have immense implications for the way we navigate information and generate knowledge. It is not simply that in the computer, the artist has found new tools, it is that we now inhabit a new environment, an electronic dataspace. The task of art throughout the 20th century has been to make the invisible visible. Now we have the means to more fully realise that ambition. Rather than denying the spiritual dimensions of art, computer-mediated systems subtly enable us to extend those dimensions.Telematic technology is finally a ‘spiritual’ technology, its domain is that of human consciousness. Connectivity through the electronic networks induces telenoia, a life-affirming sense of mind-at-large. Pre-telematic society induced only paranoia, the Self imprisoned in the mind. […]
[…] There are any number of descriptions we use today to describe the technologically advanced state of our society: the Knowledge society, the information society, the communications society, the telematic society, and so on. All of these labels contain the idea that a new impetus in technology – namely, digital technology – will lead to the replacement of industrial capitalism as we have come to know it. […]
[…] masterplanning represents a strategy for maintaining social systems - it is difficult to estimate the extent to which present and future - strategies - and concepts of sophisticated action guided by utopias or dystopias may become a relevant framework for dissidence in the telematic society, where this framework originates from a variously regarded relationship to those forms and spaces of activity which differently motivate its emergence. in linear discourse on this subject, those with euphoric attitude encounter conservatives and pessimists. it is the task of the experiments based on these encounters to confirm or to refuse the arguments on either side of discontent. […]
[…] Bruce Lincoln, Senior Educational Technologist at the Institute for Learning Technologies, recognizes the achievements of Playing 2 Win and has a vision for how much further it can go. “People need to think about economic equity in a telematic society from narrow-band to broadband”, said Lincoln. “You won’t have to have a computer; it will be a device, a screen, glasses, clothes. If we don’t bring the networks to these communities, the people who live there won’t be tied into the economy.” […]
[…] Long lists of services are meant to suggest the coming utopia: interactive television, electronic funds transfer computer-aided instruction, customized news service, electronic magazines, electro- nic mail, computer teleconferencing, on-line stock and weather reports, computerized yellow pages, shopping via home computer, and so forth. In the words of James Martin, writing in Telematic Society: “The electronic revolution will not do away with work, but it does hold out some promises: most boring jobs can be done by machines; lengthy commuting can be avoided; the opportunities for personal creativity will be unlimited.” […]
[magyar]
Telematic Society • Telematic Art
[…] Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term “telematic art” to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott’s philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. […]
[…] Telenoia by contrast speaks of open systems, fluid and dynamic relationships, unconstrained communication. Telenoia must inform the quality of European life in the 21st century. The radical constructivism of post-biological philosophy joined with the radical connectivism of telematic art can provide a scenario of living in which we take on responsibility for the construction of our own identity and the reality it inhabits. An identity and a reality in a constant state of transformation and flux., in which no aspect of cognition or perception is taken for granted, no a priori conditions assumed or accepted. […]
[…] ANDRÉ VALLIAS - From 1987 to 1994 he lived in Germany, where he was inspired by the ideas of the philosopher Vilém Flusser, and oriented his activities towards computer media. Vallias is concerned with the creation of non-logocentric poetry that would be able to compound all forms in which knowledge manifests itself, such as words, numbers, images, and sounds. He regards the suitable poem for the telematic society as a kind of “Open Diagram”, which is compelling to a non-linear, active mode of reading. […]
[…] While Telematic Connections presents the possibilities for connections and affiliations, it still acknowledges a persistent question about connective new media. Artist, theorist, and teacher Roy Ascott stated it poignantly already in 1990, “Is there love in the telematic embrace?” Is there content besides technology? Engagement beyond entertainment? A message that is not only the medium? […]
[…] Some pervasive questions have dominated the Telematic Art field for the last few years. These include questions relating to our need to create meaningful contents for a diversity of cultures without losing depth. The process of organising an immeasurable volume of information in poetic signs and the articulation of flexible poetic actions for the network environment are very important considerations for telematic artists. These questions are entwined with others related to the use of computer languages and the development of the technological environment in which they will function. […]
[…] The creative use of networks makes them organisms. The work is never in a state of completion, how could it be so? Telematique is a decentralising medium; its metaphor is that of a web or net in which there is no centre, or hierarchy, no top nor bottom. It breaks the boundaries not only of the insular individual but of institutions, territories and time zones. To engage in telematic communication is to be once everywhere and nowhere. In this it is subversive. It subverts the idea of authorship bound up within the solitary individual. It subverts the idea of individual ownership of the works of imagination. It replaces the bricks and mortar of institutions of culture and learning with an invisible college and a floating museum the reach of which is always expanding to include new possibilities of mind and new intimations of reality. […]
[…] In telematic art, meaning is not created by the artist, distributed through the network, and received by the observer. Meaning is the product of interaction between the observer and the system, the content of which is in a state of flux, of endless change and transformation. In this condition of uncertainty and instability, not simply because of the criss-crossing interactions of users of the network but because content is embodied in data that is itself immaterial, it is pure electronic difference, until it has been reconstituted at the interface as image, text, or sound. The sensory output may be differentiated further as existing on screen, as articulated structure or material, as architecture, as environment, or in virtual space. The metaphor of a semantic sea endlessly ebbing and flowing, of meaning constantly in flux, of all words, utterances, gestures, and images in a state of undecidability, tossed to and fro into new collusions and conjunctions within a field of human interaction and negotiation, is found as much in new science – in quantum physics, second order cybernetics or chaology for example – as in art employing telematic concepts or literary criticism that has absorbed philosophy and social theory into its practice. As communications networks increase, we will eventually reach a point where the billions of information exchanges, shuttling through the networks at any one time, can create coherence in the global brain. […]
[…] Modifying Ascott’s hopeful proposition, I suggest that the interactive elements throughout the artist’s oeuvre encompass a range of dynamic attractions that offer a more ambiguous prognosis for the future. By refracting Justine’s description of love as narcissistic reflection through Duchamp’s Large Glass and the glaring monitors of telematics, I intend to show that the technological illusion of transparency disassociates love from intimate mutuality and imposes a condition of introverted mediation at a distance. My analysis of this technological and psychological condition of love leads to a consideration of the construction of technology and intuition, form and content as dualities. This context frames my concluding remarks about art, technology, love, and the future. […]
[…] Guy Debord was even more anxious in 1988 about the autocratic reign of market economies and the invisible “officials” who run them, than he was in the 1960s - and with good reason. His concept of an “integrated spectacle” would come to resemble what French theorist Paul Virilio described as the “delocalization” of telematic society that increasingly consumes the present at the site of the electronic interface. At that paradoxical juncture of integration and dislocation, Virilio noted that “knowledge of the depth of the past” evaporates in a constant present, leading to a world “without memory”, and “a crisis in the temporal dimension of the present moment” that renders it “immaterial”. The increasing immateriality of the present, theorized by Virilio in 1995, supports Debord’s claim that the obliteration of historical knowledge and memory enables “all usurpers” to fulfill their aim: “to make us forget that they have only just arrived”. This comment suggests that Debord was mistrustful of the proclaimed “death” of both history and authorship that paved the way for appropriational discourses and practices that authenticated usurpation (by the newly arrived) with the blessings of cultural theory. […]
[…] Numerous radio projects began to employ new technologies in an artistic way; for instance, Horizontal Radio, a telematic radio network event organized by EBU in 1995. Fourteen state-owned radio broadcasting companies participated in this simultaneous telebroadcast, which involved EBU, Ars Acustica, ten independent broadcasting companies and countless pirate radio stations, using VHF, medium waves, short waves, Internet servers and a real time audio server, all based in Linz. Over 200 artists, including composers and writers, contributed works under the general heading of “migrations”. […]
[…] The description of this “bottom-up, distributed, local determination of behaviour” is also a description of the art of homo telematicus, of creative human beings in the post-biological age, of art in the telematic culture. Ours is an art of electronic networking, of intensive connectivity, mind-to-mind collaboration through computer-mediated telecommunications systems. An art in which the artist or author is a complex and often widely distributed system, in which both human and artificial cognition and perception play their part. An art which is emergent from a multiplicity of interactions in electronic space. […]
[…] «Telematic Sculpture 4» promotes a railway track at whose starting point is anchored a computer monitor. The T.S.4 is connected per modem to the Internet, whose diverse and intensive streams of data actually move the sculpture. With each signing in at «Telematic Sculpture 4,» the sculpture is brought momentarily to a standstill. In their entirety, the data streams and concrete movements of the sculpture throughout Austria’s Biennale pavilion appear on the monitor as status information. […]
[…] The new media and the Internet enable us to experience different kinds of information which are of a specifically telematic nature and for this reason effectively differ from the usual forms of communication. By linking the concepts tele and synaesthesia to each other, we deal with the fact that the transmission of data creates a synaesthetic effect: tele-synaesthesia, Synesthetes are in some sense, people of the future. At the end of the 20th century, the practicable units of time have become digitalised, magnified, and incredibly accelerated. The modalities of our sensorial perception become interactive by means of electronic mechanisms of control and selection. A tele-culture is emerging, subjecting both the perceptual and the conceptual to —strictly speaking— continuous revision. […]
[…] The value of interactive and telematic media in this context is immediately apparent, since the widespread diffusion of ideas and the enrichment of individual and collective work are the defining attributes of such media. And it is in art practice that these attributes have been most imaginatively explored and where new models of communication, construction and, indeed, resistance have been most subtly modelled. Here both the concept of emergence and the principle of uncertainty must be evoked since the processes involved are neither prescriptive nor deterministic — all is open-ended, incomplete and contingent, awaiting always the intervention and constructive collaboration of the viewer. […]
[…] The great merit of Fred Forest resides not only in this slip of the conceptual land of his thought. He goes naturally of course to the heart of the things and fully assume the neo-primitivism of our telematic universe. I greet in him, beyond even of the lucid analyst and the inspired seer, the power of his vitalist conviction. Fred Forest is the great naive of the Internet and he trusts to be. This pride, that I greet, is to put entirely to his artist’s credit. […]
[…] Some critics wish this was true. However, there is much less openness in most interactive artworks than they hope. Even though the presence of the artist is usually hidden behind the scenes, it can be inferred. There are few interactive artworks which purport to give the user the impression of being the (sole) creator. Kit Galloway’s and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s classic telematic work Hole in Space (1980) was one of them - the situation was set up in a public space, no learning process was involved, no announcements were made, no indicators of “art” or “signatures” exposed. The two-way “hole” highlighted the actions of the users in both ends - these were, however, hardly conscious of producing art. […]
[…] Catherine Richard’s historical work in virtual reality questions how the body is read, the nature of the body as data source and the redesigning of female subjectives in relation to body construction. Diane Gromala, Marcos Novak and Yacov Sharir created a Virtual Reality piece using a head mounted display and data glove at the Banff Centre for the Arts, entitled Dancing with the Virtual Dervish in which the participant navigates within the body’s space. Bill Seamen’s Passage Sets: One Pulls Pivots At The Tip Of The Tongue, is an interactive installation which explores sensuality in cyberspace. The movement of dancing bodies, along with constructed and deconstructed textual phrases creates a poetic network under the interactive influence of the user. In Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming, the bed is used as a telepresent projection surface in which two ‘users’ exchange their tactile senses and “touch each other’s image by replacing their hands with their eyes”. […]
[…] In the “early days,” networked art required some technical understanding of electronic media and was the domain of the committed computer or digital artist. Five years before the World Wide Web, pioneering network artist Paul Sermon was setting up “telematic workstations” in public exhibition spaces and at festival sites. These workstations, consisting of clusters of Macintosh computer terminals, were connected via modems to what was then the European Academic Research Network. These telematic events involved a large number of contributors from around the world and questioned the authority of the artist over representations made in networked environments. The last of these projects, Texts Bombs & Videotape (1991), simulated the TV newsroom scenario in an interactive satire of the role of the media in the Gulf War. […]
[…] This unusually interesting formal game is played, as Biskupska’s all creativity, between the illusion of a plane and the reality of space, including telematic space. The semantic area of the language of her art is enclosed within the real shape and traces of a gesture and a systemically repeated sign. […]
[…] Before I do this, I think it may be useful to outline briefly the perspective from which I am viewing these issues, by setting out the principal features of my field of practice, and the markers by which it is distinguished from the past. Interactive art is conceptually led and technologically assisted. It employs telematic media and computational systems, and works towards the convergence of technology and biology into what I forsee as the 21st century substrate for art – moistmedia – the integration of silicon dry computer systems and wet living biology. I shall describe later more fully the extent and implications for art of moistmedia. But first let me outline the five-fold path which, as I see it, can lead to to a fully differentiated interactive art praxctice: […]
[…] Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his interactive net installations and his bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ‘80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) emerged in the early ‘90s with his radical telepresence and bio-teílematic works. His visionary combination of robotics and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the “exotic” (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny). […]
[…] This is the third iteration of the Telematic Dinner Party, produced during the four-month LiveForm: Telekinetics live art lab held at InterAccess in Toronto, Canada. The lab was proposed and produced by artists Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran, who worked with a team of six invited artists to collaboratively create a series of networked live art prototypes, carried out with remote partners at the Waag Society in the Netherlands, and BEK in Norway. The lab investigated technical and social systems for telematic situations: performance environment and interaction design, live video/audio processing, networked electrokinetic devices, and live streaming media. An on-line publishing system was developed to facilitate extensive applicatiosn reference notes documenting process and research results. […]
[…] This peer-reviewed journal presents the cutting edge of ideas, projects and practices arising from the confluence of art, science, technology and consciousness research. It has a special interest in matters of mind and the extension of the senses through technologies of cognition and perception. It documents accounts of transdisciplinary research, collaboration and innovation in the design, theory and production of new systems and structures for life in the 21st century, while inviting a re-evaluation of older worldviews, esoteric knowledge and arcane cultural practices. Artificial life, the promise of nanotechnology, the ecology of mixed reality environments, the reach of telematic media, and the effect generally of a post-biological culture on human values and identity, are issues central to the journal’s focus. […]
[…] In looking for reference points to somehow locate ‘Net.Art’ (as a phenomenon of the WWW) within the recent history of art, various contributors to the discussion have proposed most of the movements and media of the 20th century. David Garcia started the list with video art, while Carey Young found “strong links” to sculpture, telematic art, land art and especially to installation. John Hopkins mentions mail art, Walter van der Cruijsen added experimental film, performance, conceptual art, electronic art and media art. Pauline Bosma suggests radio and hints at fluxus while Alexei Shulgin and Rachel Baker’s references to on-line readymades and ‘found elements’ points to a dada connection. I can add minimal art, computer graphics and Zerography to the list without even stopping to think. […]