WINTER/SPRING 2000
Editors: Sarah Michelson and Kathy Westwater
Mystified, awed and terrified still by the concept of the telephone, I fall into a lazy, dull acceptance of the technology that is offered to me. I want more. I have a deep need to understand it and be on top of it…move into the sexy world of—I don’t really know what to call it, but you know all those shaved headed DJ boys….spinning discs…walking around with finger size camera-looking objects that contain moving images that they will later plug in and digitally alter (I think). I want to be one of those boys with those sexy machines…I want to digitally alter things and then spin on my head…be at new media central…even know for sure what new media is….I want to have to sample my life or experience it through headphones….know what DVD means or HRD or TIFF…but am terrified…cannot find the way in….not sure if I am terrified of the language, of the apparatus, of the void of virtual reality itself or if the fear stems from the deep legacy of my mother who fears machines to such an extent that she will not leave a message on an answering machine, nether will she pump her own gas, driving sometimes as much as 20 miles out of her way to find a small man in a small garage who still, in 1999, offers a service like that.
We fight about it my mother and I…perhaps because I feel it is a gender referential stance, that she as a woman depending on a man to pump her gas is pathetic…I would never allow that. Here I am though allowing those Techno boys to pump my virtual/digital gas every day. And how would it feel if my father were the one who couldn’t pump his gas?
Now we need to do almost nothing with one finger to achieve a huge result…we don’t need the car, the plane. Soon machine will enter the body, rejuvenation will happen constantly and internally; we will not need face creams or plastic surgery or blood transfusions; we will think our phone calls and we won’t need the phone. Certainly the messy procreation problem will have been solved in a Petri dish or in a digital reality somewhere. So will we need the body carbon or silicon…and what will my mother do when we disappear?
P.S.: A woman said to me in a bar last night “We are looking for the Martians but we are the Martians. Adam and Eve were Martians.”
–Sarah Michelson, Guest Editor
When first considering the content of this issue I thought one could distinguish between artists using and artists not using technology, and this issue would center on the users. Over the course of editing my assumption shifted dramatically. The earliest evidence of technology dates 2.5 million years ago with the first recognizable stone tools—that predates both cognitive thought and language. While technology has been around since before homo sapiens, the advance of computers/telecommunications has focused our perception of “technology” on the more recent manifestations. A similar line of thinking was common at the end of the last century, when industrialization supplanted the agricultural/mercantile paradigm (remember the Luddites?). Yet technology has always been inextricably linked to how we exist, how we perceive our existence, how we make art. The writings contained here are from artists/writers consciously questioning wand exploring the potentials of technology as related to our embodied lived today.
–Kathy Westwater, Guest Editor MRPJ
