Pandora Revisited: Art and New Technologies Author(s): Nell Tenhaaf Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Architectural Education

(1984-), Vol. 40, No. 4 (Summer, 1987), pp. 18-23 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1424870 . Accessed: 26/06/2012 18:40
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Pandora
Art

Revisited: New

and

Technologies

1 Liubov Popova, photomontage

for the set of Sergei Tretiakov's

1923. TheEarthin Turmoil,

Nell Tenhaaf is a visual artist living in Montreal,Quebec. Her most recent work was a multi-media installation combining sculptural objects with interactive videotex (computer-generated graphics and text). An interest in issues of technology as well as an actively feminist point of view are evident in both her art practice and writing. From 1977 to 1983, she was a codirector of Powerhouse Galleryin Montreal, an art space run by and for women artists. She currently is experimenting with the integration of 3-D computer graphics into her work, and teaches parttime at Concordia University.
Summer 1987 JAE 40/4

The article sets out to investigate a relationship between the camera as the revolutionary new technology of twentiethcentury arts and the computer as a potential artistic medium that could also radically change art practices. The socially oriented strategies of contemporary "interventionist"film and video artists are used as the basis for the investigation. Ideas about the camera as both creator and revealer of artifice (or illusion, beliefs, stereotypes) are discussed from the viewpoint of social concerns, in particular, feminist concerns. These ideas are set in the historical context of early-twentieth-

century technologically referenced art and theory, from the Russian Constructivists through to WalterBenjamin. Throughout the text, the notion of myth as a matrix for absorbing technological change is a sub-current, used to gain access to our deep-seated biases and preconceptions about technology and its meaning. Finally,the article proposes tha the computer as a "thinkingmachine," i.e., as it is used in current artificialintelligence research, can be relevant to the representational practices and concerns of contemporary artists.

El
Prologue: Technology leads art The notion that technology leads art, that is, that technological development brings about change in art practices, has both a historical and empirical basis. The impact of new technologies on art has been evident in important artistic currents and theoretical works since the early part of the twentieth century, concurrent with the growth of technologically based art forms, As the interrelationship between humans and the machine (in its broadest sense) has evolved, conditions for both the production of art and its meaning within the culture at large have changed accordingly. In the contemporary context, technological innovation is increasingly rapid in pace and multiple in its forms, and although much of it is obscure to anyone but specialists, it pervades all facets of life. It continues to provide tools and materials to artists. But more importantly, contemporary "high-tech" research proposes new dimensions for investigating perceptual and representational issues, expanding once again the scope of art practices. The relationship between technology and art, viewed historically, has also given us a legacy of the sociopolitical significance of art. The first thirty years of this century spawned ideas about art, expressed in both theory and practice, that were revolutionary in proportion to the political events of that time. The technological development pervading Western society (which from the vantage point of our own time can be taken to include Russia) was a crucial factor in these new ideas. Russian Constructivism of the 1920's provides us with the model for a politically engaged art practice that can be seen as the forerunner of contemporary interventionist art, i.e., art in which a social and political intention is primary and determines an aesthetic. Within more traditional artistic terms and therefore in less directly political ones, European Dadaism of the same period portrays the dilemma of artists in the face of rapid sociopolitical change. In his 1930s essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin provides a Marxist and also scientific basis for understanding the interrelatedness of art and new technologies. Benjamin's pivotal text delineates a relationship between technical, perceptual and social mechanisms operating through cultural production. Thus, it is possible to trace historically, through both art practice and cultural theory, the technological factor in much contemporary art, at least, in interventionist art practices. It is possible as well to trace the various mythologies of "technological man" in the context of the cultures they arose from, up to and including presentday concepts of bionic humans and thinking machines that accompany the computer revolution. In relating these myths to the historical and current conditions of specific art practices, it becomes apparent that the interrelationship between technology and art is not simply that of new tools for art production, but one that is complex and intricately bound up with larger social issues. This perspective points out the necessity for an expanded understanding of the premise "technology leads art." Art addresses technology Dadaism and Constructivism sought to address the industrialization of daily life and technologization of production that characterized the period of World War I and immediately after. Dada was given its name by a group of artists in Zurich in 1916, although it was already flourishing in New York by 1915. Its character varied from one place to another, ranging from revolutionary fervor in Zurich and Berlin through cultural reformism in Paris, to a light-hearted anti-art in New York. This depended quite clearly on how close it was to the European center of war and devastation. German Dada spawned the most ardent, iconoclastic, anti-art thinking as well as the most direct affiliation with Russian Communist ideals. Richard Hulsenbeck, a founder of Zurich Dada, declared: "The significance of this program is that in it Dada turns decisively away from the speculative, in a sense loses its metaphysics and reveals its understanding of itself as an expression of this age which is primarily characterized by machinery and the growth of civilization."1 During the same period, in post-1917 Russia, the efforts of Lenin and the Bolshevik party to centralize political control as well as cultural policy aroused opposition from the artistic avant garde. Looking to European art movements such as Dadaism for direction, avant-garde artists formulated the Proletkult that was to "link artistic activity directly to material societal production"2 to counter the political superstructure's appropriation of the ideals of the Revolution. The Constructivist school emerged from this matrix in 1921. Whatever their immediate inability to realize revolutionary ideals, the Dadaist and Constructivist avant-garde movements can be described in retrospect as rebellions against control: hegemonic control that was becoming materially (technologically) omnipotent and ideologically invincible. The principal mechanism employed by the state to counteract the movement in the U.S.S.R. was to appropriate traditional (pre-Revolution) art as emblematic of post-revolutionary goals. This undermined the avant garde, relegating them to what we might call the underground in relation to official state-controlled art. For Dadaists also, art had come to be not just conformist and ineffectual but identified with official culture, that is, the state. And the state, to a greater or lesser degree depending on its ideological commitment to war, was perceived as a destructive technocracy, with technology at the service of the war machine. Dada's counter-proposal to machinery as a basis for society and metaphysics as the traditional basis for art was anarchy. Whether Dada's political convictions were serious, or ultimately relevant to its impact as an artistic movement, is open to debate. Certain Dadaists perceived their actions in more directly political terms than the majority, whose anti-art was made more in protest against the popular forms of literature and visual art than against political or social conditions. The Dadaist negation of status quo values as expressed in the accepted norms of art thus addressed representational issues, but social issues only indirectly, including the issue of technological growth exemplified in the bourgeois notion of progress (what Hulsenbeck referred to as the "growth of civilization"). Dada is less a model for interventionist art than an indicator of "the gulf between art-protest and genuine political action."3 The Constructivists, on the other hand, were committed to technology with its apparent potential for reconstructing a social order. This is demonstrated in their logical approach to the "science of art" and the extent to which their work reproduced technical and engineering design principles. From the point of view of art practices, the strongest link to be made between Dada and Constructivism is
Summer 1987 JAE 40/4

Es
through the notion of the tabula rasa or "cleanest of clean slates"4 that would destroy all the (bourgeois) conventions of past art. Their common ideal was of a new art, relevant to the new machine age while counter to the technocratic disposition of the state. (Fig. 1) The program of the more politically radical Dadaists, and the technologically committed Constructivists, closely corresponds to Karl Marx's theories on technological humanity as producer, exemplified in Marx's appropriation of the Prometheus myth from early Greek writings. There is a correlation between these art practices, which communicated the social and political upheavals of the early-twentieth century, and what Marx characterized through the Promethean myth as the revolutionary process inherent in the machine age. For Marx, Prometheus' rebellion against the gods (or metaphysics) signified the materialist, productivist order that would transform society and ultimately bring about victory for the proletariat.5 Concerning Marx's faith in the transformative potential of technology, the emphasis will here be put on the implications of his recourse to a mythological metaphor, that is, his appropriation of a construct from a sociopolitical order dating back nearly three millenia. Myths of technology In the eighth century B.C., a renaissance was beginning in Greece with the development of city-states from the ruins of the Mycenaean feudal kingdoms. From the latter part of this century come the works of Hesiod, writer of lyric poems in the epic tradition, who was said to be a contemporary of Homer and "the principal authority for the myths about the beginning of everything."6 One of his poems in the collection Works and Days is "The Prometheus-Pandora Story." The story is a myth about the human condition-in essence, why men (sic) must work hard for a living and yet never arrive at an easy life free of hardship. Prometheus stole fire from Olympus to give to mankind; some stories say that he made the first man and put life into him through fire. In any case, he did this in defiance of Zeus, ruler of the Olympian gods, who wanted men to struggle for their survival. After the gift of fire, men began to build tools, houses, etc. Technology was born, and civilization with it.
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Hesiod's story goes into detail about Zeus' punishment of mankind itself for its acquisition of fire and skills. Men's troubles are attributed to the arrival of the first woman, Pandora. The gods had Hephaestus, their artisan, fashion Pandorawhose name means the "Gift of All"-and sent her to earth armed with beauty, treachery, and a large grain storage jar full of all the evils known to mankind (Pandora's "box" is the result of a translation error in a medieval transcript by Erasmus: pyxis for "box" rather than pithos for "great jar").7 Pandora permitted the release of all the miseries in the jar, with only Hope left. Her attributes are therefore not very commendable, although in Chthonian lore (of the underworld) she is a goddess figure and is perceived as a rebel and companion to Prometheus in revolt against the will of the gods. This story has a remarkably close parallel in the Gnostic version of the biblical creation tale. One of the angels, Lucifer the "light-bringer," was cast out of heaven for his hybris (usually translated as "pride" by the Church fathers, but also meaning "sexual passion").8 Lucifer brought light to humanity, in the Bible the light of knowledge offered to Eve and Adam by the serpent in the garden of Eden. Here, enlightenment parallels the fire of civilization, the divine rivalry is the same as that between Prometheus and Zeus, and Eve, the first woman, personifies God's punishment of mankind for the upstart's act. A few centuries after Hesiod, the dramatist Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, added to the legacy of Prometheus as the paradigmatic metaphor for technological man. Along with the story of Prometheus' revolt against the gods in favor of mankind, Aeschylus recounts Prometheus' subsequent punishment of being chained to a rock in the Caucasus for 6,000 years, as well as his ultimate liberation by Hercules. As Roland Barthes postulates in Mythologies, myth is the material world given "signification," that is, mediated by discourse in a specific form and with a specific intention. All the conditions of a particular society shape myth and correspond to it. A mythical concept correlates, for a certain group of people, with the underlying meaning or function of some aspect of reality, rather than with its apparent or literal sense. Thus, "Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it."9

The specific historical context for the production of a myth is invisible within the myth itself. Hesiod's account of early productive humankind described a pragmatic society in which men ruled and everyday matters of existence were paramount. Many other myths, earlier and from other cultures, associate women with the taming and use of fire through female fire deities and stories that attribute the invention of fire-making instruments to women. Thus, women were the first possessors of fire/enlightenment and men stole it not from the gods but from women.?10 The valuable exercise of reclaiming early technological innovation for women allows us to see that not only have mainstream mythologies such as the ancient Greek or the Bible come to supersede the traditions of other cultures in Western thought, but popular understanding of the history of technology can be traced to a set of stories that have substantiated and propagated a one-dimensional belief system. The selective memory of its origins contributes to one teleological aspect of the contemporary characterization of technology: its self-perpetuating, deterministic nature, what Jacques Ellul has called the "self-augmentation of technique."1 Clearly the Promethean myth as appropriated by Marx can also be understood as transmitting the ideology of the technological imperative. Prometheus' gift to mankind represented a promise of liberation through the productivism of the machine age: "For Marx, Prometheus is the archetype of the producer/rebel, at once homo faber and man in revolt. Marx extends the bourgeois Enlightenment's notion of progress through material production, and at the in his later worksame time-especially he problematizes the rationalization of production by locating contradictions in the production process itself and by concluding that human beings through labour will also bring about revolutionary change."12 But even for certain of Marx's followers, Prometheus' identity as rebel and liberator was not sustained as he assumed the role of technocrat seated on the shoulders of his liberator.13 Decoding techniques The mythical image of Prometheus can be rejoined with art practice by comparing

BE

the portrait Marx sketches, that of the Positive Communist Hero, to the Constructivist artists in their dedication to productivism and social reconstruction through art. The rise of official art in Russia, dating from Lenin's establishment of the People's Commissariat for Public Instruction in 1919, accounts for the subversion by the state of the Promethean ideal and the avant-garde artists who expressed it. The Constructivists' rebellion collapsed as centralized technocracy strengthened. But concurrently, the new art form of cinema escaped officialization in its early years, even though it was recognized by Lenin as the most important of the arts. This was by virtue of its lacking a cultural tradition. Although they were under the direct control of the state, early Russian filmmakers were not subject to an identifiable aesthetic that could be appropriated by the state as politically correct. Thus, they were able to take on the goals of the political/cultural avant garde in depicting class struggle and shaping the new society. The principal formal constraint imposed on them, which conversely allowed a creative freedom for those filmmakers who were supported, was that official sanction was given to nonfiction film (later to become known as the documentary).14 The new technology of film was, as the basis for a new art form, wide open. (Fig. 2) Walter Benjamin in the 1930s first analyzed the profound shift in the relationship between technology and art that is represented by the advent of the camera as a tool for cultural production. In essence, the shift is from art addressing technology, exemplified by Dada and Constructivism, to art using technology in its production process (and thereby addressing it). In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin addressed the arts of the camera to develop Marxist "theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production."15 But his hypotheses about revolutionary change through "mechanically reproducible" art were grounded as much in a study of psychosocial and perceptual mechanisms as in analysis of socioeconomic conditions. Therefore he added to the Marxist belief in the historical instrumentality of t6chnology a new meaning specific to cultural production. Benjamin revealed the technology of the camera as a vehicle for new

perceptions that would fundamentally alter the definition of art and its impact on society. Similarly, revolutionary heroism as an active cultural agent was in Benjamin's view superseded by the mediating role of the technologies themselves. For Benjamin, changes in perceptual mechanisms resulting from the intervention of the camera provoked a specifically technical discussion, with overtones of the behavioral sciences, especially psychology: "Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web."16 Here Benjamin is describing an interrelatedness between the person controlling the camera, the tool, and the reality that the tool reproduces but also affects. This interrelatedness is transposed to the viewer/viewed relationship, and the work of the camera reveals to the viewer aspects of reality hitherto undiscovered: in its penetration of space, "the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."17 Ironically, Benjamin also described true art as the illusion of "reality that is free of all equipment." He might have reconsidered his assessment if he had foreseen the extent to which such an illusion could mystify the technology and transmit retrograde values. Through the invisibility of the camera and its techniques in the filmic or photographic product, the tech-

nology seems to be neutral rather than the mediator of reality that Benjamin perceived it to be. This perceptual seamlessness is the central premise of today's mainstream, commercial production in film, television and advertising. Benjamin elaborated on the apparatus of perception in its social sense when he discussed the politicizing potential of film. Again there is an idealistic simplification in this thesis, a disparity between the "simultaneous collective experience" that film provides, which Benjamin proposed as a "progressive" response (as opposed to "reactionary") where "the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide,"18 and the power exerted by filmmakers over the perceptions of this public. Nevertheless one must admit that the film "industry" was barely underway at the time Benjamin wrote this essay. Benjamin says in his preface to the essay, "Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value," and he seems to have applied the same principle to his understanding of filmic mechanisms. They provide a pivot for deciphering contemporary mainstream productions, and reimplicating the camera in progressive art practices. In a contemporary context, with the end of Modernist idealism and the concurrent "revolutionary" shift from machine age to information age, the Promethean myth has broken down as a paradigm for production. Yet the myths of Pandora and Eve are still firmly implanted as symbolic representations of women in the collective beliefs expressed by popular culture. We might say that these representations

.1
2 Still from Dziga Vertov's documentary film The Man with the Movie Camera, 1929. 3 Still from the series of videotapes The Gloria Tapes, 1979-81, by Toronto artist Lisa Steele. The artist is on the right, portraying a single mother on welfare named Gloria. Summer 1987 JAE 40/4

with Individual and Collective Beliefs Coping in a Ulser Model

with Dialog U ser 1, User 2, ... y
_,_B^^

..., User N-1, User N '* y~~~~ ? ,M

which were seen from an 'audience point of view' camera, as though transparent. (And it is this same lack of sophistication or seduction through transparency that we identify in the 'amateur' acting and sets of much video art, e.g. Colin Campbell or Lisa Steele's works.) Anti-naturalism is pro-interactive."20 (Fig. 3) Anti-naturalism is in essence a decoding process. Whether it is brought about through, for instance, the representation of deliberately constructed realities, textual intervention, or the foregrounding of technology, it operates against both media conventions and dominant ideologies. This decoding process is initiated by the producer, the artist, and as pointed out in Ferguson's last remark, is a participatory process. The viewing public is complicit in or interactive with the production, invited in rather than seduced. Update: new tools, new myths While the instrumentality of technologies is becoming a clearer issue in cultural production, are new mythologies of dominance and heroics replacing outdated ones, as new technologies arise? The very notion of a paradigm such as the Promethean myth seems irrelevant to the current technological context of information exchange and complex systems management. Yet persistent dreams of progress, heroism, transcendence of material needs, even immortality, have carried over into the contemporary context. Such ideas correspond to Barthes' concept of myths as comprising a superstructure that interprets and gives value to the material world. In turn, new technologies for representation have been the means for translating these myths into perceptual codes. We have seen how this loop mechanism can serve both dominant and progressive ideologies. In contemporary new technology, the computer and the systems it can control comprise the technical configuration that corresponds to a basic mythical construct of the information age, i.e. the notion of the extended self, or the parallel functioning of machines and humans. This new myth can be called the "thinking machine." Its roots are in the science of cybernetics and, more specifically, the field of artificial intelligence or machine intelligence research. As Sherry Turkle describes it: . . . the driving force of the science (of artificial intelligence) came from far greater ambitions than making a program perform brilliantly at chess or any other particular task. The real ambition is of mythic proportions: making a 'general purpose' intelligence, a mind. In a long tradition of romantic and mystical thought, life is breathed into dead or inanimate matter by a person with special powers."21 The reality of artificial intelligence (Al) research is, to date, somewhat more mundane. From their inception, Al systems have been built by means of computer programs designed for efficient problemsolving within specific domains, with knowledge-handling aspects of the system designed to generalize problems and

of Construction Collective Models

Inheritance Relations

U: This productis goingto be a big seller. S: Is this your personalopinion or an official statement of your company?
4 Figure 8 from "Dialog-Based User Models" by Drs. W. Wahlster and A. Kobsa. In this model of a user named Miller (U), the system (S) has to ask a meta-question to distinguish between private and inherited beliefs.

are encoded in such a way as to have persisted until both technological and social changes could address them. From this point of view, contemporary theory on art production, especially feminist theory, has provided valuable insight into the interrelationship between cultural beliefs, representational practices, and technology. Laura Mulvey published "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1975. In this article, she formulated her theoretical position concerning the colonized image of women in film by means of an alternative cinema that could be both politically and aesthetically radical. This was a condition of technological and subsequently economic changes within film production that weren't yet present for Benjamin. Mulvey's "gaze theory" derives from psychoanalytic formulations of fetishism and voyeurism on the one hand and alternative cinema's conscious use of film's technical and perceptual mechanisms on the other. The theory of the gaze takes as its premise that "(mainstream film's) formal preoccupations reflect the physical
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obsessions of the society which produced it.. ."19Thus in mainstream film production, staging and camera techniques are applied to character depiction and development to portray women in a way that parallels the dominant sexist ideology's view of women. These techniques are invisible in the sense that they correspond so closely to viewers' preconceptions as not to be perceived. They are imperceptible by virtue of a correspondence or interrelatedness between the viewer (in the double sense of filmmaker and spectator) and the viewed. Nevertheless, as Benjamin's analysis implied, such mechanisms can be made evident. They are encoded and can therefore be decoded, or deconstructed. In his analysis of a television practice that ran counter to the dominant production modes of its time, i.e., that of Ernie Kovacs in the period 1950-1962, Bruce Ferguson says: "All of these sightings (of cameraman, producers, technology of the production) . . . work against the naturalizing tendencies of the then-prominent anthology drama

ultimately arrive at higher level concept discovery.22 A more recent (1985) explanation of Al research situates its focal point as not the complex intelligent process of the mind, but the trivial tasks that lead to them: "using language, showing common sense, learning from past experience."23 Al programs emphasize the importance of memory and its organization for most aspects of cognitive activity, from understanding language to writing stories. The goal of much Al research is to help people improve their ability to perform complex cognitive tasks, complementing and extending the original goal of computer development, i.e., relieving us of simple, repetitive, but time-consuming tasks. To explain and test the science of Al, its theorists have turned to analytical models offered by more familiar disciplines such as psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics and semiotics. In fact, much Al research and theory is based on "natural-language" systems. Margaret Boden points out: "The discussion of (R. C.) Schank's work suggested that very general psychological as that hitting hurts, or that facts-such people tend to render tit for tat-do indeed underlie our interpretation of language. And (V. A.) Wilks has agreed with the Wittgensteinian claim that our epistomological world would be barely intelligible to anyone whose differing forms of life rendered their language and conceptual schemes radically different (Wittgenstein's remark, "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him"), and concludes that the underlying semantics of language-using programs must include representations of these matters that tacitly determine our understanding."24 To take into account the factors that "tacitly determine our understanding," an important trend in Al research is the development of "user models" which permit an Al system to consider the reality of a user during interaction with her/him. User modelling means "the construction and use of an explicit model of the user's beliefs, goals and plans," arrived at through "dialog" between the person and the computer system.25 (Fig. 4) Thus, to arrive at models of human cognition, language-based Al research assumes language and its use (dialog behavior) as "natural," whereas the knowledge that the Al system then builds around language use is called "artificial," or a simulation of intelligence. This shifting opposition of the natural and the artificial across language recalls Barthes's semiological analysis of myth, with the artificial corresponding to the naturalized instance of ordinary speech in myth, its transformation into a meta-level that is beyond the specific: "the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal." From this perspective, Al could be portrayed as inherently mythologized. The metalanguage of cognitive processes that, in Al, is embodied in an externalized, physical (computer-based) system can acquire profound truth value, even though it is actually a representation of intelligence, shaped by individuals from within their particular belief systems.

Consideration of Al as a representational practice susceptible to mythologizing points out certain limitations, but also proposes a potential application. Technologically based interventionist art practices in film, photography, or video have tended to confront the contrived and seductive version of reality that mainstream media imagery projects. Correspondingly, the relevance of Al for art practice might lie in its interrogation of the "real nature" of human cognitive functions, including the image-making process itself as one of many symbolic systems. As an external representation of the internal self, thinking mechanisms in the form of computer routines can further put into question the authority of visual representation in shaping our identities and realities. Or more precisely, Al is a facet of computer technology that urges a reintegration of the image with other representational systems (including language, numbers, scientific or statistical data, or any other ordering of information) suggesting entirely new modes of apprehending physical and social reality.26 Al research is perhaps most pertinent to the computer-based technologies now emerging as artists' media, specifically, interactive media such as videodisc and videotex, computer-regulated functions within installations, performance or sculpture, or simulation of perceptual experience by means of sophisticated animation graphics. In these practices, artists can use computer technology to address itself, to question its broader implications for representation, as alternative filmmakers or video artists address the impact of their medium in its mainstream version. Imagine, for instance, an art work based on interactive videodisc and Al technology, in which the computer system regulating the videodisc offers a particular sequence of image and sound unique to the profile of a given viewer. This suggests a new aesthetic, one that radically alters both the authorial position of the artist and the interpretive function of the viewer. An understanding of such Al characteristics as interactive management of information between humans and machines and the encoding/decoding of cognition can ultimately provide useful strategies to artists and encourage them to play a more active role in articulating both the aesthetic and social potential of powerful new technologies. By extension from Benjamin's Marxist vision, technology leads art in a revolutionary sense:

humanistic enterprise which counterbalances the rationalism of science and technology, a concept that virtually disenfranchises artists within an increasingly high-tech society. As in the case of Pandora and her grain-jar, the mythical reconstituting of this belief is long since overdue. Acknowledgment The research and writing of this text were made possible through the Canada Council, Integrated Media Program, and the Ecole d'Architecture, Universite de Montreal, in conjunction with 3-D animation graphics research (TAARNAsystem). ? Nell Tenhaaf, 1986
Figure Credits 1 2 3 4 ? 1981 George Costakis. The George Costakis Collection photo collection Cinematheque quebecoise, Montreal photo courtesy of V/tape, Toronto ? 1986 IEEE

Notes 1 Lippard, Lucy, ed. Dadas on Art Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.) 1971, p. 49 2 Bathrick, David "Affirmative and Negative Culture: Technology and the Left Avant-Garde" in The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions (Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, Kathleen Woodward, eds.) Coda Press, Inc. (Madison, Wl) 1980, p. 114 3 Middleton, J.C. '"Bolshevism in Art': Dada and Politics," Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 4, No. 3 (1962), p. 419 4 Lippard, op. cit., p. 10 5 See Fehervary, Helen "Prometheus Rebound: Technology and the Dialectic of Myth" in de Lauretis et al., op. cit. 6 Hamilton, Edith Mythology New American Library (New York and Scarborough, Ontario) 1940, p. 63 7 Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets Harper and Row (San Francisco) 1983, p. 767 8 ibid., pp. 551-4 9 Barthes, Roland "Myth Today" in Mythologies (Annette Lavers, trans.) Jonathan Cape (London) 1972, p. 123 10 Stanley, Autumn "Women Hold Up Two-Thirds of the Sky: Notes for a Revised History of Technology" in Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology (Joan Rothschild, ed.) Pergamon Press (New York) 1983, p. 8 11 Ellul, Jacques The Technological Society (John Wilkinson, trans.) Vintage Books (New York) 1964, first published 1954, p. 85 12 Fehervary, op. cit., p. 98 13 ibid., p. 104 14 Feldman, Seth R. Evolution of Style in the Early Work of Dziga Vertov Arno Press (New York) 1977 15Benjamin, Walter "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans.) Schocken Books (New York) 1969, p. 218 16 ibid., p. 233 17 ibid., p. 237. See also Feldman op. cit., pp. 130-132, for Vertov's theory of "Life Caught Unawares," or "a belief in the camera's ability to discover hidden meanings in images taken from ordinary life." 18 ibid., p. 234. In "The Author as Producer," Benjamin uses the terminology "progressive technique" to describe a method of cultural production, in this case writing, which involves it in social struggle, in Reflections (Edmund Jephcott, trans.) Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (New York and London) 1978, p. 223 19 Mulvey, Laura "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in Screen Vol. 16, no. 3 (1975), p. 8 20 Ferguson, Bruce "Ernie Kovacs: A Good Look (And Listen)" in C Magazine no. 7 (Fall 1985), pp. 16-17 21 Turkle, Sherry The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit Simon & Schuster Inc. (New York) 1984, p. 240 22 Minsky, Marvin, ed. Semantic Information Processing MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London) 1968, pp. 7-8 23 Schank, Roger and Larry Hunter, "'The Quest to Understand Thinking" in Byte (April 1985) p. 143 24 Boden, Margaret Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man Basic Books Inc. (New York) 1977, p. 440 25 Wahlster, W. and A. Kobsa, "Dialog-Based User Models," University of Saarbrucken Al Laboratory (Saarbrucken, West Germany), published in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc., Vol. 74, No. 7 (July 1986) 26 Biocca, Frank "Sampling from the Museum of Forms: Photography and Visual Thinking in the Rise of Modern Statistics" Mass Communication Research Center, University of Wisconsin (Madison, Wl) 1986, p. 7 27 Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," op. cit., p. 233

"Whatmatters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers-that is, readers or spectators into collaborators."27 Itwould be disproportionate to claim that art can lead technological development. But the art world has by no means abandoned the residual belief that art is a

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