Telematic connections: the virtual embrace

Self-portrait

Telematic Connections, like many of the works in it, is a hybrid affair. Part history, part speculation, partly onsite, partly online, it crosses boundaries between art, communications, and popular culture. Its four sections include installation works, past and recent film clips, online projects, and a "telematics timeline." Through these various media, the exhibition presents the ways in which artists use technology—and the Internet—to explore both the utopian desire for an expanded, global consciousness and the dystopian consequences of our collective embrace, willing or not, of computer-mediated human communications. At the same time Telematic Connections places this emergent work within a historical framework.

The eight installations that comprise the "Telereal" component of this exhibition use the Internet and computing to explore this mediated embrace between parties, whether human to human, human to machine, machine to machine, or even human to nature. Here, as well as in the ten online projects in the "Datasphere" component of the exhibition, what the visitor-participant does in the galleries affects (and is affected by) someone or something somewhere else in physical space. "The Virtual Embrace" signals this shift from the viewer as an observer to embracing us as a participant, integral to the work-process of art.

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?

Telematic Connections is not fundamentally about technology. Nor is it an attempt to define a new genre of art practice. It is about what MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos calls "the forces of the cave"—some of the eternal human traits that have never left us, including the desire to connect, even to merge with another—but in today’s world of ubiquitous computing and global networking.

Steve Dietz February 2001

Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace is a traveling exhibition, organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, curated by Steve Dietz, and made possible, in part, by the Rockefeller Foundation. The website is copresented by the Walker Art Center.

(http://telematic.walkerart.org/overview/index.html)

Description

Telematic connections: the virtual embrace is a travelling exhibition dedicated to the study and exhibition of works of art that experiment with technology, internet communications, and popular culture, so as to reflect on the condition of mankind in our computer mediated interactions. The initiative is organized by Steve Dietz and the ICI (Independent Curators International) and partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The website is co-presented by the Walker Art Center, located in Minneapolis.

The project gathers creations of various epochs, media and themes, in categories that include installations, performances, or films, and a includes timeline that aims to show some of the most relevant digital art productions from the pioneers to the present time. Many of the projects compiled in this site explore creative possibilities of the internet. For example, Telereal consists in eight installations that use social media and computation for raising problems related to the hybrid reality of cyberspace, such as: Community of people with no time, by Victoria Vesna, or Teleporting and Unknown State, by Eduardo Kac.

The Open Source telematics timeline aimed to show the various manifestations of art in the World Wide Web, including pioneering projects such as Satellite Arts Project, by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, who introduced the notion of virtual space in 1977, or Roy Ascott's theories of Telematic Art: dystopian or utopian visions of the future, technology and the digital age. The Datasphere comprises a collection of installations that are accessed online, such as Telezone, by Erich Berger, Peter Purgarthofer and Volker Christian, that creates remote controlled architectural structures, or Oiuja, by Ken Goldberg, a board remotedly operated by online players. Telewood is a collection of films and videos that delve into the relationship of computers with telepathy, virtual reality, alien worlds and time machines, generating narratives geared by the possibility of interaction beyond the body, time and space.

Links

URL: http://telematic.walkerart.org/index.html

Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://telematic.walkerart.org/index.html