Techno-utopianism: computers and a new world

“All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.” Toni Morrison ( Online NewsHour interview, Mar. 9, 1998)

At some point networked computers made our lives better. But equally, it is worth questioning the role they play in the construction of our societies, our economies, our education and our culture.  It is this paradox  of positive good and potential harm that is at the heart of discussions around media technologies, and often contributes images of worlds either (depending on your perspective) emptied, mediated or enhanced by computers and other digital technologies. Computers and new media are intimately connected to the ideologies of those who use them. If I look to the future I imagine a world based on my individual politics. Maybe yours is a world free from the controls and demands of electricity and oil. Maybe it’s a world where computers and robots do all the labour so the humans can relax in luxurious boredom.  Whatever, the images we create of future worlds reflect much of what we hold important today. 

In 1872 Samuel Butler published the satirical novel Erewhon, based on his experiences farming in mid-Canterbury. Over the alps, his protagonist discovers a utopian world where all technologies (even the wristwatch) are banned and people live an in idealised perfect environment. In 1920 Czech author Karel Apok wrote R.u.R. ( Rossum’s Universal Robots) in which mass-produced robot labourers serve humanity. There are many other examples in literature, art and science, and many of these techno-utopias have been embedded in architecture. Le Corbusier imagined a radiant city. Built from 1947-1952 the Unité d’Habitation was collective housing designed to consolidate a community and “provide the perfect residence for a family, while facing the sun, the surrounding space and nature in silence and solitude.” Le Corbusier echoed the dreams of the cyberneticists who saw strong connections between the growth of electronic systems of communication and biological evolution. This evolutionary track is marked in the thought of many key architects in the histories of new media including Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler. If we believe that technology evolves then we believe that soon we will be 3D printing our own shoes.

In 1967 Vannevar Bush wrote of his dream for the memex machine – a personal computer that he couldn’t imagine ever truly becoming a reality, simply because of the cost of storage media. Now Nicholas Negroponte and others at MIT have developed the One Laptop per child (XO-1) computer based on the utopian belief that every “third-world” child should have access to computing networks and that this will improve their lives markedly. The computer and the networks it has helped us build are central to twenty-first century dreams and play a large influence on media art practices. Nam June Paik dreamed of an electronic superhighway, where global networks transverse social and cultural boundaries. A long way from Paik’s groove, these networks have become realised in nodes of surveillance and movement. And it is artists who are questioning the increasing role of the network.  For example collectives like Blast Theory and PVI are examining the impacts of the global shift to visual media as authoritarian control. It is the network itself that has become a tool for critique. Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries make work that is both dependant on these networks and highly critical of the utopian dreams they may present. Equally, the dreams of progress that underwrite the limitless caring and sharing world of web2.0 need the kind of gentle criticism that artists can offer.

When people were first dreaming of the information age, they saw human knowledge embedded in machinery, and began labelling things as posthuman  or transhuman, now many see our knowledges becoming embedded in networks. As Mark Wigley argues “networks of communication, like any technology, are prosthetic extensions of the body.” Australian performance artist Stelarc is one of the strongest advocates of a coming together of biological and technical bodies. In his world “Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of our own and we often perform involuntarily conditioned and externally prompted. Ever since evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and machines. In other words we have always been coupled with technology.” (http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/arcx.html)

Is this a twenty-first century framework for biopolitics? Is  a contemporary vision of the future determined by our ability to manipulate our environment through GPS and computer vision software, search and memory, documentation and trace? Without the ubiquity of cell phones and photography would we have witnessed the atrocities of abu ghraib?  In an age where it is essential to temper aesthetics with ethics, and when visual data are quickly distributed via multitudes of networks, we need to question once again the utopian dreams of the very materials we work with.  As Paik says: “the real issue implied in ‘Art and Technology’ is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium.”

Su Ballard is Academic Leader for Electronic Arts, and senior lecturer in Theory and History of Art, in the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin. Her research focuses on digital aesthetics, visual culture, sound, and media ecology. She recently completed a PhD through the Centre For Contemporary Art and Politics at UNSW, Sydney. Her PhD used histories of cybernetics and sound to examine contemporary digital installation practices in art galleries. Su is also a curator, writer, and musician.

Links

• Utopia: the search for the ideal society in the western world (New York public library exhibition) http://utopia.nypl.org/homepage_qt.html
• techno-utopia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-utopianism
• web 2.0 http://www.metamute.org/
• One laptop per child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1
• Stelarc http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/arcx.html
• Vannevar Bush http://books.google.co.nz/books
• Le Corbusier http://www.marseille-citeradieuse.org/chap1/immeuble1-2.htm
• Blast Theory http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/
• PVI Collective http://www.pvicollective.com/
• Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries http://www.yhchang.com/
• 3D shoe printing http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925386.200