"We're in transition from the Industrial Age to the Cybernetic Age,
characterized by many as the post-Industrial Age. But I've found the
term Paleocybernetic valuable as a conceptual tool with which to
grasp the significance of our present environment: combining the
primitive potential associated with Paleolithic and the transcendental
integrities of "practical utopianism" associated with Cybernetic. So I
call it the Paleocybernetic Age: an image of a hairy, buckskinned,
barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and
logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-generated
holograms or krypton laser interferometry. It's the dawn of man: for
the first time in history we'll soon be free enough to discover who we
are."
Expanded Cinema is a heady mix of full bore utopianism and dead reckoning prescience that is just simply inspiring. Gene does not avoid the trap that every historical advance in technology has been rhapsodized for: greater communication = greater understanding (not), but he was also writing about computer films and expanded cinema that included networks the same year as the 4-node ARPAnet for crissakes. Brilliant.
Gene is writing a book about Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz and their pioneering work. For my money, their Satellite Arts Project (1977), Hole In Space (1980), and Electronic Cafe (1984) are an influential trifecta of communications art. Electronic Cafe and its successor Electronic Cafe International, in particular, remain relevant to contemporary practice. They certainly influenced my commissioning of the Dialog Table by Marek Walczak, Michael McAllister, Jakub Segen & Peter Kennard for the Walker Art Center.
We talked about how to think about such proto-works in the context of the post-WWW explosion of "new media." Not an easy task and the topic of much discussion in general, from ISEA2004's Histories of the New symposium theme to the International Art and Technology History Conference at Banff in the fall of 2005. Looking forward to Gene's book.
