In 1995 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the phrase “The Californian Ideology” in an essay by the same title which provided a genealogy of the concept of the internet as a placeless and universalizing utopia: “This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” A lot of forces were at play in the mid-nineties, but Wired Magazine with editor Kevin Kelly were especially influential in promoting information technologies as emancipatory, limitless and beyond geography.

Although the internet has the power to build communities and bring together diverse geographic places, it has also emerged as a very local and geographically situated place. Geert Lovink has articulated this point nicely by highlighting statistical figures of internet use: in August 2008 China surpassed the United States in internet use, with users being overwhelmingly non-Californian – Asia has 578.5 million users, Europe has 384.5 million, North America has 248.2 million, and Latin America/Caribbean has 139.0 million. (For an excellent overview of a lecture Lovink gave in February 2009 at UC Irvine, see Liz Losh’s insightful “The Empirical Turn.”) Within these statistics, a Californian Ideology doesn’t hold up. It’s grown to be an incredibly diverse place linguistically, with highly localized and geographically situated practices.

As Lovink has humorously pointed out through a drawing from the webcomic xkcd, even our concepts of digital space are localized:

(Enlarge “Map of Online Communities” by xkcd)

Today our concept of the internet has more similarity to political balkanization of physical geography than universalizing dreams of VRML, for example.

(View Balkanization animation)

In terms of my own experiences, many things change with a change in physical location. This includes art scenes, and living in Southern California for the past six years has significantly impacted my work. Creating the work still consists of sitting down, building, soldering, and producing it, but the community that it enters into and circulates in is considerably different. It’s not the “Californian Ideology” that makes a difference, though: it’s the local that has the greatest impact.

Much of Certeau’s work in The Practice of Everyday Life concerns boundaries and spatial organization: like his defining of strategies and tactics, for example. Strategies are the manipulation of power relationships from an institutionalized and delimited place, while tactics are calculated actions that have no boundaries or center: one is centered (strategies), the other (tactics) is not. It’s almost as if one can imagine lines drawn on the ground for many of his concepts. This focus on the demarcation or stepping across of boundaries carries over into his discussion on spatial stories, which is where fas is brought forward.

The fas is part of stories creating a theater of actions, of building a foundation and opening up a space for action through a story. The Roman priests referred to in the text appeared to function as ambassadors that went to a neighboring country’s border and gave a deadline to when war would start if conditions didn’t change. If the time ran out, the fetiales would apparently hurl a spear with blood on it over the border, which would be an official declaration of war.

For my own work, specifically the OutRun project, I don’t see it as creating a story to lay a foundation for future actions. Building a device/artwork can be viewed as a story that lays out actions in the future, but I think it’s more accurate to think of this project as a style of backward action – not a future narrative. It’s all a tangled network of recycled stories, objects, fantasies, realities, and actions, though. Although I think he articulates a lot of foundational concepts that are relevant to DIY practices and tactical media, I haven’t gravitated toward Certeau in my work. I find that The Practice of Everyday Life leans toward text-based and subtle practices, like moving between spaces, creating narratives, or constructing stories.

Recently, I’ve also been rethinking the “avant garde” metaphor within art: of artists being on the front line of change, and of forging a path into the future. Certeau’s concept of fas, fetiales, and creating a theater for future actions has an avant garde resonance to it. Many exceptional pieces of artwork successfully function as antennae into the future and lay a foundation of things to come, but this isn’t the sole role of art. There is also a reflective recycling of the past, of picking up the discarded memories and artifacts of culture – and this backwardness tends to sometimes be underdeveloped in the media arts. Media art doesn’t need to be more cutting-edge: it needs to be more emotional, historical and thoughtful.

And not that driving around in an arcade cabinet is so thoughtful, but it tries to look into the past and short-circuit it with the present. My recent thoughts are in line with what some term as a media archaeological perspective: to look backward and forward at the same time, and pursue them simultaneously. It’s more interesting than trailblazing a path into the future: I think many that seek the leading edge eventually find out that they were just redoing something that had been done before.

I still see a lot of technological utopianism from technology people who don’t connect to any critical traditions. There is something so beautiful and mind-altering in the 2.0 moment where it is a matter of doing simple reversals on ideas from inherited power structures and saying,  “Aha! Yes! So what does it look like now?” But of course the ideas that gave rise to these sea-changes in the way we view contemporary culture (Tim O’ Reilly et al) were based on much thought and development and were not as easy to articulate at the outset as they are now, 5 or more years down the line. When thinking about these things as currents in culture I think it’s important to hold the big, buoyant visions but also to investigate that which is small and complex, intricate, even contradictory, as this is the essence of critical procedure, and without it giant parts get lost and simplicity gets hold in areas where it is not useful.

Art people don’t usually fall victim to the simplicity – I think they are used to seeking the overlapping areas (otherwise known as gaps).

I was so interested to read Garnet’s reflections on his childhood in Saskatchewan and to think back to my own experiences of technology. I remember as a child growing up in Calgary in the 1970s feeling the basic stupid flotation of technology: technology was consumption based (Radio Shack),  alien, delicious, dissociative and liberating (yellow Sony Walkman), fragmenting or inconvenient (moving from LPs to cassettes to accomodate David Bowie and Duran Duran, and having an 8 track in the station wagon), or somehow dangerous and larger than myself in scientific function, magnitude and domain (the microwave oven).

My primary point of contact with personal communications technology was a princess telephone and a separate children’s line so my sister and I could speak late at night to boys. It didn’t change much from grade 6 until my first year of graduate school when I was given an email address as an automatic step in the registration process. I remember feeling very apathetic and not being able to imagine who I’d speak to using this mode, because no one I knew had an email address. When it became apparent that my friend in graduate school at Harvard was also given one, we began to communicate over email and we found that it was much more convenient than writing letters.  By the next year I’d also discovered this strange shell network function that I accessed using PINE, and through this I would connect for very long real-time textual conversations to my friends and professors, and the discussion was magical and confessional and the modes of discussion quite distinct from those of real life.

I never felt, through this progression, that technology was going to save us as a culture, but I suppose it must evolve alongside the idea of what it means to be saved, or lost, or anything else.

I spent part of my childhood growing up on a farm in Saskatchewan, which is idyllic in some ways but far from utopian.  Clemenceau Saskatchewan is a real, grounded place, and the only utopias I found there were in the oil paintings by my grandmother and the odd (and failed) mechanical devices that my uncle cobbled together from bits of engines, parts, and abandoned machinery.  I learned a genuine joy in creating something out of nothing, and utopian dreams were usually brought down by mechanical malfunction, the two dimensional picture plane, harsh weather, or something else.  The false promise of utopia fills the landscape of Saskatchewan: as a place where many European immigrants were promised an idealized future and came to find a bitterly hostile environment.



As a teenager and early in my twenties I found myself caught up in the promises of the Web, Email, FTP, and Usenet.  In 1994 the idea I could look at photos on the FTP server of Survival Research Labs in California had an immense impact on me.  I was quickly swept up in communities of artists using technology, but maintained a discomfort with the beaming promise of technology: of the spiritual transcendence of virtual reality, of Mondo 2000, Wired Magazine, and of what is termed by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron as “The Californian Ideology.”  Although I didn’t think it at the time, I think the reality of Clemenceau made it impossible to believe.  Clemenceau was (in Baudriallard’s terms) my heterotopia.

Instead, I found resonance with what is now termed “D.I.Y.” – and my heroes were Mark Pauline, Simon Penny and other people hacking around with physical devices.  I grew to hate VRML, the glossy promises of interactive communication, and of the Californian Ideology. For me the best part of the internet was finding that there was a community of junkyard hackers, like my Uncle Reginald in Clemenceau. Utopian promises of technology are alluring and sexy, but seem oversimplified and shallow, like a type of pornography.  There’s only a surface promise and no personality.

Consumer culture, of course, requires a consistent cycle of excitement and hype over the promise of tomorrow – but for me this was harder to be swept up in with fond memories of Clemenceau.  Playing in abandoned cars, making go-karts, and watching my grandmother construct images out of oil paint: it was all too real and fun to get caught up in a fictional future.

Like Kate, I dislike terms like “virtual,” “cyber,” or “interactive” since they are often used uncritically and tend to allude to a simple binary between digital and non-digital.

One thing that I think is productive – or at least a topic that I’m interested in – is complicating or critiquing utopianistic and oversimplified views of technology. Technological utopianism often overlooks the raw and beautiful complexity of mundane, everyday life.

For me, tactics for rethinking this include extending communication and representation technologies beyond their normal scope or range of use. This is a way we, in Baurillard’s terms, work over the illusion. When extended to their limits, media technologies can invert themselves, which I think is nicely articulated by McLuhan through his tetrads of media.

Towards the end of his life, Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric embarked on a project to update the 1964 book Understanding Media in response to critics’ requests to provide a solid basis for his drastic and metaphoric claims; the result was Laws of Media: The New Science (1989), published by Eric eight years after Marshall’s death. The book articulated that media technologies have the potential to change in four distinct ways, and constructed a poetic four-region model to envision their concept with characteristics of obsolescence, retrieval, enhancement, and reversal. The reversal, in McLuhan’s eyes, occurs when something is pushed to its limits.

The main point of relevance to this discussion on simulations is that when mediating technologies are pushed beyond their ordinary limits, they can reverse or flip in their intent or use. The McLuhan diagram gives me a visual graph to think about how projects simultaneously amplify, invert, revive, and subsume – they swirl around and don’t simply proceed in a straight line.

When a simulation is taken beyond its role as a safe fantasy and pushed to envelop and take over reality, it becomes perverted. Problematizing a binary virtual/physical view of the world, for example, can be done by taking virtuality to an extreme. In the process, beliefs are “perverted” (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Perverting Technological Correctness, Leonardo 29:1, 1996). By taking a belief or simulation too far, it stops being a comforting diversion and flips into an absurdity, an obsession or a dark dream.

I don’t envision my work as building an alternate social space, but see it as primarily exploring the interstitial space between ordinary life and simulations of it. In the case of the OutRun project, for example, it plays within a space where reality and dream are intentionally blended, confused and blurred: the video game becomes reality and reality becomes a video game. In some ways it’s intentionally trying to create an uncanny valley between the familiar and the almost-familiar (Masahiro Mori, 1970). The “virtual” has always been with us in different forms through history and is not something unique to digital technologies. However, the continued proliferation of digital media technologies has created a lot of interesting opportunities between everyday life and representations of it.

The work that we’re doing might be thought of as exploring an in-between space, or as I’ve heard Tim Durfee refer to it as a spandrel: an in-between space that has evolved into something new.  I think that artists serve as good navigators and explorers of the in-between.

I’m really happy to catch up with Garnet’s work and to hear about Michelle’s new projects, specifically “Buscando al Sr. Goodbar”. I am interested in how the project brings into the youtube/map equation a very new and vital thread of connection through and between the network and the world.

I have never liked any of the words suggested by language– “cyber”, “virtual”, etc., and I always think that it is a mistake to think of the real and the virtual as a simple binary. These things are intertwined and complex, and there isn’t really any reason we should separate out that which happens “on the screen” from that which happens “off the screen”.

I think it is a real challenge to work with elements between screen/not screen and have them retain or recapture vitality, loveliness and importance, because in culture we are used to transferring between these modes, and we tend to discard the haeccaeity of the thing if it is onscreen. I see this thread in some of Garnet’s work, for example with his use of the real cockroach in “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot”. This is one of the things I think is successful about Michelle’s new projects – there is a cascading array of representation and represented activity and it is examining what that movement is, and where that transformation is happening or not happening.

I also like how there is a play with scale. Scale of course is so important to considerations of the map and how it functions. We don’t always consider the haptic qualities of the map or of the things that are mapped. Google Earth is so tiny and fluid and swift and gigantic, Borges’ interactive map.

That is why I like the introduction of people, especially groups of people, especially groups of people in a bus (!) when tracking down and connecting with youtube videos. The man playing the piano on youtube is so very small and luminous, but when we meet him in real life he is large and in the centre of a crowd, and the whole things scales up back up again.

It relates to the Baudrilliard quote advanced by Garnet: “The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.” I like how sometimes the world can be rendered “a little more unintelligible” through the provision of detail and specificity, through the actual activities of people and qualities of places and things.

I think Baudrillard is a good starting point for this conversation: as I look back at my work over the past fifteen years, I’ve continually worked with the theme of inverting simulations or the virtual.  I initially did this by attempting to invert and play with the internet and notions of reality wrapped around it – see  ”Interface” (1995-1996) <http://conceptlab.com/interface/> or “The Simulator” (1997) <http://conceptlab.com/simulator/>.

About five years ago I started exploring biomimetics and computer simulations of biological intelligence, and produced “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot” (2004-2006) <http://conceptlab.com/roachbot/> which attempted to rethink a trend in robotics to increasingly use simulated models of insects.  In this case, I saw scientific research pursuing a goal of a sanitized, simulated model of something, but afraid to directly engage with the real thing.  In this project, I replaced the sanitized, simulated model of insect logic on a microprocessor – which is frequently used to control mobile robotic systems – with the real thing, an actual cockroach.  It’s an extension of the logic and a perversion of it at the same time: it can show that simulations are inherently curated, manicured and biased.

In my most recent work, “Out Run” (2009) <http://conceptlab.com/outrun/> I’ve been exploring the theme of simulation in videogames and points at which games cross over into everyday physical reality.  In my Out Run project, I am taking a sit-down arcade game cabinet that is modeled after a Ferrari Testarossa and enabling it to actually drive.  In other words, I am “un-simulating” a 800 pound driving video game built by Sega in 1986 and converting it into a small car.  While driving your miniature Ferrari, the video game screen in front of you will completely obfuscate your view, but software is being built to render the real world in the style of the original 8-bit videogame.  It is like a fantasy taken to its extreme and gone humorously wrong.  I expect that it will be quite dangerous driving a car with only a 1986 computer simulation of reality as your windshield, but perhaps not too different from people that have blind faith in GPS navigation systems while driving.

Coming back to Baudrillard, I think it is worthwhile to note that about fifteen years after he published “Simulacra and Simulations” (1981) that he brought forward the concept of “radical thought” as a method out of his somewhat fatalistic view of simulacra and how images degrade from reflections to perversions to masking absence to pure simulation.  One of my favorite passages of text is from Baudrillard’s description of radical thought in “The Perfect Crime” (1996) and I think it pertains to some of the work that Michelle, Kate and I are involved in:

“Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion – in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real… The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.”

I think of radical thought as being similar to the historical role of the trickster –  one that disrupts the everyday by inverting conventional behavior, using humor, and being open and at peace with life’s paradoxes and multiplicities.  Being a clown doesn’t accomplish much, but trying to intelligently invert social conventions and assumptions can constructively and artistically rewire our understandings of who we are.  Mapping real space using virtual models is a part of “working over the illusion.”

I think one of the reasons I started being interested in the mapping of real space was that it could be looked at as relating to the operation or function of a network, but it was a low-tech network, and it didn’t involve the screen.

I was looking at relationships between places – the structures and activities of a city – as another kind of information network, or exploring ways these extended, evolved or evidenced other networks. The interest was about information, function, and connection that pulled away from the screen and started to operate in new ways by relating to and attaching to the real world.

One of the directions this has taken me is using the activity and movement of people or structures in the world to animate and recombine text. In the Path project, I produced a 12 volume bookwork from text that was recombined or put into order by the incidental physical movement of an individual going about their life in cafes in Montreal.

I’m interested in how activity of any kind (physical movement, network activity, social or symbolic activity) can be something you can kind of attach to and use as a generator. Doing this is funny from the perspective of mapping. That which is produced becomes a kind of a map, because there is a relation between “real” information (that which acts as a generator, i.e. the movement of an individual) and representational or poetic information (that which is mixed as evidence of the activity, i.e. the text they recombine when they move). This to me is the essence of a map: shifting overlays between real and representational information. For me, there is always a reversal, and I’m interested in beauty and surprise.

We are very happy to feature our next conversation between Kate Armstrong, Vancouver multi-media artist and scholar, Garnet Hertz, a Canadian artist and scholar based in California, and Michelle Teran, Canadian multi-media artist based in Berlin. All three artists deal explicitly with contemporary ways of mapping space, or in some cases, a contemporary poetics of space. We’re drawing them together from three very different parts of the world to discuss their newest projects as well as the ideas driving them.

Below I’ve included bios taken directly from their websites.

Kate Armstrong:

Kate Armstrong is a writer, artist and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice merges networked media, written forms and urban experiences to create work that examines process and accumulation.

Her exhibitions include the Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey, Canada), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania), Psy-Geo-Conflux (New York), Western Front (Vancouver), Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), ISEA 2006 (San Jose, California), ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge (San Jose, California), Yerba Buena Centre (San Francisco, California), Interactive Futures: The New Screen (Victoria, Canada), Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie, Alberta), and Akbank Sanat (Istanbul, Turkey).

She has lectured and held workshops at venues including the Tate Britain, Banff New Media Institute, the Obermann Centre for Advanced Studies (Iowa City, Iowa), and Time’s Up (Linz, Austria). . . . more

Garnet Hertz:

Garnet Hertz is an interdisciplinary artist, Fulbright Scholar and doctoral candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He also holds an MFA from the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, has completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis and is currently an affiliate of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction in the Department of Informatics. His dissertation research explores the creative, historical and cultural advantages of reusing obsolete information technologies in the media arts, and uses these examples to construct a critical theory of a cluster of related activities: circuit bending, D.I.Y., critical design and media archaeology. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in eleven countries including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotics. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture and workshop series on electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News.
(updated May 2009)

Michelle Teran:

Michelle Teran (Canada) explores the interplay between social and media networks within urban environments, She uses performative action, many times involving public participation, to articulate the relation of media to the body and architecture by staging urban interventions such as tours, walks, outdoor projections, participatory installations and happenings. These projects involve working within different locations, social and cultural contexts and are the direct results of occupying spaces and cultivating exchanges.

She has talked, performed, exhibited at events and venues throughout North America, Europe, Australia and Asia such as the Transmediale Festival, Ars Electronica, ISEA, BEAP, V2, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Medialab Prado, Theater der Welt, Impakt Festival, CCCB/MACBA, SONAR, ARCO International Art Fair, Vooruit, HAU2, Nabi, Performance Space, Waag Society for Old and New Media and the World Wide Web. She has completed residencies and commissions with several cultural institutions including Tesla (Berlin), Waag Society for Old and New Media (Amsterdam), Mobile Digital Commons Network (Montreal) , La Chambre Blanche (Quebec City) and The Interactive Institute (Stockholm). She has lectured and led workshops on topics such as the relation of artist, performer and audience to networked space and the urban topologies of space, place and non-place at several educational institutions including Bauhaus Universität (Weimar), Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Dance Unlimited (Amsterdam), Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam) and Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen (Bergen).

She has received numerous grants and awards for her work including the Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention within the interactive art category and 2nd prize in the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition, sponsored by Fundacion Telefonica (Madrid).

She currently lives and works in Berlin.