SIGGRAPH 1995: Digital Atelier
Conference:
Overview:
Rendering Text: The Web as Hybrid Community
Community is a central tenet for those who have used the computer to transform art, culture, commerce and communication in the years since SIGGRAPH was founded. Yet there has never been a unified community of makers and users. Instead, we are “communities,” satellites of interest groups and sub-specialties, employing local dialects so thick that even though we claim to speak a common language of bits and bytes, most of our conversations are impenetrable to all but a select few. Thus, it is cause for wonder when the technologies that so often splinter our attentions instead bring about new unities. We concentrate here on the conjoining of text and image because this involves a transformation not only of the form of on-line environments, but also of their very purposes.
Consider two groups of people: those who communicate with digital graphics and media, and those who use text-based networking to bring about interaction. This is not to say that graphics programmers did not have email accounts or that IRC and netnews users did not download .gif images. Though substantial numbers were cardcarrying members of both groups, there were many who belonged to one or the other, each with its own history, emphasis, and argot. We speak in the past tense, because with the recent advent of the World Wide Web, these two groups have effectively merged. Designers are now creating home pages that compress effectively for transmission, and net surfers are incorporating graphics into on-line MOOs. Interactive Communities celebrates this fusion, showcasing those projects that combine the instant access and interlinking of online environments with the visual richness and icono graphic quality of computer imaging.
Yet we have to ensure that the specificities of each of the communities – what drew people to them in the first place – are not lost in the rush. What happens to the growing sophistication and nuance of digital images as we subject them to the compression algorithms required to pipe them around the globe? And, perhaps even more important, do we sacrifice the egalitarian community of text, which has defied our usual social hierarchies, to the requirements of “professional” imagemaking? The late critic Craig Owens once defined the essence of postmodern art as “the eruption of language into the field of the visual.” In a cultural turnabout, the Web demonstrates an invasion of the textual by the order of the image. Lasting communities are built by a responsible and empowered citizenry. We must ensure that images flow from many to many – like the Internet in its text-only days – and not only from the powerful few to the multitudes (the model offered by contemporary mass media).
Peter Lunenfeld
Art Center College of Design
Ken Goldberg
University of Southern California
