Techno-anxieties, guilt and the restoration of a material world

IMMERSED IN TECHNOLOGY: ART AND VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS Edited by Mary Anne Moser with Douglas MaCleod MIT Press 336pp, Pounds 35.95 ISBN 0 262 13314 8

This is a book in which it is easy to get immersed, but it investigates theories of "immersion" at no great depth, and treats "technology" in a somewhat emblematic way. It is based around the Art and Virtual Environments project which took place at Banff Center for the Arts in Western Canada through the period 1991-94.

Rather than identifying new realities, it seems virtually governed by technocaution. Except in the artists' own notes, imagination and vision in cyberspace are edited out of most essays and scepticism and suspicion are factored in. The authors are worried about it all, a worry meriting many footnotes, worried on our behalf, on behalf of the human race, of oppressed peoples, genders, races everywhere.

The introduction asks important questions: "What is the artist's role precisely and how do aesthetic features of cyberspace relate to the viewer's experience and conception of the work? Who has access to the technology and how will they apply their power?" But these are quickly delimited with the assertion that "it is then a task of art to give shape to possibilities and questions about this socioeconomic shift and its emerging cultural forms that are not raised by virtual environments produced and designed for instrumental purposes or for entertainment". Socioeconomics and cultural practice provide the leitmotif to most of these writings, while creativity, consciousness, aesthetics and art are largely avoided. Moreover, not only is the socioeconomic scenario for our technoculture not a pretty one but even "exclusion from this virtual realm does not protect economies and cultures throughout the globe from potentially suffering its yet uncertain effects" (my italics). Governed by a common ideology, the book lacks the "energy and opposition" that characterised the debates of the "Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus" at Banff which preceded this project, now "largely replaced by more collegial interactions", leading to a rather arch sobriety.

The book consists of theoretical essays and artists' statements. While the essays are mostly suitable for cultural studies students, the statements will be of value to everyone interested in the poetic, inventive, and challenging work which artists in North America are producing in this field. The project's call for proposals received applications from all over the world but those approved were mostly North American. Clearly Japan, Europe, Africa, South America and the Middle East were seen as virtually mute. Paradoxically, the essays make much of the need for fair representation of other cultures and races in all matters cyberspatial.

The book would benefit from a fuller documentation of the project itself, looking at its own internal gender problems, racial and socioeconomic tensions and tribulations, its internal connectivity and community. One senses that matters "spiritual" and "poetic" would have been met with some indifference or cynicism (unless they had an aboriginal source).

With its context of "new imaging technologies" and "virtual environments and landscapes", the book retains the classical view of art as image, as visual representation and evocation. The authors have not connected "the construction of meaning" (to which there is some reference in the book) with the "construction of reality", which is perhaps why they "long ago abandoned the term 'virtual reality' at Banff for the less sensational 'virtual environments' , thereby, in this reader's opinion, defusing the charge and challenge of VR technology and commuting it to a rather harmless and passive backdrop to "a material word in which we continue to operate". Connectivity and hyperlinks in cyberspace are not given any real significance. VR is largely represented as a stand alone affair. This is very much a North American publication , with all the techno-anxieties and guilt one can expect from such origins but few of its hopes and dreams. Utopia has been ruthlessly excluded. Of the 26 contributors, 17 are based in the US, the rest are Canadian, with one each from from Finland and Australia.

The quality of writing is uneven: Cameron Bailey, Rob Milthorp, Jeanne Randolph - immature writers at best - simply do not belong in the same book as Frances Dyson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nell Tenhaaf, or Avital Ronell. The richness of the book lies somewhere between the poetics of Loretta Todd, who writes movingly and poetically of aboriginal attitudes to this new world, and the shrewd aesthetic and art historical understanding provided by Erkki Huhtamo. Allucqure Rosanne Stone adopts an admirably oblique critical style.

The book is well designed. The colour plates, like the artists' own writing, are clear and informative. The black-and-white photographs are often low resolution, fuzzy (especially of the splendid Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun) and tell us too little about the creative and human experience of cyberspace that was the Banff Project - not unlike the critical essays that make up the bulk of this book.

Roy Ascott is director of the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, University of Wales College, Newport.