Forethought, a Labour thinktank on the future, have published a report on how they think Britain will change by 2020. I’m about halfway through the report, and most of the assumptions are not that radical – aging population, increased consumer expectations from public services, decline of manufacturing sector and rise in importance of ICT. But there is one statistic that has stopped me in my tracks:

“all of the phone calls made in 1984 are now made in less than a single day”

Annoyingly, they don’t give a reference for that statistic, or say whether they mean the UK or global communications market. But assuming its true, thats an amazing statistic – in 17 years, the amount of phone calls we make has increased 365 times. Its one of those stats that gives you an almost vertiginous perspective on the progress of technology. What did we do with all that extra time in 1984? What are we doing with all those extra calls? There is no analysis of whether they include internet access in the stats, but even so, that wouldn’t account for an increase of that scale.

It illustrates how communication technology changes society in subtle ways. We don’t end up with jetpacks, food pills or homes under the sea, but instead our lives change gradually, then exponentially, until we can’t remember what life was like before those technologies existed, even if this was less than 20 years ago.

In a previous job, I had to sort through the archive of a photography gallery, including carbon copies of all the gallery’s correspondence with artists in the 1970’s and 80’s. These conversations would take place over days, even weeks, as letters were sent and replies drafted. Nowadays, the same conversations would happen in a day, at most, using email. But we still ran the same number of exhibitions every year, with roughly the same number of artists, in 1997 as they did in 1977. What did the gallery staff in 1977 do with all their time? And what were we doing in 1997 with all our calls, emails and faxes?

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I was looking at this timeline of potential futures, and the bit on virtual reality and consumer robotics struck a nerve. People have been talking about VR taking off for over 20 years now. It made me think about certain ideas that asymptotically extend into the future, never seeming to actually get any nearer in real life. These ideas all seem to exist at the extreme edges of scenarios, either utopian or dystopian.

Technologies, like VR, that fall into this category often have technical or form factors that prevent them from catching a hook into the dynamics of real life. By existing mainly in labs, they don’t get the chance to get misused and abused by real users, and so never quite touch down on the street.

Other more conceptual ideas about the future are often just manifestations of rapture-like fantasies about cataclysmic change caused by some unstoppable force. These type of fantasies are closely linked to our insecurities about the limits of human agency, and take many forms depending on the belief systems of the author. Perversely, they are as much about reassurance as threat, as they imagine an event that shows all our beliefs about controlling our environment or destiny to be hollow illusions. If you’re struggling to make sense of your life, thats a reassuring thought.

But anyway, lets not go down that route. I started this post intending to write a list of ‘perpetual futures’ and their distance from real life:

Reality being replaced by VR – 15-20 years
Sentient Robots – 20-30 years
Curing all illnesses – 20-40 years
Living under the sea – 20-50 years
Colonising other planets – 50-100 years
Uploading consciousness/escaping the biological body – 50-100 years
Time travel – 100-500 years
World Peace through impact of technology – 100-200 years
World War through impact of technology – 100-200 years
World Peace through intervention from divine being – 1-1000 years
World War through intervention from divine being – 1-1000 years
World Peace through intervention from extra-terrestrials – 50-500 years
World War through intervention from extra-terrestrials – 50-500 years
Boston Red Sox winning the World Series – infinity

Any other suggestions?

[Thanks to thingsmagazine for the link]

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I love these two quotes from lasagnafarm’s interview with someone who’s just left friendster:

But really, walking up to strangers on the street and awkwardly introducing yourself is the new Friendster. Haven’t you heard?

Friendster is 75% hot 23-year-olds. Or there’s some serious trick photography going on. This is the perfect forum for them. It’s a demographic that likes to see themselves summarized in bullet points and photo-booth pictures

[via connectedselves]

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Tom Dolan writes about sony’s proposed PDP, and wonders when we’re going to get rid of the concept of the ‘phone’ as a device, and admit that it is merely one of a number of possible applications on a ‘mobile data-linked device’. But is the phone merely an application? It seems that the mobile phones, in particular, are almost ritual objects, imbued with emotional associations that we don’t assign to other devices.

I’ve been digging around for some historical perspectives on how the phone became such an emotional object, and found an excellent excerpt from the book ‘America Calling’. The final section quotes a report on the effect that the telephone had on women in isolated farm communities:

The most dramatic and consistent testimony in the first few decades of the twentieth century indicated that rural people, especially farm women, depended heavily on the telephone for sociability, at least until they owned automobiles. These women used the telephone to break their isolation, organize community activities, keep up on news, help their children maintain friendships, and so on. Observers repeatedly claimed that telephoning sustained the social relations – and even the sanity – of women on scattered homesteads.” Industry men were among such observers. For example, the North Electric Company stated in 1905, “The evil and oppression of solitude on woman is eliminated.” An officer of an Ohio telephone company wrote the same year:

“When we started… the farmers thought that they could get along without telephones…. Now you couldn’t take them out. The women wouldn’t let you even if the men would. Socially, they have been a god-send. The women of the county keep in touch with each other, and with their social duties, which are largely in the nature of church work.”

Tom suggests that the ‘you’ in your mobile device is your data, and so the device is just a dumb brick that stores data and applications. I disagree – the ‘you’ in your mobile device is the intimate connections that the device enables. Its this network that makes us imbue the phone with its emotional power – the hope or dread of its many possible connections. When a phone rings, or a text message bleeps, who doesn’t get a small jump in the stomach, a fleeting sense of wonder at who it could be?

The function that enables this emotional connectivity – telephony, IM, SMS, etc – might subtly alter, but whatever it is, we’ll continue to be in thrall to the emotional connections it enables, not the application itself. And while we have that emotional connection, the phone will always be a whole lot more than just an app.

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One of the things I commissioned in my old job was Speakers Corner, an interactive art project that links a 15m LED screen with the web, the street and text messaging. The artist who developed the idea was the fantastic Jaap De Jonge, who is not only one of the most interesting digital public artists around at the moment, but was also incredibly patient during the projects extended gestation period.

It was first commissioned at the end of 1998, and almost immediately I was asked to step into another role in the organisation, so had to put development of the project on the back burner. Jaap was very patient during this time, and also put up with a curator (me) that kept asking for more things to be added (like SMS functionality). In the end, though, it rocked. The opening night in June 2001, when groups of people stood on a Huddersfield street corner and battered the thing with SMSes, was fantastic.

Then genius artist/coder dorian mcfarland was roped in to totally re-write the back-end to make it more flexible, but I buggered off to a new job before he got a chance to do it. I only found out a few weeks ago that he’s been struggling with it for the last 2 years. I’m *really* sorry Dorian… 😉

But now its back up, and looks 100 times better than it did when I left it. And the new Creative Director, Tom Holley, is commissioning more work for it, so hopefully they’ll be able to use the project for all sorts of experiments around digital networks, public space, and social writing. The one thing that I really wanted when commissioning the project (and that Jaap was the only artist to understand) was to create a digital public artwork that was a flexible, configurable *interface*, rather than a shiny badge that doesn’t change for 5 years and just looks increasingly out of date.

The fact that its now in version 2.0 is a good sign that its more like an on-going software project than a static, white-cube object. And like software, the initial release was the product of lots of delays, late-nighters and last minute fixes that we promised ourselves we’d fix in the next version, then went through all the same problems all over again.

Most artists wouldn’t be able to let go enough to be able to treat an artwork like a software project. They feel that too much of themselves is contained in the details of the work, and any suggestion that it might have to change or adapt over time threatens their ego. Jaap was confident enough about himself and his practise to want to work hard to make it flexible, and to realise that it was more powerful it could adapt and change. Almost every other artist on the shortlist we had wanted to take a ‘signature’ piece and drop it on site (actually, SODA came up with a fantastic idea, but it wasn’t quite as good as Jaap’s).

All in all, I think the curatorial policy for this project would have echoed Wiliam Gibson’s quote – “the street finds its own use for things”. I wanted to find a way of creating something that had that kind of flexibility. The measure of success came one morning, about 3/4 months after the project launch, when I was walking down the street towards the sign. There, immortalised in 15m red LED, was a scrolling message, repeating over and over again:

BOOTHY IS A LADYBOY

I don’t know who boothy was, or who was questioning his gender preference, but it obvioulsy needed saying, and it marked the point at which a few thousand pounds worth of technology became just another surface of the city, and all the more interesting for that.

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This is the second in the series of three interviews I did for a recent essay. In this one, Lucy Kimbell talks about her project Audit:

“Audit is the result of conducting a personal poll in which Lucy Kimbell asks – “What am I worth?” Combining techniques from business analysis and other disciplines, this book uses material gathered from a specially constructed questionnaire to measure a broad range of values about the artist.”
[from the publisher Bookworks website]

Matt Locke: Are there any questions about yourself you refrained from including in Audit? If so, what were they, and why?

Lucy Kimbell: Yes, loads, things that I wanted to keep inside my public-private boundary mostly for reasons of fear – not wanting to expose myself.  The book is not actually about me but about the interface between me and a group of other people who know me in some way, and the process of finding out things.

ML: How did you choose who to send it to? Was this an empirical or an emotional
decision?

LK: Selecting respondents was partly about who I thought would respond, based on the nature of their relationship to me; partly circumstance and an instant ‘Hey, I’m doing this project…I wonder if you’d consider….’ It was sometimes emotional, sometimes pragmatic, sometimes me being a chancer. This did include people I think don’t like me or find me difficult. and vice versa.  Sometimes I gave it to people I had recently met professionally and they seemed to find it easiest to fill in my form.

ML: Did you have an interaction model in mind for the contributors? – did they all see the final book, or did their participation end with the questionnaire?

LK: No one saw the final book except for me, the publisher and designers until it was ready. My interaction model involved respondents filling in the form and sometimes my reminding them to fill it in and send it back, or hassling them a few times, or begging. It also involved slight shifts in the perception of each of us towards each other as a result of the interaction I had initiated. These shifts are alluded to and documented in my notes in the book.

Some of the contributors have seen the final book and mostly they like it, or don’t reveal their real thoughts or feelings. Without exception, on the occasions I gave the book to them in person, they all flicked through the pages looking for any recognisable reference to themselves.

ML: Did anyone expect the project to continue in some form after the publication of the book (eg be updated annually, or lead to more intimate (!) interactions?)

LK: No. But I’d like to set up a lovely graphical page on my site to display feedback to the book.

ML: Has the project changed any of the relationships that it measured?

LK: Yes, all of them in some way. In the same way that any feedback and observation changes everything.

ML: Has the project changed any aspect of your opinion of yourself, or self-esteem?

LK: Yes. I’d rather not say how.

ML: What kind of response have you had to this work ‘as an artwork’? Has it been reviewed/criticised at all?

LK: I’ve had very, very positive feedback from academics and writers including some well known names. In particular sociologists love it. But nothing from the art press that I have seen. Some of the audit form pages were reprinted in Tank magazine.

ML: What other responses have you had to the work? Are these more or less valid to you than its status as a piece of art?

LK: Who decides its status as a piece of art? Sure, it was commissioned as an artist’s book by an established art publisher and I refer to myself as an artist on the blurb on the back. But if ithe book has no or little currency among artists, curators and critics I do have to question its status as a piece of art. It may or not make a difference that I thought of it as a book all the way along. It has to work as a book, in relation to other books, as well as to what art does or can do. I welcome all interesting and considered responses, and particularly the ones that lead to a stimulating conversation.

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A few years ago, in a previous job, I commissioned a number of projects with artists using SMS as a medium. One of them was Tim Etchells, a writer and co-founder of Forced Entertainment, a performance group who have produced some of the most innovative and exciting theatre I’ve seen over the last 10 years. I was really eager to get Tim to consider SMS as a medium, as his writing is very epigrammatic, and his subject matter devoted to the random poetry of urban life. The project he came up with was ‘surrender control’, a series of instructions sent as text messages to subscribers over a number of weeks that cleverly traced narratives of desire, trust and intimacy.

As part of an essay I’ve recently written on the project, I asked Tim some questions about ‘surrender control’. I really wished I’d found some way of sparking a debate about this project at the time, as it touches on so many issues about narrative, privacy, intimacy and technology that have become even more important as ‘social software’ like friendster have gained popularity. Surrender Control explored the darker shadows of communication technologies, illustrating the umheimlich twin of the shiny, happy world of ubiquitous connectivity that we are always being promised (look at those smiles on the Friendster homepage! Everyone’s having such a rad time!). So, rather belatedly, I’m putting this Q&A session with Tim up here, and hope that it sparks some comments. Also, read Jill Walker’s blog for an excellent description of what it felt like to participate in the project.

TIM ETCHELLS ON SURRENDER CONTROL:

“Surrender Control is somewhere between a game and a set of dares. The instructions that people will receive vary enormously – some are orders to think about particualr topics, others are invitations to look at the world in a particular way, other instructions are for actions, demands that people behave in particular ways or that they carry out particular tasks.

What interests me about SMS is the intimacy inherent in the form – messages go direct to the phone of an individual, direct to a ‘place’ which is normally occupied by that person’s friends, family or lovers. To create an art work for this context is an invitation, one could say, to whisper in the ears of strangers as they go about their daily business. Surrender Control tries to explore and push the boundaries of what is possible or even permissible in this context.”

Matt Locke:How did you find writing for SMS as a delivery medium?

Tim Etchells: I liked it in the sense that I really enjoy working to limits – the technical limits (text only, a certain number of characters) as well as the limits of the context – one’s expectations of the place and time that people would be receiving the messages. Once I know what the edges of a form are (be it SMS or theatre or video) then I’m happy to play with and disrupt those edges!

ML: What kind of responses were you expecting from participants in the project?
What role did they play in the narrative?

TE: I didn’t have a definite idea of what people would do.. I thought that some would obstinately do nothing! And that some would obediently do everything.. and a lot of middle ground.

There are certainly many instructions where the participants need to make their own decisions about how far they’re willing to go. To me that’s a part of the project. The instructions are proposals, invitations – but there’s undoubtedly an element of flirtatiousness and temptation in what I propose – people have to make their choices about what they’ll do and what they won’t do.

In fact it’s not even that important to me that people follow the instructions. Perhaps what’s just as interesting is to sit in a bar with friends, or ride the bus home or sit with familly in front of the TV and just consider for a moment what it might mean to follow a certain instruction. I think a powerful sense of what the world is, and what our boundaries for acting in it are could emerge from that…

ML: Surrender Control was designed as a one-way project – how did the lack of feedback effect your experience on the project?

TE: I can’t really imagine it working with feedback – it was so solidly built on the fact of none. Feedback would only be interesting to me if it was an interactive piece for ONE phone user at a time (now that would be something to pursue!) ­ ie: response from user is followed by a real response from me and so on. In that sense the piece was a broadcast work – a one to many piece, not a peer to peer piece. But any one receiver always gets their instructions/msg alone.. so it can still feel very personal. I think I constructed it so that the ‘voice’ of my text/instructions could appear personal and one-on-one but also so that it could switch to something more machinic/unsympathetic/relentless.

ML: What kind of narrative structure did you use for the texts? Was this influenced by the limitations of SMS as a medium?

TE: I think the structure was one that developed more musically, or in terms of
increasing demands and dares… It had a ‘pull to excess’ or a pull to the edges of the game that was established… ­ The texts become more and more insistent, stranger, more intrusive and at certain times more frequent or at anti-social times of the day. I tried to make it develop whilst at the same time avoiding any sense of it starting to cohere around a single narrative idea. It’s something I say or think about a lot of my work in a lot of media – I don’t want it to collapse into a narrative, I want it to stay in that state of suspension where narratives are possible, but not confirmed. In this way I’d say I am interested in juggling the elements of story, but not really in telling them! Of course this also connects very well to the context of SMS – as a writer I can’t control the context of receiving, so however much one wants to ‘control’ the meaning of what one writes/sends it is always changed/reinvented/reassembled at the other end. I embrace this.

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[this is a recently finished article commissioned by Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, based in San Francisco. Thanks to Marisa Olson for the commission, and the artists for their assistance]

Part 1: Three stories about trust.

1: A story about Uncle Roy All Around You by Blast Theory

I’m standing in a red phone booth on the lower half of Regent St, London. Outside, a drunk-looking man in a tweed suit looks desperate to make a phone call, whilst I’m standing here, holding a PDA, waiting for the phone to ring. After what seems like an age, the call comes, and a man’s voice tells me that I have to trust him, and that he has something he has to ask me to do for him. After he finishes the call, I’ve got to head north, take the first left turn, and get into the white limousine that’s parked by the side of the road. I wait in the limousine for about 5 minutes, then a man in a brown suit gets in and sits next to me. Without saying a word, the limousine drives off, and the man starts asking me questions, looking straight ahead all the time. Have I ever had to trust a stranger? Would I be able to help someone I’ve never met if they were in need? Could I be at the end of the phone whenever they needed to call me? Could I commit to that for a year?

2: A story about Surrender Control by Tim Etchells

My mobile makes the two-tone bleep that tells me I’ve got a text message. Scrolling down, the message reads “Write the word SORRY on your hands. Leave it there until it fades”. What should I do with this instruction? Obey it? Delete it? What would happen if I did write SORRY on my hands? I think through the rest of my day – a meeting at work, a packed underground train, meeting my wife in a restaurant… What would people think I was sorry for? Is it a reminder to say sorry, or to be sorry? Would they ask me about it, or would they store the memory, forever affecting their impression of me, of who I am and what I might do? Am I the kind of person who writes messages on their hands about emotional issues? Am I the kind of person who says sorry?

3: A story about Audit by Lucy Kimbell

It’s a Wednesday. I’m at my desk, thinking of ways to not do things that I know I should be doing. I flick through the pile of envelopes in my in-tray, and come across an A4 manila envelope. Inside is a questionnaire from someone I’ve met a few times over the last few years – it’s an audit about her and about our relationship. The questions are strange; like a work appraisal, but veering off into more intimate territory – Would she make a good parent? Do I think she should have children? If she died tomorrow, or if we never communicated again, what are the three things I would miss about her? I start filling out the questionnaire, taking it seriously at first, as if it were a tax form, or a reference for a passport application. I feel like I know her, but we’re acquaintances rather than friends, and some of the questions push me to be more intimate, to imagine parts of her life that I don’t know about. What will she do with this? Why is she asking me? If I drew up a list of people to fill in a similar audit about me, would I include her?

Part 2: Trust, art, and technology

Those stories describe three interactions. Or performances. Or moments in the production, or consumption, of an artwork. Or perhaps they are descriptions of how the production and consumption of an artwork can be reduced to the same act, the same moment. They operate within, to use Nicholas Bourriaud’s term, a ‘relational aesthetic’ – these artworks don’t rely on an encounter with a traditional art object, nor do they substitute that with some transcendent concept of a dematerialised art object. In Bourriaud’s definition, these works exist within “the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”. They are moments to be experienced, not viewed, reaching out and enmeshing themselves in the messy network of conversations and relationships that make up your life.

But these are not ‘happenings’, ‘live art’ or, worst of all, ‘public art’ – these aren’t experiences created to celebrate the liberation of art from the constrictions of the White Cube, and the high capitalist symbolic value bestowed upon art by those hermetically sealed walls. Enough politics already! For some critics, art cannot exist amongst the quotidian without taking to the barricades. It’s damned if it keeps quiet within the safe walls of the museum, and damned if it tries to live outside that space without constantly reminding you of that fact. For isn’t most ‘public’ art exactly like the worst kind of evangelist – carrying a bundle a pamphlets behind its back whilst it tries to disarm you with a handshake? There’s no real risk there – no commitment to existing more than a toddler’s-step from the safe arms of the curators and critics, plaques and pronouncements that silently re-build white gallery walls around their ‘interventions’ into our city streets. Much harder to just put something out there, to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to risk misunderstandings and rejection.

If these works have one thing in common, it is this – they understand how communication technologies have created a series of fissures in everyday life, a series of moments when some small act – a phone call, text message or a letter – creates the possibility of stepping into someone else’s world. Bourriaud is right when he says this kind of work isn’t about the modernist fantasy of progress and opportunity – “Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world: today it is modelling possible universes” . But he then coins the term ‘hands-on utopias’, as if artists had slipped the shackles of the avant-garde project only to engage in the equivalent of community service. The fissures these works inhabit are sometimes more like wounds than open doors. They are intrinsically wound up in the dual morality of communication technology – the yet-to-be-answered phone call could just as easily be a bomb threat as a declaration of love.

Of course, we’ve been here before. Photography, the cultural virus that infected the last century, was heralded as a technology for emancipation and understanding. Given the grand project of uniting the world under an egalitarian flashlight, it instead illuminated our darkest shadows, creating unheimlich Memento Mori. Sophie Calle, in her book Suite Venitienne, embraces this duality, and uses the camera as a tool for an uneasy exploration of desire. Taking a chance encounter with a stranger as a sign, she follows him to Venice, keeping a diary of photos taken with a lens that took photos at 90 degrees from the camera driection. The diary documents, in breathless prose, her stalking of the mysterious ‘Henry B.’ through the streets of Venice. There is no clear justification for the act – it’s a folly, but the desire with which she throws herself into the project always threatens to become something else entirely – “I must not forget that I don’t have any amorous feelings towards Henri B.”

The intimacy of the mobile phone creates a similarly fragmented network of communication and desire. In Tim Etchells’ Surrender Control, a series of flyers were distributed in London with the enigmatic message ‘Do you want to Surrender Control?’ with the instruction to send a text message saying ‘SURRENDER’. A week or so afterwards, a series of instructions were sent back, each from an anonymous source, and increasing in risk over the following days from banal thought experiments (‘Look around. See who’s looking’) to actions that have tangible effects on real life (‘Dial a number one different from that of a friend. If someone answers, try to keep them talking’).

But who is really surrendering control here? Subscribers, experiencing the frisson of an instruction from an unknown Other, can still decide whether to actually obey the actions or not. But the artist risks much more. Nothing heralded this work as ‘art’ – in fact, in online discussions that commented on the project, it was frequently mistaken for a corporate viral marketing campaign . The work exists or not in the mind of the receiver (audience seems too passive a noun, whilst participant assumes an activity that might not actually have taken place). The text message, less than 160 characters long, was easily deleted, and there was no avenue for feedback – like Calle, Etchells wanted an unconsummated relationship. Describing the Other, or giving a motive behind the communication, would have greatly diminished its power – better to let people project from their own intimacies, and imagine their own masters:

“At first I felt as though something was lacking. Motivation, I think. Why would I want to follow these instructions? I wanted more of a story, reasons, causality, a role to fill, perhaps? Who was supposed to be sending these messages? I can easily imagine a messaging sequence like this with a clear narrative frame.
[…]
And yet there is some narrative here. It’s like a very loosely woven net that I slip through easily, but if I’m careful to stay inside it I can pull at threads and find the connections, feel someone else pulling threads pulling me towards them, imagine from the rhythm of the pulling and the messages who that other person might be.

Do everything in the wrong order, was my latest instruction. Shall I? Hmm…”

[fromjill/txt]

Lucy Kimbell’s Audit treads a similarly risky path. By sending out the questionnaire, she risked rejection, or, even worse, earnest responses that could be as disturbing as they were enlightening. In the book published to document the project, she uses a number of critical approaches to frame the responses, from economic theories to sociological. But the work keeps sliding out from under the microscope, with some respondents resisting the format, and Kimbell’s own sidebar comments that never quite give her the last word. So what is it as a document? It’s obviously flawed as a serious piece of research, due to the complicity of researcher and subject, It’s not a portrait of the artist – despite the whole book being ostensibly about her, you could read the whole thing and still pass her by in the street. Instead, it’s a fragile kind of map – a temporary document of a series of relationships, created not according to a strict topography, but by the warp and weft of real life. Those that didn’t respond don’t appear on the map, and the ones that did form a chorus of unreliable narrators. Audit, for the purposes of research, treats relatives and relative strangers with the same even hand, and demonstrates the fragile networks of trust that exist between them.

Part 3: Epilogue

At the end of our car ride around London, the brown-suited stranger asked me for a postcard I’d picked up from a disused office earlier on. Driven by a series of hints and instructions sent to me over the PDA, I’d discovered this office in an otherwise normal block on Regent Street. After rummaging around amongst desks, computers and guidebooks to London, I found a postcard printed with the text ‘When would you ever trust a stranger?’. I wrote, ‘When you have no other choice’, and slipped it into a shirt pocket. Back in the car, we’d parked by the side of the street, near a post box. The stranger asked me to write my phone number on the card, then added an address and stuck on a stamp. “This is the address of a stranger” he said. “There is a post box outside. If you post this card, the stranger will have your number. You will be committing to be there for them, at the end of a phone call, for 12 months. They can call you anytime, for any reason. Will you post the card?”

As the stranger drove off, I stood in the street, the postcard bending in my hand from the wind. I thought about posting the card, about how a simple act would transform a few square inches of ink and paper into a year-long commitment to trust, and being trusted. How many small acts of trust do I commit to every day without thinking about it? How many promises, phone calls, emails, letters? What kind of network is formed by these pushes and pulls – how many knots, how many loose ends?

And finally, how come its taken a stranger to make me think about this?

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Matt Webb has just posted a long, complex, discourse comparing the symbolic forms of archaic art with the connective tissues of the web. Its fascinating to see how he links a vast range of theories about the nature of cause and meaning, from linguistic concepts like parataxis to the social effects of walking down a street. At the end, he poses a very pertinent question:

It’s possible there’s some trend in our virtual worlds: from the creation of a new medium as a paratactic aggregate, how long does it take for it to become part of the real world again, complete with the implicit nothing-is-wasted qualities of the universe? Is this period decreasing? How long did art take, how long did other media take, and by extrapolating this line, can we tell how long before cyberspace becomes a fair place to live?

An interesting question, but phrased this way, it carries the assumption of a historical progression – that a virtual environment is an abstract ‘place’, access to which is restricted by technological, social or cultural factors that are normalised over time. Matt uses the example of archaic art as another virtual world with a different set of barriers to entry – this time due to the cultural signifiers embedded in the spatial arrangement of forms. The stylised figures in Egyptian pot decoration represented the worldview of that culture in a way that has to be investigated by contemporary audiences. We need to interpret the differences between this mode of representation and ours, divided by the fracture point that was the adoption of perspective during the Renaissance.

But to imagine that we have no reference points *at all* to this mode of representation is too simplistic. The belief that theories of representation progressed in a historical line from cave painting to analytical perspective is in itself a cultural formulation, starting with the formalist ‘Strukturanalyse’ of the Vienna School of Art History in the 1930s, and leading to the aesthetic theories of high modernism used by Clement Greenberg to position US Post-War abstract painting as the apothesis of a analytical representation.

Many of the theories Matt refers to are explicit attacks on this cultural construct of a logical historical development, so it seems odd that he relocates his question about the symbolic form of the web within a historically progressive context. The fact is, many different modes of cultural representation exist simultaneously, on both macro and micro-cultural levels, and this was as true in the time of archaic art as it is now. Erwin Panofsky’s ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ is a good starting point to appreciate the interplay between theories of representation and their wider cultural influences. Since Panofsky, the logically progressive model that sees representation move from a ‘naive’ archaic language to an ‘analytical’ refinement of perspective has been under attack, and representational models that echo earlier historical forms (such as the links between baroque, rococco and art deco) have been re-evaluated.

So what does this mean for the web? Well, if we’re looking to understand the web as Symbolic Form, we need to appreciate that it has never *really* occupied a hermetic ‘virtual’ space, but that even in its earliest forms, it has contained echoes and reflections of pre-existing modes of representation. Even more importantly, these modes of representation are continually being mutated, built upon and erased by its users – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Alongside this constant process of accrual and modulation, the web occupies a number of positions in relation to other contemporary modes of representation, and is both cause and effect in these relationships. For example, the web has sometimes tried to look like cinema or TV, but equally, these forms have adopted some of the representational modes of the web (eg the mix of visual and textual data on 24hr news channels).

We don’t need to identify a point in time in which the web becomes part of an imagined historical progression of increasingly sophisticated modes of representation. Unlike other technological media of the 20th century, the web has retained a huge amount of flexibility – indeed, mutation and adaption are intrinsic qualities. This means it has retained a myriad of representational forms, from the aping of mass media to the ‘folk art’ of homepages. If we want to understand how the symbolic form of the web illuminates its value as a cause and affect – how it accrues meaning – we need to ask a different question. Instead of asking when cyberspace will become a fair place to live, we need to ask how it is being lived – how it is being folded and adapted into the myriad other representational forms that we use to illustrate our lives.

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If you want to get a perspective on the hype surrounding new technology, its always worth looking back through history to see how the past viewed the future. You often find a few persistent visions that recur every time a new technology comes along. These dreams usually have some kind of transcedent aspect to them, and are continually re-invented from the technological capabilities of the time.

A good example of this is illustrated by this series of victorian postcards giving a vision of the year 2000. There are a few future memes that have come up again and again – like personal flying machines and weather control machines. Another consistent curiosity for futurologists is the sea – it seems we’re always just a few years from living under it or walking on it. I’ve got a fantastic album from 1973 by the Soul Searchers called ‘We the People’ that includes a track called ‘1993’ – “will we all be living/in new homes in the sea/by 1993?” goes the refrain. Funk Futurology – hmmmmmm, nice!

The best thing in this selection of cards is the things they get right – particularly ‘Televised Outside Broadcasting’ and ‘Police X-ray Surveillance Machines’. That last one is almost scarily prescient – but substitute the x-ray with its contemporary heirs DNA and CCTV…

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