OMNIZONE

Outline:

Organized by Yu Yeon Kim and Stephen Pusey of PLEXUS, the ambition of OMNIZONE is to present a "mapping" of digital culture from individual perspectives. The participants of this project include artists, curators, critics, programmers, research scientists, and other cultural practicioners. They have been invited to supply texts that substantiate a critical view of digital culture and its dynamics, as well as artworks that function (however obtusely) as maps of digital space and culture.

MAPPING PERSPECTIVES OF DIGITAL CULTURE

An Introduction by Stephen Pusey
and Yu Yeon Kim

Attempting to chart a course through digital culture is akin to Columbus setting forth to discover the islands of India beyond the Ganges only on arrival to apply preconceived notions and mythologies about his intended destination, to a location that was far from what, and where, he assumed it to be. Like him, we inevitably view new and emergent discoveries within the frame of inherited ideologies and only formulate new strategies of evaluation when we are forced to recognize that their misalignment prevents us from understanding what is really before us. In constructing a map of the arena of digital culture it may be possible to obtain an idea of the dynamic forces that are operable in its evolution only if it is viewed from distinct points within and outside of its circumference, rather than thinking of it in terms of direct lines of historical ascent.

To conjure a visual model that might serve to illustrate the layered complexity of online culture that has developed within just the last few years - imagine that you are examining, within an advanced VRML space, a transparent Babel Tower - its diaphanous walls etched with both genius and trivia in every language. Viewed laterally the Tower is an open matrix of corridors of informational exchange, spiraling inwards and outwards, a multiplex of data streams in digital space, alive with the light of electrons dancing in frenzied transmission. Select "slide" on your control panel so that you are looking from above and what we you might see is a glass disk with the inscriptions of each floor visible through the other; as a palimpsest of the iconography of our cultures melded as an equivalent array. Such a configuration would allow us to understand our histories not so much as a vertical osmosis, through which the ideas of the past percolate to posterity, but more as a complete saturation of the present by its own infrastructure - functioning as a delivery-and-exchange network of cultural packages.

To those familiar with its principle navigation tools (browsers, email programs etc.), the Internet is not exactly terra ingognita, but certainly a shifting landscape. It is being constantly changed by those who engage it, and by transactions, input, programming languages and devices that further diversify its modes of communication, its routes, and the means through which it is seen and navigated. Its impetus comes from a spectrum of sources that include both the profit and non-profit sectors of its "community". But undoubtedly its extension is fueled most of all by the corporate sector. Navigation of this terrain requires guidance that not only supplies directional information, but also encourages a critical understanding of informational structures and the systems of micro-power with which they are interwoven. The digital landscape is being shaped not just by the convergence of various new media and information technologies, but also, by a convergence of industry interests from all sectors, especially entertainment and electronics. The "Information Revolution" therefore, is a process determined, in part, by the combined forces of multinational corporations, and though this is not exactly orchestrated, it is changing the nature of our participation in all spheres of society, and both the way, and the means, by which we perceive these activities. The integration of digital technologies in daily life has especially reconfigured the relationship between the areas of work and leisure, which may share the same tools of information access, only adjusted for the different context.

Of course these technologies not only facilitate access to information, but control, and record, how it is accessed and by whom. Therefore data banks for all purposes proliferate and surveillance technology is developed and employed for both efficient measurement and control. This data flows constantly through the networked social body, and implicates it at all levels in the exercising of power and control. The utopian ideal here, might be the democratization and decentralization of power, but the reality might well be just a networked market place, where the enfranchised are those who possess the latest and fastest in computer and video technology. This informational consumerism acts as the conduit for industry and capital interests to permeate through education, entertainment, industry, to our very thinking processes, substituting for our innermost reverie, consumerist desires. The ideologues have heralded the Information Age as virtuously encouraging decentralization and fragmentation of power, and indeed, this appears to be occurring both nationally and internationally. But the conclusion of decentralization is not necessarily diminished control - on the contrary, the pragmatic industrialist or politician is able to coordinate the decentralized constituency through their communication networks, with a gain of flexibility, responsiveness, and control. The Internet therefore, is a contradictory mechanism that has the potential for enhanced democracy in the hands of critical users, and yet simultaneously, may afford the corruption of knowledge by a systematic manipulation of information to serve political and commercial interests.

"Virtual existence", stretching the span of inter-network space is the mind disassociated from the body, the "World Brain" that H.G. Wells hoped would be the "creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements . . . the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind". The contemporary "World Brain" is the mind become digital encryption dispersed across interconnected zones, where it births the changeling hologram of a "virtual body", a transparent entity permeated with pre-planted consumerist wants, myriad and contradictory concepts, an evolving, dissolving, and shared "alt." authorship. Within this milieu capitalism transcends to the realm of avatars and decoy identities, and the intellect is taxed to discern the fake from the real. Yet it is also a laboratory of artists and other intellectuals who engage its form profoundly and philosophically, and who are positioned to change the nature of critical communication in ways, which we may only imagine. Indeed, much of online "art" and "theory" has evolved partly from a frustration with the traditional exhibition and symposium circuits, and from a desire to build a broad spectrum of informational exchange and creative initiatives capable of having a direct political and cultural impact on society. Within these networked "culture" spaces are evolving new articulations of visual and theoretical language around the connection of diverse modalities, and the discovery of new forms of spatial representation.

OMNIZONE is a continuous mapping of digital space that will present no conclusive statement, structure, or design. Rather it comprises visual and written works by artists and cultural practitioners that may provide a unique perspective from their points of access. Many of these digital "maps" (and the term is used loosely), have an inherent structure that facilitates a view of digital culture as being composed of overlaid, relational and transmissive entities that exist in an entanglement that intersects at multifarious levels - rather than in simple linear or vertical trajectories. These "entities" may be regarded not merely as nodes or sites, but as relational systems that may merge into larger ones or fragment by accident or by design into smaller subsystems.

It is our ambition that OMNIZONE will become a portrait of an era that is characterized most of all by a sense of transparency and of production and existence at the interstices of informational systems. An era in which information is robotically assimilated, our hyperlinked cultures are reconstructed, and brought into a zone where they become chronologically equivalent. These processes have forever altered the manner, in which we perceive distance and spatial hierarchies. Our locations and cultures are now telematically connected and our imagination and global culture is embodied and formed in the plexus of this network, not merely in local 'centers'. This digital globalization has produced an intercultural interweave in which the lines between insider and outsider are not so clearly drawn and in which traditional hierarchies of spatial articulation may no longer be relevant.

We consider the scope and evolution of digital culture as a problematical area that requires developing an access model of investigation, a conceptual device that is both ontological and structural, for understanding its causal connections and their multi-level interaction in a way that existing deterministic methodologies cannot. It is our ambition that OMNIZONE will have the potential to trigger new ways of thinking about relational evolution, and that in diverting from redundant codification, we will transit to another level of thinking - one that may serve to illuminate an evolving culture.

Through "OMNIZONE" we may present an understanding of human development, not as a direct linear advancement, but as a sporadic, tangential growth and retraction. In this perspective the organism is seen as attempting to find new forms through a combination of accident and experimentation, in which the Darwinian best is not guaranteed survival, but where regression may be considered as important as progression, or eventually amount to the same thing. Indeed, the Internet may be the ultimate mechanism that humankind has invented to ensure the maximum combination and mutual infection of all its cultures. This is not really a mix of cultural dilution, but of diversification, repossession and change - as ideas are exchanged, assimilated, re-exported and re-imported. Each location redefines the package according to its own uses and imperatives, and in turn - the package redefines its host. There is an interlocking of values and practices in which the co-present cultures are incidentally maneuvered to examining the articulations of power that are contained in their cultural exchanges, and how these dramatically alter their "world view". The Internet is optimizing our societies as both transactional and transnational networks in which it may no longer be possible, or important, to distinguish the "center" from the "periphery".

To navigate this phenomenon with mapping tools that employed the conventional nomenclature of the non-virtual world would not provide any indication of the substance of the labyrinthine digital terrain. OMNIZONE has the potential to provide illumination in this respect as an evolving guide, which has the inbuilt facility to reveal new perspectives through the combination of intellectual discourse, and new technologies. It may even provide new cognitive models that will contribute to a transformation of our mental culture and our concept of a "World View".

Stephen Pusey is an artist.
Yu Yeon Kim is an independent curator.