The Artist's Media

"The ancient prophets were the television sets of their time, charged 
with a harsh, definite and penetrating message." - Boeli van Leeuwen

Now that the battle between art and technology has lost its meaning at 
the end of the twenty-first century, we can quietly examine what has kept 
the world population up in arms for so many generations. Looking back at 
the technological media that were installed outside of the self, we see 
the artists struggling with their relationship with the world of objects 
until recently, drawing upon the reservoir of ancient mythology to 
clarify the faint outlines of their predicament. With the disappearance 
of the separation between subject and object over the last decades, we 
have acquired the privilege to traverse the mythical past and supply our 
ancestors with the images they can elaborate on.

Keeping to conventional chronology, the late twentieth-century 
impressionist media can be characterized as a system of "devices" with a 
secret. They derived their credibility from the fact that the users 
themselves were not connected, but that it was the other who looked, 
listened or talked within their sensorium. At the time, this resembled a 
modern version of the nineteenth-century phrase, "I is an other." This 
electronically controlled effect of alienation determined what would 
ultimately emerge from the artists' inner worlds and crystallize into 
their works. The disaffection for the media resulted from the uneasy 
feeling that one's authenticity was always inspired by something alien. 
The media had an inexhaustible reservoir of global information at their 
disposal. This prevented contact with the origins of the imaginary: the 
pictorealm of the personal unconscious almost naturally lapsed into an 
entropic state of disconnected items. In this eternal day of topicality, 
art lacked a mission of its own. Artists were driven by their lack of 
protection to seek maximum media market attention, an overexposure meant 
to safeguard their evocations of at least the shadow of a secret.

Around the year 2000, two strategies were developed which would 
ultimately result in the expressionist stage of the media. On the one 
hand, there was the flight into matter. Against the background of the 
highly popular antimedial mass movement, which deserted the media for 
reality, the socially engaged artists restyled their relationship with 
their materials into the cult of reliability. They went back to 
"essentials; the perennial." They propagated their worship of substance 
as a reaction to the virtual, all too virtual of global consciousness. 
The artistic school of material order saw the stimulation of the memory 
of nature as its social responsibility. In a frenzied bid for future 
immortality, these ecological realists erected their monuments amidst the 
powerful ruins of modernity. Selling their art as the ultimate chance to 
save humanity from the media, they engaged in a corrupt conspiracy with 
the World Government against the planetary population. Thus, they brought 
down the same fate upon themselves as had befallen folk art and social 
realism in the totalitarian twentieth century. With the defeat of the 
antimedials, even their sculptures disappeared into the dumpsters of art 
history.

On the other hand, the early twenty-first century witnessed the attempt 
of sovereign media at the dematerialization of the world. In their 
transnational network, the multimedial wallowed in the rush induced by 
short-circuiting miscellaneous media. Theirs was to be the first school 
to effect a direct link between the media and the sensorium. Influenced 
by drugs, Nietzsche, Burroughs, and Pynchon, they prepared for their 
ascension. Their thinkers interpreted the uneasy feeling of being visited 
by an Other who ignores you and imposes its world on you as white noise. 
Human subjectivity turned out to be a medial by-product with no further 
charm or danger. The sovereign artists excelled at creating artificial 
continents. With all their unnatural global resistance, they embarked on 
a journey through inner experience, from now on to be directly related to 
neural networks and the biosoft. 

Haunted by the commercialism of psychoconsumers, the sovereign artists 
sought refuge in a form of medial contemplation which soon came to regard 
extra-laboratory experimentation as an unachievable endeavour. 
Threatening to succumb in their secluded world, they responded with a 
flight forward into research. Initially, they regarded the human brain 
where they had taken up residence as a model for the open architecture of 
their hardwares and softwares. With their neural networks and biochips, 
they carved a path through the think tank of homo sapiens. Then they made 
an astonishing discovery: through their diligent work, they had exposed 
the human spirit as a timeless media matrix open for immediate 
exploration. But this made mere child's play of all their former tricks 
in VR, the cyberspace already recorded by Jules Gibson in 1985.  

When art does not seek to depict its own era, it falls back on the 
classics. Myth is thought to contain eternal truths that can be tapped 
through state-of-the-art methods. Even today, mythology remains an almost 
inexhaustible source of forms and motifs. For centuries, the antitopical 
have succesfully appealed to the topicality of mythology. According to 
them, human beings by nature imitate Oedipus or Eurydice at the most 
inopportune moments. They give a subtle twist to this eternal return of 
the same: we should not think of it as a circle, but a spiral (Jünger) or 
gyre (Yeats). The unrestrained use of mythology enables the artist to 
present us with questionable moments that make us stop and consider the 
present for a moment. Even the advocates of progress are not above using 
myths to warn against their recurrence. After all, they're tall tales 
that have been around and are perfectly versatile.

The media era was a suitable age for the recovery and democratization of 
mythology. Having served as the legacy to the nineteenth-century poets 
and painters, they lost their stuffy historical connotation of 
traditional tales in the twentieth century. They were introduced into the 
narrative framework of television and computer programs as pattern 
recognition, which replaced the data classification of the Gutenberg 
universe of linear logic (McLuhan). In the twenty-first century, the 
authentic stories which had once united local civilizations remained 
universal box-office hits. Thus, they still manage to provide employment 
for those artists who ignore the problem of immateriality. It is 
precisely the physical aspect of the myths, with their candid treatment 
of violence, sanctity and bestiality, which constitutes the beneficent 
return of a lost corporality.

The adventurers who had set out to explore the brain of humanity and 
computer were uninterested in this form of mythical entertainment. When 
they set foot in the timeless media matrix of the mind, they gained 
direct access to the complex performances of the imaginary. This required 
no archeological excavation or prophetic gifts on their part. They found 
they did not have to be geniuses or chosen ones to come face to face with 
human nature and its terrors. They just happened to have the right 
equipment, and that in itself was shocking enough. After examining the 
brain's cognitive functions, they penetrated the geological strata that 
lay buried underneath the sensorium. In these older grounds, they 
encountered the grids which had inspired priests, mystics, poets, and the 
founders of empires and religions. The strange thing was that these 
heroic flagbearers of enlightenment always received fresh input from this 
timeless arsenal but never returned it. The only ones who could grant 
visions to these prophets where the ones who had access to the same 
strata. To their amazement, these astronauts of the brain, who were far 
beyond cyberspace, had to acknowledge that it was up to them to create 
these mental images. They accepted the invitation. After a century and a 
half, their science had finally found its mission. Their scientific 
education dictated harsh and definite messages to them. They became the 
artists of our present. But this also signaled the end of myth as eternal 
truth, and of the dialectics of art and technology. 

Ever since, the task of art has been to produce the material to supply 
the past. After the late twenty-first century, even art will be dedicated 
to the pliability of the world. Artists produce images that will return 
forever, even in their own time. Although there exist universal works 
that are instant hits wherever they go, innumerable regional studios 
supply the local market with the future archetypes of our forebears' 
myths.
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