Three years ago when we were all multimedia virgins, I called a friend who was working on a great 'Peanuts' multimedia contract. "What are you doing," I inquired. "Scanning carpet," was the reply of the brightest young man I know in new media. He needed a carpet texture under Peanuts and he held a ratty little square of carpet and scanned it into the computer. Here are some of the Scanning Carpet columns:
I've gone from a multimedia enthusiast to a multimedia hater and back to not just an enthusiast: now I'm an addict. Am I addicted to the computer? To online chatting? To notoriety? None of the above. I am, perilously, addicted to the cutting edge and believe me, I often feel like I'm walking on razor blades. I'm addicted now to the feeling that there is no future unless I am creating it. There is no past because reverting to an unconnected netless world seems like total isolation and self indulgence.
Once I would have been happy to have a nice house where every room would have been part of my studio plus one office for all my writing activities. Now a house, anywhere, unconnected to the rest of the world seems like a prison. Even living in an environment that is not heavily peopled with other digital cadets seems stifling. When I travel I see that other newspapers do not have whole pages about technology and the Internet. Other business sections do not discuss the intricacies of new media distribution, endlessly ad nauseam.
Nauseam? This is my adrenaline. I feel high all the time. Like New York in the sixties when I was too high on life (or too pregnant) to do drugs without going through the roof. At that time social change and intermingling of the arts were the highs. Videotaping mice released under a block long sheet of white paper on Prince Street in New York was a NEW ART MEDIUM. Boundaries of art forms were being blasted away one by one and new - what we then called multimedia - were moving in.
Today if someone asks me about copyright issues for my artwork on the Web I think they are in the Permian Age. We don't have copyright systems yet for our new media. We barely have distribution. We really don't have marketing in spite of what the pundits are writing about marketing on the net. Meanwhile the creative people are moving in. We're still working in the background but our numbers are swelling and soon we'll be attacking the screens you are reading this on. We're creating work in and for the new media. We are the slayers of repurposing.
Your word processor should have a Style button but the choices might be: Torah, Medieval, Gutenberg, 19th Century, 50's New York, World Nineties. You'd click on medieval and instantly your screen text would appear with curled yellow pages and illuminated caps, and you'd be, for ten minutes, a monk(esse) in a medieval monastery. It would be FUN to use your word processor. It wouldn't be called that either. It would be your Lettersceneï, your Wordscapeï, your WordLifeï, your Wordpainterï.
Our critical edge drug is the digital screen. Particles we haven't named yet are bombarding us every minute when we work in front of our screens. What we don't acknowledge is that we are also sending particles back into the screen; these are transformed into digital information and are creating a neural (for want of a better word) network of all our unseen, unacknowledged psychic sharing with other life forms on this planet. Right now everyone on Earth is contributing to this enormous digital database with no center and no server. It digitizes oxygen and nitrogen from farmers in Central Africa; it digitizes rice vapors in China. It digitizes coal sludge and computer signals in Novosibirsk. The Internet, as we know it and use it, is just a small section of the skin of the seething globe of digital signals. We're only just now learning to read these, although it may be that centuries ago, mystics could also read the same information.
Other technologies are beginning to make their claims, facilitated by the seeming omnipresence and omniscience of the Net. But the nanotechnologists, the subparticle people, the galaxy readers and so on can all yield to the Digital Masters. Nothing quite beats on-off. Your subatomic particle is either there or it isn't. The galaxy created 20 trillion years before our own is either there or it isn't.
Once I accompanied a gentleman friend when he needed a CAT scan. While he was being "read," I was watching the computer with the radiology resident. I saw this man's entire innards pass before me on a screen no bigger than a Mac SE/30. I knew things about this man he didn't even know about himself. He had compacted bowels (a polite euphemism here) and that little digital sucker knew more about it by adding up the on offs than the entire American Medical Association.
So ladies and gents, girls and boys. Twirl your partner. Get in step. Grand march forward. Or better, keep your eyes forward, which means stare into your screens for now. I exhort you to be on the cutting edge. You know why? You're either on or off.