Theories of Internet Culture and Internet Textuality by Janez Strehovec, Ph.D.DESCRIPTION

OF NEW RESEARCH PROJECT ON

THEORIES OF CYBERCULTURE

b y J a n e z S t r e h o v e c, P h. D.

Today, the traditional media, such as the print, film, radio and

television, co-exist with the new interactive media (the Internet being

the leading one), which are not only opening up possibilities of global

information saving, real-time data transfer and of on-line communication,

but also have numerous anthropological, aesthetical, cultural, social and

political implications. These media are also a means of forming new

cultural contents and means of establishing manners and approaches of how

these contents are accepted, which has quite an impact on contemporary

art, on life styles, fashion and design. Internet culture is an integral

part of a wider concept of cyberculture, its essential concepts being

interactivity, (total) immersion and participation as role and identity

switching, dematerialization of the object and decentralization of the

subject, however, it has also other specific features that will be dealt

with in this research.

Its aim is to explore the specificity of the Internet medium in two

fields, namely

a) Internet (web) art and

b) Internet textuality (in particular, the literarily coded one).

These two will also provide a starting point for research of wider

cultural implications of the Internet medium (even in the field of new

politics). These cultural implications namely often come along with net

artists' hacking and cracking activities directed against data monopolies

of power centers. It is particularly important to stress the specificity

of the Internet medium, because the making of Internet contents is often

accompanied by misunderstandings that are connected to the naive copying

of data from the given reality into the Internet medium. This, namely,

leads to simplified duplifications, which can be called "virtual mimesis".

Similarly, the Internet is much too often being used as a striated and

hiearchical space of static placements (for example in the form of web

pages), and less as a smooth space for unpredictable "cross-overs" and the

medium's very own activities.

My basic hypothesis concerning net art is that such artistic activity

destabilizes the traditional concepts of artwork as stable entity (with

"Kunstwerk" character), and directs to artistic liquid and performing

processes, situations, events and "inscenarios". The traditional concepts

of author, creativity, expression, form and originality are being

abandoned and replaced by new concepts, among which collaborative

authorship or even anonimous authorship occupies a very special place. Web

art is a creative field, intertwined with other, non-artistic contents on

the World Wide Web (links from artistically coded web pages often lead to

them), which makes it differ from modern art that makes a clear

distinction between artistic and non-artistic fields. As a result of this

distinction modern art is being locked up into white cubes of galleries.

After dealing with the specificity of web art will follow the analysis of

its major effects in a broader area of cyberculture. Part of my research

will be dedicated to the artistically formed virtual communities (MUD and

MOO), to the question of techno-formed reception of data objects and also

of political implication of the Internet-based artistic activities

(especially in the form of the so called Internet civil disobedience)

My basic hypothesis regarding Internet textuality is that it presents a

means of forming new ways of communication, based on altered text

organization, its multimedia design and on the concept of word-image-body.

Internet textuality is a medium that cannot be translated into printed

form without significant loss of its specific features. The medium of its

authentic articulation is a computer screen or screens of mobile Internet

devices (mobile telephones, palms, pocket computers). Influences, crucial

for this sort of textuality, are trendy visual and audio cultures (for

example the placement of textuality in music videos), computer games (its

special textual features), commercials, comics and graffiti; of vital

importance, however, is also the changed perception of word-image-body. It

is no longer a matter of words, printed or written on paper in such a way

that they have a firm tie with their carrier, but it is a matter of

word-object, a 3d-data unit in a computer screen, which can be

(interactively) manipulated, touched from a distance and viewed from a

deteritorialized perspective (a term coined by G. Deleuze). The verbal

medium, also, has mutated within the framework of cyberculture and has

been adjusted to the demands of digital morph and real-time communication.

Internet textuality has also laid foundation for the Internet-based

literarily coded objects and other types of web literary forms (for

example hypertext fiction, web novels with collaborative authorship and

literarily coded text-based virtual communities). Web literary objects

(such as cyberpoetry by Komninos Zervos, visual web poetry by Loss Pequen

Glazier and Mark Amerika's textscape "Grammatron") represent a new medium,

which cannot be explained by means of "common-use" theoretical devices of

classical literary theory. Invention of new concepts in various fields of

new-media theories is therefore called for and this is also one of the

objectives of this research.

Of crucial importance for my methodological approach is the application of

methodology, developed within traditional American and British cultural

studies, complemented by approaches and theoretical devices of general

philosophical aesthetics and by the application of the phenomenological

method (for example in the thematization of approach in the field of

Internet textuality, which requires bracketting of traditional

reading/perception forms of printed textuality).

I will also touch upon the results of trend research in the field of

techno science (genetics, molecular biology and medicine, nanotechnology

and theories of artificial life), because my field of research has also

witnessed a significant shift to the "bio" paradigm. The Internet, too,

will within this paradigm gradually cease to exist "on the outside" - on

computer hardware and its software, and will start reaching under the

user's skin, into the physical body. My analyses will be based on on-line

documents of Internet culture and Internet textuality and on the most

recent achievements of theories of the Internet and new-media cultures. I

will also focus my attention on the theoretical conceptualization of a

(trendy) individual as a user as well as a creator of the Internet

culture. It is important to know that the user is no longer a passive

receptor of information, transmitted by the big, traditional media, but is

actively involved in data environments, immersing into them, assuming

roles in their processes and adopting standpoints regarding their

perspectives. The most of my attention will be devoted to the question of

the techno-formed sensitivity within the Internet culture, for we have

been witnessing new forms of "virtual sensitivity" (virtual viewing,

hearing and touching and a virtual sense of telepresense and remote

activities).