The Floating Gallery, which is an artist-run photo-based Gallery in Winnipeg, recently held a symposium on the theme: "Utopia/Dystopia". The final panel looked at some of the issues relating to art and technology, in particular digital technology.

1. The first speaker was Timothy Druckery, who sent out a number of warnings about uses of contemporary technology. He worries about abuses in medical technologies, in particular genetics. One of his most interesting concerns was the abuse of language, where metaphors linking biology and technology are reified, obscuring the differences between human beings and their technological culture. An example which came to mind is Rushkoff's "Media Virus", which conflates technologically-based cultural phenomena with the biological activity of viruses. Druckery's concern seemed at least two-fold, first that such catchy metaphors obscure rather than elucidate, undermining genuine thought and analysis; second, that they devalue the status of human beings. He was particularly scornful of what appear to him to be loose, metaphorical conclusions drawn from experiments which had created electrical transmissions between cellular material and silicon.

2. Almost it seemed by design, Jospeph Donatelli, an English Professor and new media proponent from The University of Manitoba, gave a talk called "I Sing the Body Electric." Donatelli embraced the fusion of human and technological through a series of provocative metaphors drawn from cultural history: Whitman's identification of the human body with the newly discovered force of electricity, the electrification of the Statue of Liberty, the ATM, and finally the French performance artist Orlan, whose performances have consisted of having (cosmetic) surgery performed on T.V. He asserted that Orlan's performances offer no social meaning outside of themselves as acts, spectacles of the bionic.

A Few Observations

1. For Donatelli the embeddedness of technology in the human is basically value-neutral, a fact of life. But when Whitman sang the body electric, his metaphor implied a mysticism in which all things were bound into a spiritual unity in which animate and inanimate become more than they are in themselves; it was a metaphor sympathetic to the transcendental culture of Emerson and his followers. But Donatelli's take on the human/technology conundrum appeared to flatten out all distinctions and to offer no direction outside of itself, leaving the artist little room to manoeuver. Like Wallace Stevens the artist can offer the surface of things as they are or, like Donatelli's Orlan, attempts to preserve that surface, a spectacle of self-mutilating attempts at regeneration.

2. For Druckery the corruption of metaphor and the dangers of a glib and unthinking technological society place demands upon the artist not to become the unwitting accomplice of technology. In what ways and to what extent are artists currently involved in digital culture responsible for the tools they use? Must artists always make the ethical implications of their tools (and materials) part of the meaning of their work? Or is the use of digital tools different from the use of traditional tools? Is the computer merely a pencil, a means of delivery, or is it both tool and cultural structure like Renaissance perspective embodying a world view? Perhaps in fact the tools that artists use are rarely value-neutral. Wood-block prints, engraving, lithography, photography, perspective, 19^th century theories of light and color-- they all implied a world view and contributed to changes in the culture. Yet, artists generally embraced them without a hesitant ethical self-consciousness, but with the enthusiasm of the embrace. Were they or their times more naive? Or the technologies less dangerous? Certainly, nothing could have been more subversive to traditionalist, theocentric Renaissance values than the anthrocentric implications of perspective. One of the most delightful 20^th century artists to take technology into his work is Yves Tinguely. One could argue that his work is a critique of mechanical culture; yet he himself has said, "the machine allows me, above anything, to reach poetry."