Introduction
Every time there is a major technological shift, there exists an opportunity for creative intervention of artists. The most recent historical example of the television is an unfortunate failure - video art never succeeded in reaching a wide popular audience, and cable TV was swallowed by large corporate conglomerates. Once again, the window of opportunity opens with the Internet, which is in the process of being integrated into an emerging global language. Communication technologies in themselves have a limited language that require creative input and a critical eye, and artists recognised this very early on. With the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1993, development of this new language is taking place with dizzying speed, with or without our participation. The window is still open, but getting smaller and smaller by the minute, and it is critical to assess the possibilities and develop strategies that will make it possible to avoid failure of making the leap into the new paradigm. Networked Art may have a better chance of survival however, since it is not as media bound as film or video, but follows the footsteps of conceptual artists who in turn owe their heritage to the constructivist, dadaist and futurist trends of the early twenties.
Currently there are many worlds evolving on the Net, with two major streams that are developing in parallel cyberspace and e-commerce. Cyberspace owes its heritage to science fiction[1] and e-commerce is a child of the established banking and commercial systems. Networked Triadic Spaces is an attempt to bridge these opposing approaches, create a more stable triangular structure, and negotiate the space 'in between'.
Networked environments are natural spaces for interdisciplinary mutagens to grow and evolve, and luckily, in my studies of historical personalities, I connected to one recent predecessor of a non-specialised networker -- Buckminster Fuller. Through him I weave the story of a complicated new artist persona impossible to categorise in existing organisation systems. Fuller provides a prism through which I address the evolving world of networked art and the result of this research, a online software agent, the Information Personae, developed collaboratively during my studies at CAiiA.
He will reappear in this thesis many times, acting as a primary personality and a "Phantom Captain"[2] from whom many threads of inspiration are teased out.. In order to root this narrative historically, I have chosen his persona and his work to act as central web weaving entity. Why Buckminster Fuller?
First and foremost because he was a practitioner. Although he authored 26 books, Fuller persistently materialised prototypes that put his idea in action. During his lifetime he patented some 28 inventions and lectured tirelessly. The second reason is more practical -- I had the good fortune of being in physical proximity to the Buckminster Fuller Institute and was allowed access to his enormous archive. After learning more about his multi-faceted persona, I decided that he provides perfect prism through which I can address practically all issues I have researched. Third, he embodies many of the qualities this work is concerned with -- his lectures were performative, he was a natural networker, he traversed many disciplines and had an effect on many important personalities who went on to shape cultural events, attitudes and thought.. He was someone who was very much present in public consciousness during his lifetime but has become marginalised in his posthumous years. Yet he left behind much work that deserves closer attention, particularly in those areas he is lesser known for such as philosophy and economics. I find useful the fact that he worked closely, and had relationships with artists whose work is important for this thesis.
It is not my intention to present Buckminster Fuller as a saint with no flaws, but to show the importance of recognising complex personalities and being willing to forgive some unfavourable aspects of his persona. Ultimately, he is someone who believed in technology as the driving force for advancing humanities' goals and spent a great deal of his energy on developing practical concepts advancing his philosophies.
Recognising that there are many scholars who have spent years studying Buckminster Fuller, the focus of this thesis is largely on his persona and his influential thoughts on the developing culture of networked arts. Fuller's belief in 'less is more' and his persistent use of tensegrity principles in building have proved to be inspiring ideas for me while conceiving the architecture of an online agent and the prototypes for future art projects. The narrative does not end with his death in 1983, but continues with the discovery of a molecule that so resembled his structures that it was named after him. The Buckminsterfullerene provides a thread into the many futures I project at the end.
It is important to take a look at his work precisely at this juncture because so much of what he was proposing was ahead of its time, and waved off as utopian, is relevant today. His vision was ahead of the technology of his time, not allowing him to materialise more of his ideas. But perhaps even more of a reason why his vision was marginalised is because he was a few decades too early with his ideas for public consciousness. John Cage said in last lecture "...Fuller is dead but his spirit is now more than ever the spirit the world needs, it is alive, we have it in his work, his writings... " (ed. Perloff, 1992) One of the purposes of this thesis is to bring his lesser known work and thought to the forefront, specifically in relation to networked art.
Recognizing that any work involving codification, situating and mobilizing categories has a direct effect on the very nature of knowledge production, this thesis is an effort to not only point to existing and potential problems and the possibilities, but to in fact propose a model and develop a prototype.
The result, or product of this dissertation is the development of an online agent software I am developing collaboratively: the Information Personae. I consider Buckminster Fuller as an analogue predecessor of the Information Personae -- a networker who travelled tirelessly across the globe delivering lectures, documenting every single move into what he called his Chronofile.[3] The large body of documentation including the video and audio tapes of his lectures is a database portrait of a personality that had a major influence on many creative minds who changed history in the 20th century. His database serves as a historical anchor through which I can present many points of views necessary to build context and argument for developing the Information Personae. The connections between issues, subjects and themes are made in a triangular way throughout the thesis thus laying the foundation for the architecture that will utilise some of the principles that Fuller believed in his entire life. Thus, the Information Personae is being developed to exist on the Internet, but with a specific goal of helping along other networks outside of the technological extensions. The main conceptual premise of development of the Information Personae software architecture is that it is not researched and developed in isolation and separate from the content and people it is meant to serve. The architecture is envisioned as growing out of content and people using it, rather than being built in independently and then filled with "content".
Structure and Chapter Synopsis The basic premise of this thesis is that content will dictate form and form will dictate content. It is comprised of three sections, each section is comprised of three chapters. The sections are color coded in primary colors of the digital world, Red, Green and Blue. Thus the form of the thesis is that of a tetrahedron. [4]
The first section, Breaking with Tradition asks defines the role of a Network Artist (chapter 1) and positions him/her/them in the context of Art and Science (chapter 2), creating an entire new Telematic Culture (chapter 3).
The second section, Building Many Worlds, examines issues of Online Identity (chapter 4); emergence of a Database Aesthetic (chapter 5) and considers Network Communities and e-commerce. (chapter 6),
The third section, Construction of an Information Personae, introduces concepts of Information Architectures (chapter 7), elaborates the architecture of the Information Personae (chapter 8) and projects Many Futures (chapter 9)
Notes:
1. William Gibson coined the term "Cyberspace" in his seminal novel Neuromancer.
2. See chapter 4 for discussion on the "Phantom Captain"
3. See chapter 5 for discussion on the Chronofile
4. The form of the tetrahedron provides a powerful conceptual model to replace the static, obsolete, pyramidical, top-down hierarchical structures. The discovery of the prime geometry that nature employs as its "building blocks", in both physical and meta-physical universe (i.e. the tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron and the vector equilibrium), provides us with an opportunity to base our own designs of models and architectures on those that nature employs.
