|
 |
Villemard
"Missive phonographique" [Phonographic Missive]
Visions de l'an 2000, 1910
Chromolithograph
BNF, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie*Benjamin Barber (Rutgers University)
In fact, technologies generally mirror the societies in which they are engendered rather than transform them. Our world is commercial, individualistic, anarchic, competitive and market-based. Why do we think the Net will look any different? Does it? Or is it the perfect reflector of the society? Not even a technologically interactive medium can animate a passive and socially and capital-drained culture; not even a lateral, point-to-point medium can overcome the hierarchies of power and economic monopolies that own the medium; not even a high-connectivity medium can link cynical individualists who have lost faith in the possibility of cooperation or communication. In the end, our new technologies will not save us from the problems we created before their advent. Machines, even electronic machines, are no salvation of women and men. The faster we recognize this, the sooner we can set about confronting our problems and dilemmas without the comforting but ultimately futile succor of technological utopias.
Michael Heim (Art Center College of Design at Pasadena)
Space in the term cyberspace won’t go away. The spatial seems more than metaphor. Despite the fact that data networks transmit buzzing electronic signals that are nonsense to the unaided human ear, and despite theoretical objections, we continue to use the spatial term cyberspace because we sense in the Net a location, a locus for projecting human presence. The term cyberspace suggests a real-time shared location, even if the location cannot be measured by physics. The presence of other presences, in chat or avatar shapes, confirms our telepresence in place after virtual place. We exist increasingly online. We no longer watch television or listen to the radio; we are evolving into telepresent entities, networked to a deeper, interactive dimension. Spatial metaphors run through the language of networks. Hyperlinks suggest a more-than-three-dimensional space where written language pokes through 2-D surfaces, zooming out to infinitely successive branches of words and pictures. If hyper-chess is chess played in more than three dimensions, then cyberspace allows humans to move in and out of computer-networked environments. Is cyberspace out there in the heavenly beyond, waiting to encompass us like artificially intelligent robot aliens that will one day embrace their inferiors as subjects for non-human purposes? Or is cyberspace inside us in the sense of subtle projections where we share prototype fantasies from the human psyche? If cyberspace offers prototype fantasies, then does cyberspace belong among those traditional projections like the biblical New Jerusalem, Baconian science’s New Atlantis, or Huxley's Island? The word cyberspace itself springs from Gibson’s dystopian fiction, from a skepticism that throws into doubt the utopia of cyberspace. Utopia means literally nowhere. The empty screen elicits flickers of many imagined places that seduce with the lure of what does not but which might exist. Visions of how things might be someday can unleash potential, foment revolution, or even provide warnings to take our measure. Today’s software offers something different from the utopias of scripture, reason, or science fiction. Instead of projecting envisioned places by means of argument, religious art, or story-telling, virtual worlds offer direct experiences of prototype spaces. Virtual reality belongs to technological society, which many trace to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626). Bacon’s techno-topia offers incessant collaborative improvements, incremental upgrades, and continual replacement of the less efficient by the more efficient. There is no end to the rainbow of meliorism, no stop to Progress. What keeps Atlantis afloat is the promise of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Today’s virtual realities augment imagination with collaborative tools for reality prototyping. These virtual worlds are not the rationalist concepts for stimulating arguments and arriving at conclusions. Nor do virtual worlds offer spiritual tools for broadcasting attitudes, feelings, and intuitive values. Virtual worlds offer immersive experiences that take place within societies of avatars. An avatar is a graphic representation of a person communicating through real-time online chat in 3-D fantasy worlds. Such worlds already exist as Internet test beds in software universes like ActiveWorlds, Eduverse, and CyberTown. Avatars are shared fantasy identities that prove they are alive and telepresent through real-time playful construction. Avatar identities are finite points of presence, intrinsically interactive and plural, embedded in communities of other avatars. The inhabitants of cyberspace are slowly evolving their own three-dimensional identities. Avatar identities interweave human with artificial expressions. The collaborative development of prototype structures is called avatecture. Avatecture constructs habitats (Latin tectum = "roof") for avatars that are telepresent (Sanskrit avatar = "to cross down into"). Humans are uploaded into cyberspace and physical surroundings are downloaded into fungible prototypes. Human habitation will soon be designed through thoroughgoing testing and collaboration. One example of an ongoing avatar society is the series hosted by the CyberForum@ArtCenter. Many artists and authors have gathered in 3-D cyberspace since January 2000 to discuss the development of avatar spaces. Cyberspace theorists, including William J. Mitchell, Brenda Laurel, Katherine Hayles, and Bruce Damer, have descended into avatar for these public events. In Fall 2000, the CyberForum introduces an avatecture series featuring, among others, the real-world architecture of PUSH, a Los Angeles-based architectural firm directed by Christophe Cornubert. The CyberForum's online meetings take place in the 3-D universe called Eduverse. This universe exists on the Internet as a freely downloadable browser known as the ActiveWorlds browser. Like all online media today, the 3-D browser is restricted by narrow bandwidth and limits on image quality and representation, but the over 900 worlds in the ActiveWorlds universe enjoy lively interactive avatars who chat, dance, and build structures. Could this new marriage of art, architecture, and technology be a vestige of utopian fantasy? Only the innocent eye can see utopia. Utopia is a mere fantasy only in a world that has lost its innocence. Utopias spring from innocent acts of enthusiasm. Innocence assumes that good is good and bad is bad and all we need do is follow the lines that mark out good and evil. Utopias are lovely as long as they remain innocent thought bubbles that never bounce against the real world. The real world has tasted fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 3:5). The Tree of Knowledge elevates humans to the "understanding of good AND evil," so they become "scientes bonum et malum" - where the "et" (Latin "and") suggests a deep inner connection between good and evil. For former innocents, good and evil interpenetrate, mix, and seldom appear separate. Once you know the bite of the serpent, you understand how attractive things bring with them serious downsides, and that a gorgeous garden includes toil and sweat. Utopians ignore the tiny "and" in "Good and Evil" and they wrongly insist that the ideal be 100% pure. The very basis of virtual identity builds skepticism into enthusiastic prototyping. Like the society at a masquerade ball, the virtual community masks real-world identities in order to engage fantasy possibilities. You give your identity online to an avatar but that virtual identity simultaneously withdraws the real self. Privacy remains inherent in virtual identities and gives them the power of fantastic freedom. Virtual identities withhold the full commitment typical of traditional utopians. Suspension of disbelief is both the price and the prize for entering cyberspace. Traditional utopias, whether spiritual or technological, require purgation, elimination, and abstraction. Virtual worlds, by contrast, amplify, augment, and proliferate. Cyberspace is infinite space. It is a nurturing emptiness that evokes continuous creativity. Like software, cyberspace is never finished.
Related links:
"Avatecture" and "Avatar Manifesto" (fineArt Forum, September 2000)
CyberForum@ArtCenter series
CyberForum Archive of Virtual Worlds Events
"Travels in Hyperreality" (LA Weekly, August 1999)
"Virtual Bodies" (Telepolis, February 2000) [in German]
Naomi Jacobs (University of Maine)
To my mind, the Internet's utopian potential lies in the access to information it provides, and in its efficiency as a means of linking people around the world. Its dystopian potential lies in the way it increases the numbers of people whose emotional life is centered in the realms of spectacle and of consumption. The problems of our societies and our world can only be solved by hands-on involvement. Unless we get out of our houses, away from our computers and TVs, and do more face-to-face talking, more organizing, and more acting, the world outside our real windows will become increasingly dystopian, while our virtual windows lure us to live in a glitzy fantasy of omnipotence.
Elizabeth McCutcheon (University of Hawaii)
Since I do not think that a utopia can ever be realized (and that if it could, it would no longer be a utopia), my answers may be somewhat tangential to some of the questions asked here. I want to reiterate both my interest in utopias and utopian thinking, then, together with my conviction that, for me, utopias (and I am particularly interested in literary utopias) have value as fictions, as imaginative constructs, and as thought-processes, not as models for actual construction. Perhaps this is why I become very uneasy in a totally planned community; its very structure and order simultaneously interests and appalls me. There is a certain inherent messiness in life as it is lived - a kind of spontaneity and flow that gets lost in utopian constructs but that, to me, is an essential part of life.
Raymond Polin (St. John's University)
Our society and government can be constantly improved and achieve increasing excellence; but the whole idea of utopia presents an impossible task of design as well as of attainment. This is so not only because, being neither God nor angels, humankind will always be flawed and fall short of perfection, but also because no one can devise even in theory an ideal, or even a one best, form of society and state. Fortunately, we can formulate, especially on the basis of lessons learned from our past, standards of increasingly excellent society and government that have continuing applicability – i.e., they are classical in nature – and tend to produce increasingly excellent individuals and groups. The "Earthly City of God" St. Augustine yearned for that would be patterned after the "Heavenly City of God" and be peopled with nearly angelic humans, must forever remain a dream: "Earth could be fair," indeed, but not be a heaven – or a utopia. However, we can achieve in large measure, for all alike, John Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity" (1630) for imperfect people and erect "A City upon a Hill" that would be a decent, kindly community in which we would help one another and "love one another with a pure heart fervently." That is the best we can do because we can never eliminate such dilemmas as how simultaneously to make government effective and the individual safe from it. Accordingly, Charles Austin Beard, in The Economic basis of Politics (1922, 1934), refuted the idea of an ideal utopia when he pointed out: "In other words, there is no rest for mankind, no final solution of eternal contradictions. Such is the design of the universe. The recognition of this fact is the beginning of wisdom – and of statesmanship." Finally, we must ask what utopia signifies. The Delphic Oracle enjoined us to "Know thyself." Utopia shows the opposite side of the coin on which Niccolò Machiavelli stamped the legend, "I write of things not as I would have them, but as they are." The utopian writes of things not as they are, but as he would have them. This tells us about ourselves, that we realistic humans are characterized by optimism, the hope that people and things can be better than they are and that our children and posterity can, through the human gift of creative intelligence, be given a blueprint for building a better world. Utopia, then, in essence is a symbol and powerful beacon light purposed to guide us closer to a "promised land" here on Earth that we may catch a glimpse of but never quite enter. If "the wisdom of the ages is in poetry," then Robert Browning sagely exhorts us: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?" Utopia represents man grasping vainly – but necessarily because of his wonderful nature – for Heaven on Earth and trying to restore Eden. These may be unattainable wish-dreams, but in all plans for utopia we may find bits and pieces we can put to use for humanity's better purposes. Thus, a blessing of the World Wide Web is that our new utopias will ineluctably promote global fraternity and peace among mankind as it makes us more aware of our shared destiny, concerns, aspirations, and humanity. Then what of the Universe in the unfolding subatomic-space age?
Brian Stableford (Freelance Writer)
There is only one possible technological basis for an authentic utopia, and that is a sophisticated biotechnology. The advancement of biotechnology offers us the only hope we have of permanent freedom from famine, disease and death from natural causes (we must, of course, look to politics for an end to war and civil strife). Everything that we think of as human nature is actually the product of biotechnologies (the primal biotechnologies – cooking and clothing – provided the incentives for the initial development of all the inorganic hardware that we nowadays think of as technology) and it is to new biotechnological developments that we must look for further progress towards the perfectibility of humankind. All else – including politics – is of merely marginal relevance.
•••
Wilhelm Vosskamp (University of Cologne)
The history of utopias – since Plato, More, Sannazaro, Bacon and Mercier – is the best reservoir for new models to discuss on behalf of the future.
•••
Please note: The views expressed on this page are those of the named individuals, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The New York Public Library.
In the ongoing search for the ideal society, the Internet has been proposed as a "place" in which a utopia could exist. Parallels to previous notions of utopian thought are discussed in "Cyber-Utopianism" and the Evolution in Utopian Thought.
*The New York Public Library provides the information contained on this website, including reproductions of certain items from other institutions, for personal or research use only. Contact the Bibliothèque nationale de France for additional guidelines regarding this image.
printing instructions
 |
|
