Cyber Spaces: Encountering the Digital Environment
an informative program of video and television
curated by Kathy Rae Huffman for TELEPOLIS
This video program includes educational documentaries, and artistic
works (many produced in association with television) that comprise a
screening program at the exhibition: TELEPOLIS, the Interactive and
Networked City, Luxembourg (November 4-12, 1995).
The Rationale for this program is an investigation of our urban
environment and daily reality, which is fast becoming virtual.
Computer generated graphics overwhelm the advertising, television and
game environment; history is computer memory; and personal
communication is based on text which is transmitted over transparent
networks. The real cyber spaces today are click-on realities that
transpose us by digital effects into a post-mediated platform of variable
speeds, sounds and entertainment choices.
The quality of life in cyber spaces is safe. It include instant access to
people and places. Virtual sex and a hypertext converge - extending all
possibilities for information from all times to be accessed whenever
desired. It is an environment where are fantasies can become realities -
cyber realities.
This post-mediated cyber environment (post-TV yet pre-VR) has
effected our personal hopes and dreams, yet few people actually know
what these spaces look like, or what they signify. To the common
individual's sense of personal space, cyberspace does not have any
concrete meaning. Science Fiction writers have been investigating these
questions for two decades, but it has only been in the past few years that
television and filmmakers, artists and theoreticians have had the
access to resources and the ability to visualize the most complex virtual
ideas - creating images with advanced computing power that can finally
predict what *CyberSpaces* can be. The future has become possible.
This video program presents two critical attitudes toward the major
topics in the ongoing dialogue about how individuals will identify with,
and respond to *CyberSpaces*. One is informative, and is largely
offered as information for the television audience. The second is the
artistic idea of future virtual and computer generated space. Some works
offer warnings, and are cautious of the rapid evolution and worship of the
virtual. Often these positions intertwine - after all - everything is
possible in the cyber-understanding of the future (which is now).
Kathy Rae Huffman
- SPECIAL PROGRAM - Invited presentation
- TELEVISION & MEDIA ART PROGRAMS:
SPECIAL PROGRAM - Invited presentation
Stefaan Decostere: Saturday, November 4, 1995
Lessons in Modesty 1995 90 minutes
A production by the BRTN culture department, Belgium, broadcast 14 March 1995
An extensive video-essay on the body and technology in the 90s.
Decostere says: "We TV makers are causal on-lookers, unlike artists
who can deploy their own bodies to give insights into the technological
fate of the human frame." Today, anyone with a home computer and a
modem is in a position to play a part in the technological performance of
the future. Why are we all dreaming the same?
In Lessons in Modesty, after a moment of sharp therapeutic conditioning
and some last minute instructions by specialist future builders at the
NASA and Xerox Park, we wonder how San Francisco looks like, after
the future passes by. Driven -as it were by a dream- we land in Las
Vegas to witness the final showdown between Good and Evil. This
program is bringing you the future: a young girl asks: "Papa, when will I
be reborn? I am not anymore the person I was. Now, I am a totally new
and different person. Once I was lost, but now I am found..." Does the
new millennium look like this?
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