METASCREEN
Though most people are obediently aligning themselves with the illuminated dictatorship of digital, a few of us have decided to reset our watches and go slightly analog instead.
To go fully analog would be impossible. It would require us to drop away from GDR (Global Description of Reality) which is based entirely on being digitalized. Digitalization - which began a few thousand years ago with categorization and naming- went mainstream with the use of the written word.
The roots of Digital are based upon a very simple instruction:
“This is a door”
“Yes” (1) versus “No” (0)
Accepting this instructionrequires us to choose between 0 and 1, and then passing that “knowledge” around. Whether this knowledge was delivered by God, discovered by human genius, or simply appeared at the head of a long string of possibilities, the binary result of this instruction is taken very seriously, and for a very long time.
In our time, the instruction has become such dogma that if we try calling things by strange names, or calling them names of other things, we are either crazy or speaking metaphorically. Or-they say- "we are doing art”.
As it happened, art hacked a place for itself upon our need to be reminded of the relativity of all those definitions. We need art; now, more than ever, with all computers and networks around, with Big Digital closing in on us from all fronts. We need to look at digital and see "what else it is", because if Digital is left to digital computers, this guarantees a very miserable future for all of us.
Priscilla Tea, a young Italian painter based in Milan said: “The aesthetics of the Net are not reaching us through the subject of the artwork any more, but through the method that we use to create the work.” She is referring to certain artists that belong to the generation before hers, those that got into the pains of depicting the landscape of the computer screen exactly because it was offering a new subject.
I am one of those artists. My friends and I made paintings where, instead of an apple or a guitar, we depicted a website, a Skype window, or something clearly made with Photoshop.
Priscilla Tea’s paintings do not look like that. Still, somehow, they feel ‘computer’. To make her paintings, she first draws patterns on her laptop. She spends a lot of time in preparation of these patterns, which she sometimes extracts from photographs, and at other times draws from scratch absentmindedly. Then she lets those patterns evolve, inside and outside her MacBook.
Sometimes, for example, she will ask a computer program to drip paint to form a pattern, but before she draws it on to her canvas, she will turn it ninety degrees. It is a simple thing to do really, but our brain recognizes such modifications as aesthetic calculations, which are, by tradition, analog. Finally, our brain reads the final object, not as a digital instruction–scandalous / fun / interesting / boring / already done–but as a piece of Metascreen: an analogue marvel.
By using the term Metascreen, we refer to both a time without all of these screens littering our lives, but also material that contains mental tags, referencing the landscape of the computer screen. Speaking of such mental tags, I can very well imagine Travess Smalley surfing the net and, impatiently, looking for these tags. What he finds, he collects with the same passion of a young Jannis Kounellis who finds and carries an abandoned train rail to his studio, and spends weeks looking at it.
Travess is not very fascinated by the possibilities of the different new media that are thriving these days on the internet. Like Kounellis in his day, he is mostly eager to pinpoint his personal position in this state of affairs. For Travess belongs to Postinternet: a “second wave” generation of Internet artists who see themselves more “artists” and less “internet” than the militant network vanguard that started operating in the early 2000.
The artists of that early internet vanguard, either openly - such as Rozendaal's tattooing the word "Internet" inside his own mouth or by hiding it like Harm van den Dorpel who began producing large amounts of irrelevant 3D stuff in order of getting included to shows like any other regularly conformist contemporary artist, have always been on the side of the Internet. Postinternet artists aren't..
Now, if we concentrate at the data (ignoring the different personal reasons for which after all people do things), we realize that this retro-move of attention may be nothing else but the behavior of information itself!
Information wants more - than anything- "to be copied". To do so it wouldn't hesitate today passing through more traditional channels such as Education. Indeed, most of the artists of Postinternet went to art school. They regularly read art magazines and they seem to know a lot about recent art history while for the artists of the First Wave - if they had any art history knowledge at all- it was knowledge acquired after the artist already went through his or her formation. Such knowledge simply wouldn't interfere with the work: those artists were able to look at the Internet mostly as an environment and less as a tool.
Ten years later, computer screen itself has become a burden. The last time that I counted, I realized that I am carrying fourteen screens in my suitcase, while at my home or at the hotel, there are many more waiting for me. In an ideal world, the move-away from Screen to Metascreen would be the passage from the nightmare of all those computer screens to the promising domain of Existential Computing. Existential Computing is also some kind of computer “reality”. But it has nothing to do with virtual reality, augmented reality, and the like...
How would this "other" computer reality look? I have no idea, if I did, Existential Computing would be already here (knowing the aspect of something is inventing it).
Still, we can start by imagining how this possible future will look by thinking of what would be different if the "Three Requests" of the Father of the Internet (Mr. Leonard Kleinrock, the man who send the first email in 1969), were satisfied.
These requests are the following:
1. We need to be able to access the Net from any place. (Even from the center of the Earth, or from the most remote corner of the universe).
2. We need to be able to connect by using any device (with a fork or with an old shoe for example ).
3. The device used to connect us, should be invisible.
Kleinrock’s early “Metascreen”, is the utopia of an era where the database has finally become just another layer of nature! Dr. Kleinrock, after all invented the Internet just because - he says- was fascinated by Supeman’s powerful radio. Six-year-old Leonard Kleinrock was reading a Superman comic at his apartment in Manhattan, when, in the centerfold, he found plans for building a crystal radio. He built that radio and was totally hooked when free music came through the earphones: no batteries, no power, all free. Later, in another issue of Superman, Kleinrock read about another radio that could emit its signal from anywhere in the galaxy and he decided that this was the radio that he wanted instead.
We need start thinking about analog again...
I am not talking about the old pre-Internet analogue, but of the coming one, of "analog after digital". A certain new type of architecture could help. In the works of Greek-Norwegian architect Andreas Angelidakis, we already feel "the space of Metascreen".
Architecture differs from art essentially because of the fact that it has always been more analog than digital, because once it is inhabited, it ‘becomes’, instead of remaining always on the state of ’being’. (A work of art remains instead in such a state of ‘being’ ).
Angelidakis builds ruins. He is doing so for many years now, starting with the creation of the "Neen World" in the year 2000. But aren't ruins such as those that Piranesi was depicting; these ruins are coming from the future, not from the past. These are The Ruins of Digital!
To use the words of Priscilla Tea, speaking about her own works and those of other Metascreen artists: “Instead of bringing an echo of nature to the digital unreality by using mostly digital tools, we are now carrying the very echo of digital into so-called reality. Reality is here to stay, even if we will augment it.”
Metascreen is the cry of digital that is soon to become both history and past.
Miltos Manetas, Bogota 2011 (reviewed in 2019)