IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

cal results with simple technology. In a piece called Light on the Net, visitors
encountered a large monitor displaying the entrance hall to a building
somewhere else, plus a seven-by-seven matrix of light bulbs in one corner
of the screen. By clicking on any of them, participants from anywhere in
the world were able to switch on one of the real bulbs in the distant building.
The concept and its implementation were simple and beautiful. Even
with something so simple as spelling out ‘‘Hi’’ from a distance, the effect
was extraordinary.
The idea that time delay and distance contribute positively to reflection
is not a new one. Aesthetic theories since the eighteenth century have
seen spatial distance and temporal delay as preconditions for critical musing.
Twentieth-century thinkers worried that space and time for reflection
would be undermined by the culture of simultaneity ushered in by the telegraph.
Decades later, Susan Sontag restated the same dilemma: How much
do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by
today’s imaging technologies? These technologies are supposed to give us
a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing
reality itself. 65
‘‘In the Bay Area we are more likely to look to our palm pilots for information,
than to look to the tree we are standing under,’’ says Natalie
Jeremijenko (who lives in San Francisco). ‘‘We are more familiar with distributed
computation than the distributed human intelligence.’’ 66 Today’s
media artists work with the ambiguity and tension between ‘‘here’’ and
‘‘there’’ that is an inherent property of communication technologies. They
play games with mediation so that the participant is both the observer
and the observed. In so doing, they sensitize us to the need to use media
critically. Jeremijenko (discussed earlier as the originator of the OneTree
project) created feral robotic dogs that would ‘‘sniff out’’ radioactive contamination
and thereby locate radioactive hot spots.
Tomorrow’s Literacies
Literacy 183
If tomorrow’s literacies are to be system and process literacies, then the
tools and sensibility of media and network art have two crucial roles to
play. First, in terms of content, media art can draw our attention to phenomena
in our world that exist but are not seen—the hidden forces that
shape the places and situations we live in. Second, media art can also teach