Audiovisionaries of the Network Planet

Cubitt, Sean and Harris, Jonathan (2011) Audiovisionaries of the Network Planet. In, Globalization and Contemporary Art. Chichester, GB. Blackwell Publishing, pp. 225-236.

Abstract

The process of imaging or imagining, of sounding the world in an age of digital globalisation is by definition an unfinished project. It embraces various modes and experiences of the global: as triumph of corporate technologies, as diasporan cultural exchage, as the isolation but also the solidarity and ultimately the freedom of migrants. Elsewhere the global appears as breakdown (Mark Napier's Landfill, a browser which mulches html and web content) or as conflict (Olia Lialina's much-praised narrative My Boyfriend Came Back From the War), or as sheer abstraction (Alex Jarrett's Confluence, a socialised attempt to gather a photograph for every place on the planet where lines of latitude and longitude cross, or as corporate network (Josh On and futurefarmers' They Rule). The intersecting planes of globalisation evolve on the basis of network technologies, and in network technologies we find not only their shadows and their footprints but also their ommissions and their blindnessses, pulled apart in deconstructions of code (Alex Galloway's Carnivore) or discovered in the spaces between that most characteristic quality of digital media, layers. Investigations of how the planet has been and might be visualised digitally employ the same machines and often subvert the same software that powers the mangement and extraction of value from the planet among ruling elites.

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