New Theories for New Media
Sabrina DeTurk · Afterimage · 2023
Peter Lunenfeld“Digital Dialectics: A Hybrid Theory of Computer Media”Afterimage 21, no. 4 (November 1993): 5–7At a moment when the art world is confronting the challenges and opportunities presented by a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) image generators, revisiting Peter Lunenfeld’s 1993 Afterimage essay “Digital Dialectics: A Hybrid Theory of Computer Media” offers an opportunity to reflect on a similar turning point in the cultural landscape. In his essay, Lunenfeld, now professor and vice chair of UCLA’s Design Media Arts Department, sought to theorize and contextualize computer-inflected new media forms in a way that moved beyond the “market’s cliché that is the word ‘new’” (5). Acknowledging that the “accelerated pace of innovation inherent in the very objects of such an investigation…renders this process difficult” (5), Lunenfeld nonetheless identified two modes of computer-inflected new media, hypertext and virtual reality (VR), which he saw as most representative of the new genre.In Lunenfeld’s assessment, “the computer-inflected media of hypertext and VR demand a distinct break with the modernist call for purity, and in fact require a theoretical assessment based upon notions of hybridity” (5). These hybrid forms are interrogated by Lunenfeld as he works past the binary debate between art as a harbinger of change in a technological society (McLuhan) and technology as a pointer for transitions in the field of art (Barthes). Rather, Lunenfeld seeks to follow the path of Hegel in working toward a “digital dialectic” that will contextualize computer-inflected technologies and their artifacts “in relation to both cultural and mechanistic discourses” and “ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice” (5). Lunenfeld identifies the extraction of information as a core component of the hypertext model, while virtual reality foregrounds the immersive experience of an environment (albeit an artificial one). Yet, it is the overlap between these two technologies that fascinates Lunenfeld, forming the locus at which “the technologies of hyper-extraction and virtual-immersion combine to create a shared syntax for not merely a new medium, but rather a new culture” (6). In this assessment, Lunenfeld’s prescient recognition of the cultural upheaval engendered by these new technologies becomes clear. It is not simply the change in creation and display (medium) but the profound reshaping of experience that must be interrogated through the digital dialectic in order to appreciate the impact of computer-inflected technologies on art and life.Turning first to an exploration of hypertext, Lunenfeld briefly traces the profound shifts in our interactions with text since the sixteenth-century invention of the printing press. The twentieth-century shift from print to digital text was driven by business needs (increased bureaucracy, proliferating memoranda), yet despite the mundanity of the impetus for the print to digital transition, the possibilities inherent in the digitized word are extraordinary: “No longer stationary on the page, the word once digitized is afloat in a universe of polyvalent databases” (6). In such an environment, reading becomes “extraction” and offers the possibility of hypertext, a technology that Lunenfeld characterizes as “the most sophisticated manifestation of the computer’s impact on writing and reading” (6).Lunenfeld reflects on how hypertext could transform the learning experience, using the example of Walter Benjamin’s canonical 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as the base text from which could be linked not only Benjamin’s other writings but also “an even greater hybridity [of documents], with graphical elements like images of the artworks that he discusses, selected photographs by Eugéne Atget, and maps and pictorial renderings of Paris and Berlin” (6). As appealing and pedagogically stimulating as Lunenfeld’s description sounds, however, this is not the way most readers experience Benjamin’s essay nearly ninety years on, despite the fact that the technology to facilitate such an experience is even more readily available than at the time of Lunenfeld’s writing. Why? The answer is, perhaps, suggested by Lunenfeld himself: “Too easily glossed over in all this attention, though, are the questions that non-linear authoring and use raise about the creation of (hyper)textual meaning” (6). These questions may point to one element of the problem: a destabilizing loss of authorial control. However, it is another aspect of Lunenfeld’s critique of hypertext that resonates in our current, oversaturated media landscape. Musing on the difficulty of presenting lengthy, complex arguments in hypertext, Lunenfeld asks, “Are all ideas, metaphors, and images to be processed down to their smallest units and then repeated ad nauseam throughout the digital databases?” (6). He cautions that “Only by planning for and incorporating ongoing synthetic processes can hypertext save the technoculture from inundation, in info-bits, unsustained characterization, quick cuts, plot shards, and sound bites…hypertext must also develop strategies to encourage the re-emergence of the long form” (6). Lunenfeld views these strategies as a core component of the hybridity he seeks to foreground in critiques of new media—from the vantage point of 2023, with nonstop social media barrages and dire warnings about the demise of reading, we seem to have missed the opportunities Lunenfeld sought to alert us to.Moving on to a discussion of virtual reality, Lunenfeld described the hold the new medium was developing on the popular imagination, largely due to its immersive qualities, which offered the possibility of “a technology that will alter our positions as spectators, our perception of phenomena, even the solidity of our socio-sexual identities by opening up a new (virtual) space for human cultural interaction” (6). Lunenfeld was quick to acknowledge, however, that such descriptions were more hype than reality given the current stage of development of VR, cautioning that “although there are undeniable differences between cinematic or televisual engagement and the ‘active’ participation in virtual environments, the rhetoric predicting spectatorial revolution is overstated” (6). Speaking of the facile “takes” on new media, particularly VR, that marked the critical and popular literature to date, Lunenfeld exhorted media theorists to “face these challenges [steep learning curve, high access costs] and beg, borrow, or steal time on systems, for only then will they be able to test their ideas against the limitations and potentialities of the new media” (7).Lunenfeld’s essay is most significant for its assertion that a new mode of theorizing is needed for new media and for his proposal that such a theoretical mode should balance critical inquiry with an awareness of the technological practices inherent in the production of new media. As Lunenfeld states,As I am calling for a hybrid theory of new media, it is the dogmatic application of entire paradigms to new media and not the importation of critical ideas from other discourses that makes me wary.…The digital dialectic must keep in contact with new media’s techniques and practices of production, drawing strength from this familiarity, without falling into a purely technicist discourse.” (7)That desire to balance theory with practice was further explored by Lunenfeld and colleagues in his 1999 edited volume from MIT Press, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, which drew on work presented at a 1995 conference that also considered the potential of the “digital dialectic.” The essay in Afterimage was thus an opening meditation on what became a sustained investigation into the challenges and opportunities inherent in theorizing new media. Reviewers of The Digital Dialectic acknowledged that the volume offered an important window into the intersections of theory and practice in new media, bringing in a range of voices beyond academics. Yet, they also yearned for more. Felicia L. Carr, reviewing the book for the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, wrote, “we need to hear more answers about how these technologies will transform our society, history, and ideology.”1 In CAA Reviews, Caroline A. Jones cautioned that, “The pressure to get news of the ‘emergent media culture’ into print is so great that there’s a rushed and breathless quality to much new media writing, but perhaps the unrushed art historical gaze could buy these authors more time to let their insights ripen into arguments, and their observations into analysis.”2Despite the caveats from these and other reviewers, Lunenfeld’s original essay and the extended works that followed were critical catalysts in a move toward creating a language of new media theory that bridged the aesthetic, the technological, and the philosophical. For Lunenfeld, hypertext and virtual reality were the technologies that precipitated the need for fresh theorizing. Thirty years on, is it worth asking whether the rise of artificial intelligence presents another such precipitating event? What kind of critical theory of AI-generated imagery will be needed for the coming years? How will art historians, critics, and practitioners articulate the intersection between theory and practice in this new medium? Does Lunenfeld’s digital dialectic, with its emphasis on hybridity, still hold or is a new mode of theorization called for? However one might answer these questions, Lunenfeld’s closing lines from the 1993 essay remain remarkably apt:The digital dialectician must be willing to reorient at a moment’s notice, taking inspiration from the hybrid natures of the new media, all the while maintaining a middle ground, between an underinformed and vaguely technophobic reaction to the intrusion of the computer into the realm of mediamaking and the non-stop boosterism of enthusiastic techno-philes. (7)It is an admonition worth remembering as we navigate and interrogate the impact of AI on art, culture, and ourselves.