Darren Tofts,
Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology.
City: Interface Books, 1999.
ISBN 90 5704 007 7
109 pp.
A$19.95
(Review copy supplied by 21C Publications)

Uploaded 30 June 2000

Parallax collects a number of essays on art and literature in various media, both the sort known as “old” as well as the self-described “new” variety, from Ulysses and Duchamp’s Green Box to the computer game Bad Day on the Midway and the digital graphics of Troy Innocent. According to Tofts’ “logic of parallax” this is by no means an odd assortment but rather a remedy for the “cultural amnesia” (9) pushed on us at times by ecstatic celebrants of cyberculture. Tofts’ approach belongs to the broad-minded line of Hugh Kenner, Richard Lanham, Greg Ulmer, and McKenzie Wark, differing from more harrassing masters like Neil Postman and Sven Birkerts. To his great credit, Tofts argues for continuity without discarding discontinuity or heterodoxy: hence his title, implying a mapping across axes of difference. As he puts it: “In the age of cyberculture and hypermedia…there is still much to be learned from artists and art practices that don’t seem to fit in, or belong to, the fin de siecle age of electronic technology”. (11)
And yet most of the cultural products that pass under Tofts’ scrutiny do seem to bear in interesting ways on digital art and culture, at least as Tofts develops them here. With the exception of brief pieces on Beckett and Andres Serrano, which provide a sort of unplugged relief, the essays here nicely illustrate Tofts’ main point. Reading the tragic editorial history of Joyce’s Ulysses seems a valid way to argue for hypertextuality, if not as a technical practice then as a grounding cultural assumption. Likewise there seems an undeniable truth in the observation that “hypermedia have a lot of catching up to do” (27) when compared to the revolutionary practices of Duchamp, Joyce, or perhaps even Eliot.

Or perhaps not Eliot, the one ancestral voice we might profitably omit when thinking about post-print media. Regrettably, Tofts invokes him repeatedly. It is true that Eliot’s practical poetics embraced discontinuity and imagistic fragmentation, lately hallmarks of electronic art; but it bears remembering that Eliot was less generous when he came to theory. The injunctions of “Tradition and the individual talent” to set the living “among the dead,” and to require all poems to integrate with the eternal mind of Europe go unmentioned in Tofts’ discussion, yet they cannot help but throw a certain shadow across the work. That influence seems particularly dark for this reader, who recalls that Faber and Faber, controllers of the rights to The Waste Land , strongly opposed Christiane Paul’s attempt to create a hypertextual treatment of that work. It is hard to imagine Eliot having much enthusiasm for hypermedia or the Internet. The keepers of his memory no doubt act in good faith when they refuse involvement with anything but print. However specious, that distinction between “new” and “old” media still seems both real and vexed in some contexts.

Admittedly, I am raising an objection based on a tale out of school, which is hardly fair to Tofts. Nonetheless the story points out a potential hazard in the parallax method. In factoring our way around differences, we must be careful not to overlook salient grounds of contention. At his best, Tofts seems well aware of this pitfall. He writes of an “agon of articulation” (10), which seems a very good way of understanding the relationship of contemporary art to its modernist heritage – notably better than Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s rose-tinted theory of “remediation.”

Indeed, Tofts seems to understand very clearly the potential of hypermedia and other cybernetic forms to disrupt the cultural status quo. Arguing that hypermedia represent an extension of the modernist avant garde, Tofts takes a duly radical position: “Are the Internet and hypertext forms of communciation? I think not”.(25) This conclusion, consonant with and partly indebted to Greg Ulmer’s theory of heuretics, insists that the apparent purposelessness and chaos of the World Wide Web are not failures but primary virtues. This in turn suggests that any intersection of old and new media must inevitably be strongly agonized.

Yet the theme of continuity muddies the issue considerably. What figures like Joyce and Duchamp laboriously achieved with their divergent, high-risk art practices has become through the non-art work of Engelbart, Nelson, Berners-Lee, and Andreesen the dominant mode of information exchange. What was art has turned to commerce; or as Tofts puts it: “Cultural practices emerge, in part, from appropriating and domesticating the once bold and threatening” (11). This looks suspiciously like the theory of remediation, which holds somewhat outrageously that “technology reforms itself”. (Bolter and Grusin, 61) In the American view, the modernist aesthetic has to give up most of its revolutionary force before it can be allowed into the house of business. The Australian version adds a significant twist. Because he is willing to entertain the notion that hypermedia do not represent communication in a traditional sense – i.e., purposive, routinized transfers of information – Tofts achieves a greater subtlety. The insurgent may be “domesticated” but not without significant impact upon the domicile: a process that looks less like self improvement than home improvement – in which walls may be torn out. As Tofts might characteristically, hypertextually, say: “this is not my beautiful house”; nor indeed have we come to the glorious, long-booming economy some predicted. Real novelty carries a considerable price. It’s not easy being genuinely new.

Indeed, some (including this writer) may take issue with Tofts’ hard line on the non-communication of hypermedia. Read superficially, it seems to support dismissals of hypermedia as mere negative postmodernism, an irresponsible language game designed to elevate “confusion”. (Murray, 133) Taken at its full measure, however, Tofts’ analysis of contemporary artforms reminds us that they are part of a larger project of cultural renovation that calls for building as well as tearing down. This is a complex and controversial theory, but one we do well to consider.

Stuart Moulthrop

Works Cited

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 1999).
Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace . (Basic Books, 1997).