Peter Lunenfeld,
Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0 262 12226 X
240pp
US$32.95 (cloth)

(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)
Uploaded 1 November 2000

Between the prophesising of Nicholas Negroponte and dire warnings of Kirkpatrick Sale lies an approach to ways of thinking about the impact of new technologies on culture which are neither hysterical nor hyperbolic. Happily, Snap to Grid is evidence of this. This latest offering from Peter Lunenfeld, editor of the excellent The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media and Director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics (ITA) demonstrates that its author is clear-sighted and lucid when it comes to discussions of emergent media culture.

As the title suggests, the familiar command “snap to grid” is Lunenfeld’s key figure or metaphor. This command “instructs the computer to take hand drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space.” (xvi) It is an extraordinarily resonant metaphor. It implies a kind of precise imprecision. Which is exactly what the shift from analogue to digital, from copy to sample or from reproduction to simulacra is all about. In terms of theory, the seduction of the precise, of certainty, is constantly undermined by the inaccuracy of the grids with which we work and by a desire to escape those grids and find the fissures and gaps where they break down. Lunenfeld tries to reintroduce the noise which digital systems tend to eradicate by overlaying multiple grids which both confound and enliven each other, pushing Martin Heidegger up against the workings of digital media technologies or Karl Marx’s Kapital up against the high tech gift economy of computer hackerdom. But his use of theory is neither doctrinaire nor cavalier. It’s productive in the way of a critic finding their own use for things.

Lunenfeld ranges over a broad array of topics which are collected into three main parts. The first, “Cultures”, attempts to identify some broad features of a technoculture which is awash in tools. Rather than being characterised by an exchange of goods, Lunenfeld argues that technoculture produces relationships between manufacturer-producers and consumer-producers so that commodities aren’t so much consumed or simply consumed but produce new commodities. Positing 1989 as a year of significant change for market driven capitalism, Lunenfeld goes on to argue that these new relations between consumers and producers have demanded a new theoretical approach which is more “elastic: it lives in its moment, eschews nostalgia, and acknowledges that oftentimes, consumption is acknowledgement of rather than subterranean resistance to the global market”.(11) Lunenfeld then goes on to argue for the centrality of performance to digital aesthetics in this environment where the trade show is just as important for an artist as it is to the computer industry. The “demo or die” credo which drives both events like ISEA and, locally, an event like Interact, is given as evidence for the ways in which the boundaries between artistic practice and commercial practice have become blurred. He then surveys some of the responses this overlap has produced, arguing strongly for a position which is neither neo-Luddite nor what he calls the vapid theorising of the techno-utopians.

Part two, “Media”, addresses a range of digital arts practices which include hypertext, digital photography, the world wide web art, virtual reality and architecture. The strength of Lunenfeld’s commentaries on these practices lies in his ability to write productively about each of these without lapsing into the general. For example, his discussion of architecture eschews the wide ranging approach of the work of, say, Bill Mitchell and focuses instead closely on the intricacies of the development of hybrid architecture in relation to what he calls the “hardscapes” of the built environment and the “imagescapes” of new media technologies. Similarly, the discussion of hypertext pays only cursory attention to the already much-noted relation between post-structuralist literary theory and new modes of writing, and draws attention instead to the need to develop ways of writing in hypertext which draw on suitable rhetorical strategies in order to revive rather than replace typographic culture. The two main tropes that he discusses are “mise en abyme” and “multum in parvo”, both of which produce condensation rather than disjointed disconnection. Using McLuhan’s aphoristic probes as an example and Greg Ulmer as a guide, Lunenfeld argues strongly for the need to develop hypertextual modes of writing which are more than a “gush of unconnected nano-thoughts”(54)

The final part of the book is dedicated to “Makers” and again Lunenfeld’s choice is surprising and interesting. Rather than focus on the usual digital arts practitioners (though the book draws on a wide range of artists in its discussions), Lunenfeld chooses filmmaker Hollis Frampton, projection artists Diana Thater and Jennifer Steinkamp, installation artists Perry Hoberman and Gary Hill and painter Adam Ross. His reasoning for this focus is clear and thoughtful. Lunenfeld is concerned with mining the work of these artists for congruencies between them and the developing hyperaesthetics of digital media. It is just as important to assess the import of the computer inflected as well as of the computer generated for this particular cultural moment. And the work of each of these artists has much to offer in terms of the ways we might think about new media as well as through it.

Snap to Grid is an enlightening and enlivening book. It offers no big picture scenarios but rather shines a micro light on some aspects of digital arts and culture which illuminates rather than being blinds.

Lisa Gye