“The Screen or the Window: A Critical Proposal for Reading Computer Representations”

Michele White Wellesley College mwhite@wellesley.edu

The structuring qualities of the computer screen play an important part in how we understand the Internet and other computer-facilitated representations but they are rarely addressed in the critical literature. In this presentation, I consider how the screen and mediation remain largely invisible because the Internet is described as a material setting that users inhabit. I provide a brief study of popular and academic narratives and focus on renderings of the computer and Internet as a window or entrance that appear in telepresence art works, webcams, and advertisements for computer screens. Close visual and textual analysis and critical considerations of photography’s referential aspects are employed. These methodologies provide a way to highlight the computer screen and encourage an alternative understanding of the computer and Internet. The tendency to engage with the computer and Internet as physical and animate has significant ramifications. Our conceptualization of the medium determines the questions that we can ask and whether the representational aspects of stereotypes can be perceived and critiqued. Judith Mayne has argued that feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey have attributed “the polarity of gender, of masculinity versus femininity, to the very structures of pleasure and identification in the classical cinema” (48). Computers and Internet settings employ similar devices. However, the forms of identification produced by computers and Internet settings have an even more consequential effect because users spend significant amounts of time engaging with computers; computers and networks also appear in film, television, and print advertising; dream or trance-like experiences are often part of the engagement; the user’s identification with characters and other representations can be intense; and there is an idea that people are alive and their bodies are accessible through the Internet. Considering the screen rather than the delivered representations is difficult because of the rhetoric about physical and populated Internet settings. For instance, Esther Dyson makes it appear like people live on the Internet rather than use it when she states that “the Net includes all the people, cultures, and communities that live in it” (2). Eduardo Kac uses his telepresence artwork, Teleporting an Unknown State (1994/96, 1998, and 2001), to render the “Internet as a life-supporting system” (Kac) and suggests that there is “Birth, growth, and death on the Internet” (Kac a). Such narratives about people inhabiting the setting and live interfaces are connected to early descriptions of the computer and Internet. William Gibson suggests that physical settings and screens will combine in the first sentence to Neuromancer when he states that “the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3). Gibson starts Neuromancer, which had a significant effect on computer culture, with the screen but he displaces its constructed aspects with live programs, cyber “space,” and populated interfaces. Internet sites continue to provide “welcome” messages, invitations to enter, and depictions of spatial progressions. For instance, the webcam operator Gwen encourages the spectator to “enter the life of a college student” and Cindy coaxes the spectator to “ENTER ... with an open mind.” A variety or multi-purpose sites are referred to as “portals” and Gretchen Barbatsis, Michael Fegan, and Kenneth Hansen indicate that spectators “engage the computer screen as a gateway to another place.” Window-like effects are employed because they seem to provide views “onto” other terrain, articulate an inside and outside, and suggest that computers and the Internet deliver a continuous spatial landscape. Thomas J. Campanella suggests that “Webcams, the Web’s windows on the world, knit the Net to the physical spaces we inhabit. The accompanying illustration by Jack Desrocher supports this conception by depicting the computer monitor as a curtained window that is incorporated into the home setting. Such renderings make representations seem to be part of the lived space of the spectator. The conception that the computer and Internet are a window or portal, which provides an entrance into other places, is related to societal conceptions of photography. Photographic images are often talked about as if they provided direct access to the thing depicted—the referent—rather than being representations. This cultural conception is conveyed by Susan Sontag when she states that photography is “not only an image (as a painting is an image) an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real” (154). Internet sites often use data, texts, and graphics instead of digitized photos and digital imaging technologies to make representations seem real. However, society’s usual conception of photography can still provide another example of a technology and cultural form in which the framed aspects of images are often ignored. Histories of photography and other referential media-like film and television-indicate that the physical and animate aspects attributed to the computer and Internet are not unique and that these renderings should be associated with other produced forms. Such photography theorists as Rosalind Krauss, Martha Rosler and John Tagg, also offer some significant literature to employ in engaging with the produced and framed aspects of computer and Internet renderings. A re-employment of the photographic vocabulary of cropping and rectangular formats can highlight the relationship between individual screen elements, software windows, and monitors. Noting and articulating the repetitive aspects of computer and Internet representations can also indicate that it is cultural conventions rather than people that are conveyed. For instance, Tagg argues that realism “works by the controlled and limited recall of a reservoir of similar ‘texts,’ by a constant repetition, a constant cross-echoing” (99). Such critical considerations of photography may be more productive in highlighting the produced aspects of computer and Internet settings than in helping society to engage with photography differently. Computers and Internet settings rarely employ traces of material objects in the ways this concept operates in photography. The redeployment of photography theory can also begin to render a new vocabulary for describing and conceptualizing these settings. We should continue to consider other possibilities for speaking, writing, designing, and visually rendering the Internet since these acts produce the setting.

REFERENCES

Gretchen Barbatsis Michael Fegan Kenneth Hansen. “The Performance of Cyberspace: An Exploration into Computer-Mediated Reality.” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. 1999. 5: .

Thomas J. Campanella. “Be There Now.” salon.com. 1997. : .

Cindy. Intro. : ,

Esther Dyson. Introduction. Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.

William Gibson. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Gwen. Gwencam. : ,

Eduardo Kac. Teleporting an Unknown State. : ,

Judith Mayne. “Feminist Film Theory and Criticism.” Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1994.

Susan Sontag. “The Image World.” On Photography. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

John Tagg. “A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in the Law.” The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.