Technologies of abundance : consumer culture, government and the media arts

Arts funding provides one of the clearest examples available of the cybernetic metaphor, that is, the role of cultural policy in hierarchically ranking cultural forms and their publics. Justification for the hierarchical control of the cybernetic apparatus in the national cultural interest takes on a rhetorical form because it is, in essence, an ideological argument, reflecting the dominant social beliefs and interests which underpin political action. The objective of arts funding policy is cultural survival in global capitalism through government subsidy and top-down prescription of appropriate social practices. This emphasis on the creative dimension offers not only images of what is, but also those of what might be--alternatives to the status quo. The convergence of the home computer, television, and telephone lines as the nexus of a new social machinery--interactive media, on-line multimedia and their hybrids promises new cultural territories for consumer capitalism. The new contexts, technological, commercial, and telesocial, require a reconsideration of methodologies of cultural production and conventions of consumption. The new forms of production and consumption will inevitably generate new cultural institutions. With these potential realities in mind it would seem appropriate to anticipate what kind of art we are going to make in these new social spaces, what kind of audience we will have, and what kind of interaction will occur-- ultimately, to consider what art will become in this context. The era of on-line digital interactivity and virtual communities will evolve a genre that may be unrecognizable in a traditional sense.