Parallax: essays on Art, Culture and Technology
Darren Tofts
fineArt forum, 2001

Since receiving a review copy of Darren Tofts' Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology, I have cited the foreword on several occasions. It makes a point which seems worthy of repeating. In writing about cyberculture, Tofts doesn't think it all just happened. He is skeptical about the hype surrounding cyberculture and the incipient promises of virtual futures, all too often couched in descriptive and well-intentioned neologisms too neo to comprehend.

In his foreword, Tofts argues that despite the apparent novelty of cyberculture, there is something to be gained by including history in our perceptions of cyberculture's nascent artforms. I like this idea, partly because I write history and partly because I enjoy the lines of flight which can result. He doesn't argue for this in the 'ho-hum-all-been-done-before' way that proponents of generation wars or 'endist' discourses might argue it. Instead, he refers to the logic of the parallax, claiming that all is not as it might seem:

rather than being new of necessity, hypermedia's contribution to and advancement of the cultural apparatus of representation lies in its re-constitution of the historical practices it re-combines.

The challenge is to talk and construct cyberculture in ways that do not subscribe to a normative notion of a post-historical age. Through a shift of perspective which includes history, a practice which Meaghan Morris might describe as wanting history, he points not only to change but also to continuity.(2) Of wanting history, Morris argues:

for a context prolonging the life of the ephemeral item or 'case': saturating with detail an articulated place and point in time, a critical reading can extract from its objects a parable of practice that converts them into models with a past and a potential for reuse, thus aspiring to invest them with a future.(3)

Persistence is a word that seems necessary in understanding what Tofts is doing by including history in his account of cyberculture. In referring to the 'recombinant logic' of hypermedia and cyberculture, he alludes to the persistence of seemingly unnamed and experimental artistic practices, which to some might actually be called the avant garde. Recalling artists who don't or haven't quite 'fit in' - James Joyce, Stephen Mallarme, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, John Cage, Gregory Ulmer, Jon McCormack and Troy Innocent - Tofts asserts that certain "inflections, attitudes and energies" persist into the present and persist into the virtual realm. They persist, not through feats of endurance, but in those shimmering and random moments of resonance and remediation. There is still something to learn or wryly observe about these works, and Tofts seizes this opportunity for such an undertaking.

Parallax anthologises and revises essays written and published since 1993 and provides a space in which Tofts can draw out the persistence of his ongoing cultural criticism. Each essay explores a site of some cultural conflict or confusion which is firmly located in a present moment or event. The insightful and lucid essays each convey a sense of having 'been there' or of bearing witness to the events of our own time, the 1990s. It's what gives the essays an aura of excitement, the ability to account and account for moments and works which might be lost. This sense of seeing is believing is central in The Passion of Andres Serrano as Tofts follows the events that resulted in the destruction of Piss Christ. Tofts recounts the 'desecration' and susbequent media reportage as the 14 Stations of the Cross: pitched as Serrano's cross to bear, as well as his symbolic sacrifice. As the last essay in the anthology, this piece is like an epilogue, almost a warning. Clearly, in this tightly wound era, censorship and conservatism comes in many forms, fortified by a paranoid polity, and the fear of bodily fluids.

Written in 1996, Your Place of Mine? Locating Digital Artpartly addresses the exhibitionBurning the Interface. As Australia's first major survey of cd-rom art and because of the ambiguity in digital art's relationship to the museum or gallery, it "raise[d] the question of the appropriate location of digital art."(4) The issue is not only location but also locatability given the contingency of much digital art on computer-based presentation. As he canvases the other realms of Eco, Baudrillard, Debord and Plato, I am reminded of the ways in which the digital or virtual had been grasped, never quite graspable, theorised and spatialised over the past decade as an immersive realm. However, the reality of virtual reality (as we experienced it through artworks on screen or online) always seemed to let the theory and the imaginary down because, as Tofts states, "identification can only go so far."(5) The question of how digital art might shift from the desktop to immersive, virtual spaces, is partly addressed by interactive installations. Perhaps not as liquid as silicon, such installations by virtue of their scale, offer opportunities for a more encompassing interactivity, even a more real virtuality.

Terms like 'new media' don't readily relinquish their secrets or their genealogies. There's a peculiar discomfort in discussing 'new media' because of its more elusive and emergent qualities, because there always seems to be more questions than answers. While this modest anthology doesn't claim to capture the answers, it does, in the way that only cultural criticism can, make some valuable connections. Each essay seems to investigate and create ways in which old and new media interrelate. Tofts asks "in what ways do hypermedia practices have to be reconciled with those media, such as the book, cinema, television, animation, etc., which have contributed to its recombinant logic?"(6) For example, when Tofts threads his essayUn Autre Coup de Des. Multimedia and the Game Paradigm through Mallarme's A Throw of the Dice, game theory and computer games such as Myst, he is inquiring into the reflexivity of reading, narrative and interactivity. So too, in Hyperlogic, the Avant-garde and Other Intransitive Acts, instances of interactivity, as a defining characteristic of hypertext, are identified in the work of Duchamp, Cage and Joyce.

Tofts acknowledges the limitations of the chronological approach to annotating culture and cyberculture. In Machine Metaphysics, Tofts is drawn into speculation about cybernetic and android organisms. Perhaps his take on history is similar to that of Phillip K. Dick's take on human indeterminacy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?:

the burden of authenticity, of having to prove that you are in fact human, falls virtually on everyone. Similarly, humans are gripped with self-doubt and paranoia in the fear that they may in fact be androids.(7)

The tension between old and new media might be similar. As hypertext and e-texts emerge, the onus of proof might fall on the book. At this time, there is a tussle over authenticity, over which media is redundant or superceded. However, Tofts seems to deflect the underpinnings of this line of questioning, while drawing various cultural sites into account. The proposition is not that 'novelty' has a history but that there have consistently been artworks that do not subscribe to normative perceptions of cultural works that don't seem to 'fit in'. In so doing, he is not writing the history of hypermedia but rather suggesting that various ideas and practices have existed fleetingly and persistently across multiple time/s, technology/ies and space/s. As if by chance, by being in the right time and place, Tofts is able to thread them together.

NOTES
1 Darren Tofts,Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology, Interface, Sydney, 1999, p 11
2 Meaghan Morris, Too soon too late: history in popular culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1998, p 4
3 ibid., p 3
4 Tofts, op.cit., p 31
5 ibid., p 30
6 ibid., p 10
7 ibid., p 13