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Cyberspace has been introduced into the public imagination as an electronic space, a wholly different kind of environment of instantaneous communication and immaterial information - a virtual space, a consensual hallucination of immateriality. Somehow what gets left out of this hyperbolic discourse is the very real investments in the actual machinery that makes cyberspace possible, for example the hardware industry of short-lived equipment, its environmental impacts, and the old questions of labor organization. What happens to all the highly toxic capacitors, the plastics of the boxes that make cyberspace?
 The material reality of cyberspace is eluded in the delusion of virtual reality. The Live Wire is a 3D, real-time network traffic indicator. It is actually a material manifestation of cyberspace. Plugging into a local area network, it wiggles proportionally to the amount of traffic on the net. With each data package it convulses and sets up standing waves.
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This has been an amazingly popular device, not only amongst system administrators who no longer have to explain why the network is so slow, because the network load is rendered obvious, but further. The Media Lab, for example, has taken it and some other projects to represent tangible media. Hiroshi Ishii heads a new research group seeking to develop media that can function less intrusively. This is perhaps an example of how technoart has effected new media development, as actual intervention into material reality. This, I take for granted, is one of the general ambitions of technoart. |
It is placed in the spectacularly banal office environment of the glamorous Xerox Park Computer Science Lab, the place where WYSIWYG, Macintosh interface, ethernet and many other things were invented - essentially the birthplace of personal computing as we know it. Live Wire could be another graph on your computer screen, a real-time 3D rendering of network traffic, something else in your face, in, to quote Perry Hoberman, the monogamous relationship of the user to the screen. But instead it is in the periphery, in the shared physical space. Live Wire is tacit information, rather than more of the precisely graphed, data fetishism of information rhetoric.