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GL: You read this development in two ways: the first is the potential for increased density, as demonstrated with the aphorism or directed slogan, but the shadowside of this is the rise of vapor theory. Can you say something about the danger of vapor theorizing and at what point texts transform into neologism and sales talk? PL: The failed aphorism is only one small part of the overarching category of what I came to call "vapor theory." Vapor theory is a gaseous flapping of the gums about technologies, their effects and aesthetics, usually generated with little exposure, much less involvement with those self-same technologies and artworks. Vapor theory is one result of the historical condition in which new media emerged. There was an almost fully formed theoretical context for digital art and design even before they were fully functional as media technologies. This certainly did not happen with film, radio or television (though there are some parallels with artists' video of the 60s and early 70s). The late 90s moment of overwhelming, and overweening, hype for the Web seems at last to have subsided, so perhaps that will temper the vapor theory as well. The increasing institutionalization of "cyber-studies" may sustain vapor theory, though, due to the ever-increasing velocity of academic job hunting and publishing for advancement. GL: In your writings, body-centered bio science metaphors are remarkably absent. Nor do you criticize them. PL: I'm one of the few people I know who doesn't want to live forever, so the central attraction of bio-blather – immortality -- leaves me cold. I don 't want to have an endless dialogue with Extropians and associated noospheric hangers-on about the religious fervor that they bring to these issues, nor have I been particularly impressed by the work that artists have done in these areas. Too much of it falls into the "when we have the tools, the work we'll make will be wonderful" school of mediocre art/tech. I'm fascinated by what Matthew Barney is doing with biology in his Cremaster films, but that's far removed from what you're asking me about. Perhaps my relative silence in this area is simply intellectual modesty. Just because digital technologies, about which I know something, have moved into the bio-sciences, about which I know little, should I venture cavalierly into this arena just for the pleasure of expressing an opinion? GL: You just mentioned "art/tech." Why do you think so many electronic artists are fascinated by this "arts meet science" discourse? PL: I'm wary of the notion of the artist as research scientist prevalent in new media circles. At conferences, I hear artists going on about how they are now validated in their choice of art as a profession because scientists and engineers respect their "research," and the fact that they are getting money from Intel. This attitude is incredibly odd. Collegiality is a wonderful thing, but in the final analysis, why should artists give damn about what engineers think about them? This "scientific method" is growing rapidly with the megaversity structure, in which artists who can create a practice that apes the forms of scientific research get hired and funded. They hire and fund others like themselves, and thereby build a peer network to evaluate the "results" of their work. This has gone hand in hand with the development of the arts practice-based Ph.D. in the UK and other parts of Europe. Most artists have some sort of "research" component to their own practice. But this research is generally only important as it relates to the work to which it contributes. There are some, select artists for whom the research is the work, but quite often they are working within a specifically conceptual framework and what they tend to explore ends up being the idea of research itself, rather than a specific topic (a metacritical project that is more ontological than empirical). GL: Is this then just opportunism, an attempt to bring the artist to the level of the so-called neutral laboratory engineer/inventor, in effect to "increase" the perceived utility of art in an ever more technologized society? PL: This gets straight to the heart of the matter: art can be "useful," but the glory of it as a sphere of cultural production is that it does not have to be. Researchers and scientists are trained differently and have a different set of expectations for their work - there is an expectation of utility, and often of clarity (avoiding the detours of postmodern science wars for a moment). This whole artist-cum-scientist confusion reminds me of the 1980s when what we saw, especially in the United States, were artists-cum-social workers. For every innovative effort like Tim Rollins and KAOS there were a thousand dreary "community-based collaborative projects" that existed for one reason and one reason only: to get money from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) or local funding agencies. Originally, by putting in some vague pro-social rhetoric, artists could get some support for the work they really wanted to do, but then they came to see the funding scam as their whole reason for being. What began as something of a scam turned into an entire aesthetic. Then, during the "culture wars" of the late 80s and early 90s, conservatives in the U.S. Congress neutered the NEA and this entire brand of practice died out – though now I see some of the same people who went after the social work funding going after money and tech from hardware and software companies. GL: Now that we've covered some of the movements you don't like, what about the ones you do? The 60s and 70s avant-gardes – in art, cinema and literature --are very important to you. For decades, we have heard that the avant-garde was dead. Has this category risen up and returned in the figure of the digital artist? PL: I'm very careful about using the term avant-garde, even as I spend a great deal of time looking at what other generations did indeed term avant-garde art and media. The very phrase "avant-garde" needs to be given a rest, like a good horse that has been ridden too hard for too long. When stylistic and technical "advances" come from all spectra of digital media production – commercial, artistic, scientific, academic, etc. – the notion we have inherited of a singular, oppositional avant-garde serves little purpose anymore. If our softwares, music videos, computer games and WAPs are all to be termed "avant-garde," then that phrase has indeed been reduced to a marketing phrase like "revolution." I do not see the digital artist as being an avant-gardist in any classical sense of solidarity or shared artistic destiny; and, in fact, too many mediocre talents have hung on to just such exhausted tropes to support their own, weak brands of practice. GL: I like the way Snap to Grid treats 70s structuralist film as being of central concern to contemporary media art. One chapter is devoted to the work of Hollis Frampton. Do you see any continuity twenty five years later? Or similarities compared to current digital media developments? PL: I wrote about Frampton for a number of reasons. The first is simply out of admiration for his life's work. He was able to meld rigorous art practice with far ranging and vital theorizations of his media, from photography to film to video to digital media. Like his contemporary, the protean conceptualist Robert Smithson, and those who followed this path like painter Peter Halley and video maker Gary Hill, Frampton offers theoretical texts that are supported by, and support in turn, a body of important artwork. These kinds of artist's writings offer ways out of and around the dead ends of too much mainstream, contemporary media theory. One of the things that drew me to digital media in the 90s was that same sense of artists creating the contexts and explications for their own works, on listserves, in catalogues, on conference panels, and – perhaps most of all – in bars around the world.
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