Mediated

The Media(ted) Landscape:

Image Becoming Context

Images of the landscape abound in Video Art. Water in particular, its fluidity, ever-changingness and its affinity with Light have made it a source of endless fascination for videomakers. But these purely visual qualities, which shape a hyper-aesthetic genre of video art, perhaps mask a deeper connection between the liquid element and the liquifying medium: that of flow, of current. Video - most especially in the form of television - is a flow of images, of information, of energy within which the external landscape is effectively dissolved or liquified. The Media(ted) Landscape, therefore, is not merely an image of the external world rendered through video. Rather, it is the internal landscape of the Image-World, the electronic reality that we are told we are all going to inhabit in the near future. The Finnish theorist Erkki Huhtamo speaks of The Archeology of Virtuality and traces the roots of our present technologically mediated simulations in earlier optical phenomena from the Camera Lucida to Stereoscopy. Here, we will focus more closely upon the emergence of forms of Video Art which have given us a clear view into electronic space. From the early eighties onward, Video Art began to breed with television, producing hybrids like music video and videographics, resulting in fundamentally other forms of spatial representation. Two determining factors in the development of a discourse of the media(ted) space were the writings of post modern theorists such as Baudrillard and Virilio, and the arrival of affordable digital video effects processors and desktop computer graphics systems. The software of theory and the hardware of digital technology combined to create the conditions for a fundamental shift in our relation to pictorial space. In the mid eighties it became quite apparent to anyone who spent time working with digital video post production systems that what we were dealing with was not simply another way of putting images together, not just a refinement of the cinematic language of montage. We were constructing an entirely synthetic pictorial space within which images 'sampled' from the real world were recombined and modified to fir the syntax of another order of representation. The digital video effects processor was like our first window on virtual space, and by using studio effects like chromakeying we could imagine that we were inserting ourselves into a new electronic landscape.

At this point, as we begin to experience the actuality of entering the electronic realm, it is worth rewinding a few years to examine the development of the media-(ted) space.

It has always been a problem to fix a definition on video: is it a technology, a medium, a carrier, a language, a hybrid ? Depending upon which aspect of video we are discussing, the answer will be different. Paul Virilio in a 1988 interview described video as the third window :

It is the new window in effect because we have recovered the dimension which I would call the architectonic of the electronic, the optoelectronic image of those kinds of things. Enter; the third window. The first window is the door-window, no building exists without a door. By definition, if there is no door, then it's not architecture, it's not a human habitat. Thus the door window is the first opening which produces man's habitat, structures his day: diurnal/nocturnal. The second window, which appears very late, is the window which only gives to the day - light only - a window through which one doesn't enter. What enters through it is only an abstraction - the sun, direct vision. At this point, the third window comes into its own: like in the American films, or the films of Wenders where the tv is going on continuously. It doesn't function at all as a medium like radio or newspapers, but is an architectonic element, it is a portable window. insofar as it can be shifted. It's part of the organization of a city, a definitive, final, terminal city. The movement from television to information video, the games, the machines, and all those gadgets, to an architectonic video or television creates a topology of the image of the world.. You know that when you change the program on a computer screen So you can have the window of the building in which you have the screen window plus the electronic window.

So video's function here is doubled: as an electronic window it gives us a view onto the electronic world, but at the same time, it is the electronic world itself. Once video is networked, it constitutes a continuity, a landscape. Just like the computer, video achieves only a part of its functionality if it is disconnected. At this point in the development of electronic information systems, the video screen has become ubiquitous, and it is no longer possible to speak of video as a medium. The information screens in transport terminals are part of the same structure as surveillance systems, automatic banking machines, tourist information kiosks, cable and broadcast television and the worldwide computer network - not to mention the telephone system that is the basis of all communication networks. This ubiquity of the screen represents a special problem for artists working with video in a sculptural or quasi sculptural configuration in public space, because the artwork will always tend to disappear, to merge into the meta-structure of the information network that surrounds it. As Virilio points out, the screen has become an architectonic device. The architectonics of electronic media can in fact be extended downward through the hierarchy of the media's technological construction: the fundamental materials, the building blocks, of this new architecture, are bits, bytes, pixels.

Video is, at base, an input device, a means of recording data, and a system for displaying that data. Whether this data is a family birthday party, an artists' confessional performance, a recording of the midnight sun over Spitzbergen, a riot in Downtown LA or the detonation of a nuclear device in the South Pacific, does not really matter. Everything is data. Everything is input. Nam June Paik, whose video tapes have always been a kaleidoscopic collage of recut and reprocessed images has declared a profound disinterest in the content of imagery (though one may well question this, since he has a clear preference for certain images) maintaining that everything us input for video. This echoes Baudrillard's comment that everything exists to end up on television.

Since its inception, Video Art has existed in an awkward space somewhere between the gallery and the wider world of television and electronic communications. Particular forms of video practise, such as Scratch Video or the Camcorder Guerrilla Tactics of an artist like Paul Garrin, have attempted to engage directly at a critical and often ideologically determined level with the mechanics of image reproduction at play in the electronic news media. Others have seen in the emerging electronic landscape a space in which new forms of narrative may develop. Others still have recognised in video a medium that can afford the viewer a different experience of space and time. What all of the above have in common is they recognize that here we have a different kind of space, a space that can only be accessed through the electronic image, a space in which crucial factors determining the future shapes of our lives are brought into play, a space whose relationship with the external world is not simply indexical. The dialogue between the external world and the image world is two way, the electronic world now responds to the physical world and changes it in the process.

Surveillance is a key to the understanding of the media-(ted) landscape. From the earliest days, artists recognized and seized upon the real time connection between camera and monitor as a tool of enormous power. Its power was already well known to the military and to security agencies, for whom the technology was first developed. In the course of thirty years, the visual field of the electronic eye has extended to encompass the whole planet. Someone is watching you, everywhere, all the time. You already exist in the media-(ted) landscape, and this other you, composed of data, can have a profound impact upon the conditions of your life in the material world. Current desires to live a life inside virtual reality represent perhaps the need to re-unite the halves of a divided self. This is a subject we will return to later.

The appropriation of surveillance technologies to make art that both practices and critiques surveillance is a strategy that several artists have adopted with some success. The American Julia Scher makes installations in museums where the apparatus of surveillance becomes both object, in a sculptural sense, and subject of the artist's project. The difference is that the image of those being watched becomes the image to be watched by the viewer. That which is normally protected - the work of art - has been removed and only the apparatus of protection remains. The apparatus watches and protects itself in a perfect logic of cybernetic self sufficiency.

In the early eighties German artist Michel Klier produced the video tape "The Giant" from actual surveillance images, exploring the fundamental voyeuristic fascination that surveillance images hold for us.

The Giant may be a description of the Orwellian state, but it can now aptly describe the very real presence in our urban scene of architectural structures whose relationship to human beings has shifted in a fundamental way. Buildings whose purpose is no longer to shelter humans, but to control their access and movement and monitor their activities. Mike Davis, writing in Mediamatic, 1995, describes the establishment of a so-called "virtual scan scape" in the hyper modern city:

.....video monitoring of downtown redevelopment zones has been extended to parking structures, private sidewalks, plazas and so on. This comprehensive surveillance constitutes a virtual scanscape - a space of protective visibility that increasingly defines where white collar office workers and middle class tourists feel safe Downtown. Inevitably, the workplace or shopping mall video camera will become linked with home security systems, personal panic buttons, car alarms, cellular phones and the like in a seamless continuity of surveillance over daily routine. ...tall buildings are becoming increasingly sentient and packed with deadly firepower. The skyscraper with a computer brain in "Die Hard" (Actually F.Scott Johnson's Fox-Pereira Tower) anticipates a possible genre of architectural anti heroes as intelligent buildings..... The sensory system of the average office building already includes panoptic vision, smell, sensitivity to temperature and humidity, motion detection, , and in some cases, hearing. Some architects now predict the day when the building's own AI security computer will be able to automatically screen and identify its human population.....

The science fiction imagery of a film like Blade Runner is now an accepted part of the structure of our cities, and not only those with the appearance of a Megalopolis. The average small city in America or Western Europe is ringed by a barely visible security net that effectively monitors the movement of its population and the through traffic of travellers.

The practice of surveillance is not, however, simply a preference of the State apparatus or of industrial security. The popularity of candid camera type television shows since the 1950's has shown that we are all more or less complicitous in this vicarious observation of 'other-as-victim'. The current rise in amateur video as television is simply an acceleration of the process. The camcorder becomes a weapon to be used on the one hand by new right vigilantes wishing to control and eradicate subversives and deviants, and on the other by street fighters striving to protect the liberties of individuals against an increasingly hostile state apparatus.

When the New York artist Paul Garrin, in a 1988 interview, exhorted his viewers to "use your camcorder wisely" he unwittingly lit the fuse to an explosive device in the hands of his enemies. While Garrin wanted artists and activists to fight the good fight on the streets of the city, for the benefit of society's underclasses, the palmcorders of Middle America were being pressed into service in a Holy War against the non white, non Christian, non heterosexual enemies of the New World Order. While new right libertarians argue that the use of camcorder surveillance by citizens represents a bulkhead against the excessive involvement of government in the affairs of communities, the reality is that most of the firepower of these citizen armies is directed against other members of the same communities, right down to the level of the nuclear family, where parents concerned about drug use routinely practise surveillance upon their own children.

This, then, is civil war by video, and one version of the media-(ted) landscape is a battle zone. Behind the peaceful appearance of the ideal suburban community lies a virtual Bosnia in which the besieged population is not that of the encircled city, but the others on the outside who have to be kept at bay by a cordon sanitaire of information systems.

But the practice of oppression through media is not the only characteristic of the media-(ted) landscape. It has also been seen as a visionary space, as the elsewhere of the poetic imagination, as a neutral space in which new kinds of human interaction can be tested.

During the eighties a number of video artists and film makers were engaged in trying to elucidate this new space and to understand its points of contact with the social realities of the external world and with the older technologies of representation. A landmark in cinema's attempts to comprehend (ultimately to appropriate) the electro-scape was Chris Marker's 1993 film Sans Soleil, which remains today one of the most cogent essays in late twentieth century image culture. In one particular sequence of the film, Marker describes the electronically altered landscapes of a Japanese video artist as being 'The Zone' borrowing a term from Tarkovsky's film "Stalker". Whereas at the time of the film's release, Marker's closing aside about the presence of "Emus in The Zone" sounded merely fanciful, with hindsight we can read this as a prescient observation of a situation to come. Perhaps Marker had realized that the Tokyo cityscape he was recording was already becoming a site at which exchanges would be made between the physical and the virtual world. Wim Wenders, whose Until the end of The World owes a heavy debt to Marker's film, has long been fascinated with the media-(ted) landscape and was perhaps one of the first film makers to effectively absorb the condition of television into the practise of cinema. However, Wenders will always draw back from the brink and can not admit to a post cinematic world in which what Marcos Novak terms "the loss of inscription" leads to a vaporization of the distinctions upon which cinema has been predicated. Wenders perhaps came closest to an understanding of the electronic image world in his short (made for tv) documentary on Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, "Notebook on Cities and Clothes". It is not so much that the problematics hinted at in so much of Wenders' work were resolved in this film, but rather that in the conjunction of the fashion image, the practice of fashion, the city of Tokyo as a concretization of the 21st. century urban scene and video as a solvent of cultural values, the problematics were seen as unresolvable, and thus, accepted.

Wenders' cinematic version of the American landcsape is echoed constantly in Baudrillard's book "America" which in turn has provided the impulse for numerous attempts to render this "Virtual America" on videotape, often by Europeans. Terje Dragseth, a Norwegian film maker based in Copenhagen, set out to find Baudrillard's America equipped with a Hi8 camcorder and a rented car. We are given to understand through most of the film, that the film maker is travelling through a text, a script of the American landscape. It is familiar, it is constructed from mediated memories, it is a world we have all visited through cinema and then through television. But occasionally the horizontality of this prefigured landscape is ruptured by the insertion of events that do not seem to belong to the Baudrillardian vision of Virtual America. Short interviews and cameo portraits of characters encountered by chance, these moments of Cinema Verite illustrate aptly the tug of the documentary tradition which insists that film (or photography or video) is still capable of an unmediated presentation of "objective truth". The contradiction that arises forces the question: are these interludes inserted simply as light relief, to alleviate the inherent boredom of the film's horizontality, or are they brilliantly extreme simulations whose existence further validates the propositions of Baudrillard's text ? At base, the film is of course, a self conscious Road Movie, a piece of knowing artifice, but it is rendered interesting by its all too human inconsistencies. The inconsistencies are perhaps unavoidable, inevitable consequences of the maker's European sensibilities, if according to Baudrillard:

This country is without hope. Even the garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and the cars so fluid, the hair so blond , and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of the insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here.

Then Dragseth's need to insert images of "Real Americans" into his film is simply the European's innate reaction, his recoil. Is the film maker culturally and historically trapped within a sensibility that Baudrillard describes as follows:

We fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavour and seduction, we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who are unfailingly attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence find it a mental shock and a unique release to discover the fascination of nonsense and of this vertiginous disconnection, as sovereign in the cities as the deserts. To discover that one can exult in the liquidation of all culture and rejoice in the consecration of in-difference.

This in-difference is perhaps, then, a given of the media-(ted) landscape. A flattening and remoulding whereby all input ultimately becomes part of the same continuity. Landscape as liquid television, and its inhabitants variously surfing, diving, swimming against the current or drowning by numbers.

In Britain, Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman pioneered the integration of cinema and the electronic image, albeit from radically different aesthetic and ideological standpoints. But two of their films represent a shift of the space of film from the naturalistic, cinematic space to the synthetic, electronic realm. Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" remains, to date, one of the most fully elaborated electronic landscapes in cinema - an entirely constructed, or perhaps more correctly, recombined, environment in which the action is also the result of the processes we associate with electronic image manipulation. Prospero's Books is one of the first films that owes more of its qualities to the computer graphics paint box than it does to the standard practices of cinema. In contrast to other more or less spectacular films that incorporate computer graphics, Prospero positively revels in its own artifice. Whereas "Jurassic Park" or "Terminator II" employ advanced computer graphics to create an illusion that roots itself in naturalistic representation Greenaway abandons the entire discourse of naturalism to concentrate upon the elaboration of another space.

The second example I would like to discuss is Derek Jarman's The Last of England - a very different film, but equally important to a consideration of the media-(ted) landscape. Like Greenaway's film, this is a recombinant work, but in contrast to the digital perfection as the condition to which Prospero aspires, The Last of England is a dirty mixture of media and materials, synthesized through the processes of video post production, then laser scanned back to film. The landscape of Jarman's film is the Media landscape, the media-(ted) landscape of Britain as a society in permanent post-industrial decline. Or as Arthur Kroker would put it, a society in recline - sinking into the virtual zone where memory is a televisual re-run of a lost history and the "real" world as a projection outward of dystopian cyberpunk visions. Both examples are perhaps flawed works when viewed relative to the history, theory and practice of film - but are arguably examples of something else that exists only partially within the framework of cinema. Jarman's film is a hybrid that belongs to the emerging order of recombinant media, and as the media converge within the hypermediated space of the digital world, it will be recognized that it is precisely this kind of hybrid that allows us to communicate in the languages that are suited to communication in the Image World.

Another deciding factor in the real-ization of the electronic space was the development of high quality video projection systems and their use by artists like Bill Viola and Gary Hill to create a new kind of video work in which the viewer almost enters the image. Such strategies had of course existed in video art since the earliest days, and Peter Campus in particular did important work in the seventies with closed circuit live projection. But It is with works such as Viola's The Stopping Mind and Gary Hill's Tall Ships that a certain threshold is reached, and having crossed this threshold, we have already begun to inhabit the media-(ted) landscape. Much has been said and written about Tall Ships, and I would simply refer to the work of other authors without going into a detailed summary of what has been said. For me personally, the experience of Tall Ships was a profoundly physical one, the quality of which changed over successive viewings in different locations. Objectively I know that when I enter the installation I am in fact going into a narrow unlit corridor of wooden panels within which dim, low resolution, grey images of human figures are projected onto the walls. I know that these images are video recordings, I know that a computer controls the playback of video from laser disks, and I know that a simple switching device "tells" the system that when my body is in a certain position, an event will occur. The image of a person will approach me. This is not interactivity, it is responsiveness of a low cybernetic order, but it is enough. The human imagination will fill in the gaps more than adequately, to complete the experience, and this quality, perhaps, is what differentiates the work as a piece of Art from another form of synthetic reality which attempts to construct a complex interactivity between human and technology through hyper-realistic simulation and sensory bombardment. Like the difference between eroticism and obscenity, the subtlety of the experience is its quality. In Tall Ships we are given time and space in which to shape our own experience of this synthetic world, and because the time and space is experienced as open and extendable, the action of memory and perception determines the quality of interaction. An interaction then that is not a machine function, but a meeting of the perceptions of the viewer with the presence of the artist in his work. Not so very different, in fact, from the willing suspension of disbelief that is a requirement of representational theatre, but more evocative than theater because the exchange happens beyond, in advance of, or in the absence of language. In a sense, the wordless meeting that occurs in Tall Ships is a perfect exchange in which I the viewer neither make demands upon nor become subjected to the demands of the other, but instead experience a kind of mutual acceptance of the state that exists and separates us. The installation is an interface between two worlds and it supports an illusion of communication between these worlds, an illusion that sits so strongly in the memory that when I return to Tall Ships after an interval of many months, I have the familiar feeling of a return, of a welcome, of meeting again. I realize that my response to the phantoms in the corridor is almost as if they were real, and far from breaking the illusion, this realization simply adds to the richness of the experience. I become an active participant in the work. I recreate it for myself, each time I see it. This openness represents a generosity and a trust on the part of the artist that exists in stark contrast to the many deterministic, goal oriented interactions being developed under the rubric of interactive art. Treating the viewer like a rat in a maze is not the hallmark of an enduring work of art, and presenting the viewer with a mind boggling array of choices is not a real form of interaction. Tall Ships manages to simultaneously preserve the integrity of the artist's intentions, and his separateness from the audience, and to collapse the power relation between producer and consumer.

Bill Viola's installation The Stopping Mind , on permanent show at Frankfurt's Museum of Contemporary Art is a fully articulated electronic space that belongs to a late stage of the Archeology of Virtuality. The step from this installation to a fully immersive virtual world is but a small one - though still a step that is technologically too great to be taken. The installation is extremely simple. In a square room, four large projection screens form a room within the room. Sound is also projected into the space such that the viewer, when standing at the center of the installation, has the impression that the sound is situated precisely in the center of his brain. The images are large enough that it is possible to feel fully surrounded by them and their evolution is such that one experiences the work as an exploratory, gradual unfolding of a world that, while close in appearance to our own, is nevertheless another place, possessed of its own laws of nature and elaborating its own sense of time. Like Tall Ships, I experience this as a work of remarkable generosity within which my participation is invited and rewarded richly. Although the installation is not interactive or viewer responsive at the functional level, it us, again like Tall Ships, what I would term a space/time machine. It effectively creates a space and time through the active engagement of the viewer whose role is not passive consumer or laboratory rat, but whose presence is the key to the realization of the work. The work does not inform or describe, but it communicates by creating a space and a time and a language whose grammar is jointly elaborated by the viewer and the object of viewing. In a recent interview Esther Dyson spoke of the vacuum of attention in relation to cyberspace:

The popular notion about Cyberspace is that it is infinite and unbounded. But it, too, is limited by the amount of human attention available in it. Does a place in Cyberspace exist if no-one visits it ?

The question is rhetorical, but actual, and is answered by a work such as The Stopping Mind, whose existence is at best latent until the moment when the presence of a human observer completes it. We can of course speculate about a future machine art that speaks not to us but from machine to machine. but then it is a problem for the machines themselves to decide upon what they consider to be art.

Viola is often considered to be an artist whose work exists primarily in the realm of metaphysics, but it is often the very viscerality of his vision that is striking. Perhaps we approach the metaphysical through the body, and the body in much of Viola is, to borrow Arthur Kroker's term an event scene in which technology invades and re configures the body. Anthem (1983) remains a work of enduring power and importance within which are laid out all of the elements of Viola's future work. It is also a coherent vision of the media-(ted) landscape: not a synthetic world of technological transformations but a precise mapping of the contemporary landscape in which both nature and the city are elements that are absorbed by and re configured within the televisual. This is the virtual scanscape - nothing escapes the scrutiny of the camera or the scanning device, we have the whole field covered, and barring the Uncertainty Principle, which still allows for a degree of elusiveness as the nano level, we can say with some precision just where everything is. The media-(ted) landscape is a universe in which, to use Foucault's phrase, the Order of Things has been established, and in Anthem, the continuity of the natural order into the synthetic order is an unbroken slide. Anthem is also a work possessed of a rigorous formal structure and a clarity that communicates, as in most of Viola's work, beyond the apparent use of language.

Viola's works are often mythic and epic in scale, and some clue to why this is so can perhaps be traced in the American landscape, whose scale and potential for emptiness remain difficult for Europeans to comprehend. The expansive scale of both the physical landscape and its electronic counterpart find expression in Woody Vasulka's monumental video work The Art of Memory (1987) within which the traumas of the history of the twentieth century are replayed in a kind of cinema-as-landscape that is both an outward projection and an inward investigation of our collective cultural consciousness. Vasulka was one of the first artists to seriously engage with the possibilities of digital imaging. His earlier works, though formal and abstract, were already a form of electronic landscape, or indeed electronic architecture within a synthetic landscape. Many of the earlier works had a tendency to be extremely dry and somewhat flat in their formal construction which seemed to priviledge the technological process at the expense of graspable content. No such criticism could be made of Art of Memory which is both a technological tour de force and a searing commentary upon our collective failure to learn from our own history. In a liquid, post nuclear landscape, the cinema of our recent history projects a newsreel of unfathomable folly onto the contemporary consciousness. Let us not forget that cruise missiles fly in virtual reality, let us not banish history from the information landscape.

The media-(ted) landscape is not a single landscape, a single construction. It is a network of networks, but the one form - if we can speak in such terms - that is ubiquitous in this immaterial geography is television. Engaging directly with the imagery of television, its conventions and modes of presentation, its flow and its all encompassing glow, has been a primary motivation for many media artists. John Sanborn is famously quoted as saying We are interested in television - in talking about it, in making it and being on it Sanborn's works of the eighties and early nineties were a love affair with the rapidly evolving technologies of image production and manipulation. Usually taking their starting point in some form of performance, often dance, the tapes that Sanborn made together with Mary Perillo and other co-producer/directors were explorations of a pictorial digital space. This space was often a hyper-realized version of New York City where most of the works were produced, but realism or naturalism was never an issue here. Image manipulation taken to extreme - to ecstatic heights - created an entirely artificial space that was often an attempt to simulate or synthesize the spatial depictions of painters or the imaginary landscapes of fiction. In several works of the late eighties, such as Visual Shuffle, the images of dancers' bodies became objects in a simulated space, interacting with computer generated artifacts whose movements were also choreographed in relation to the human dancers. These encounters between human images and computer generated entities were advance echoes of the 3d virtual worlds that would become widespread only a few years later, though it is important to remember that these constructed encounters were entirely fabricated through post production. In a sense they could be described as a virtual stage of the virtual, referring once again to Erkki Huhtamo's proposition of an Archeology of Virtuality .

From Nam June Paik onwards, artists have borrowed, appropriated, stolen images from television and reworked then to create new meanings, new fusions, new stories, new hybrid forms. The genre that came to be known as Scratch Video, although traceable in some ways to the experimental film practices of an artist like Bruce Connor, arrived as the perfect vehicle for a new generation of video artists in the eighties. Post punk popular cultural attitudes and an awareness of how electronic media function combined to create a video art with street credibility and popular appeal. The accusation that Video Art is boring by definition, was swiftly demolished. Dara Birnbaum's analytical deconstruction of prime time American tv in her Pop Pop Video series represents a kind of starting point. Although not strictly part of the scratch genre, these short works collaged from fragments of Wonder Woman, Kojak, General Hospital and commercials for Wang Computers, and cut to loud music, functioned as a kind of template which other, younger artists freely based their works upon. Throughout the second half of the eighties, Scratch became an international style as much in mainstream tv as in artists' video and it remains today a fundamental stylistic tool. It is not my intention to go into a full analysis of Scratch Video here, but I would make reference to my earlier text One Nation under A Will of Iron which deals extensively with Scratch and its various offshoots within a specifically British context.

Scratch grew up alongside sampler music and it is no accident that the two genres grew closer and closer together. Today, a guerrilla media/performance art group like Emergency Broadcast Network in New York can commercially release a CD that is a hybrid of music CD, music video and interactive CD Rom. Scratch introduced strategies and concepts into video art practise that have been taken to extreme heights in recent productions like Stefan Decostere's Deja Vu , co-produced by Belgian and French television. Deja Vu is the media-(ted) landscape in extremis. Everything has always already happened, been recorded, edited and re-transmitted. Television is the world and the world is television. Reality has been vapourised in the electron beam that scans the world onto the screen of our consciousness. This is, in the terms of Arthur Kroker, a vision of the world that exists after television has gone liquid and entered our bodies, never to leave again. The Virtual Scanscape as the only landscape, in which a total interpenetration of MTV and CNN under the sign of Coca Cola creates a culture of infotainment whose participants are entirely absorbed and self absorbed, waiting for the moment when they can finally and permanently disappear into the screen. Science fiction ? Popular tv series like VR5, a sanitized version of William Gibson's cyberspace, effectively market the idea that we can all get ready to go virtual. Game shows and soap operas have already taught us to live inside television. The internet lets us dive deeper into the ocean of electronic data - and dive we do, even though the preferred metaphor is surfing. The clear message is that the media-(ted) landscape is a geography that invites our intervention. Technology will promise us the tools with which to shape our own worlds. Technology is turning the world inside out.

The short video works of Ivar Smedstad aptly illustrate some problems with regard to the media-(ted) landscape. Using digital video techniques such as morphing, Smedstad creates liquified landscapes that are in a constant state of transformation. The world quite literally turns inside out and upside down. Architectures become organic forms and humanoid creatures transform into industrial machineries. These works function in close parallel to Woody Vasulka's Art of Memory, illustrating both the transformative power of technology to realize our desires, and the real danger that we allow our technologies to eradicate that natural "other" that exists outside of us and upon which we depend for our existence as organic life forms.

To conclude this discussion of the media-(ted) landscape, I will make reference to the video works of French artist Robert Cahen, active in Video Art since the seventies, and a pioneer in Europe. The works of Cahen aptly demonstrate the divergence of emphases between American artists who have often focussed their attention upon television as the primary site of exchange between image and identity, or as the normalizing force of a society increasingly shaped by information, and a European aesthetic that references several centuries of cultural history. In common with Vasulka, Cahen creates electronic landscapes that are the site of memory's visualization, but whereas Vasulka, in The Art of Memory, elaborates a morphological landscape of neurosis, Cahen's space is intimate, almost private, suffused by personal memory and the desire of the poetic image. Certain of Cahen's works bear relation to certain works of Viola - there exist clear parallels between Viola's Chott el-Djerid and Cahen's Voyage d'hiver - but whereas Viola's quintessentially American fusion of diverse cultural references and metaphysical understandings situate his works within a New World, and perhaps specifically Pacific context - notwithstanding his reading of European cultural history - Cahen's renditions of space are those of the European who sets out to discover the world as many Europeans have done before him. Again, like Viola, Cahen's project is not anthropological, nor is it a mere quest for novelty and strangeness, though the quest for novelty is an understandable motivation from the perspective of a culture that has overproduced itself to the point at which it believes there is nothing left to say, do or discover. Cahen travels the world in search of images that allow him to renew a vision of the world we already know, to visualize the world of the imaginary, a place to which art has often transported us. The interior landscape of Cahen's world is one in which time is also visualized, where the processes of change and the movement of bodies through space leave palpable traces. The time of Cahen's vision is a quantal time inscribed in quantised space, and like the works of Bill Viola and Gary Hill discussed earlier, many of Cahen's works function like time machines. Not in the sense that they transport us from now to some-when else, but in that they function precisely as machines for making time and space. We enter the space of the image and the time we experience possesses its own logic, determined by the interaction of our own organic time, the time of the body, with the time of the internal evolution of the image. This is a time that is fundamentally different from cinematic time that is constructed through dramatic tension, through release and closure. It is a time that is in a sense un-eventful, horizontal and notionally circular or cyclical. Which in a sense, could describe the space-time of Cyberspace envisioned as a virgin territory, a clean sheet upon whose surface yet-to-be-written histories (memories) will be inscribed.

The media-(ted) landscape, therefore, is a territory which, analogous to the physical world we inhabit, has its metropoli and its quiet places, its teeming jungles and its deserts. But unlike the physical world, it may be responsive to the impulses of the individual imagination. It may be a landscape that we create by dreaming out loud .

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