Creative Interlocutors
a manifesto
by Charles Traub, May 1999

Art today, redefined by its relationship to technological innovation, changes to both its meaning and its many functions in the all-pervasive communications culture. Creative inspiration derives from many sources; we can no longer speak about imagery singly as art or design or communication. It is no longer a question of film versus video or painting versus photography. We can only conceive of the postmodern image as a child of multimedia that reflects the spirit of our time, without hierarchies and authoritative voices.

The vision marks a new generation of artists sensitive to a multitude of possibilities for exploration in a media-conscious society. The best of them, inventive and politically and socially aware, will serve as creative interlocutors of our culture. The following are some maxims one might think about when engaging with the imagery and art of the computer age.
  1. We want to believe that art is only output that it consists of replaceable artifacts of the great evolution of image in the body of thought. But art is in essence process.

  2. The digital world tells us unequivocally that not only is there on one-to-one correspondence between the image and the scene, but there is no original.

  3. Originality resides with the receiver.

  4. Creativity rests in exploring the potential and the consequences of this new geography of the imagination.

  5. Imagery is the ectoplasm of our existence.

  6. Cybernetics is the biosphere of the elastic mind.

  7. The field of creativity resembles the collective metabolism of all human bodies.

  8. We are now in an age of enlightenment, enabled image-handling.

  9. By our intervention in the image, we are made aware of the plasticity of our universe.

  10. We cannot accept the imagery only records. We must comprehend that the virtual world is valid circumstance.

  11. Scrutiny will bear witness to new truths. Fiction is its counterpart

  12. All we can really know of truth is our own reality.

Charles Traub and Jonathan Lipkin
are the authors of
In the Realm of the Circuit
Computers, Art, and Culture
ISBN: 0-13-093674-X
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Copyright: 2004
Format: Cloth; 512 pp

From IntheRealmoftheCircuit.com