Among the growing body of books about the cultural consequences of electronic technology, Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture ranks among the most readable and challenging. Kudos to artist and editor Lynn Hershman Leeson for the volume's intense aesthetic awareness.The best such an anthology can offer? New perspectives. Latino artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña gets me thinking about computer hardware as altar pieces, ritualistic objects imbued with spiritual magnetism. Art critic Söke Dinkla links today's high tech interactive art to early experiments with border-dissolving audience participation in dadaism and surrealism. And cyberspace researcher Sandy Stone offers the hilarious fantasy of creating a phone-sex robot to make a serious point about the complexity of translating lessons learned in virtual communities to the face-to-face everyday world. There's a great deal of speculative imagining among the various authors, questions raised without a hint of solution. That contributes to the book's freshness.Ironically, the CD-ROM packaged with the book contradicts this sense of open-ended intellectual adventure. It supposedly serves as a "hot link to digital culture," supplementing the text with video clips of several of the book's authors. Writers' videos, in contrast to their writings, depict them as pompous and dogmatic. R. U. Sirius, for example, suffers glibness on the page ("Dying should soon be obsolete for anyone who wants to go on ..."), which becomes more odious when linked to a face drowning in terminal self-importance. Forget the disc. The book alone offers an abundance of revelatory connections to a digital world enhanced by artistic and feminist perspectives.
- Norman Weinstein
Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, edited by Lynn Hershman Leeson: US$24.95 (includes Macintosh- and PC-compatible CD-ROM). Bay Press: +1 (206) 284 5913.
STREET CRED
Atari DazeDawkinian Evolution
Culture Warps
