Choosing "Technophobia" as the title for a CD-ROM featuring interactive multimedia works at first appears to be paradoxical--counting on our attraction to new technologies and at the same time highlighting our anxieties about them. But this ambivalence towards new technologies perfectly captures the underlying theme of this CD-ROM published by Dooley Le Cappellaine. In case you aren't already suffering from technology-inflicted phobias, the works by the 12 artists featured here might induce them (but perhaps the title creates this interpretive bias). On the other hand, those works may also turn out to be a cure for existing phobias. The multimedia pieces presented here play with our fears regarding technology, computers in particular, and thus raise questions about the very medium the artists are using.
In this context, Judith Ahern's minimalistic and simple Una-Bomber is right to the point, establishing a connection between the Unabomber Manifesto and computer technology. Excerpts of the manifesto--"the bad parts of technology cannot be separated from the good parts"--are superimposed on a cityscape which turns into a view of a mountainscape. The contrast between nature and urban civilization, both of them represented within the computer medium, underscores that there is no moral value intrinsic to technology.
Alan Koninger's Megalopolis examines the technological landscape on a more literal level by focusing on the effect that space--in this case the three-dimensional space represented on your computer screen--has on the human condition. The viewer is invited to navigate through an underground maze located in contemporary urban culture and to explore the various rooms and interconnected chambers. The gray-scale spaces of "Megalopolis" have the beauty of architectural drawings, but at the same time are cold and omnipresent and thus may easily induce feelings of claustrophobia. Bill Albertini's Viewer may have a similarly claustrophobic effect. The interface of "Viewer" consists of an image of a desk with a computer, a TV monitor tuned into a dead channel, and a mysterious white cube--once you click on the cube's surface, the little monitor appears on top of it and is then transformed into morphing shapes. Clicking on the image of either the computer screen or the monitor will present differing perspectives on what you're seeing on your computer screen. The viewer may easily get the feeling of being trapped in the small world on the screen that can do nothing but reflect on itself.
The most elaborate among the works presented on the CD-ROM is Troy Innocent's Techno Garden, featuring prototypes for virtual worlds. Innocent's garden is a platform-like landscape where everything you expect to find in a garden is reduced to its simplest symbolic form. Viewers may navigate through the garden's virtual geography from which trees or mysterious "organisms"--including a little creature reminiscent of a Jack-in-the-box--will spring and bloom, or explore the sky above the landscape, or dive into the waters beneath it. "Techno Garden" examines the possibilities of mutation and relation and manages to create the illusion of an organic virtual world. Yet, the aesthetic roots of this world in a toyland may also have the eery effect of a theme park in a world beyond fear or hope.
"Technophobia" doesn't only highlight some of the fears people might have about technology. Joe Ferrari's Requiem and Dare not speak its name, in particular, seem to suggest that the computer medium may be used as an answer to our fears and may offer new possibilities of expressing conflicting emotions. The basic structure of both of Ferrari's works is a square consisting of various clickable image fields that either change color, morph into a different form, or give view to an underlying image. "Dare not speak its name" focuses on subconscious fears and anxieties--at some point, the words "we dream lots of silly things don't ask tell" appear on the screen. The way Ferrari plays with visual and sound fragments to capture or expose conflicting emotions proves to be a very effective means of using multimedia to visualize anxieties. Ferrari's pieces remind us that fear is part of the human existence, that the rhetoric of fear has existed for a long time, and that we tend to apply it to new objects/technologies.
"Technophobia" manages to provide various angles on its subject, and at times the visual beauty of a work collides with fears surrounding technology. At best, the works featured on this CD-ROM demythologize our technophobia by making it concrete.
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