The Australian Post-convergent Imperative

25 February 2010
The Australian Post-convergent Imperative

Contemporary Australians are the best suited of all "western" or "developed" societies to intuitively understand and manipulate the virtual environment. This is not a patriotic or nationalistic jingoism, rather a realisation of two key fundaments of contemporary Australia that happen to also be two key fundaments of virtual networks.

First is the idea of culture at a distance, or "telematic culture" - Australia has always cast itself in relation to very distant cultures.
Second is the idea of nodes rather than centres. Within Australia's telematic culture, we have always encountered the "monumental cultural truths" of several northern hemisphere societies (England, America, Europe, Asia), all of which tend to have a single continuous historical truth that is mutually exclusive with other cultures, and thus prevents them from intrinsically understanding the potential of a virtual decentralised network.

Australians, on the other hand, have always encountered all of these cultures as equally influential and have mixed and matched to suit our dynamically shifting needs. This is exactly the nature of virtual networks, and so it makes sense that contemporary Australians are culturally intrinsically suited to creating work in virtual environments.

Witness the last Ars Electronica Prix Ars, where 3 of the prizes were given to Australians - a proportion that far outstrips the comparative size of our population.

On “post-convergent” art
Adam Nash coined the term "post-convergent" to describe a media space containing ALL previous media as a subset. Post-convergent, or Virtual art does not signal the "end" of anything, rather it is an innovation within which all prior knowledge still holds, but with an added X factor (or perhaps it's an iFactor) that is possible only within virtual environments, at the same time as being informed by all previous media.

Conventional contemporary art seems incapable of understanding the decentralised, shifting nature of virtual environments, or identifying within them. The art world struggles to commodotise it, much as the music industry finds itself in crisis over the same issue.

ACVA will be teasing apart many of these topics over the next few months via an online journal. If you’d like to comment or submit we welcome your ideas.

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From Ricardo Peach, Program Officer, Australia Council

This is an excerpt from a paper I wrote that is in review for publication in the Metaverse Creativity journal in 2011:

Although I question Nash’s notion of Australia’s ‘equal’ engagement with ‘the monumental cultural truths’ of the north, and more specifically his lack of reference on how we engage with diverse cultures within our nation, (especially given colonisation and the racialised origin of Australian Federation since 1901), he does have a point that post-colonial cultures such as Australia are continually evolving their hybrid identities.

Unfortunately cultural transference and transmission between groups in the process of hybridity is rarely equal. In Australia’s case Indigenous and other internal cultures have often been mined for cultural product and traditional custodians disempowered and dispossessed.  There are dilemmas with hybridity when groups do not come from level playing fields.

However, thanks to the strong and critical arts ecology that currently supports this type of exchange in Australia, contemporary Australian artists have to a certain extent developed tools for cultural exchange that assists them in engaging with relevant cultural protocols. These protocols create a more level playing, I think, for those affected by the process of hybridity.

As Nicos Papastergiadis in Turbulence of Migration (1999) suggests, however, hybridity is never a clean exchange of ideas, instead it is ‘the process by which the discourse of colonial authority attempts to translate the identity of the Other within a singular category, but then fails and produces something else.’

Although I do not have the scope to discuss this in detail, Papasteregiadis suggests that to understand some of the cultural transfers that occur in colonial and post-colonial cultures, you have to understand the process of exchange. He unpacks the five stages of cultural exchange by using the theories of Yuri Lotman, one of the first thinkers to extend complex theories of hybridity into the semiotics of culture.

The five stages are:
1. the foreign text’s arrival, with the foreign text initially seen as superior;
2. a transformation which then occurs at both ends, where the foreign text and the receiving culture begin to restructure each other;
3. a reception which consequently leads to a form of transcendence, where the foreign text is deprecated;
4. the receiver, once assimilation and internalisation of the imported text occurs, becoming the producer of a new, original text; and lastly
5. the receiver becoming a transmitter.
Within this complex arena new, hybrid spaces are created.

Papastergiadis,  Nicos (1999), The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity: Polity Press, Cambridge, p183
Peach, Ricardo (2011), ‘Proticipation: The Australia Council and Social Media Arts in Virtual Worlds’, full publication in review for Metaverse Creativity, Intellect, Volume 1, Issue 2

Ricardo Peach - March 04, 2011 at 17:16

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