{"id":5584,"title":"Memory and Hope (1996-2006)","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/memory-and-hope-1996-2006","version":"bba1394e7019666a07dce15b0a32cc567886861c1523fa55d2bdf50554ff4c37","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4399335+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Thomas Sherman"}],"authorKeys":["Sherman, Tom"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"The Squealer","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Squeaky Wheel","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Winter 1996/Spring 1997","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Buffalo, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"11","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"2","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0815","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Memory and Hope (1996-2006).\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/memory-and-hope-1996-2006.","publication":"Thomas Sherman. Memory and Hope (1996-2006). The Squealer. vol. 11, no. 2. Squeaky Wheel. Winter 1996/Spring 1997.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5584.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0815","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":23342},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":782}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"[This is a text adaptation of a presentation given under the title, \u0022Emerging Technologies: Options For The Near Future,\u0022 at the New York State Media Festival, held at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, April 1996.] Sherman: We inhabit an increasingly complicated technological world. We are willing participants in the creation of a second nature. While the biological world is collapsing, we are busy constructing an elaborate media environment. As a means of describing and coping with this second nature, it is useful to apply biological language to our post-biological cultures. This cross disciplinary language is everywhere these days. For example, I\u0027m involved in a think-tank initiated by Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria-our work is culminating in a symposium called \u0022Memesis: the Future of Evolution.\u0022 The way we\u0027re using the metaphor of memesis should be pretty well fleshed out on-line by the time you read this text. MEMESIS The main idea of Memesis is that the future of evolution will be cultural. Memes, instead of genes, are and will continue to be the basic building blocks of our evolution. Memes are ideas or concepts (patterns of cognitive behavior), or simply the way things look or sound or feel. The concept of the meme was launched by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. In his book \u0022The Selfish Gene,\u0022 1976, Oxford University Press, he suggests that living organisms are nothing more than survival machines, subservient to their genes. Genes will or will not survive depending on the bodies they construct. The genes are in the driver\u0027s seat. We exist to permit them to replicate. They build our bodies, the vehicles for their mobility and reproduction. These bodies are phenotypes, the physical presence of the gene as it interacts with the environment. And these bodies create extended phenotypes: in other species extended phenotypes are things like birds\u0027 nests, beavers\u0027 dams; or in the case of humans, extended phenotypes include architecture, art, transportation and communication technology... Extended phenotypes are part of the story of natural selection. Language springs forth from our bodies as protomemetic soundings. Memes are cultural building blocks, the message forms and contents at the very base of our cultures. Video and film and digital media genres are memes and they too can be said to share the ultimate goal of replication and survival. We build organizations and networks around these memes to facilitate their propagation and replication. Media production coops, exhibition sites or distribution systems can be seen as survival mechanisms for the memes themselves. The memes drive the phenotypes through languages (protomemes) into extended phenotypes, the cultural infrastructure of the organizations and the networks. Memes are also the basic units of cultural inheritance. They are our thoughts, ideas, images and sounds, carried by our appearances and voices. Emerging from our meme pools, dominant memes are driving our phenotypes into a state of hyper-phenotopia. Our extended phenotypes are becoming more and more extensive and interwoven. The continuous evolution of our extended phenotypical environment becomes particularly apparent in emerging technologies. Emerging technologies are the new \u0027species\u0027 of extended phenotypes. The development of the phenotypical environment can be seen as a survival strategy for the dominant memes of our times. Obsolete technologies falter and fall away as emerging technologies move in and spread. Memes are altered as they are forced to compete with other memes in the cultural environment. They adapt, or they disappear. The protomemetic energy of language stirs the meme pools. Memory is the essence of who we are: the present and past combined. Memory is order and certainty. It is controllable through revision. Hope is the future, the unknown, the dream and/or the nightmare. We hope to envision what the future will bring. Our extended phenotypes are right in front of us. Emerging technologies point the way to the future. Why are we so motivated to find out what tomorrow will bring? Most technology futures are in the stock markets. People play the future hoping to make money. If money\u0027s not your game, you may simply want to make sure you\u0027re not outflanked, exploited and destroyed. Or more optimistically, you may wish to seek ways to fulfill your memetic potential as a person/machine entity. Machines R Us. People look to the future so they may seize opportunities as they arise. PREDICTING THE FUTURE There are a number of ways of predicting the future. None of them are foolproof. One good rule of thumb is to look back 30 years for every 10 you try to look ahead. Time is a continuum. If we drop back to 1966 and trace a somewhat wiggly line to the present, then we should be able to extend that line 10 years into the future, right around the corner, to the year 2006. In 1966 we were living with minimal cable TV and wobbly satellites. Computers were strictly for calculating, but there were already lots of cartoons about thinking machines. By 1969 the U.S. Defense Department had set up its own computer net, ARPA Net. Sony introduced Betamax video in 1972 and VHS emerged shortly after. In 1980 Turner fired up CNN, the first 24-hour news net. In the early 1980\u0027s IBM introduced its first personal computer (1981) and the U.S. government created NSFnet (National Science Foundation Net, 1983), the germ of the Internet. In 1989 the World Wide Web was created in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1993 Bell Core transmitted full-motion video over standard twisted pair telephone wires. Artists during this stretch were busy, desperately engineering their own kind of memes or at least they were trying to serve, conserve and preserve the interests and integrity of waves of naturally emerging alternative memes. After a decade of abstract expressionism by alcoholic men, around 1963 advertising spilled over into fine art with Pop Art and then there was one last gasp of modernism, an attempt to separate art from the world at large again: minimalism and conceptual art. ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL By 1969-72 video art was finding life-support on a growing equipment base and it rose quickly with the energy of the sixties and the desire for peace, along with environmental and feminist concerns. By the mid-70\u0027s women made up half of the video and performance artists in the Western World. Then in the 1980\u0027s art became all tangled up in entertainment and things were so fucked up for a while that painting as a real estate business actually made a comeback. First artists were critical of entertainment, wanting only to inhabit its seductive forms to attract and subvert an audience. But unfortunately many artists became indistinguishable from entertainers. This was supposed to be a strategy for survival, but it has left most artists beached and endangered in the 1990\u0027s. In the Information Era, information is a commodity and art is linked with entertainment. In the emerging information economy, art has been pigeonholed as nothing more than difficult entertainment. Dropping back to consider our recent history in more detail, let me say that I\u0027ve been tracking the relationships of artists and art to emerging technologies since the early 1970\u0027s. As an artist I hitched a ride on the emergence of video but couldn\u0027t help but notice the digital rhetoric rising to the surface between 1972-74. I remember how all the shortcomings of analog video were addressed by a then inevitable but still inconceivable digital future. There was a lot of speculation about analog-to-digital conversion, mostly to improve editing and dubbing, and therefore the reproduction or perhaps more correctly the replication of our messages. The socio-political drive during the 70\u0027s was to gain access to the means of production, distribution and exhibition: access to equipment, distribution systems and exhibition sites (i.e. audiences). Our memes, which carried different values than the predominant memes of mass or popular culture, could not survive without a contemporary media environment of extended phenotypes. Meanwhile, our societies\u0027 predominant array of extended phenotypes were transforming from analog to digital. REAL-TIME DIGITAL By the end of the seventies a minority of artists had made the compromises necessary to gain access to digital technologies. They had either become researchers or mascots (creative types, the fashionably hip) for governments or corporations. They had gained access to the digital technologies that only governments and corporations could provide. In 1979 I was working on a contract with TV Ontario in Toronto, conducting research for a television series called \u0022Fast Forward.\u0022 \u0022Fast Forward\u0022 dealt with how the emergence of digital technologies would affect various sectors of society. My contract was for the development of the episode on the arts. After talking to literally hundreds of people on the phone and examining the video they sent us, the program ended up featuring Steina and Woody Vasulka, Kit Galloway and Sheri Rabinowitz, Richard Lowenberg, and Laurie Anderson, among many others. The buzzwords of the day were real-time digital. The visual artists envied the musicians and composers because digital audio, with its relatively modest bandwidth, could already be made and shared in real-time. The hope was for real-time digital multimedia including a live visual, moving image component. Throughout the eighties I was privileged to watch things develop as an official in The Canada Council, Canada\u0027s national arts funding agency. We launched the Computer-Integrated Media grant program in 1983, anticipating the importance of the digital arts. In 1986 I was also involved in curating digital works for a major exhibition, \u0022Art, Technology and Informatics,\u0022 at the Venice Biennale. This show featured an international network of communications artists, artists who had worked collaboratively in global networking as an end in itself for years. Real-time digital had arrived, somewhat lamely in the form of low-resolution slow-scan video, decent audio (over standard phonelines) and shared-screen text and drawing experiments. The whole Venice exhibition was organized and held together by an e-mail network based on a commercial business network called the I.P.Sharp Associates system that had been used quite extensively, prior to widespread use of the Internet, by telecom artists since the early 80\u0027s. To get a perspective on how much as happened since this Venice show in 1986, fax machines were still relatively rare during this period. Artists were still going to a lot of trouble organizing collaborative city-to-city fax exchange shows using donated, then still expensive, fax machines. This same year the prices of fax machines plunged and there was an astonishingly rapid assimilation of telefacsimile technology throughout the telephonic world. By the end of the 1980\u0027s there had been major advances in personal computing and networking and remote sensing, optical memory, robotics, smart systems and artificial intelligence. There was an explosion in the complexity and power of our extended phenotypes. Primitive forms of artificial life were beginning to emerge (the first digital technologies in the form of life-forms). While this was a period of exotic technological change, artists and arts organizations were becoming very interested in rather ordinary things, like computer databases. While building databases appeared pedestrian and hopeless, this was smarter work than it seemed at the time. Only those who would get their data organized would be prepared for the browsing public. To restate the obvious: art will become difficult entertainment in the Information Era. Another type of artists were obsessed with inventing new technology to suit their needs. These were the hands-on inventor types. Digital tool-making was and still is a popular preoccupation with several artists. Process ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":23342,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}