##(text-style: "emboss")[Paul Sermon's //Telematic Dreaming//]
Paul Sermon, born in 1966, attended The Newport School of Fine Art. He went on to combine telecommunication networks and computer systems within his art practice- telematic art. Sermon's art evolved as he learned more about telematics and new ways to integrate technology into his work. He was especially interested in a theme of (text-style: "underline")[technological displacement], a term he coined to describe the linking of two places/people through the use of telematics.
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His piece //Telematic Dreaming// (1992) was an expansion of a work made two years prior titled //Telematic Vision//, both operating as a link between two installations. In //Telematic Dreaming// two site specific installations containing a bed and a system of projections onto said bed, connect the viewers in the two distinct locations. A projection of Site #1 is displayed onto the bed of Site #2 so as to essentially combine the viewers in the two location's experiences. The viewer could see the other in real time and vice versa. Although the only sense being used explicitly was sight-the viewers see each other in the projections- Sermon created an intimacy and a suggestion of physical touch between the two subjects. The piece garnered praise for the immersive nature and tactile sensibility of the projection.
In the 1990s, new immersive technology was being introduced to the public more than they could probably keep up with. The amount of speculation being pointed towards the extent to which technology could reach was not only being had by cybernetic scientists, but artists as well. "In essence, virtual enviornments are an extension of this metaphor into a third dimension, connection between body and machine one step further," ([[Grau->Sources]]). While in some, this instilled a fear of impending technological takeover, many also embraced the new possibilities and explored their own relationships with tech through their artwork. Foundational theories surrounding the intersect of telecommunications and the art world, including Roy Ascott's "Telematic Embrace" explored the proposed consciousness through a network of technologies.
"The individual user of networks is always potentially involved in a global net, and the world is always potentially in a state of interaction with the individual," ([[Ascott->Sources]]).
[[Various Telematic Works of the Late 20th Century]]
[[Inspired Works of the 21st Century]]
[[Telematic Art and New Media]]
[[Sources]]
[[Hole in Space (1980)]]
[[The Telematic House (1983)]]
[[Interactive Hallucination (1988)]]Telematics encompasses many technologies being improved upon in the late 20th century such as telecommunications, electrical engineering and computer sciences. In the 1980s there was what was later defined as a 'telematic culture', a society that was reliant on computer mediated interaction that would be influenced by new and engaging technologies. "Art practices that engaged with technologies such as telematics, cybernetics, and robotics among others emerged either in reaction against or in response to the increasing importance and ubiquity of information and communications technologies, such as telephony, television, computing, networking and so on," ([[Gere->Sources]]). Telematic art challenges viewer and artwork relationships and creates a more immersive and interactive experience, building upon new technologies being introduced to the public. "These phenomena are exerting enormous influence upon society and on individual behaviour; they seem increasingly to be calling into question the very nature of what it is to be human, to be creative, to think and to perceive, and indeed our relationship to each other and to the planet as a whole,"([[Ascott->Sources]]). Telematics and in turn telematic art changes the perception of a viewer while intigrating new and exciting ways to view art/nature/the world.
Telematic art is a subcategory of a larger, more ambiguous subset of art-'new media'. Not as easily defined, new media art generally consists of integrated technologies whether that be internet art, interactive or virtual reality, biotechnology, etcetera. A specific characteristic of new media art is a sense of interaction or viewer participation of some form- which is an overlap of other art forms such as performance ([[Periera->Sources]]). New media is vague and overlaps many other existing art forms for a reason however; technology and media is continually changing and expanding.The technology being used in new media art only a decade ago differs greatly from what is being made now. As we approach a new decade-surely to be full of new technologies that artists will play with, an all-encompassing term such as 'new media' will still be applicable in the years to come.
"With the television image our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen; the subject itself becomes a computer at the wheel" ([[Baudrillard->Sources]])Over the course of three evenings in November of 1980 pedestrians in New York City and Los Angeles unsuspectingly stumbled upon life-size televisions projecting videos themselves across the country to one another. From a series of site-specific installations and videos by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, //Hole in Space// created a link between two cities on opposite coasts of the United States. Galloway and Rabinowitz titled these experiments //Aesthetic Research in Telecommunications//, combining newly introduced televisual technologies and an interactive viewer experience to create one of the first truly telematic artworks.
<img src="https://iphiahenry.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/hole-in-space-image.jpeg" width="300" height="250" alt="hole in space">//The Telematic House// was an installation created for the Milan Fair in 1983 to depict what Ugo La Pietra envisioned our homes in the future to look like, with an emphasis on how televisions and telematic communications would affect how a home functions. Each piece of furniture in the fabricated home featured a television, implying a sense of entanglement between the person or persons of the home and their technology.
<img src="https://ugolapietra.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/casatelematica_letto_low.jpg" width="400" height="350" alt="telematic house">Jim Campbell's //Interactive Hallucinations// was one of his many forays into the realm of interactive, tech-based artwork. When the viewer is positioned in front of a monitor they are shown to be on fire through a real time distorted mirror effect. This creates a disorienting and immersive experince for the viewer, directly influencing how many artists made and viewed interactive art post this work's creation.
<img src="http://www.jimcampbell.tv/portfolio/installations/hallucination/002.jpg" width="500" height="300" alt="hallucination">[[Significant Other (2018)]]
[[Movies About Intimacy and Artifical Intelligience]]
[[Cybernetics in Film]]Pedro Moreira's //Significant Other// is an installation and video art piece that questions the role of romantic partners in a digital age. On a bed sits a laptop, from which Moreira is being screened via live video-chat. The work echoes the intimacy that is formed in //Telematic Dreaming// in which both settings the viewer can see and hear another person while them not actually being there. Moreira creates an intimate moment between the viewer and the artist, further blurring the relationships a viewer has with art.
<img src="https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1555003478158-SO2-web2.jpeg?resize=1575:*" width="500" height="280" alt="Two foxes">Within the sci-fi genre there is a specific genre of film that deals with the relationship between humans and technology. In many cyberpunk affiliated movies, there is threat to be seen from technology and usually a rift between the technological and biological (see; //Blade Runner// , //The Matrix//, etcetera). However, in recent years especially, a subgenre has emerged that encompasses a love between human and artifical intelligence or AI. Both //Her// (2013) and //Ex Machina// (2014) revolve around a similar storyline- the romace between and human and a sentient artificial intelligence, one in the form of an operating system and the other a robot. In each of these films the characters grapple with the intimacy that they have founded with their respective tech counterparts and question their own moral stance about the extent to which technology can empathize or feel. This progression from fear to love can coincide with society's demystification and embrace of newer and newer technology and echoes Roy Ascott's questions of intimate technology, could there be love in the telematic embrace?
<img src="https://www.slantmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/exmachina-2.jpg" width="400" height="260" alt="Two foxes">Ascott, Roy, and Edward A. Shanken. Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. University of California Press, 2007.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Autonomedia, 1987.
Gere, Charlie. “New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age .” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/02/new-media-art-and-the-gallery-in-the-digital-age.
Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: from Illusion to Immersion. MIT Press, 2007.
Pereira, Lorenzo. “Why Is It So Difficult to Define New Media Art ?” Widewalls, https://www.widewalls.ch/new-media-art-definition/.
“Telematic Timeline.” Telematic Connections: Virtual Embrace, http://telematic.walkerart.org/timeline/timeline_shanken.html.
In the 1980s and 1990s the sci-fi genre was expanding to include new notions of cybernetics and how this could influence and change society. Films like <a href= https://homi.neocities.org/2019/t/Decoder_1984.html target=“_blank”>//Decoder// (1984)</a> and <a href= https://homi.neocities.org/2019/t/Tetsuo_the_Iron_Man_Connor.html target=“_blank”>//Tetsuo the Iron Man// (1989)</a> deal with various fears the public faces when introduced to new technology. The fascination with cyborgs continued to grow, sparking moral ambiguity and questions of the sentience of technology.