Postmodernism and photoshop 后现代主义与photoshop(3)

后现代主义与photoshop

databases and libraries becomes the default; creating them from scratch becomes an exception. The Web acts as a perfect materialization of this logic. It is one gigantic library of graphics, photographs, video, audio, design layouts, software code and texts; and each and every element is free since it can be saved to a user's computer with a single mouse click.

It is not accidental that the development of the GUI [Graphical User Interface], which legitimized "cut and paste" logic as well as media manipulation software such as Photoshop, itself popularizing the plug-in architecture, took place during the 1980s—the same decade when contemporary culture became "post-modern." In evoking this term I follow Fredric Jameson's usage of

post-modernism as "a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order." As it became apparent by the early 1980s for critics such as Jameson, culture no longer tried to "make it new." Rather, endless recycling and quoting of the past media content, artistic styles and forms became the new "international style" and the new cultural logic of modern society. Rather than assembling more media recordings of reality, culture is now busy reworking, recombining and analyzing the already accumulated media material. Invoking the metaphor of Plato's cave, Jameson writes that post-modern cultural production "can no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real word but must, as in Plato's cave, trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls."

In my view, this new cultural condition found its perfect reflection in the emerging computer software of the 1980s which privileged the selection from already existing media elements over creating them from scratch. And at the same time, to large extent it is this software which made post-modernism possible. The shift of all cultural production to first electronic tools such as switchers and DVEs (1980s) and then to computer-based tools (1990s) greatly eased the practice of relying on old media content in creating new productions. It also made the media universe much more self-referential, because when all media objects are designed, stored and distributed using a single

machine--the computer-- it becomes much easier to borrow elements from already existing objects. Here again the Web became the perfect expression of this logic, since new Web pages are routinely created by copying and modifying already existing Web pages. This applies both for home users creating their home pages and for professional Web, hypermedia, and game development companies.

+ + +

This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book "The Language of New Media" (MIT Press, Fall 2000).