The neon paintbrush: Seeing, technology, and the museum as metaphor

The Neon Paintbrush: Seeing, Technology, andthe Museum as Metaphor

Peter WalshDavis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481. E-mail: [email protected]

Visions of the Blind

My starting quotation is this one, first published in 1929:

One of my never-to-be-forgotten experiences was circum-navigating New York in a boat. The trip took all day. . . One who has not seen New York in this way would beamazed at the number of people who live on the water.Someone has called them ‘harbour gypsies.’ Their homesare on boats—whole fleets of them, decorated with flowerboxes and bright-colored awnings. It is amusing to note howmany of these stumbling, awkward harbour gypsies havepretty feminine names—Bella, Floradora, Rosalind, Pearlof the Deep, Minnehaha, Sister Nell.The occupants can beseen going about their household tasks—cooking, washing,sewing, gossiping from one barge to another, and there is aflood of smells which gives eyes to the mind. The childrenand dogs play on the tiny deck, and chase each other into thewater, where they are perfectly at home. (Keller, 1998, p.506)

What is remarkable about this passage is not so much itscontent as its author. It was written by Helen Keller, wholost both her sight and hearing in very early childhood.Keller learned to “hear” others by interpreting the lettersthey traced on her hands. I have, in fact, omitted thissentence from Keller’s account: “I had with me four peoplewho could use the hand alphabet—my teacher, my sister,my niece, and Mr. Holmes.”

Part of the scene Keller is able to glean from sensationand smells, which, she notes “gave eyes to her mind.” Therest she has constructed from the laborious hand notationsof her companions.

I cite this case to make a fundamental point about seeing.It is not done just with the eyes. I am making a distinctionhere between eyesight or light perception through the opticnerve, and seeing. In humans, seeing involves all the sensesand the mind.

This is hardly a new observation. Marshall McLuhan(1962) pointed it out, and he, in turn, was referring back to

the work of Francis Bacon (Marchand, 1998). But it issomething that we have a strong tendency to overlook.

To people with normal eyesight, achievements such asKeller’s can even seem suspect, a species of fraud or parlortrick. But Keller’s case is hardly unique. Another writerwho lost his eyesight in early childhood is the distinguishedIndian-American author Ved Mehta (1998). Not wanting tobe known as a “blind author,” Mehta writes, even more thanKeller does, as if he could see with his eyes as well as hismind.

In one of his memoirs, Mehta (1998) quotes Herbert L.Matthews’New York Timesreview of his second book. Hefound Matthew’s comments on his blindness particularlypainful. Matthews says:

Ved Mehta plays an extraordinary trick on his prospectivereaders. Mr. Mehta, a Punjabi Hindu, now 25 years old, hasbeen completely blind since the age of 3. He has written thisbook about his return to India after ten years’ absence as ifhe had normal vision . . . Hecannot help his blindness andhas, indeed, turned it by a miracle of will power and courageinto something resembling an asset, but he could not hope towrite about India as if he were not blind. (Mehta, 1998, pp.51–52)

Mehta comments: “Matthews’s main point was: How dare ablind person write as if he could see? Isn’t writing in thatway dishonest?” (Mehta, 1998, p. 53). To a friend, Mehtaanswers his own question: “ ‘I live among the sighted. Idress, I eat, I walk with the sensibilities of the sighted inmind. I hear the talk of the sighted from morning to night.My whole inner life is made up of visual assumptions’ ”(Mehta, 1998, p. 56). Later, he writes of “piecing together aworld of five senses by the diligent use of four.” To preventhim from writing as he chose is like preventing a deafBeethoven from composing (Mehta, 1998, p. 59).

Mehta, moreover, seems not only to see the visual worldbut also to understand and value its full range of signs andsymbols, even at great expense to himself. Early in hiscareer, he moved into the famous Dakota on New York’sCentral Park. He writes that:© 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The entire apartment needed a coat of paint and I had to payfor that. I felt that for my books I must have built-inbookcases with a special kind of molding to match that ofthe apartment, and obtaining them required the services of acabinetmaker. More important, none of my . . . furniturewas appropriate: the Dakota seemed to call for antiquefurniture . . . nosooner had I moved in, with nothing but mybooks and records and a couple of pictures, than I wascaught in a web of rug merchants and antique dealers,drapers and upholsterers, and the money was draining out ofmy savings account as if I were a rich traveller recklesslythrowing gold coins in the Fontana di Trevi. (Mehta, 1998,p. 229)

Despite the fact that Mehta cannot see in the conventionalsense, he finds himself caught up in the full symbolic worldof visual status. A few months later, he reports,

I was just settling in with some of my newly acquiredpossessions—an eighteenth-century dining table and someGeorgian silver. Given my precarious life as a writer, I haveno simple explanation of why I went in for such trappings;either I was always trying to put up a dazzling front in orderto guard against any unwarranted pity or I was just bornextravagant. (Mehta, 1998, p. 234)

But just as it is possible to see and even act visually wherethere is no eyesight, it is possible not to see where there is.The American writer Paul Theroux tells the story of “acertain New Yorker” who, because Mehta’s writing de-scribed the visual world with such vividness and nuancedoubted that he was really blind.

Seeing Mehta at a party, holding forth in front of anattentive audience, the doubter decided to test him. He creptup to Mehta, began making faces at him, waved his handsover his eyes, thumbed his nose, and did everything hecould to distract and interrupt him. Finally he put his faceright up to Mehta’s and stuck his tongue out. Through all ofthis, Mehta went right on talking, calmly and articulately,without the slightest sign he was distracted.

Finally, the doubter, humiliated by his own behavior, leftthe party. As he went out, he said to his hostess “I hadalways thought Ved Mehta was faking his blindness, or atleast exaggerating. I am now convinced that Ved Mehta isblind.”

“That’s not Ved Mehta,” the hostess replied. “It’s V.S.Naipaul” (Theroux, 1998, p. 279).

I ran across a quotation recently that succinctly states thisfirst point I am trying to make. John Dugdale is a photog-rapher who lost most of his vision from AIDS-related CMVretinitus, but continues to work. “I absolutely have a full,clear visual picture of everything that I photograph,” saysDugdale. “That really starts inside my head, because eye-sight and vision are completely different” (Photography inNew York, 1998).

Galileo’s Moons

This brings me to the subject of technology. At leastsince the era of cave painting, technology and seeing have

been closely linked. Technology changes and, in somecases, even forms what we see.

I am defining technology very broadly here. I am goingback the Greek root “techne,” which means “art”—art in thebroadest sense that encompasses fine art, craft, and tech-nique. I will be talking about technology as any artificialmeans that relates to seeing. Cave painting, under thisdefinition, is technology, as is the written alphabet. And ofcourse photographs, moving pictures, television, and theWorld-Wide Web are also technology. All such technolo-gies are directly linked to the natural visual and cognitivecapacities of human beings.

In 1610, Galileo Galilei, already known as something ofa boat rocker, published a book with the titleSidereusNuncius, known in English as “The Starry Messenger.” Inthe summer of 1609, Galileo had heard of an odd Dutchinvention, a piece of optical technology that made distantthings appear closer than they really were. In The StarryMessenger, Galileo describes in detail how he adapted,improved, and greatly enlarged the invention, and used it tolook at the moon.

What happened next is one of the great moments in thehistory of science for, in examining in detail the variousspots on the moon’s surface, Galileo came to an astonishingconclusion (Fig. 1). He wrote:

I have been led to the opinion and conviction that thesurface of the moon is not smooth, uniform, and precisely

FIG. 1. Galileo’s wash drawings of the moon.

40 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE—January 1, 2000

spherical as a great number of philosophers believe it (andthe other heavenly bodies) to be, but is uneven, rough, andfull of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face ofthe earth, relieved by chains of mountains and deep valleys.(Drake, 1957, p. 31)

We see the mountains of the moon, even with the nakedeye, without much difficulty. But Galileo’s contemporariessaw the moon and the entire universe differently for thereason that, for many centuries, they had been told that thecosmos consists of a series of perfect spheres, all of themrevolving around the earth, which stood motionless at thecenter of creation.

Galileo’s conclusion does not seem so remarkable to usbecause we take his telescope, and much later technologies,for granted. Galileo was not even the first person to look atthe moon through a telescope.

Besides the moon, Galileo discovered a number of otherthings, including several moons of Jupiter and many previ-ously unseen stars (Fig. 2), that challenged the view of thecosmos that had been established since Aristotle. Those ofyou who remember your history of science know that Ga-lileo’s observations came in the middle of what has beencalled “The Copernican Revolution,” which changed theway human beings see the universe.

The old, so-called Ptolemaic model of the universe,endorsed by the Church and Aristotelian science alike, wascentered on the earth (Fig. 3). Copernicus’ book presented amodel of the universe centered on the sun (Fig. 4).

The Copernican Revolution actually is, I think, morecomplicated than people generally think. For one thing,Copernicus’ famous model, as we shall see, was neither newnor entirely accurate. I am going to attempt a quick sum-mary of what was really going on because I think it makesan interesting illustration about the relationships betweenseeing, vision, thinking, and technology.

The idea that the sun, not the earth, was the center of thesolar system had actually been around for a very long time.The early Greek philosophers explored the idea, and alsophilosophers of the late Middle Ages. The problem was thatthe idea was very hard tosee:the optical illusion that thesun and stars revolve around the earth isvery strong.

The clue to the truth, however, was the planets. Becausethe planets actually revolve around the sun, not the earth,they behave oddly when viewed from the earth. Instead ofrising and setting like the sun and moon, they sometimesappear to slow down, stop in their courses, and even movebackwardsfrom time to time. This is why the ancient Greekword for planet is “planetoi,” which also means “wanderer.”

How to explain the movements of the planets if they aresupposed to revolve around the earth, as was believed, inperfectly circular orbits (actually, they were imagined as setin revolving crystal spheres)? Well, it was not easy. Youhad to imagine perfectly circular suborbits or “epicycles”within the orbits. As observations of the movements of theplanets became more precise and detailed, the number ofepicycles needed to account for them grew. By the time ofCopernicus, the system required 83 epicycles within eightperfect crystal spheres, all kept in motion by a hierarchy ofangels (Hanson, 1967, pp. 221–222).

FIG. 3. The Ptolemaic Universe.

FIG. 2. A page from Galileo’s notebooks showing his studies of themoons of Saturn.

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Everyone realized that the epicycles were pretty untidy.Alfonso X of Castile famously summed up the whole mess:“If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarkingon the Creation, I should have recommended somethingsimpler.”

Copernicus’ model of the universe was only partly right.He put the sun instead of the earth in the center. But,because the heavens were believed to be perfect and un-changing, he still assumed that all the orbits were perfectlycircular. So he still needed 17 epicycles to explain how thesolar system worked. And, of course, he still thought thesolar system and the universe were more-or-less coexten-sive.

This was progress, you might say, but not quite the fullrevolution. It wasn’t until 54 years after Copernicus’ deaththat Johannes Kepler, after an immense amount of work,figured out that the orbits were not circular but elliptical,and that the epicycles were no longer needed.

As a young man, Kepler was assistant to the Danishastronomer Tycho Brahe, and later used Brahe’s very pre-cise astronomical observations in his own work. Brahe’s

observations were actually so accurate that Brahe refused tobelieve them. His calculations indicated that the stars weremillions of miles away. That was clearly impossible. So, heconcluded that the planets revolved around the sun, but thesun and everything else revolved around the earth, whichstood still at the center of the universe.

Copernicus circulated his ideas in manuscript form foryears. But he published his famous book placing the sun inthe center of the solar system in 1543, the year he died. Nogreat controversy followed. The book itself was a dud. Itsfirst printing of a thousand copies never sold out, and it hadaltogether four reprintings in 400 years.

Copernicus’ work has been called “an unreadable bookdescribing an unworkable system” (Koestler, 1967, p. 329).Part of the reason may have been that Copernicus was nottrying to start a revolution but merely clean up the messi-ness of the old model of the universe. The result was asmuch a fudge as a revelation.

The actual revolution takes some time to evolve.Twenty-one years after Copernicus’ death Galileo isborn, in 1564. Thirty-three years later Kepler publisheshis book on planetary motion. Another dozen years passand Galileo builds his first telescope. It is now 66 yearsafter Copernicus’ death, and Galileo himself is 45. Whereis the revolution?

The first printing of “The Starry Messenger,” however,sold out immediately. The book had two major effects. Itmade Galileo an instant celebrity, and it created a techno-logical fad. The demand for telescopes, especially onesmade by Galileo, increased dramatically. Public fascinationwith the new technology was so great that, in Florence,people mobbed a courier in the streets because they thoughthe was carrying a telescope from Galileo. When the packageturned out to be Galileo’s book, the mob demanded areading (Drake, 1957, p. 59).

The early controversies around Galileo’s discoveries fo-cused on the telescope, not so much on his observationsthrough it. Galileo’s discoveries were said to be illusionscreated by the technology, not things that really existed.One adversary said the moon only appeared to have a roughsurface. It really was as smooth and spherical, as Aristotlehad claimed: the mountains and craters were just coveredwith a smooth, transparent material, which the telescopecould not detect. Others argued that nothing new could existin the heavens because astrologers had already accountedfor everything in the sky that could have any effect on theearth. Still others just refused to look through the telescopeat all (Drake, 1957, p. 73).

It was not until Galileo published his book on sunspots,in which he fully endorsed the Copernican system andreinforced it with his observations that he got into serioustrouble with the authorities. Even then, the process of offi-cially condemning his ideas took a long, tortuous, and evenhalf-hearted path over two decades, during which he pub-lished several more works.

Central to Galileo’s dangerous idea of scientific truthwas that his notion that it was accessible to any reasonably

FIG. 4. The Copernican Universe (illustration fromDe revolutionibusorbium coelestium, 1543).


intelligent person. Of these ordinary observers, he wrote, “Iwant them to see that just as nature has given to them, aswell as to philosophers, eyes with which to see her works,so she has also given them brains capable of penetrating andunderstanding them” (Drake, 1957, p. 84).

Galileo understood that his version of truth was createdout of combination of technology, logic, and the senses. Justas Helen Keller’s friends conjured up for her the Manhattanwaterfront, so Galileo conjured up for the world a wholenew cosmos.

Thus follows my second point: technology can changethe way people see, completely and forever. The telescopehas changed so utterly the way we see the universe that theold system of perfect spheres and epicycles is difficult for useven to imagine, much less see in the sky.

Africa Vanishes

So, you might say, technology helps us to see things asthey really are. Not necessarily, as this comparison willexplain.

Here we have two European maps of Africa. The one inFigure 5 was made in the late Renaissance. Although itsoutlines are rather crude, you can make out the main fea-tures of the continent: Lake Victoria, the Nile River, and itssources in the east, the Niger River in the west. Even someof the major cities of the interior, such as Benin, are clearlymarked out.

The map in Figure 6 is a French map made in the 19thcentury. Written across the middle of the continent are largeletters spelling out the French words meaning “INTERIORPARTS almost entirely UNKNOWN.”

When Professor Craig Murphy, a political scientist atWellesley College, first showed me this comparison I had areaction that is probably similar to the one you are havingright now. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “If Europeans knewthe interior of African in the Renaissance, how could “un-known” be in the 19th century?”

In fact, Professor Murphy explained, before the Age ofDiscovery, Europeans were quite familiar with the interiorof Africa.

In 1858, John Speke, the British explorer, traced theWhite Nile to its origins and found Africa’s largest lake,Victoria Nyanza. Europe hailed him as the victor in thecenturies’-long search for the source of the Nile. But ifSpeke had bothered to check the map collection at theUniversity of Edinburgh before he left for Africa, he wouldhave found at least half a dozen European printed maps, allof them more than two centuries old, that already locatedVictoria Nyanza and the source of the Nile just where hewas about to “discover” them (Murphy, 1996).

How did modern Europe manage to forget what it hadknown in the Renaissance? Part of the reason is political.European knowledge of Africa came largely through Arabtraders who traveled there on business. At the end of the15th century, with the fall of the Arab dynasty in Spain andthe nearly simultaneous collapse of the Byzantine Empire inthe East, centuries of contact between the European andArab worlds were broken.

These political events, of course, did not destroy all themaps. The maps were discredited—by the new technologyof map making.

The Renaissance maps were not maps in the sense we usetoday. They were, in effect, illustrations of travelers’ ac-

FIG. 5. Renaissance map of Africa, drawn in 1550 by Pierre Deceliers for Henry II. Courtesy of Prof. Craig N. Murphy, Wellesley College.


counts, cataloging major landmarks, and putting them inrough approximation in symbolic space. They were compa-rable to the kind of maps you jot down to remind yourselfof a friend’s verbal directions: “follow route 10 south to thebig Mobil station and then ask.” Such maps are perfectlysuitable to travelers over land, who plot their progress fromtown to town and landmark to landmark with the help oflocal informers. But they are not nearly as helpful if you aretraveling by sea.

When the Portuguese sailors began to explore the coastof Africa, the old land travelers accounts were pretty use-less. Instead, Portuguese navigators developed their ownmaps. They used the modern science of cartography, whichuses observations with precise optical instruments (includ-ing the sextant) in conjunction with mathematics to createcarefully scaled representations of land masses and ocean.These new maps were linked with modern navigation tech-niques that used further technology to make careful astro-nomical observations. The whole process was an enor-

mously effective tool in the European exploration of theworld.

The Portuguese did not map the interior of Africa be-cause they could not see it from their ships, and rarelytraveled very far from the coast (Fig. 7). Thus, the centers oftheir African maps were blank, and because they were nolonger considered “scientific” and were no longer confirmedby new travelers’ accounts, the old maps were forgotten.Thanks to the new technology, Europeans were no longerable to “see” Africa.

This “erasure” of Africa had, in turn, some very impor-tant political implications. Africa, for Europeans, becamethe “Dark Continent,” just so much empty unclaimed space.This spurred the 19th century’s “rush for Africa,” in whichalmost the entire continent was “discovered” and carved upby European powers.

In Asia, Europeans tended to conquer intact kingdomsand nation states. Africa was divided “by the map,” that is,in straight lines that disregarded preexisting language, eth-

FIG. 6. Pierre Didot (publisher),L’Afrique avec ses Division Ge´ographiques, 1806. Etching or engraving with hand coloring. Courtesy of Prof. Craig N.Murphy, Wellesley College.


nic, or political divisions. This process had devastatingeffects on colonial and postcolonial Africa, effects thatcontinue to this day. And, to me, the most astonishing thingof all is that this all happened from the effects of a newtechnology that no one even noticed was having an effect.

The story of the African maps illustrates my third point:technology can have unexpected, unpleasant, and even un-noticed effects on the way we see. Even an apparentlybenign or at least politically neutral technology like cartog-raphy can have real and devastating implications for thelives of millions and millions of people.

A Web of Children

In the last 200 years, a cascade of new technologies—lithography, photography, motion pictures, television, radar,computers, and even sound recordings and radio—havehelped change the way human beings see. I’m going to skipover most of these to get to the World-Wide Web. One ofthe axioms of this article is that the World Wide Web is akind of apotheosis of visual technologies, uniting such me-dia, as motion pictures, the printed book, the computer, andthe sound recording, all with their attendant effects (seeWalsh, 1998, and forthcoming). There is a parallel to theWeb’s merging of technologies in the emerging field ofVisual Studies, which unites parts of what were originallyvery separate fields like art history, psychology, anthropol-ogy, and marketing theory into a single realm of inquiry.

I tried to think of a catch phrase that encompassed theemerging social psychology of the World Wide Web. In theend, I came up with two works that surprised me. I want tomake clear before I say them that I do not intend any valuejudgement here.

The two words are “children’s literature.”Let me repeat, I do not intend the catch phrase to have

pejorative implications. But it seems to me that the Web, inits current nascent state, has a lot in common with thethoughts, fantasies, morals, and ideals of childhood. Whatfollows are a few of my observations on this state ofdevelopment.

The Campfire

Irina D. Costache, of Loyola University, has pointed outthat there is an important difference between contemporarycomputer images and earlier ones: that is, they glow. “Un-like other forms of reproduction,” she has written, “theseductive brightness of the [computer] screen and attractivegraphic patterns . . .have transformed the interface into asurrogate primary source” (Costache, 1998).

The advent of the World Wide Web coincided with theintroduction of cheap, high-quality color computer monitorsso that much of the Web appears as if painted with a neonpaintbrush. Thus, the web is cozy, warm, and small. It is aflickering substitute for a nice wood fire, and seems to drawthe same rapt, uncritical attention.

The image on the right is from a genre of website knownas the “campfire chat,” a type of site that invites visitors toshare stories and comments on literature. There are campfirechats for Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, Jane Austin, andNietzche, among many others, as well as this “GlobalCampfire.” All make sure of the metaphor of computer asmodern campfire, inviting visitors to “draw up a log.”

I wonder also if this effect has anything to do with thedramatic changes in the public image of the computer overthe last few years. In popular literature and film, up to andincluding Stanley Kubrick’s2001, A Space Odyssey,com-puters were huge, distant, cold, and inclined towards dan-gerous malfunctions. They were inhuman and counterhu-man, often resentful and subversive towards their creators.

The Web, so far, is largely seen as helpful, friendly,imaginative, comforting, unthreatening, and, if anything,slightly comic. The Web and the Teletubbies seem to havea lot in common. This may be changing as concerns aboutchip identifiers and computer spying via the Internet. HarlanEllison’s famous science fiction vision, of all the computersin the world combining to defeat and torture humankind,may yet return.

The Picture Book

A number of commentators on the new technologieshave suggested we are moving from a text-based culture toa more visual one. In fact, as McLuhan (and many otherssince) has pointed out (McLuhan, 1962), written language is

FIG. 7. Seventeenth-century Portuguese map showing the coasts of Af-rica and Brazil.


essentially a visual medium. McLuhan claims the advent ofprinted text in particular helped convert Western culturefrom a “hot” or emotional oral and aural culture to a “cool”or more detached visual culture.

What I would like to suggest is really happening on theWorld Wide Web is something more like a picture book, inwhich written words and visual images have equal weightand roughly equivalent symbolic value. The typical WorldWide Web page is a flashing, glittering collage of text andimages, and actually the boundaries between the two tend todissolve. Text is treated visually; images are treated as signsand codes.

A web page is not meant to be read sequentially—ordiachronically, as the structuralists put it—but simulta-neously and synchronically. The images are clues to the textand the text is a clue to the meaning of the images.

Web pages are particularly frenetic versions of whatEdward Tufte has called “confections.” Confections, Tuftewrites, “place selected, diverse images into the narrativecontext of a coherent argument. And, by virtue of thearchitecture of their arguments, confections make readingand seeing and thinking identical” (Tufte, 1997).

But most real web pages are much less rational thatTufte’s idealized confections. The relationship between im-age, word, and meaning are intuited as much as consciouslyunderstood. The random conjunction of advertising mes-sages, text, graphics, images, and the viewer’s actions inweb pages produces unexpected relationships that are rarelyplanned. Browsing through the Web thus is a bit like walk-ing through Times Square. You must expect to be surprised.

The Magic Wardrobe

In C.S. Lewis’s classic children’s fantasy,The Lion, theWitch, and the Wardrobe, a group of children in wartimeEngland walk into the back of an old wardrobe and findthemselves magically transported into a fantasy worldcalled Narnia. There magic exists, and there the children,moreover, are really kings and queens. The sequence oftime between Narnia and earth are such that the children areable to have fantastic adventures, grow up, and rule formany years as Narnia’s royal family. Yet, when they goback through the wardrobe, they find that they are stillchildren, and only a few hours have passed back on earth(Lewis, 1988).

In the same way as C.S. Lewis’ fantasy, the Web prom-ises magic portals to other worlds in which one can playmany roles more exciting than the ones offered us in normallife, yet which takes nothing—not even time—from ouroff-line existence. This strange sense that on-line existenceis somehow suspended from off-line seems even to be afactor it the newly identified syndrome known as “computeraddiction.” Psychiatric professionals are even beginning tooffer treatment in the addiction (McLean’s, 1997).

Ghost Stories

The Catholic philosopher of modernism, Teilhard deChardin, described the ghost story aspect of technology as

early as 1959. He wrote that: “. . . thanks to the prodigiousbiological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth(actively and passively) simultaneously present, over landand sea, in every corner of the earth” (Teilhard de Chardin,1959, p. 240).

What Teilhard de Chardin describes here is the realiza-tion, through technology, of the age-old fantasy of being aspirit, that is, of mind and perception separated from thephysical limitations of a body. McLuhan described the samephenomenon as “disembodied man” (McLuhan, 1962).

During the 20th century, technology has allowed peopleto float, more and more completely, to distant places, andthere to witness events, large or small, as they were actuallytaking place. At first, with radio, these technological ghostswere only able to hear; later, with the advent of television,they were able to see as well. Now, with the Internet, theyhave begun to speak, and are gradually forming the illusionof a physical form, just like the ghosts in folk tales andchildren’s stories.

The significance of our ghostly existence, paralleling ourphysical existence, should not be underestimated. Radioallowed human beings to listen in on the crash of theHindenburg and World War II. Television permitted real-time travel to the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, theriots of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention, and theVietnam War. Now the Internet allows out-of-body voyagesto museums and outer space alike, and even permits us, likewitches and vampires, to materialize inside private homes.The vividness of these electronic visitations has had aprofound effect on our social and political consciousness, asthese few examples should make clear. The notion of “faceto face” begins to take on new meanings, and even seemsrather quaint.

Jack the Giant Killer

Bruno Bettelheim pointed out the great significance, inchildren’s stories, of the weak, small, and powerless stand-ing up to and overcoming the strong, great, and mighty(Bettelheim, 1976). The story of Jack and the Beanstalk isonly one example of many children’s stories in which thehero manages to triumph over beings that are far morepowerful. Bettelheim explains that the fantasy helps chil-dren compensate for their dependency on the adult world,and imagine the time when they come into their own adultpowers.

The quintessential Jack of the Internet beanstalk is MattDrudge, creator of the infamous Web site, The DrudgeReport. Matt Drudge, who before the advent of the WorldWide Web was a convenience store clerk, created TheDrudge Report in a cramped Hollywood apartment.

Not constrained by normal journalistic standards or eth-ics (or, one might add, an adult idea of responsible behav-ior), Drudge has been able to scoop the media giants withhis blend of e-mail-based gossip and Internet innuendo. Hisrole in breaking the Monica Lewinsky story shook up the


White House and traditional journalism alike. By the sud-den, reverse lens effect of the Web, he made himself aperson to be noticed and to contend with (McClintock,1998). In an odd parallel with Galileo, he also used a newtechnology to challenge established authority.

The borders between fantasy and reality are alwaysmined with dangers, however, so it is always important tobe clear about where they lie, especially when the involvefantasies of power and revenge. Understanding the differ-ences between fantasy and reality, and the consequences ofacting out fantasies in the real world, is one of the mostimportant lessons of adulthood. Failure to learn it oftenleads to disaster.

One of the very real dangers of the Web, I suspect, is inits tendency to blur such distinctions, and thus potentially todelay or distort adult understandings of reality. In somesense, the Web still has a child’s morality, in which actionshave consequences no more real than the fantasies thatinspire them, and death is no more permanent than it is in avideo game.

The Cat in the Hat

Childhood and the Web are both fertile grounds for whatI call the “instant symbol.” Children, perhaps because theirminds are generally less cluttered than adult minds, arequick to pick up on visual signs. Children’s stories, Disneymovies, and Saturday morning cartoons alike create andexploit dozens of instant symbols. Whether it appears on Dr.Suess’s original creation or on a preteen on a ski slope, theCat in the Hat’s hat is instantly recognized, as are other suchsymbols and characters as the Ninja Turtles, the Teletub-bies, R2D2, the White Rabbit, and the Red Queen.

The Web and the other visual media that feed into itcreate a similar set of instant symbols by virtue of theirability to repeat images over and over. For example, fewAmericans have ever seen Monica Lewinsky in person. Yetbecause of electronic technologies, repeating a single videoclip of her over and over, her simple piece of headgear—ablack beret—has been transformed into a potent politicalsymbol and a frequent excuse for sly humor. Lewinsky maynever have worn a beret before or since that video wasmade, but it will be some time her beret loses its associa-tions with scandal.

To sum up, the Web presents a child’s eye view of theworld, where roles are fluid and partly imaginary, fantasticwishes come true, parental figures are easily overthrown,and new relationships between image and meaning arequickly and easily created. To use the Web as an adult is tosee the world as a child: without boundaries or categories oradult consequences.

Few species place so much importance on children andchildhood as humans do. If childish behavior is frownedupon, a flexible and child-like mind is often considered asign of genius. Childish things have always play a keyedrole in our culture.

For example, many things that adults think they teachchildren are, in fact, learned first by children. As the Swisspsychologist Jean Piaget has first demonstrated, because ofthe way their brains develop, children discover languagelargely on their own, according to a standard pattern, just bylistening to it. Adults speak because they were once chil-dren. When two human groups speaking different languagescome together, the adults speak a pidgin that is an awkwardmixing of the two. The children spontaneously create thenew grammar that forges them into a new, united language.

Children also love to collect things. They do it almostspontaneously, as if in doing so they are developing that partof their minds that selects and sorts objects from the chaoticworld into ordered categories. In children, they are usuallyassumed to be imitating adults. In light of the evidence onthis slide, I would like to suggest that perhaps collectinganother thing children teach adults.

Tradescant’s Ark

Earlier in this article I talked about Galileo’s discoverieswith the telescope. Galileo, in fact, created a new visualculture, one that created deep divisions within the linguistic,national, and religious culture in which he lived. A similarchange in visual culture, one with profound implications forglobal politics, took place when the technology of mapmaking changed at the dawn of the age of discovery.

The Tradescant Room, at Oxford University, represents athird major change in visual culture. The room containsportions of the Tradescant Collection was an enormousgroup of curiosities, artifacts, and scientific specimens,gathered from around the world by two royal gardeners,John Tradescant the Elder and his son, John Tradescant theYounger. In 1683, Oxford opened the Ashmolean Museum,which was built to display the Tradescant collections (for-merly shown in the family home, known as “Tradescant’sArk”) to the general public.

The Ashmolean (n.d.) is one of the oldest public muse-ums on earth, and in some ways is the “mother of allmuseums.” As such, it represents the third change in visualculture I mentioned a moment ago: the museum.

Charlie Gere of Birkbeck College, University of London,has written an article that points out the increasing interestin “irrational” cabinets of curiosity such as the one createdby the Tradescants (Gere, 1998). He also maintains in thepaper that the great inventions of modernism were themuseum catalogue and the modern map, both of whichbegan to rationalize and order a rapidly expanding world ofknowledge.

Finally, Gere proposes that “the so-called ‘irrational’cabinet is an appropriate model for the representation ofvisual and material culture in digital technology.” I find thisa fascinating idea, and endorse it for your consideration. Itplaces museum web sites in a peculiarly important position,as a bridge between one dividing line in the creation ofvisual cultures and a new one, between the borderless world


of childhood and the organized world of adults. It is a bridgeto both exciting new discoveries and unexpected dangers.

So let me sum up. What I have tried to say in this articleis this:

1. Seeing is a combination of all the senses and the mind.2. Seeing is changed, sometimes dramatically and unex-

pectedly, by technology.3. The combination of seeing and technology creates visual

cultures.4. The technology of the Web will undoubtedly change

seeing and visual cultures and probably already has, andin profound ways.

5. Museums and their web sites potentially have a uniqueand special role to play in the new visual culture of theWeb, but one that is subject to all the unexpectedchanges in seeing that every technology brings.

In conclusion, let me invite you to consider this: whatmuseums put on the Web will not just present importantimages in a new technology. That technology will almostcertainly change how those images are seen and what theymean. And in the end, it will help create the new visualculture we will live in in the future.

References

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Costache, I.D. (1998). The work of art (historians) in the age of electronic (re)production. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual Conference, Com-puters and the History of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Ellison, H. (1979). I have no mouth, and I must scream. In H. Ellison (Ed.),The Fantasies of Harlan Ellison (Rev. Ed.). Boston: Gregg Press.

Gere, C. (1998). Hypermedia and emblematics. Paper presented at theFourteenth Annual Conference, Computers and the History of Art,Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Hanson, N.R. (1967). Nicholas Copernicus. In P. Edwards (Ed.), Theencyclopedia of philosophy. New York: Macmillan.

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Lewis, C.S. (1988). The chronicles of Narnia (7 Vols.). New York: Mac-millan.

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York: Harper.Theroux, P. (1998). Sir Vidia’s shadow: A friendship across five conti-

nents. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.Tufte, E. (1997). Visual explanations: image and quantities, evidence and

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The neon paintbrush: Seeing, technology, and the museum as metaphor

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