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Why would I expect to find a proliferation of new work in digital media at the 1999 Istanbul Biennial, in the first place? Looking back, biennials over the world launched the entry of semi-peripheral regions into the heartland of the international contemporary art world. These biennials profit on "new media's", actually not that new anymore, metaphorical strength to suggest that the world is within reach from the present exhibition. Conceived of as a world-wide audience or a world-wide set of artists behind the work, the entire world would somehow be involved. Communication technology makes things happen in art, and it does so fast. Video art took its first stumbling steps in the 1960s with pioneers like Nam June Paik, accompanied by the televised "Global Village" of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. The shrinkage of the world to the size of a village where everything happens simultaneosly to everyone was not only the promise of worldwide freedom and democracy - who could see the suffering in India without taking action? Access to all relevant facts from all around the world ensures us of well informed decisions and direct democracy in a global community, that Marshall McLuhan spelled out. And, best of all, the artist was the one to show the way out of the System, just like Gilles Deleuze´s War Machine smoothing the State Systems striated space. Nicholas Negroponte, IT guru of the Wired magazine and MIT Media Lab was also quick to see the advantages of artist-hackers´ free creativity in the face of profit- and warhungry governments. Even Jean-FranÁois Lyotard would say that artists typically work with small, partial narratives without legitimization of Grand Narratives, and thus an artist working with new technology (hopefully) produces non-conforming knowledge from within the oppressive system. The romantic genius returns when least needed, artist and new technique united in a critical project as a substitute for the slow machinery of literally heavy democracy. Empowerment has been a promise of new media since the introduction of film, as when Walter Benjamin predicted that people would make their own films in a near future. Sadly, Real time events, the Gulf War debate with Jean Baudrillard, "Real world" TV and Johan Grimponpréz Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y film collage on real aircraft hijacking in Documenta X 1997 are not exactly comforting about the possibility of reality to make its way through art and media to action.

Nonetheless, video has since the 60s enjoyed a tremendous breakthrough helped by theories of the immaterial and / or virtual in the 1980s, and was dubbed the art medium of the nineties. This is obvious at a look at the biennials in Venice, São Paulo and Istanbul alike, as well as the Kassel Documenta. Computer art, or digital art, made a similar career advancing from a gadget in tech-nerd circles to the mainstream of photography. It comes in the guise of ordinary photo, as well as cd-rom and more and more now, Internet with a more high-tech look. The audience gets the art via a computer monitor or a large screen projection. Digital art is the equivalent of darkroom processing, nothing more dramatic. But used right, it has the power to suggest the new, the direction of the future - very appealing in the context of contemporary art. Not forgetting the real possibility to reach the entire world either via video or cable carried or satellite TV, radio broadcasting or its digital equivalents, netcasting. The world is in our living room, and we could be in everybody elses. So, what is new about that? Why, it is just normal!

Zoran Naskovski "War Frames" 1999

Familiarizing the strange?

6th Istanbul Biennial 1999. The Passion and the Wave
Walking around in the 6th International Istanbul Biennial and looking for signs of computerised techniques in the art works is an activity which soon starts to feel like asking the wrong question. Geography inevitably comes through in interpretation of the works with painful clarity. Who could forget the earthquake when looking at disarranged or fragmented compositions? But interest in geography had not led to use of digital techniques in the art works. The biennial works from the theme of a slightly marginal location bypassing the direct connection to geography, to focus on pleasure and sentimentality. It does not explicitly aim at a global audience or show the world on flickering screens. Instead, it digs in Istanbul's past, like popular scientists, archaeologists, Orientalists and tourists to find a mix of personal desire, cultures and sentimentality of past grandeur: The Passion and the Wave.

In this dreamweave, photoshopping photographic pictures is everyday business. Since Inez van Lamsweerde made her strange and upsettingly erotic combinations of men and women, adults and childen, the technique has established itself as a normal way of working with photographic pictures - a digital darkroom, hardly more dramatic. Anne Katrin Dolven (Norway/London) used digital video on laser disc in this discreet way. Januar (January), her video loop at the Dolmabahce Cultural Centre makes no affair of its medium. Two pinkish irregular shapes mysteriously appear and disappear again in the white non-space on the screen. Suddenly, the perception of the white and pink is clearly legible as two nipples rising and sinking with the slow breathing of a person bathing in milk or in white foam. Dolven's choice of a digital medium has not added much to the understanding of this course of events, defamiliarising the familiar. The estrangement comes from her limited context and perspective - not enough clues to guess a game of what "two pinks in a white" could be.

Ambiguosly, Predators by Nicolás Fernández (Switzerland) raised an eerie set of questions about the story presented. A series of photos related to prostitution or pornography presents the constructive elements of the series: a rural part of a presumably North West European country, a car, a man driving and a female by the road. A handshake, and the car is parked in a forested area, and suddenly the viewer is presented with a scene where a female body is placed on the car's motor and windshield or splayed out in onanist or ecstatic fashion in the open luggage space. While the picture of the man is never worked on, the female part has had the areas of the body that are of special communicative interest (eyes, hands, breasts and sexual parts) erased. The skin is perforated by other surfaces, as patches copied from the other parts of the picture, fragments of green foliage or tree trunks, replace the eyes in their sockets. The title's predators is significantly given in the plural, suggesting equal and exchangable positions of the counterparts on view. But how could that be? One part half erased and the other unaffected by the techniques of the picture and thus actually normalised?
Photoshopping is also in the untitled series of photographies by Nadia Berkani (France/Algeria), the lower half of a female dancer's body striking a muscular version of the Marilyn Monroe-pose, holding the yellow dress down with the hands. No head, one would expect the dancer to go on moving after the head was severed, like a chicken or a Duracell rabbit. But it didn't erase the impression of Fernández upsettingly violent treatment of his pictures, piercing the surface of the body represented. But what else is to be expected, as I am used to looking for a critical content of every piece of digital art - even when there is none?

"New media" was obviously not an issue in the Istanbul biennial 1999. Symptomatically however, Internet did have a congenial and stringent place in a sideshow. Always Already Apocalypse was the name of an exhibition, a clever pun on semiotic theory and the "always already written" texts forming the repertoire of human language guiding the view of reality. Could the parallel with media-message mutual influence be more clear? Macedonian curator Suzana Milevska and the artists have made a brilliantly sharp-edged exhibition updating ever-present apocalyptic fears and visions. Have we just experienced the Apocalypse in the guise of a natural catastrophe, the earth quake? Fast and well-informed decisions are crucial for survival in natural catastrophes. Serbian Zoran Naskovski's Internet piece War frames show the opposite. Selections of broadcast programs in Beograd the during the war in Former Yugoslavia, shows that the viewers were fed with sitcom-programs and soft entertainment, if not downright false information. Bulgarian Luchezar Boyadjiev's computer installation There are no earthquakes in Manhattan is a fantastic web of new and traditional lore on the Deluge or Apocalypse which informs the expectations on the Last Days. Besides, would we trust earthquake information on Internet? Remembering the very real Chernobyl catastrophe 1986, who would know first and have the time to avoid general panic and get to a safe place? Ana Stojkovik's Institute for Hybrid Diseases has an air of perfect credibility. The installation with slide projection, medical and seismological charts and digital prints was enough for a report to UNICEF or UNHCR, but the human injuries shown on photo were processed and made up.

Nicolás Fernàndez "Predators" 1999

In the Beginning, the Earth was dark and desolate.

1st and 2nd International Istanbul Biennials
So how did we come this way, and where did it all start? The 1st and 2nd International Istanbul Biennial took place in 1987 and 1989. No one should be surprised to hear that there was no digital art back then. Partly because of the contacts and interests of coordinator Beral Madra, Istanbul critic and curator, who wanted to "catch up" with the international art scene since the 1960s, partly because digital art had not made a definitive move out of the hightech-ghetto. Of course, there was video, but not in the mainstream of art that it has lately moved into, and not in the geographical peripheries of the art world.

Virtual communication and real colonisation

3rd International Istanbul Biennial, 1992. The Production of Difference
The mass media and simulation-simulacra debate culminated when Jean Baudrillard provocatively declared the fictional nature of the Gulf War in 1991. That war actually took place in Turkey's neighbouring country Iraq, postponing the third Istanbul Biennial until 1992. Thus, it was hard to see it in the fictive perspective of American-continental French theory. The 3rd Biennial took place in the Feshane, a newly renovated 19th-century warehouse and manufacturing plant. As the first manufacture in Istanbul, it was heavy with signs of the dawning industrialization and modernisation of Turkey, as well as international exchange and trade. Moreover, the building was redone by no other person than Gae Aulenti, who has the Musée d'Orsay in her curriculum, and it was meant to have been Turkey's first museum of contemporary art. Great expectations were set to Istanbul's role in the then hot multiculturalist debate. Very important, remember that in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the Americas caused great debates and cultural activity on the topics of cultural exchange, imperialism and colonialism. Fifteen countries participated in the Istambul biennial and the curatorial responsibility was delegated by Vasif Kortun, artistic leader, to the representatives of the countries that he had chosen.
No nation could be a better example of the arbitrariness of nations and borders than the state Israel and the Jewish people in the diaspora. A prime example of millennias of colonialist projects Islamists, Christian crusaders, English and French 1st World War treaties with Israelites and the subsequent occupation of Palestine land it has a terrific tradition of constant reworking of personal, national and religious-ideological identity. This rubbed off on Zvika Kantor's and Neta Ziv's work. Kantor showed computer generated black and white graphic pictures in a larger composition with similarly black and white striped figure that looked like something between a child's drawing and a toy robot on wheels, standing in a black and white fence. The strict binary values have their parallel in an uncompromising political setting, and the unnatural clarity of borders -Ýthe fence really overstated the point. On the other hand, Ziv's computer processed graphic work on transparency film have a starting point in diagrams of brain activity, a familiar connotation following the route technology-intelligence-intellect confronted with a two-dimensional non-verbal presentation. Information storage and communication is not to be equated, it seems to say. Contesting the possibility to distinguish borders (digitally) and interpret them into another medium (just like computers do, turning I/0-values into almost any medium), these Israeli works are quite good examples of digital congeniality.

Digital Nomads.

4th International Istanbul Biennial, 1995. The Vision of Art in a Paradoxical World
This year, with René Block curating and bringing his reputation from several large international exhibitions like the Sydney biennial, marked the entry of Istanbul biennial into the limelight of the global art world. Geography was the overall theme of the biennial. Typically so, as the mid-90s saw the peak of post-colonial theory, and Istanbul is a dream of Orientalist discourse. This year saw the birth of two new biennials on the fringes of the art world, Johannesburg and Kwangju, which seemed to confirm that the former peripheries were now generally acknowledged. Was this the effect of several decades of critical work on the hierarchies of the art world, or the Internet revolution? Even at the Venice biennial, Identità e Alterità. Figure del corpo 1895/1995, the alterity-issue thus did not pass unmarked - digital works were of course signs of our time's degeneration and estrangement.

Video installations were firmly established as mainstream in the 1995 Istanbul biennial. Mid-career Marina Abramovic, Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik were only three of the very well known video artists in the show. A careful note should be inserted: here, I have been interested in digital works. However, in many cases, it is hard to judge from reproductions of works if they were digitally processed. And robot works often have microprocessors, making them digital works in another sense. For example, Cengiz Çekil (Turkey) included electrical bellows in his work Sagir Çiglik/Deaf Scream (1995), and Ulf Rollof (Sweden) had 12 motorized trees.
The digital canon at this point was one of a certain formal elegance coupled with spatial uncertainty. In Pencere/Window (1995), Hakan Akçura (Turkey) used 48 photographic images of windows documented at different times in different light. Then a computer generated an image of the final work, that was applied in acrylic paint on canvas. The familiarity of a personal room, a private flat or living quarters, was destroyed with the creation of an average space. It is at once vaguely strange and yet recognisable, like a rearrangment of old furniture.
Rosemary Laing (Australia) showed aerial wall (greenwork ) and Top stretch (greenwork) (1995), works which were wall-size digital images, in computer painted vinyl. In one picture a wall shape materialises, seemingly made up or out of the green foliage of lush trees. The effect is one where the image becomes like a patterned two-dimensional surface (which it is, of course) and the illusion is that the surface is seemingly folded in the shape of a wall. In the other picture, the smooth image of foliage bears no trace of any fold, or wall.
Finnbogi Petursson's Winddrawings (1995) used the assistance of wind and electronic programming. The least material element, the wind, and the immaterial programming have a parallel in their ability to rearrange substances with uncompromising strength. For digital nomads in the recently expanded universe of the art world, indifferent to the place of living, forming matter is still conditioned by the material conditions set at the beginning. But reshaping one's space is not the same as reshaping one's own body, no matter how informing and enlighting playing games with virtual space/identity is. Who, might one ask, is the looking/experienceing subject implied in the disturbingly defamiliarised images of space? Urban, Internet-user, smart and Englishspeaking.

Luchezar Boyadjev "There are no earthquakes in Manhattan" 1999

Talking in/on Passing

5th International Istanbul Biennial, 1997. On Life, Beauty, Translations and Other Difficulties
Rosa MartÌnez was the curator of this highly dispersed exhibition, that had looked up the gates, straits and other spaces to cross the borders of Istanbul. Places near the Topkapi Palace and Sultanahmet mosque, the Atatürk Airport, the Sirkeci and Haydarpasa Train Stations, the Women's Library and Information Centre, the Marmara Hotel in the busy Taksim Square, a ferry trafficking the Asian-European shores of the Bosphorus and more - places for exchange, communication and the going to and fro were the biennial's venues. Passing, whether as in passing for (or as) something which one is not authentically, or the issue of literal passing of borders is thus highlighted in MartÌnez biennial. But human adaptibility has its limits.
Identity has a set of technical issues, easily illustrated by the expression identical twins - obviously not the same person, but with the same looks. Matthew McCaslin´s Garden Delight (1997), 5 video players displaying luscious flowers and a synchronizer, technically resembles Mark Wallinger's Royal Ascot (1994) where horse-drawn carts carrying royal persons were featured in four video monitors, with a syncstarter. These are in an awkward position inbetween magnetic and digital video technique. The issues brought forth by the technique relate to simultaneity, repetition, reproduction and identity. But here, in these examples of a substitute passing for the real thing, the falsehood does not entail any consequences. The video-recordings are legitimate reproductions, so to speak. This is not the case with living beings, as Halil Altindere has shown.

A Kurd in Turkey is officially a "Mountain-Turk". No ethnic differences ideally exist in the modern Turkish state, and the authority of nation builder Mustafa Kemal - more known as Kemal Atatürk - is asserted on paper bills of every value. This reminder is repeated to the absurd, Atatürk is everywhere with the visual culture of European fashion and hairstyle, whereas Kurdish presence is hidden from view. Kurdish Halil Altindere's Dance with the taboos (1997) comprise six large digital colour prints and forex, and two slightly smaller prints, showing the artist's face in different angles on a passport page, and a one-million lira bill where Atatürk covers his face in his hands - the same gesture as the artist on the passport page. Money also provides identity, and the digitally reworked value papers show how easily identity is altered (and simply bought). Passports and identity papers authorize identity, and the paper bills provide a model for the nation to adopt. The Kurds should pass as Turks, who in their turn should pass for being so-called secularised and modern Europeans.
Has the passing in and out of the body's organic borders become a possibility with Virtual Reality, even in its more limited visual aspect (i.e. without body suit and gloves)? Sense:less's work Sense:less, a large soft-looking egg-shaped creation standing in a square space would guide the way between interior and exterior space. The technique is immersive virtual reality - abstract electronic art, moving forms and colours - put on a steel platform, powerfully computer supported. Any subversive effects on the identity after bypassing the sensory apparatus? People who have experienced how the confirmation and support between bodily movement and the brain's impulses are suspended have given fantastic accounts of possible liberation. In this game of "what if" with other rules than earthly space, there is no possibility to change, hide or forget one's own body in interacting with other people. But vertigo from an illusory space that actually surrounds the audience is something else than perspectival painting, it must be admitted.
By way of conclusion, was digital art ever necessarily critical? In the examples above, it seems to have reached a condition where everything could be a accepted as a fabrication. Now digital techniques (just as art) seems to be supporting the normal in the same way that plastic surgery is a normal feature of everyday life. Yes, the breasts and biceps are implantates, but show me one normal thing in the world anyway, you know. Art has always taken liberties with reality, there were collages before the advent of digital image processing. The normal case is that nothing is necessarily true, and thus critique by way of defamiliarisation, of showing the made-up character of a reproduction, is hardly upsetting. At the 6th Istanbul biennial, it is especially obvious that hightech-medium artworks are not unanimously critical of a peripheral location in the art world, race or gender issues. It is rather a free play. It takes a special exhibition, an earthquake and a war to pin down Zoran Naskovski's War frames to make a recognisable critique of representations and their relation to reality.~