Augmenting Wilderness: Points of Interest in Pre-connected Worlds - Augmented Reality Art - page 210

from the bell horn of a radio, through the air, across the unseen ether all around
us, to an Iñupiat family with a radio antenna at their cabin many miles away in
Bethel. The white man at the bell horn is Joseph Romig, an early doctor in territorial
Alaska. He would help aid in deliveries via radio, a proto-telephonic version
of action at a distance. Early telemedicine. Radio Babies shows an immediate
technological connection between remote locations (pre-connected worlds), and the
way information exists in an ecosystem as part of the human experience inside
of it. One of the notable elements of the work is Ahgupuk's ability to take a
technological marvel (radio communication), being used for good (family medicine)
and illustrate it with a pronounced bit of magical realism (the baby flying on radio
waves) personifying nonlocal action via technology.
Another poetic illustration of technology in Radio Babies is the gigantic see-
through reel-to-reel screen on top of Mt. McKinley in the background, titled the
'J.H. Romig Radio Babies Pricelist', showing what people can expect to pay for
family telemedicine services, boys and girls start out at $200, with discount prices
for a twin, and notable discounts for triplets and quadruplets. Ahgupuk's written
words in the painting are as much a part of the environment as the images of
buildings and mountains, with the words “Umbrella Roadhouse” and “Rainy Pass”
geolocated on their watercolor locations. Radio Babies practices a flat ontology
where the ambient information in a place is equivalent to the other objects in it,
without losing the complex humanness that is so apparent in the artistic depiction
of the technology (the pricelist and the healthy family are both effected by the
radio communicator). Radio Babies is a nonlocal networked media piece, made with
locally available (and traditional) materials, which also places it firmly in the canon
of Alaskan art history.

13.5 Anti-tradition

In 1996, when Nicholas Negroponte was looking at the future of digital media art
from the beginnings of the MIT MediaLab, he wrote, “the digital superhighway will
turn finished and unalterable art into a thing of the past. The number of mustaches
given to Mona Lisa is just child's play” (Negroponte 1996 ). He was mentioning
Duchamp's ready-mades tangentially, but more importantly, he invoked a spirit
many artists refer to as the anti-tradition , which has been part of the networked
or digital aesthetic since its inception. The anti-tradition isn't an art movement,
but rather a variegated practice of producing counter-culture art, which has been
going on for a very long time, from Bouzingo to Pussy Riot. The Canadian poet
Christian Bök places the historical onus of the anti-tradition on the 'pataphysical
literature of Alfred Jarry (Bök 2002 ) whose major literary influence was the drunken
dithyrambic fantasies of François Rabelais, a writer from the European Renaissance.
Negroponte's enthusiasm for a society full of malleable cultural objects has been
given a new technological tool for the anti-tradition with the advent of the 'digital
superhighway'.