When you think of "new romantics" and "internet" the first thing that probably comes to mind is goth girls posing in cemeteries.
Possibly that wasn't the first thing that popped into the heads of the curators of Eyebeam's upcoming exhibit with the unapologetic title, The New Romantics. "Just as the Romantics responded to the industrial revolution," the curators postulate, "this group of artists are similarly responding to the current information revolution."
Ever since William Gibson envisioned Haitian voodoo spirits inhabiting cyberspace, writers have been trying to depict computers and the internet as something other than what they are: soulless cold environments created by nerds to be inhabited by other nerds. The internet is the domain of numbers, statistics, menus, and multiple choice tests. The only way to imagine it otherwise might be something like David Cronenberg's fleshy "game pods" that attach to your spine with an umbilical: a "dream space out of meat space" governed by murky synaptical potentials rather than precise silicon robotics. In the real cyberspace we inhabit, however, no amount of pouty romantic acting out can overcome that it's going to be converted to pixels and aiff files and reproduced on a page where it will be tabulated with like counts and stored with thousands of other similar expressions.
my new romantic drawing above was made with the Computers Club Drawing Society "Chibi Paint" software (and resized to fit here)
