Inspired, no doubt, by the telegraph, Hawthorne recognized the shifting ecology occurring in the 19th century. Indeed the telegraph, fueled by the development of the railroad, broke the limits not only of space but of time. Unimaginable speeds of transmission across a vast web of sites communicating in a language that precursed binary code surely suggested "instinct with intelligence" and the end of "substance" as a signifier of material presence. No small surprise that Marshall McLuhan would use the remark by Hawthorne as a precedent as he evolved a communicative practice riding on the problematic of technological progress as a measure of social transformation. Political to the extent that the techno-logic of post-war western economies seemed triumphant, the issues of the media/message bond wasn't so much different than that of the linking of signifier and signified in semiotics. Encoded discourse, afterall, is rooted in the research environment of 19th century, whose "mastery" of nature was deeply entwined in systems. These discourses of representation, survelliance, mechanics, medicine, physics, and communication are the basis of the theoretical frame that seems to haunt our relationships with the modern world. And while the grand schemes of modernity were so allied with the discourses of power politics and mastery, they both established and dismantled the linear concept of progress they so blithely presumed. Nature, linear and distributed, was no longer a suitable metaphor for progress in an era surpassing biological evolution. And as the industrialization of technology reached its first apex in the 1920s, it was sundering the flawed principle of development it so relied on. Technology reconfigured the equation between nature and culture. What we inherit from the development of communication technology, visualization, and representation is a legacy of empowerment rooted in expertise camouflaging power. Deeply implicated in the systems structure of technoscience, are the practices of domination that ground the various utopias of the network. Within in the immaterial space of information, culture, the sphere of public action, is destabilized as a sphere of knowledge, a sphere of discourse, and a sphere of difference. Ubiquitous computing, the "intelligent ambience," the wired world, only serve to suggest the clear fact that the triumph of technology has already occurred, that the shift from agency to behavior has become the focal point of technology research. Rather than liberating, the trajectory of so much of this work is to map, to record, to simulate, and to produce behavior. The cold war metaphor of command and control and communication (so evident in the work of von Neumann and Wiener) has found new metaphors. Top-down access and software implementations now mediate almost all forms of communication and are implicated as much in the discourses of on-line chats as they are in the development of digi-genetic therapies. No history of electronic culture would be complete without revealing the power dynamic that roots new media. Cybernetics, information theory, and the internet itself have emerged from military strategies for dispersed forms of command and control whether it is tactical or psychological. Maturing in corporate R & D, the spin-off technologies of networking or biogenetics represent a no less cogent instance of both privatiza-tion and deregulation. Indeed, the recent debate and legislation concerning network content presupposes surveillance and precipitates yet greater hesitations about the first amendment guarantees of free, and not unregulated, speech. But the camouflage of communication policy overshadows more substantive issues concerning information, computing, biology, culture and freedom.

Concepts of presence, technology, and the cyber-pathological inflections in which, as Frederic Jameson writes, we have developed a subject position within technologies that are "triumphantly artificial," signify a moment in which representation and correspondence no longer coincide with perception. Instead, the act of consciousness itself might have to be conceived as artificial. What seems daunting is how the lapsing boundary between con-sciousness and cognition is sutured by biotechnologies, neuroimplants, and the spe-culative potential of the post-cyborg as the last stage in the technologizing of the body. One might begin speculating about neuro-interfaces, links between the representational schemes of computing and the neurological activities of the brain. The utilization of diagnostic technologies to identify and analyze behavioral activity confronts the issue of power and knowledge squarely as a technique of neuro-culture. "The code," remarks Claude Rau-let, "is performativity, which substitutes control by pure operationality for rule-based social control." This bio-architecture is a conflation of hard and soft technologies. It is no surprise that cognition is the frontier for cyber-science and that its link with representation has become the signifier of its efficacy in both the imagination and in the development of a genetic social logic.

Writing about the catastrophic transformation of the topos Paul Virilio writes, "so in spite of all this machinery of transfer, we get no closer to the productive unconscious of sight... Instead, we only get as far as its unconsciousness, an annihilation of place and appearance the future of which it is still hard to imagine." Mediated by the tele-visual, the issues of memory, consciousness, and perception become disassociated, or disembodied, from experience, other than the experience of the perceiving self. Perception becomes scanning, retention becomes retrieval and thinking becomes processing. A metaphor is emerging in which the self is understood as an operating system. In this system the convergence of networks, neuro-computing, and connectionism extend into the forma-tion of consciousness itself. Instead of an experiential topos, the trajectory of research is aimed, through informatics, at the "space" of synaptic and genetic interactivity, what might be thought of as bio-topos. As Evelyn Fox Keller writes, "even while researchers in molecular biology and cyberscience displayed little interest in each other's epistemological program, information either as metaphor or as material (or technological) inscription could not be contained." The spheres of public representation that so characterized cultural theory for the past decade, have been superceded by discourses that link cybernetics, information theory and biology (in the broadest sense) with the development of computational strategies directly involved with bio-computing, neuro-computing, and genetic programming. And while the model of the mind as a distributed parallel-processor might be useful in explaining the ability to store, process and retrieve vast amounts of memory, the metaphor is only useful as discursive and not as fact.

Years of study of artificial intelligence, computational reason, or distributed models of cognition are as yet irresolute and not fully convincing as to their efficacy as scientific, psychological, or cultural models. However, it is certain that the issues will find persuasive adherents as neuro-technology and bio-technology find common ground in what Fox Keller identified as information inscription. Historically (remembering that the models for computational reason emerged in the late 1940s), the distinction between computer and person was mediated by the interface. Suddenly even the recent manifestation of the cyborg is losing its effectiveness as a trope of either opposition or identification.

The merging of the cybernetic, the artificial, the biological, and the cognitive is having remarkable effects on human experience and expectation. Norbert Weiner, the pioneer researcher in cybernetics wrote, in "The Human Use of Human Beings", that "every instrument in the repertory of the scientific instrument maker is a possible sense organ." But the difference between instrumental recording and sensing are not wholy synonymous, even if the extension of the perceptual field is enlarged by technology. The complication arises when the experiential field that situates perception is no longer "rooted" in the affinity between representation and response (or cause and effect), but in a more problematic circumstance in which the act of consciousness itself could be programmed as Marvin Minsky so blithely reminds us. In this logic, interactivity could suggest much more than the navigation through hyper or virtual environments. It could suggest the integration of the neurological process at the level of the formation of consciousness (or perhaps unconsciousness) itself!

Vilèm Flusser writes that "electronic memories provide us with a critical distance that will permit us, in the long run, to emancipate ourselves form the ideological belief that we are 'spiritual beings', subjects that face an objective world... Our brain will thus be freed for other tasks, like processing information." He continues on the benefits of electronic memory that "A person will no longer be a worker (homo faber) but an information processor, a player with information (homo ludens)," and that "we shall enhance our ability to obliterate information...this will show us that forgetting is just as important a function of memory as remembering." Emancipated ideologies, situational knowledge, conditional expression these metaphors of an info-logical epistemology represent a kind of cyber-existentialism! Perhaps the after-effects of the eradication of legitimate canons of artistic, literary, even political narratives, has created a circumstance in which the meaning and usefulness of experience is wholy related with its engaged relationship with the present. And it comes as no surprise that interactive media demands a level of participa-tion in the contingent flow of information, intention and technology. Immersive media does not, necessarily, imply unreflective experience as much as it demands an understanding of reception accountable for more than material representa-tion.

Indeed, in interactive or hypermedia, the merger of text, sound, and image with narrative, cognition and information extends the implications of discourse formation beyond phenomenologically based reception theory and into the evolving issues of neuro-phenomenological research into the artifi-cial, the simulated and the immersive. Indeed one would have to consider a range of technologies and cultural discourses to understand the movement toward interactivity in the twentieth century, much of the which has grappled with the ruptured continuity initiated by physics, psychology, philosophy, literature, cinema, etc. Quantum physics, identity politics, phenomenology, stream of consciousness literature, cinematic montage, photographic montage, scientific visualization, etc., are among many disruptions that root the history of the destabilized narratives of postmodernity. Linking these disciplines are diverse practices of representation that converge in digital media. Revamping representation in electronic culture is a key to tracking the complexityand subtlety of the configurations of communication.

Emerging from digital media there is, on the one hand, a kind of transformation of several traditions: montage, narrative, temporality, a rethinking or extension of the issues surrounding the simple semiotic constitution of the image,

and a concern with the semiotics of process ("techno-semiotics" as Brian Rotman calls it). On the other hand, digital technology is implicated in the broadest transformation of culture ever attempted. More than epistemological, the implications of computing forms the core of a shift in an understanding of the ontology of the self as exempt from technology. Interfacing communicative discourse with technological discourse is a philosophical, intellectual, creative, political issue of the greatest importance. Cybernetics, biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, simulation, interactivity, in short, almost every form of cultural engagement is immersed in the technosphere.

The "space" of knowledge and the "space" of perception are merging. How much this relates to the issues of cognitive research and representation is pivotal to grappling with the development of hyper, inter, cyber and virtual media. Indeed, while the development of reproducible media and network technology form much of the basis for social communication, neurotechnology and and connectionism will shatter the cause and effect model of interactive media. And if the cultural logic of technology succeeds in mastering a universal digital system of exchange (as seems likely), then a far-reaching critique of communication will be necessary, one that would account for the cultural meaning of technology in terms of the meanings it forms aesthetically, biologically, and politically. In the distributed system of digital communication, the issue of power is crucial precisely because it seems dispersed: "The cyberelite is now a transparent entity that can only be imagined." [Critical Art Ensemble p. 17]. Conjoin this with a range of effects concerning everything from surveillance to identity and the ramifications of electronic culture take on staggering proportions.

Interactive works have posed the problem of the breakdown not of meaning but of the modernist concept of rational[ized] order and representation. Add to this, the merging of the computer, information, telecommunication, and entertainment industries, and the foreclosure of the field seems obvious. We are already in a culture in which the cultural logic of information has shattered any comforting notion of order. Non-linear principles of form, in fact, are the signifier of a culture accustomed to fragmentation and montage. Information in this environment comes as an array rather than as a sequence. Deciphering the array or even producing the array is no longer a sign of "schizophrenic" experience, but of rendering the codes of experience as a new social logic. Indeed as Deleuze and Guattari write in "A Thousand Plateau's": "The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its subject...A system of this kind could be called a rhizome...The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing... Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways."

How will interactive media characterize its goals in ways that differ from theories of hypertext? The answer will not be in the form of a unified theory of interactivity. Rather, the responses will come as diverse approaches to the maturation of shifting theories of temporality, cognition, psychology, biology, narrative and technology. The mutations of interactivity emerge without a centralized theory. But the development of works that confront the issues of mutable narrative through rethinking of the relations between discourse, the apparatus and the issue of technology as a central ideological component of experience, is well underway. Alongside the development of interactive media must come a renewed assessment of the meaning of experience as representation.

In interactive media enactment and representation are linked. This conflation of agency and reception is crucial in articulating the potential of interactivity. The interplay between history, memory, fiction, and discourse poses essential questions about the meaning of interactive media. Rather than approaches that equate the formation of linkages in episodic forms, there are approaches that structure material as thematic. Instead of the textual cross-referencing, these works collapse many of the limits between text, sound and image and situate the user in the midst of assimilation and feedback. Episodic, or arrayed, information is created in forms that suggest that the usefulness of the unified image or text cannot serve as a totality, but rather that events are themselves complex configurations of experience, intention, and interpretation. In this sense, the narratives of electronics are non-linear and kinetic rather than linear and potential. They suggest transition and not resolution. The cultural space of media is increasingly circumscribed by an uneasy conjunction of powerful symbolic form, accelerated technology, and feedback. As these reach into the imagination of a fast growing audience for interactive media, they will serve to enjoin developers to abandon the metaphor of the screen as a page and, instead, to encourage the transposition of the media into a discourse with behavior as a form of interaction in which the extension of ideas resolve in the sphere of the experiential. Timothy Druckrey