ABSTRACT
As Gertrude Stein’s Picasso (1938, 30-31) observes, one of the greatest problems for the cultural cartographer is the task of identifying appropriate conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic points of reference in order to chart ongoing technological work-in-progress. Confronted by contemporary mutations in and across mass-market publicity, photography, film, television, video, and computer art-not to mention hybrid forms of multimedia installation and performance-it is difficult to discern good from bad, substantial from superficial, innovation from entropy, originality from banality.
