Philip Glahn and Cary Levine, <i>The Future Is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image</i> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024. Pp. 336. ISBN 978-0-262-54807-6. $45.00 (paperback).

In the mid-1960s, a colourful palette of art-and-technology projects burst forth from corporate laboratories, artists' lofts and museum galleries.This aesthetic explosion was catalysed by money, media exposure and the creative energies of engineers and artists alike.For some participants, it was a short, tumultuous affair.For others, these interactions left indelible marks on their professional lives.Then, after less than a decade of highly visible and expensive efforts, this wave of art-and-technology activity appeared to retreat.Critics attacked interdisciplinary partnerships as an aesthetic disappointment that had somehow sullied the art world.A related gripe was ontologicalwhat exactly were these partnerships producing?Sure, it was interesting, but was it really art? (Such debates persist today around artworks produced via artificial intelligence.)Finally, and perhaps most damning, critics attacked artists for compromising themselves ethically by collaborating with engineers, using military-derived technology and accepting corporate patronage.By the mid-1970s, the art-and-technology movement appeared as out of fashion as moon landings and other techno-utopian projects launched in the mid-1960s.This abeyance proved temporary, however.This is where Philip Glahn and Cary Levine, two professors of art history/theory, pick up the story.The Future Is Present examines the activities of Mobile Image, a two-person art collective founded in 1977.More specifically, Glahn and Levine focus on three works made by Mobile Image's two members, Kit Galloway (b.1948) and Sherrie Rabinowitz (1950-2013).Satellite Arts (The Image as Place) was made in 1977 in collaboration with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA).It featured a 'bidirectional link' enabled by a communications satellite which fostered artistic experimentation 'between two groups of dancers and technicians' (p.45) separated by thousands of miles.Three years later, Mobile Image unveiled Hole in Space (A Public Communication Sculpture) where two large screens in New York City and Los Angeles, linked by satellite, enabled members of the public to see and interact with another as part of a 'globally distributed electronic commons' (p.119).Finally, in 1984, Electronic Caf linked members of the public across several different neighborhoods in Los Angeles to form a 'telecollaborative network'.Glahn and Levine describe their book as a 'critical history' of Mobile Image, using the three aforementioned works to make 'an argument for the historical importance' of the art collective (pp. 1, 3).Despite these claims, their book works better when seen as a close reading, grounded in art criticism, of these three particular instantiations of new-media artworks.