In modernism, the critique of form displaced the earlier concern for content in the art of representation. In Europe the 'avant-garde' united aesthetic revolt with the political radicalisms of the left. In post-colonial Asia and Africa the avant-garde revived indigenous 'forms' in the cause of Nationalism. While in post-war New York avant-garde formalism came, paradoxically, to epitomise the hubris of the capitalist 'American dream'.

        Today, it can be said that revolutionary formal innovation has been sublimated in the parodic revolutions of fashion and in the calculated product obsolescence of the dominant technological monopolies. In this postmodern situation, formal concerns, be it in architecture, painting or the novel, have been eclipsed by the reflexive and ironic play of context. As parody, pastiche and even plagiarism proliferate, if innovation has been valued at all, it has been in terms of the art of appropriating and re-presenting pre-existing representations. Indeed, the recontextualisation of appropriated  material has become the normal way of generating new content.

        Meanwhile, as the various media of representation and  communication  coalesce into an interactive hypermedia the esoteric theories of postmodern culture are rapidly turning into everyday sensibilities. With the instantaneous connectivity of the Internet, the totality of representations exist in virtual proximity. In tandem with high resolution image input, processing and output, this omnipresence and multivalence of information has made contextual play the uncritical technologically determined norm in contemporary cultural production. It can be said that the familiarisation of the contextual approach in the context of the commodification of information has led to a renewed and rather unreflective interest in content.

        Indeed, the ethos that dominates the new digital media emanates from a technocentric order which is indifferent to critical theory and to the debates of multiculturalism, post-colonial theory, feminism etc. which are now central to international cultural and artistic discourse. With the cultural consequences of economic globalisation in mind, artists and theorists must begin to map the aesthetic, social, ethical and political parameters of the ongoing electronic convergence and transcend the torpor of uncritical content production.