MONA LISA OVERDRIVE

William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

AT the end of the twentieth century, all notions of artistic genius, originality and creativity become matters of software engineering. Beats extract themselves from melody. Narrative collapses, into the cycles and circuits of fragmented stories and non-linear text. Processed words, sampled music, and digital images repeat patterns like interlacing threads, all pulsing to the rhythms and speeds of gathering intelligence. Retrospectively, from behind the backlit screens, it suddenly seems that even the images most treasured for their god-given genius were themselves matters of careful composition and technical skill.

The Mona Lisa 's appeal is precisely the fact that the image does more than passively hang on the gallery wall. As her spectators always say, Mona Lisa looks at them as much as, if not more than, they can look at her. To the extent that it works so well, Leonardo's picture is a piece of careful software engineering. An interactive machine has been camouflaged as a work of Western art.

Freud takes her as the image of womanhood. The figure in the painting is ''the most perfect representation of the contrasts which dominate the erotic life of women; the contrast between reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding - consuming men as if they were alien beings''.

He quotes Muther on this famous duplicity: ''What especially casts a spell on the spectator is the daemonic magic of this smile. Hundreds of poets and authors have written about this woman, who now appears to smile at us so seductively, and now to stare so coldly and without soul into space; and no one has solved the riddle of her smile, no one has read the meaning of her thoughts. Everything, even the landscape, is mysteriously dreamlike, and seems to be trembling in a kind of sultry sensuality.''

They gaze at her in rapture, and then in fear. At her first mention, she is ''a veiled courtesan''. To eighteenth-century European man, she is ''divine'': Sade's ''very essence of femininity,'' and Bonapart's ''Madame,'' his ''Sphinx of the Occident''. By the early twentieth century, she is both ''treacherously and deliciously a woman,'' according to E M Forster; with ''the smile of a woman who has just dined off her husband,'' in Lawrence Durrell's words. Either way, the painting ''has produced the most powerful and confusing effect on whoever looks at it''. Whatever they see, she returns their gaze. Or perhaps they are returning hers. Like no other image, she catches their eye. They cannot help but be taken with her.

The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in sixteenth-century Florence and composed as a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, a merchant's wife. There are a few holes in this story, and sometimes suggestions that the image was really a self-portrait, or superimposed with Leonardo's mother's smile. But the standard history of the painting is supposed to be a straightforward affair. By the same token, the origins of the piece are extremely obscure. The painting is untitled, undated, and unsigned, absenting itself from all connection with its source. There are no records of its progress or completion, no preliminary sketches, no entries in Leonardo's diaries of his work, and no reference to his authorship until some years after his death.

Even the setting is unfamiliar and strangely out of step with time: Mona Lisa sits before an anonymous landscape which hints that human activities once took place in this awesome terrain, but were terminated at some point. And if Vasari is right and the painting really is a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, it is ''curiously lacking in contemporary detail. The dress is unusually plain for a gentlewoman and does not seem to conform with current fashion. The hair is not artfully styled...there is not a single piece of jewellery which could denote wealth or social position''.

''She was sixteen and SINless, Mona, and this older trick had told her once that that was a song, 'Sixteen and SINless'. Meant she hadn't been assigned a SIN when she was born, a Single Identification Number, so she'd grown up on the outside of most official systems. She knew that it was supposed to be possible to get a SIN, if you didn't have one, but it stood to reason you'd have to go into a building somewhere and talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona's idea of a good time or even normal behavior.''

William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

God-given inspiration, imagination, creativity: Mona Lisa cares for none of this. Her effectivity is simply a question of technical skill. As one of Leonardo's biographers points out, ''From the start, he witnessed the harnessing of artistry to skilled engineering,'' and it is widely acknowledged to be sfumato (blending) which gives the painting its outstanding senses of movement, shade, relief. These effects are produced by ''the application of many glazes, all of them so thin and fluid that not a single brush stroke can be found anywhere in the work''. With all other records of its origins, the picture's composition is completely obscured. As if it had come complete, intact...a ready-made interactive image, slotted into the read-only memory, five hundred years too soon.

Mona Lisa herself sits contrapposto, poised at more than one angle to her audience, as if turning toward, or away from, their view. Her shoulders, head, and eyes are centered on subtly different axes, giving her body a sense of movement, animating her eyes and her smile, allowing her gaze to be everywhere and the painting itself to work. ''Her instincts of conquest, of ferocity, all the heredity of the species", says Freud, "the will to seduce and to ensnare, the charm of deceit, the kindness that conceals a cruel purpose - all this appeared and disappeared by turns behind the laughing veil...''

Leonardo's works were neither discoveries nor inventions. Scholars have pointed out that ''a sentence we may think his own is actually a transcription from Pliny or Aesop, that a certain 'discovery' is in fact the work of Pecham or Alhazen, or that an 'invention' was well known to his contemporaries''. Transcription was one of his favourite pastimes, often copying out word for word long passages from books that interested him, and his paintings were widely copied as well. Virgin with Saint Anne , says Serge Bramly,''was much copied in toto and in detail: the authors of the copies are often difficult to identify,'' and there are ''many versions of the Madonna with a Yarn-Winder... None of them seems to be by Leonardo's own hand: some scholars believe that they are copies of a lost work, but there may never have been an original''.

It is not the painting's meaning, its symbolic value, or even its perfection that makes it work. Leonardo considered it flawed and incomplete. And it is certainly not for his originality that Leonardo is ever praised. He is often denigrated for what is dismissed as his tendency to copy material rather than produce originals, whatever they are supposed to be. But the unfinished quality of the work is, for a start, why it survived. Had he thought it perfect, the painting would have been sold and lost to his estate. Perhaps it is also this which leaves the painting so alive, in the making to this day. And if Leonardo was so often "copying an existing machine when he worked, the dimensionality, clarity, and precision of his diagrams...the unusual attention he pays to detail...were in themselves major innovations. There have been virtually no better technical drawings until the coming of computer-assisted

draughtsmanship" (Bramly).

''Molly, like the girl Mona, is SINless, her birth unregistered, yet around her name (names) swarm galaxies of supposition, rumor, conflicting data. Streetgirl, prostitute, bodyguard, assassin, she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residential images have long since been woven through the global culture.''

William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

Leonardo worked at a time before modernity had divided procedures into sciences and arts, means and ends, individuated creativity and general expertise. These are the barriers which the new syntheses and collaborations spawned by digital machines now undermine. The artist and the scientist reconnect with the idea of precision engineering - they have a symbiotic connectivity with what were once considered mere tools of their trades. Their creativity is now nothing without those tools.

Multidisciplinary research, like multimedia, is only the beginning of a process which signals the end of the narrow constraints by which modernity has kept exploratory experiment under wraps. People, thoughts, passages, means of communication, art forms. The fusions of club culture and networks of dance-music production are probably the best examples of these interconnections, and the explorations which emerge from them: DJs, dancers, samples, machines, keyboards, precise details of engineered sound, light, air, colors, neurochemistries. Not that it is possible to see what's going on, but this is hardly the prime concern. The prime concern is not what it looks like, but how it works.

Sadie Plant has recently established the Department of New Technology at Warwick University. This is an edited extract from her new book, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, on Fourth Estate.