Artnodes, no. 11 - Journal of Conflictology

Transcription

artnodes
E-JOURNAL ON ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
http://artnodes.uoc.edu
Artnodes, no. 11
November 2011
ISSN 1695-5951
Table of Contents
Editorial
Mapping the interrelationships between art, science and technology
for nearly ten years
Pau Alsina. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Node: “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art:
Towards a Hybrid Discourse?”
Introduction
Edward A. Shanken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 - 67
Five Degrees of Separation between Art and New Media:
Art and Technology Projects under the Critical Lens
Cristina Albu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 - 73
Could This Be What It Looks Like?
Lifelike Art and Art-and-Technology Practice
Jamie Allen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 - 79
Apparatus, Instrument, Apparel: an Essay of Definitions
Jean Gagnon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 - 84
Reassembling Components, Hybridizing the Human and the Machine:
Cross-disciplining Expanded Cinema and the Possibilities for
a Discourse of Interfacing
Ji-hoon Kim. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 - 91
Shot By Both Sides: Art-Science And The War
Between Science And The Humanities
Philip Galanter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 - 96
The Artist in the Laboratory: Co-operating (T)reasonably
Jane Prophet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 - 101
New Media in the Mainstream
Christiane Paul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 02 - 106
The Post-Critical Hybrid
Ronald Jones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 - 111
Transdisciplinary Strategies for Fine Arts and Science
Paul Rowlands Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 12 - 116
Artnodes, no. 11 (2011) I ISSN 1695-5951
62
A UOC scientific e-journal
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
artnodes
Editorial
Mapping the interrelationships
between art, science and
technology for nearly ten years
Artnodes has been mapping the interrelationships between art, science and technology for nearly
ten years, introducing innovative artistic practices while contributing both stories and theories that
help to give an account of the long history that connects the arts and humanities to science and
technologies. Our work during this time has tried to be a modest contribution to the study of an
area that spans several fields, a contribution that we hope will help advance studies in art history
and theory as well as in artistic practice and the enormous possibilities introduced by new media.
Art history covers the different ways in which art has been practised throughout history, with
different concepts and different materials and techniques. We are conscious that the taxonomies
of art are many and varied: some are eternal and others ephemeral, still others are harmless
while some act as a combative battering ram; there are trends or traps to slip on and slide into
absurdity, while there are others that silently usher in new paradigms. In short, true to our times,
there are a thousand types of taxonomy. We seek to accommodate all of these innovative practices
of a thousand and one possible taxonomies that are transforming and hybridizing with our times.
This dossier attempts to connect the different ways in which artistic practices have been
named, given that this is not just a question of a mere “name”, an inconsequential label, but an
amorphous set of technical, material, cultural, social, economic, political, ontological, aesthetic,
ethical and conceptual specificities. These give rise to a great many consequences that can cause
us to expand the way we see and experience the world or submerge us in the most absolute of
administrative silences.
Professor Edward Shanken has selected a collection of articles dealing with the relationship
between the different areas of new media art, the interrelationship of art and science, and
contemporary art for issue 11 of Artnodes. There are articles by leading experts such as Paul
Rowlands Thomas, Cristina Albu, Jamie Allen, Jean Gagnon, Philip Galanter, Ron Jones, Ji-hoon
Kim, Christiane Paul and Jane Prophet. They come from around the world and make significant
contributions to a crucial debate. We hope that their reflections can contribute to increased
knowledge and understanding of the uniqueness of this set of artistic practices and their place
in the professional context, and to their academic study and research.
Pau Alsina
Director of Artnodes and lecturer of the Arts
and Humanities Department of the UOC
63
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NodE
“New Media, Art-Science
and Contemporary Art:
Towards a Hybrid Discourse?”
Table of Contents
Introduction
Edward A. Shanken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 - 67
Five Degrees of Separation between Art and New Media:
Art and Technology Projects under the Critical Lens
Cristina Albu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 - 73
Lifelike Art and Art-and-Technology Practice
Jamie Allen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 - 79
Jean Gagnon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 - 84
Reassembling Components, Hybridizing the Human and the Machine:
Cross-disciplining Expanded Cinema and the Possibilities for
a Discourse of Interfacing
Ji-hoon Kim. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 - 91
Shot By Both Sides: Art-Science And The War
Between Science And The Humanities
Philip Galanter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 - 96
Jane Prophet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 - 101
Christiane Paul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 02 - 106
Ronald Jones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 - 111
Transdisciplinary Strategies for Fine Arts and Science
Paul Rowlands Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 12 - 116
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Introduction
New Media, Art-Science,
and Contemporary Art: Towards
a Hybrid Discourse?
Edward A. Shanken
Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and member
of the Media Art History faculty at Donau University (Austria)
Since the mid-1990s, new media has become an important force
for economic and cultural development, establishing its own
institutions, such as the ZKM, Ars Electronic Center, and Eyebeam.
Research at the intersections of art, science, and technology also
has gained esteem and institutional support, as demonstrated
by the Artists in Labs program, Switzerland, and the proliferation
of interdisciplinary PhD. programs around the world. During the
same period, mainstream contemporary art experienced dramatic
growth in its market and popularity, propelled by economic
prosperity and the proliferation of international museums, art
fairs and exhibitions from the Tate Modern to Art Basel Miami to
the Shanghai Biennial. This dynamic environment has nurtured
tremendous creativity and invention by artists, curators, theorists
and pedagogues in all branches. Yet rarely does the mainstream
art world converge with the new media and art-sci art worlds.
As a result, their discourses have become increasingly divergent.
The goal of my research on this topic (Shanken, 2009- and 2010)
and of the essays included in this issue of Artnodes is to map the
discourses of MCA and NMA onto each other to identify points of
convergence and divergence. I take as a primary premise that
the two are not as dissimilar as is commonly believed and that
each can learn a great deal from the other, which will benefit
contemporary art in general.
Edward A. Shanken
65
Mainstream Contemporary Art (MCA) is remarkably rich with
ideas about the relationship between art and society. Indeed, they
are frequently engaged with issues that pertain to global connectivity
and sociability in digital networked culture. Given the proliferation
of computation and the internet, perhaps it was inevitable that
central discourses in MCA would employ, if not appropriate, key
terms of digital culture, such as “interactivity,” “participation,”
“programming,” and “networks”. But the use of these terms in MCA
literature typically lacks a deep understanding of the scientific and
technological mechanisms of new media, the critical discourses that
theorize their implications and the interdisciplinary artistic practices
that are co-extensive with them. Similarly, mainstream discourses
typically dismiss NMA on the basis of its technological form or
immateriality, without fully appreciating its theoretical richness, or
the conceptual parallels it shares with MCA.
New media not only offers expanded possibilities for art but
offers valuable insights into the aesthetic applications and social
implications of science and technology. At its best, it does so in a
meta-critical way. In other words, it deploys technological media
in a manner that self-reflexively demonstrates how new media is
deeply imbricated in modes of knowledge production, perception,
and interaction, and is thus inextricable from corresponding
epistemological and ontological transformations. To its detriment,
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New Media, Art-Science, and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?
NMA and its discourses often display an impoverished understanding
of art history and recent aesthetic and theoretical developments in
MCA. Due to the nature of NMA practice and theory, as a matter of
principle, it often refuses to adopt the formal languages and material
supports of MCA. This is one of many reasons why it frequently fails
to resonate in those contexts.
The perennial debate about the relationship between art and
technology and mainstream art has occupied artists, curators, and
theorists for many decades. Central to these debates have been
questions of legitimacy and self-ghettoization, the dynamics of which
are often in tension with each other. In seeking legitimacy, NMA has
not only tried to place its practices within the theoretical and exhibition
contexts of MCA but has developed its own theoretical language and
institutional contexts. The former attempts generally have been so
fruitless and the latter so successful, that an autonomous and isolated
NMA art world emerged. It has expanded rapidly and internationally
since the mid-1990s, and has all the amenities found in MCA, except,
of course, the legitimacy of MCA.
At Art Basel in June 2010, I organized and chaired a panel
discussion with Nicolas Bourriaud, Peter Weibel, and Michael Joaquin
Grey (Shanken, 2010). That occasion demonstrated some challenges
to bridging the gap between MCA and NMA. One simple but clear
indication of this disconnect was the fact that Weibel, arguably
the most powerful individual in the world of NMA and Bourriaud,
arguably the most influential curator and theorist in the world of
MCA, had never met before. Although many artists, curators, and
scholars see significant parallels and overlaps between MCA and NMA
(Paul, 2008; Shanken, 2009-; Graham et al., 2010; Quaranta, 2010),
these worlds do not see eye-to-eye, no matter how much they may
share the rhetoric of interactivity, participation, and avant-gardism.
Indeed, Weibel took issue with Bourriaud’s distinction between direct
and indirect influences of technology on art. The inconsistency of
Bourriaud’s rejection of the former and his embrace of the latter
Weibel provocatively labeled, “media injustice.”
This scenario raises many questions that establish a fertile ground
for discussion and debate. The essays here interrogate the extent to
which the discourses of art-science, new media art and mainstream
contemporary art are commensurable. What are the central points of
convergence and divergence between MCA and NMA? Is it possible
to construct a hybrid discourse that offers nuanced insights into
each, while laying a foundation for greater mixing between them?
How have new means of production and dissemination altered the
role of the artist, curator, and museum? What insights into larger
questions of emerging art and cultural forms might be gleaned by
such a rapprochement?
In a global digital culture, where the materials and techniques
of new media are widely available and accessible to a growing
proportion of the population, many of the most profound challenges
for contemporary art push well beyond the MCA/NMA debate. Millions
Edward A. Shanken
and millions of people around the world participate in sociable media,
and have the ability to produce and share with millions and millions
of other people their own texts, images, sound recordings, videos
and GPS traces. A YouTube video, like Daft Hands, can delight and
amaze 45 million viewers (Feb. 2010), spawning its own subculture
of celebrities, masterpieces, and remixers. In this context what are
the roles of the artist, the curator, and the critic? Regardless of
medium what do professional artists and theorists have to offer that
is special, that adds value and insight to this dynamic, collective,
creative culture?
The contributors to this issue of Artnodes come from a broad
range of disciplinary backgrounds, including art practice, art history
and criticism, curating and curatorial studies, design practice, film
theory, media studies, and other fields. They are broadly international,
representing North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The papers
appearing here were presented at a panel discussion sponsored by the
Leonardo Education and Arts Forum (LEAF) at the Annual Conference
of the College Art Association of America (CAA) in New York in February
2011. The response to the call for papers was so strong and the
diversity of approaches so rich that I, as chair, elected to include nine
panelists for the 2 ½ hour session in order to have as many voices
represented as possible. Tremendous discipline on everyone’s part
was required in order to accommodate twice the typical number of
speakers in a CAA panel, and the authors are to be commended for
condensing their ideas into the short form demanded. The success
of their talks in that context has prompted their publication as short
essays of approximately two-thousand words in English and Spanish
in Artnodes, under the same title, “New Media, Art-Science, and
Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?”. We hope that these
texts will spark ongoing dialogue about these issues and contribute
to a bridging the gap between the discourses of MCA and NMA.
Reference
GRAHAM, B.; COOK, S. (2010). Rethinking Curating: Art After New
Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
PAUL, C. (ed.) (2008). New Media in the White Cube and Beyond.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
QUARANTA, D. (2010). “The Postmedia Perspective” (English
translation of chapter from Media, New Media, Postmedia. Milan:
Postmediabooks, 2010) [Accessed: 12, Jan, 2010].
<Rhizome.org>
SHANKEN, Edward A. (2009-). Contemporary Art and New Media:
Toward a Hybrid Discourse? (unpublished draft).
<http://hybridge.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/writings-media/>
SHANKEN, Edward A. (Panel chair) (2010). Art Basel Conversation:
Contemporary Art and New Media: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?
Video documentation: <http://www.artbasel.com/go/id/mhv/>
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New Media, Art-Science, and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?
Recommended Citation
SHANKEN, Edward A. (coord) (2011). “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards
a Hybrid Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 65-116. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-shanken/artnodes-n11-new-media-art-science-and-contemporary-art-eng>
This article is – unless indicated otherwise – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 3.0
licence. You may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, provided you attribute it (authorship,
journal name, publisher) in the manner specified by the author(s) or licensor(s). The full text of the
licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/deed.en.
CV
Edward A. Shanken
Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and member
of the Media Art History faculty at Donau University, Austria
eshanken@artexetra.com
Edward A. Shanken is an American art historian, whose work focuses
on the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on
experimental new media art and visual culture. His scholarship has
appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated
into six languages.
Bio note on the Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_A._
Shanken>
Edward A. Shanken
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Article
New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art:
Towards a Hybrid Discourse?
Five Degrees of Separation
between Art and New Media:
Art and Technology Projects
under the Critical Lens
Cristina Albu
University of Pittsburgh
Submission date: June, 2011
Accepted date: September, 2011
Published in: November, 2011
Abstract
Given the rise in participatory theories, it is surprising to note that early art and technology
projects and new media have been generally excluded from the major art historical trajectories
delineating the emergence of socially engaged forms of art spectatorship. They have been mainly
associated with theories of interaction rather than with Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential theory of
relational aesthetics. This separation is a sign of a much larger historical divide between new
media and contemporary art. By analyzing critical responses to exhibitions from the late 1960s
and early 1970s, I aim to identify the main criteria employed in the evaluation of collaborations
between artists, engineers, and art institutions. Some of these criteria highlighted the persistent
separation between humanity and technology, contemplation and participation, perception and
thought. I argue that the heated discords over the value of early art and technology projects
foreshadowed current debates over the social implications of new media.
Keywords
art and technology, new media, participatory art practices, relational aesthetics, system
aesthetics
Cristina Albu
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Five Degrees of Separation between Art and New Media…
Cinco grados de separación entre el arte y los nuevos medios:
proyectos de arte y tecnología bajo el prisma crítico
Resumen
Dado el incremento de las teorías participativas, sorprende que los proyectos pioneros de arte y
tecnología y de nuevos medios se hayan excluido generalmente de las principales trayectorias
de la historia del arte que han descrito la emergencia de las formas de arte comprometidas
socialmente con el espectador. Estos proyectos han tendido a asociarse con teorías de interacción más que con la influyente teoría de la estética relacional de Nicolas Bourriaud. Esta
separación resulta indicativa de una brecha histórica mucho más profunda entre los nuevos
medios y el arte contemporáneo. Al analizar las respuestas críticas a exposiciones de finales
de la década de 1960 y principios de la de 1970, mi objetivo es identificar los principales
criterios empleados para evaluar las colaboraciones entre artistas, ingenieros e instituciones
artísticas. Algunos de estos criterios subrayaron la separación continua entre humanidad y
tecnología, entre contemplación y participación, entre percepción y pensamiento. Argumento
que los intensos desacuerdos respecto al valor de los primeros proyectos de arte y tecnología
prefiguraron los debates actuales respecto a las implicaciones sociales de los nuevos medios.
Palabras clave
arte y tecnología, nuevos medios, prácticas artísticas participativas, estética relacional, estética
de sistemas
New media practices continue to remain in a separate sphere of
critical discourse on contemporary art. Although they often provide
an interface not only for challenging exchanges between humans
and responsive environments, but also for developing connections
between multiple participants, they are labeled interactive rather than
participatory and have been excluded from the cluster of contemporary
art practices brought under the umbrellas of participation (Bishop,
2006) and relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002). The misguided idea
that only art projects of a non-technological nature can truly trigger
interpersonal relations between viewers appears quite paradoxical
in the contemporary context marked by an exponential increase in
the technological mediation of social encounters. Starting from this
diagnosis, I will outline the origins of discord over the value of art and
technology projects by examining the critique of such works in the late
1960s and early 1970s. The critical reception of these earlier works
anticipated current debates over the aesthetic and social value of
new media. It reflected the deeply ingrained modern binaries between
reason and the senses, form and content, humanity and technology.
Art and technology projects were developed in the US throughout
the second half of the 1960s within three major frameworks: 1)
group exhibitions that brought together artists who experimented
with different materials (whether based on new technology or not)
to create unexpected experiences or comment on changing relations
between humans and technology;1 2) art and technology programs
initiated by museums, which invited artists to collaborate with
industrial corporations;2 3) groups of artists and engineers such as
Experiments in Art and Technology who collaborated independently
of a specific art institution and made their own choices concerning
the type of support they received from industrial corporations.
For the art critics who doubted the value of art and technology
projects these works failed to provide an adequate response to
technological developments because they were a mere source of
enchantment with the wonders of technology; for those who supported
them, they were not to be taken at face value, but understood
as precipitators of fresh perceptual experiences and changing
sensibilities. In what follows, I will present five criteria that informed
the critical judgments on art and technology projects during the
1960s and early 1970s. I will dwell at greater length on the criterion
concerning the participatory modes elicited by these works in order
to bring to the surface their marginalization in relation to Bourriaud’s
influential theory of relational aesthetics in spite of their significant
contribution to shifts in art spectatorship.
The most common criterion for evaluating these works was their
ability to generate a critique of the potentially dehumanizing effects of
1.An example of this would be the exhibitions curated by Ralph T. Coe at the Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City: Sound, Light, Silence
(1966), Light (1967) and Magic Theater (1968).
2. Curator Maurice Tuchman coordinated such a program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) between 1967-1971.
Cristina Albu
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technology. Critics believed that artists’ exploration of the way art and
technology projects affected perception and consciousness ought to
take precedence over the desire to elicit fascination with the novelty of
technological devices and effects. Expressing his admiration for Jean
Tinguely’s self-destructive machines, art historian Jonathan Benthall
maintained that as compelling as the “romance of technology” might
be, artists had to develop a critical attitude towards its indiscriminate
use (Benthall, 1972, p. 106). Like many critics of his generation,
he disapproved of works that merely catalyzed enthusiasm for the
sublime aspects of technological innovation without enhancing one’s
awareness of its potential detrimental effects.
A second criterion was the capacity of art and technology
projects to elicit both sensorial engagement and mental reflection.
Noticing that the supremacy of humans over machines was coming
under threat with the development of computer technology, critics
hoped that art and technology projects would succeed in engaging
viewers intellectually instead of providing a mere hedonistic escape
from mundane sensorial experiences. In 1968, curator Ralph T. Coe
selected the works for The Magic Theatre exhibition based on the
way they enhanced viewers’ awareness of mental processes. Despite
his efforts to highlight psychic immersion, the exhibition created a
carnivalesque atmosphere in which visitors gave in to performative
impulses. Art historian George Ehrlich argued that the value of the
exhibition became evident only if the viewer surpassed “the point
where sensory experiences were allowed to override the intellectual
appreciation of the project” (Ehrlich, 1969, p. 40). Thus, it was believed
that the significance of these works would become apparent only
after a viewer’s encounter with them.
A third recurrent criterion in the evaluation of art and technology
projects was represented by their aesthetic qualities and their potential
to deliver a meaningful message, which superseded the novelty of the
medium. In the eyes of art critics, many art and technology projects
failed to qualify as art because they prioritized spectacular visual or
acoustic effects over aesthetic coherence. Although the boundaries
between art and life were increasingly contested in the 1960s, artists
who conceived technology-based projects were often expected to
develop a formal vocabulary characteristic of the new mediums
they employed. Concomitantly, they needed to provide a meaningful
critique of the subservience of human interests to technological
innovation. Art critics such as Barbara Rose feared that some of
these practices could downgrade art and turn it into a mere source
of entertainment for the masses. In a review of exhibitions focused
on the use of television as medium, she underscored “the unlikely
union of art quality with mass culture” and voiced her concerns about
the submissiveness of viewers to sensational spectacles that offered
no ground for critical reflection (Rose, 1969, p. 36).
A fourth criterion was the legitimacy of the collaborative terms
established between artists, museum institutions, and sponsors. In
the early 1970s, it was frequently argued that the actual negotiations
Cristina Albu
between artists and patrons over art and technology projects were
in fact more important than the actual product of the collaborations.
Disappointed with the outcomes of the Art and Technology program
(A&T, 1967-1971) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),
numerous art critics considered that art and corporations needed
to part ways in order to avoid the corruption of aesthetic and social
interests. Max Kozloff found it ironical that the availability of larger than
usual funding and technological resources had not made the LACMA
collaborative platform a success story: “There was a certain pleasure
to be derived from the thought of the thousands of work hours and
dollars expended on these fey and whimsical contraptions” (Kozloff,
1971, p. 76). It was widely argued that the tense collaborations
between artists and corporations had compromised the success of
the projects from the very beginning. Due to many factors, including
the economic recession of the early 1970s, the enthusiasm for art
and technology projects drastically dwindled.
The fifth criterion – the interactive modes triggered by art and
technology projects – is the primary focus of this paper. Art critics of
the 1960s feared that some of these works might restrict the autonomy
and creativity of art participants. They denounced the way these works
prescribed exhibition visitors’ behavior by encouraging them to move
or act in specific ways to activate responsive environments. Despite
being generally supportive of art and technology projects, A&T curator
Jane Livingston was dismayed by the way some of them influenced
the behavior of museum visitors. Commenting upon Howard Jones’s
Sonic Game Room (1968) where participants could superimpose their
shadows over photoelectric cells in order to activate various sounds,
she remarked that the work resembled “a distasteful pseudo-scientific
laboratory presumptuously set forth in the name of art” (Livingston,
1968, p. 67). This type of critical judgment proliferated because
critics tended to think about the art viewer in the singular and did
not consider the way art and technology projects encouraged group
creativity. Participants in Jones’s environment at the Magic Theatre
exhibition did not simply act in isolation from one another. The sounds
they created intermingled and led to complex variations that diverged
from what Livingston envisioned as a pre-established acoustic
effect. David Antin employed the same criterion in his assessment
of Rauschenberg’s Mud-Muse (1968-1971). Created in collaboration
with Teledyne Corporation as part of A&T, the work consisted of a
basin in which bubbles spurted to the surface of a viscous mass of
mud with more or less energy depending on the degree of noise
made by participants. Antin suggested that responsive environments
encouraged viewers to act in quasi-mechanical ways: “The idea of
using a human being as a power source and/or switch, which is
about all that Rauschenberg is doing, is if considered seriously quite
possibly humiliating” (Antin, 1971, p. 26). The critic claimed that this
project indicated the controlling potential of technology that could
subdue all forms of interaction. Like Livingston, Antin thought about
the interaction between the viewer and the environment in binary
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terms. He overlooked the fact that Mud-Muse reacted to the sounds
produced by multiple visitors interacting with one another, as well
as to the noise produced by its very own acoustic system based on
the bubbly eruptions and a set of sound recordings. Rauschenberg
argued that he didn’t want it “to have a one-to-one relationship to
the spectator” (Rauschenberg in Tuchman, 1971, p. 287). Above all,
the artist envisioned it as an interdependent network of humans,
physical processes, and technological devices.
The idea that exhibitions might constitute laboratory-like
environments for putting art viewers’ sensorial responses to the
test is less unfathomable in recent years, at least in the context of
non-digital art practices. Indeed, Bourriaud has referred to the Palais
de Tokyo, which he co-founded in Paris in 1999, as “more laboratory
than museum” (Bourriaud in Simpson, 2001, p. 47). Carsten Höller,
who has a professional scientific background, unabashedly titled his
Turbine Hall installation Test Site (2006). Tate Modern visitors could
navigate from one museum floor to another through gigantic slides
that enhanced their awareness of movement through space and time.
Since the role of the participant in such installations is conceptualized
as that of a “player or performer” rather than that of a subject of a
technological experiment, it is not presumed that such works diminish
the agency of individuals (Morgan, 2006, p. 13) as critics had claimed of
art and technology in the 1960s. Moreover, Test Site is not a new media
environment; hence, it poses fewer challenges in terms of a contest
between humans and technology. This is probably one of the reasons
why Höller’s works have more easily been associated with “relational
aesthetics” even though they rely on scientific experimentation.
Bourriaud’s exclusion of new media from relational art is most
likely motivated by the presupposition that these practices can limit
the dynamic character of social relations spontaneously formed
between art participants. The curator suggests that the relational
art practices from the 1990s were devised as a strategic counterresponse to the proliferation of human interaction with technology:
“[…] while interactive technologies developed at an exponential
rate, artists were exploring the arcane mysteries of sociability and
interaction. The theoretical and practical horizon of that decade’s
art was largely grounded in the realm of inter-human relations”
(Bourriaud, 2002, p. 70). Relational aesthetics is human-centered
and does not allow for the merger of human networks with non-human
networks (eg, ecosystems, information systems) as did Burnham’s
theories of systems aesthetics from the late 1960s (Burnham, 1967,
1969). In quite an antiquated manner, Bourriaud is intent on restricting
the space of intersubjective relations to groups of people, situated in
close proximity to one another. About thirty years earlier, Burnham
announced that technology opened up new possibilities for creating
encounters between participants. He suggested that gradually artists
“will deal less and less with artifacts contrived for formal value, and
increasingly with men enmeshed with and within responsive systems”
(Burnham, 1968, 363). Thus, he implied that a system of information
Cristina Albu
would engender the formation of a network of participants engaged
in interdependent processes of perception and cognition.
Art and technology projects in the 1960s were thought to be
complicit with the military-industrial complex and with the society of
spectacle. Although they challenged the autonomy of the art object,
as well as its materiality and ideal permanence, they do not figure in
mainstream discourses as the progenitors of major transformations in
contemporary art practices. The non-linear character of contemporary
art historical trajectories, combined with the strong participatory
tendencies across mediums and the consolidation of theories concerning
the interdependence between human and technological networks,
highlights the artificial separation of new media from mainstream art
narratives. In the future, art participation and interaction with responsive
environments will probably no longer be perceived as contrasting
forms of art spectatorship, especially since the development of Web
2.0 technology has cast new light on the way new media stimulates
human creativity, personal reflection, and interpersonal connections.
Reference
ANTIN, D. (1971). “Art and the Corporations”. Art News. Vol. 70, iss.
5, pp. 22-26, 52-56.
BENTHALL, J. (1972). Science and Technology in Art Today. New York:
Praeger.
BISHOP, C. (2006). Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and
London: Whitechapel Gallery.
BOURRIAUD, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du
Réel.
BURNHAM, J. (1967). “System Esthetics”. Artforum. Vol. 6, iss. 1,
pp. 30-35.
BURNHAM, J. (1968). Beyond Modern Sculpture. The Effects of
Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century. New
York: George Brazilier.
BURNHAM, J. (1969). “Real Time Systems”. Artforum. Vol. 8, iss. 1,
pp. 49-55.
COE, R.T. (1970). The Magic Theater; Art Technology Spectacular.
Kansas City: Circle Press.
EHRLICH, G. (1969). “The Magic Theatre Exhibition: An Appraisal”.
Art Journal. Vol. 29, iss. 1, pp. 40-44.
KOZLOFF, M. (1971). “The Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle”.
Artforum. Vol. 10, iss. 2, pp. 72-76.
LIVINGSTON, J. (1968). “Kansas City”. Artforum. Vol. 7, iss. 1, pp. 66-67.
MORGAN, J. (2006). Carsten Höller. Test Site. London: Tate Publishing.
ROSE, B. (1969, August 15). “Television as Art, ‘inevitable’”. Vogue, p. 36.
SIMPSON, B. (2001). “Public Relations. An Interview with Nicolas
Bourriaud”. Artforum. Vol. 39, iss. 8, pp. 47-48.
TUCHMAN, M. (1971). A Report on the Art and Technology Program of
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 1967-1971. Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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ALBU, Cristina (2011). “Five Degrees of Separation between Art and New Media: Art and Technology
Projects under the Critical Lens”. In: Edward A. SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media, Art-Science and
Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 68-73. UOC
[Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-albu/artnodes-n11albu-eng>
ISSN 1695-5951
CV
Cristina Albu
cristina.albu@gmail.com
Henry Clay Frick Department
of History of Art and Architecture
104 Frick Fine Arts Building
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Cristina Albu is a PhD candidate specializing in Contemporary Art and
Critical Theory in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at
the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation traces the genealogy of
interpersonal spectatorship in installations that trigger affective relations
between viewers interacting with reflective surfaces, closed-circuit
television systems or sensor-based environments. She is one of the
founders and editors of the Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in
Visual Culture journal. She has conducted research on participatory art
practices, new media, museum studies and site-specific installation art.
Her doctoral dissertation entitled Mirroring Processes: Interpersonal
Spectatorship in Installation Art since the 1960s traces the genealogy of
contemporary installations that encourage viewers to affectively relate
to one another by watching themselves seeing and acting individually or
as a group. By examining works that incorporate reflective surfaces, live
video feedback, or sensors, she aims to identify the strategies employed
by contemporary artists around the world (eg, Michelangelo Pistoletto,
Dan Graham, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer) to
challenge the binary relation between the beholder and the art object
and heighten viewers’ awareness of the social and spatial context of
aesthetic experience.
Cristina
Alex
Adriaansens
Albu
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Albu was granted the Excellence in Teaching Award by the Department
of History of Art and Architecture of University of Pittsburgh, where she
has taught courses on Introduction to World Art, Introduction to Modern
Art, Introduction to Contemporary Art, and Introduction to Western
Architecture. During the academic year 2011-2012, she will serve as
visiting instructor in this department.
For more information about the author, visit: <http://www.haa.pitt.
edu/person/cristina-albu>.
Cristina Albu
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article
Lifelike Art and Art-and-Technology
Practice
Jamie Allen
Culture Lab
Newcastle University
Abstract
For more than ten years, a number of archival and curatorial projects have mapped out a
trajectory of art-historical roots for the values and practices of new media arts, its conventions
and institutions. These accounts are, as often as not, earnest attempts made by practitioners
and theorists alike to “save” new media’s artists and works from the purported inevitability
of becoming a ghettoized subculture, walled off from the resources and distribution channels
associated with Western contemporary (and commercial) museum and gallery culture. Saving
new media in this way purportedly holds the promise of improving critical discourse surrounding
“the work”, developing audience and interest, stimulating economic potential, and securing
new media its rightful detent as another lineal “movement” in histories of creative practice.
The experimental, process-driven and often anti-professional outlook of the conceptual
avant-garde of the latter half of the 20th century provides an oft-cited and somewhat
contradictory framework for situating new media within a contemporary art system that has
remained relatively formal. As well, the current proliferation, popularization and extension
of abilities that only a decade ago were the exclusive purvey of self-proclaimed new media
artists have resulted in a number of points of entry for non-specialists to access concepts in
non-objective art, participatory performance, process and systems-art. Is the dream of the
early techno-artistic avant-garde becoming a reality?
Keywords
new media, digital, interactive, histories, genealogy, contemporary, art, worlds
Jamie Allen
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Could This Be What It Looks Like? Lifelike Art...
¿Y si esto es lo que parece?
Arte que imita la vida y práctica artística tecnológica
Resumen
Desde hace más de diez años, diversos proyectos de archivo y comisariado se han dedicado a
rastrear las raíces artístico-históricas de los valores y prácticas del arte de los nuevos medios,
sus convenciones e instituciones. Estas descripciones constituyen, con bastante frecuencia,
esfuerzos concienzudos por parte tanto de artistas como de teóricos por «evitar» que obras
y artistas de los nuevos medios se conviertan, en teoría inevitablemente, en una subcultura
segregada, aislada de los recursos y canales de distribución asociados con la cultura contemporánea (y comercial) occidental de museos y galerías. Se supone que la salvación de los
nuevos medios en estos términos promete asimismo mejorar el discurso crítico en torno a
«la obra», generar un público y un interés, estimular el potencial económico y garantizarles su
legitimidad como otro «movimiento» lineal sumado a las demás historias de la práctica creativa.
La perspectiva experimental, a menudo antiprofesional y procesal, de la vanguardia
conceptual desarrollada en la segunda mitad del siglo xx proporciona un marco muy habitual y un tanto contradictorio para situar los nuevos medios dentro de un sistema de arte
contemporáneo que ha permanecido relativamente convencional. Asimismo, la proliferación,
popularización y extensión actual de aptitudes que tan sólo hace una década parecían
restringirse a los autoproclamados artistas de los nuevos medios han generado diversos
puntos de acceso para no especialistas a los conceptos de arte no objetivo, performance
participativa, arte de procesos y sistemas. ¿Se está haciendo realidad el sueño de la primera
vanguardia técnico-artística?
Palabras clave
nuevos medios, digital, interactivo, historias, genealogía, contemporáneo, arte, mundos
Introduction
breakdown between producer and consumer (to say nothing of the
“comments” facility). And all the while Scott-Heron’s text calls forth a
revolution outside of cycles of production and consumption, giving way
to a culture where, as artist Allan Kaprow suggested, we all embody
a “sophistication of consciousness in the arts” in our everyday lives
(Kaprow, 1971).
A homemade music video for Gil Scott-Heron’s famous anticonsumerist song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised on YouTube
stands as a handy distillation of relations in the rhetorics and realities
of contemporary art, technologised art practice and popular culture
(craninthebrave, 2009). With Gil Scott-Heron, the quintessential antiestablishment “black Bob Dylan” (Smith 2009), we are reminded of
how many of our current notions of the role of the avant-garde begin
with the ideas of 1960s counterculture. The use of YouTube as delivery
channel for a visual complement to the original audio track situates
it within an unexceptional barrage of browser icons, banner ads and
metadata clutter. The lyrics of the song, belittling as they do advertising
and television culture (“The revolution will not ‘Go better with Coke’”),
make you wonder how pleased the Scott-Heron of 1970 would be to
see his creation juxtaposed in this way, even if it includes a link to
“Download this Song: AmazonMP3 iTunes”. The maker of the YouTube
segment, user “crinanthebrave”, effortlessly manifests the potential
of current technology to collocate and recreate our visual archive at
will. The video - presumably brought into the world with few concerns
for audience, form, context, or recognition - articulates a now-familiar
Jamie Allen
Best laid plans of gerbils and men
Art-and-technology practice and discourse (“new media,” “digital
art,” and “interactive art”), are most often historicised as having
been deeply influenced by the motivations of 1960s and 1970s
artistic counterculture (Wardrip-Fruin et al., 2003). Artists linked to
Fluxus, including Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik and related
thinkers and makers, themselves influenced by Cage’s taking up of
McLuhan and Fuller, were among the first to explore technologies as
part of processes challenging artistic convention. Fluxus and other
countercultural artistic tendencies developed understandings of artistic
freedom that led to a number of non-art, anti-form and performative
practices employing technology, inside and outside the gallery. For
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example, Kaprow’s Hello (1969), multiplexed five television cameras
with twenty-seven closed circuit monitors in public spaces to allow
people in different locations in Boston to make contact with each other
(Youngblood, 1970). The result was a progressive fusion of conceptual
art and technological progressivism — a techno-artistic avant-garde.
These early groups saw in “all this electronic information [that] has
no weight, no gravity” (Paik, 1985) opportunities for a questioning
of the material in the immaterial, the located in the distributed.
Jack Burnham’s writings on art-and-technology of this period
set out a more structured account “rooted in the concerns of his
contemporaries” (Rampley, 2005) and developed through Systems
Theory. Burnham held that systems and cybernetics were in fact
a catalyst for conceptual, anti-form and anti-object ideas in art.
He writes, “[The] cultural obsession with the art object is slowly
disappearing and being replaced by what might be called ‘systems
consciousness.’ Actually, this shift from the direct shaping of matter
to a concern for organising quantities of energy and information
[…]” (Burnham 1968). Software, Information Technology: Its New
Meaning for Art curated by Burnham at the Jewish Museum in New
York City (1970) seems to many (including Shanken, 1999; Penny,
1999; Gere, 2005; and Skrebowski, 2006) at once a first great triumph
and a great failure of early art-and-technology communities working
with the mainstream art world. The exhibition included a number of
seminal pieces that used new technologies in ways that reflected the
impact of electronics and information systems on art, as well as other
social structures and consciousness itself. Nicholas Negroponte’s
contribution was “Seek, a computer-controlled robotic environment
that, at least in theory, cybernetically reconfigured itself in response
to the behaviour of the gerbils that inhabited it” (Shanken, 1999).
Fred Turner (2006) charts a further intermingling of information
technologies and countercultures that would challenge the status
quo of the late 1960s, focusing on Stewart Brand, founding editor
of the Whole Earth Catalog (WE), an alternative cultural almanac
first published in 1968. Brand was instrumental in shaping social
cultures of computing and digital creativity. The WE office in Menlo
park was host to both Stanford University engineers, working on the
early internet, and hippies and counterculture gurus of 1960s. In
the 1980s, WE morphed into an early virtual community, The WELL
(Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), best known for its electronic bulletin
boards, where John Cage and other luminaries posted writings (Paik,
1985). Some of Brand’s associates contributed to founding Wired
Magazine, the popular journal of techno-culture. Turner notes the
specific influence of Kaprow’s ideas on Brand: “Happenings offered
a picture of a world where hierarchies had dissolved, where each
moment might be as wonderful as the last, and where every person
could turn her or his life into art” (Turner, 2006).
Such motivations call to mind what are now the tiresome and
paradoxical rhetorics of creative emancipation that we hear from
web 2.0 pundits, digital creatives and digital artists alike. There are
Jamie Allen
contradictions inherent in the presumed origins and present day
anti-establishment practices of new media that should indeed be
subject to criticism, much as Kaprow’s Happenings have been, such
as for example: Were they really interactive, Kaprow having prescribed
everything in advance? (Sandford, 1995) Why would non-art artists be
so deeply concerned with the mainstream art world in the first place?
Although talk of “freedom” may at times seem idealistic, tiresome or
divergent, real creative, artistic and social diversification has been
wrought by contemporary technologies. Although inconsistent, nonart and anti-form ideas were rendered consequential by what they
countered: the neo-modernist art world of the early 1960s. Similarly,
the military-industrial origins of new media technologies make them a
much-needed vehicle for subversive attempts to open up information
flow, increase participation and spark critical investigation. But even
as we call into question the truth, potency or necessity of early
conceptual art; even as we experience interactivity via technological
affordances, we acknowledge their similarity of ambition and intent
as an equivalent drive towards change, openness and interaction
between and with people. It is this that gives both 1960s culture
and contemporary new media art their common status as contrarian
countercultures in the first place: “Anything less than paradox would
be simplistic” (Kaprow, 1986).
Burnham vs. Mcshine
Exaggerating an idea set out by Charlie Gere (2005) we might posit
1970 as the year a face-off took place between art-and-technology
and mainstream conceptual art (Gere, 2005). Two New York shows
were mounted in this year which employed dissimilar models for
the ways in which technology could be absorbed into mainstream
contemporary art. Software, curated by Jack Burnham and installed
at the Jewish Museum, employed a somewhat determinist software/
hardware metaphor in its overall design, as well as including works
by engineers as well as artists. Work in the show used actual
technological materials to show relations to comparable complex
systems. Information, a concurrent exhibition curated by Kynaston
McShine for the Museum of Modern Art, showed no works that
were based in material technologies, but instead favoured entirely
conceptual artists and approaches.
Luke Skrebowski has outlined how the systems theory upon
which Burnham based his theory of art and the Software exhibition
in the end became associated with “the command and control needs
of a burgeoning postwar military-industrial complex” (Skrebowski,
2006). Skrebowski criticises Burnham’s work for hinting at “but never
comprehensively follow[ing] through on, a disarticulation of systems
theory from its techno-industrial deployment. In so doing he only
suggested the possibilities that systems theory might offer a critical
art practice”. The dominant narrative that emerges from this contest
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for the hearts and minds of the early 1970s art world has Burnham’s
suggestions and possibilities retiring to the dust bins of history,
and Burnham himself disappearing from the art world altogether
(Skrebowski, 2006). Comforted by the sustained (and profitable)
myth of the prominent, isolated, sheltered artist, mainstream artistic
practice absorbed conceptual art into the culture industry of the late
70s, 80s and early 90s.
storytellers of an ideologically sympathetic, yet sales and box-officeconscious gallery and museum culture. One would be remiss not to
acknowledge the profound and comprehensive nature of the 1960s
countercultural message: a radical rethinking of the artist’s position
within society, and a radical questioning of the entire idea of art. As
Kaprow noted, “Only when active artists willingly cease to be artists
can they convert their abilities, like dollars into yen, into something the
world can spend: play. [...] Gradually, the pedigree ‘art’ will recede into
irrelevance” (Kaprow, 1961). Burnham was in accord, “In an advanced
technological culture the most important artist best succeeds by
liquidating his position as artist vis-a-vis society” (Burnham, 1968).
Returning to the presumed failure of art-and-technology in
the early 70s, Gere writes, “Perhaps the real issue about art and
technology was not that it failed, but rather that it succeeded too
well”, in that “much of what such art represented or sought to achieve
was co-opted by the computer industry” (Gere, 2005). In a way, the
techno-artistic avant-garde of the late 1960s has been vindicated by
the development of information systems into aesthetic, multimedia,
interactive and social tools. This success of art-and-technology makes
plausible the hypothesis that the 700,000+ daily users on 4chan’s /b/
message board is an extension of this avant-garde — decentralised,
anonymous and relational. Just as YouTube user “crinanthebrave”
reconstitutes Scott-Heron’s revolutionary anthem, technology-literate
creative communities “create pathways through culture by reorganizing
history to bring forward new ideas” and “merge everyday life with the
aesthetic realm” (Troemel, 2010). As such, they remain true to the
heritage of the countercultures from which art-and-technology sprang.
In a techno-scientific culture, an experience of the everyday is
an experience of and through technology. Contemporary art-andtechnology practice, with its rebelliousness and affinities towards
a broad range of expressive modes, is a counterculture — but with
numerous cultures to counter. Commercial and industrial interests do
not always sit well within culture that has grown used to independent
production and creative freedoms. Likewise, the structures of the
mainstream art world remain somewhat unreceptive to the diversified,
collocated, and open structures that a technological art practice
allows. Like the best art, the best new technologies always challenge
convention. Productive frictions maintain the diversity of a creative
domain, and “antagonism is a by-product of free choice and speech”
(Troemel, 2010). Art-and-technology culture may one day cease its
evasions of and tensions with a more mainstream art world, but we
should hope that this day may never come.
Could this be what it looks like?
(A speculative conclusion)
Artists and theorists still find themselves trying to make sense of
the uncomfortable fit that new media and art-and-technology often
make in the contemporary art world. The practice is as dispersed,
heterogeneous and contrarian now as it has been in the past. But
considering the lineage just traced, should this come as much of
a surprise? Derived as it is from movements as radically anti-art
and anti-institution as Kaprow’s Happenings, Environments and
Activities; as revisionist and fiercely independent as Stewart Brand’s
countercultural cyberculture; as utopian and confrontational to the
object of Western Art in its distribution of creative agency as Burnham’s
Systems Art – we should be more astounded were art-and-technology
to smoothly and comfortably merge itself into the mainstream and
commercial art world.
It is likely that there is a resistant, countercultural strand of
techno-social DNA which evolved through and into art-and-technology
and new media practices. Many new media practitioners shyly admit
to “hippie computer nerd” inclinations, in spite of themselves. Paul
Slocum, net artist and founder of a seminal group-surfing blog
bemoans the fact that “many artists I know, myself included, have
idealistic tendencies and have really latched onto these internet
philosophies of freedom (as in both speech and beer)” (Slocum, 2010).
These are ideological standards rooted in the values of foregoing
creative techno-cultures, which actively resisted the mainstream of
their day. There are, of course, paradoxes to be picked at and on.
Google’s obliging motto, “Don’t Be Evil”, would seem in line with
internet philosophies of freedom, yet its technologies form a new kind
of institutional practice, underpinning mainstream culture. Exceptions
also surface when new media artists do succeed commercially - but
the vast majority of these artists do not.
Through sheer institutional momentum (at best) or a kind of
cultural hegemony (at worst), the angel of mainstream art history
tends to absorb the work of even its most revolutionary affiliates into
an appropriative, linear narrative. The “intermedia” ideas posited by
Dick Higgins in 1966, the opening up of formal media constraints and
spatial restrictions of the gallery begun by Kaprow, and the Fluxus
“forms” of games and kits as scores for open action within the
everyday, have all been commandeered for exhibitions by institutional
Jamie Allen
References
BURNHAM, Jack (1968). Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of
Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century. London:
Allen Lane/Penguin Press.
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BURNHAM, Jack (1968). Systems Esthetics. Reprinted from Artforum.
[Accessed: July 2011].
<http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/jevbratt/readings/burnham_
se.html>
crinanthebrave (2009, 29 April). You Tube published “music video” for
Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised [Accessed:
July 2011].
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3QOtbW4m0>
GERE, Charlie (2005). “Jack Burnham and the Work of Art in the Age
of Real-time Systems”. In: Get Real : Real Time + Art + Theory +
Practice + History. New York: Braziller, pp. 149-164.
KAPROW, Allan (1986). Art Which Can’t Be Art. [Accessed: July 2011].
<http://readingbetween.org/artwhichcantbeart.pdf>
KAPROW, Allan (1971). The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I. Reprinted
in: J. KELLEY (ed.) (1993). Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring
of Art and Life (1993). Berkeley: University of California Press.
KAPROW, Allan (1961). The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II. Reprinted
in: J. KELLEY (ed.) (1993). Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring
of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
PAIK, Nam June (1985). John Cage and Nam June Paik in Conversation.
University of California San Diego. [Audio accessed: July 2011].
<http://heavysideindustries.com/2010/10/nam-june-paik-inconversation-ucsd-1985/>
PENNY, Simon (1999, January). “Systems Aesthetics and Cyborg Art:
the legacy of Jack Burnham”. Sculpture Magazine.
RAMPLEY, Martin (2005, January). “Systems Aesthetics: Burnham
and Others”. Vector E-Zine. [Accessed: July 2011].
<http://virose.pt/vector/b_12/rampley.html>
SANDFORD, M. R. (1995). Happenings and Other Acts. London / New
York: Routledge.
SHANKEN, Edward (1999, November). “The House that Jack Built:
Jack Burnham’s Concept of ‘Software’ as a Metaphor for Art”.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Vol. 6, iss. 10.
SKREBOWSKI, Luke (2006, Spring). “All Systems Go: Recovering Jack
Burnham’s Systems Aesthetics”. Tate Papers.
SLOCUM, Paul (2010). “New Media and the Gallery”. Art Lies
Contemporary Art Journal. Iss. 67. [Accessed: July 2011].
<http://www.artlies.org/article.php?id=1993&issue=67&s=0>
SMITH, Stephen (2009). “The legendary godfather of rap returns”.
BBC News. [Accessed: July 2011].
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stm>
TROEMEL, Brad (2010, September). “What Relational Aesthetics Can
Learn From 4Chan”. [IMG MGMT] Art Fag City. [Accessed: July
2011].
<http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/09/09/img-mgmt-whatrelational-aesthetics-can-learn-from-4chan/>
TURNER, Fred (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart
Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.
Chicago: University of Chicago, p. 48.
WARDRIP-FRUIN, N.; MONTFORT, N. (2003). The New Media Reader.
Boston: MIT Press, p. 83.
YOUNGBLOOD, Gene (1970). Expanded Cinema. Boston: Dutton, pp.
343-344
ALLEN, Jamie (2011). “Could This Be What It Looks Like? Lifelike Art and Art-and-Technology Practice”. In: Edward A. SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards
a Hybrid Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 74-79. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-allen/artnodes-n11allen-eng>
ISSN 1695-5951
Jamie Allen
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CV
Jamie Allen
Culture Lab
jamie@heavyside.net
http://heavyside.net/
Culture Lab
Grand Assembly Rooms, King’s Walk
Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU
Jamie Allen likes to make things with his head and hands. These
things often involve peoples’ relationships to creativity, technology and
resources – and mostly attempt to give people new, subversive and
fun ways to interact with all of these. He works as Assistant Director of
Culture Lab (Newcastle University, UK), where he leads the Digital Media
course, teaches and develops projects. His projects and events have
been featured in a number of media outlets, including Wired.com and the
New York Times. He has been supported by international organizations,
festivals and venues, including: Korea Foundation (KR), Issue Project
Room (NYC), Sonic Circuits (DC), Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary
Art Center (DK), FACT (UK), Transitio (MX), Arts Council England (UK),
Northern Film and Media (UK), Arts Council Korea (Seoul), Eyebeam.org
(NYC), The Canada Council for the Arts (CA), STEIM (NL), Baryshnikov
Dance Foundation (NYC), Joyce Soho (NYC), The Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council (NYC), Exit Art (NYC), Harvestworks (NYC), La Société
des arts technologiques (MTL), Washington State University (USA), The
University of British Columbia (CND), The Tisch School of the Arts (NYC),
The Tank (NYC), Tonic (NYC), Vertexlist (NYC), Chelsea Art Museum (NYC),
Mushroom Arts (NYC), Medianoche (NYC), The Bent Festival (NYC), The
Edinburgh Festival (UK), The Glasgow School of Art (UK).
He is a PhD candidate with the European Graduate School (Media
& Communications).
Jamie Allen
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article
Apparatus, Instrument, Apparel:
an Essay of Definitions
Jean Gagnon
Director of Collections at the Cinémathèque québécoise (Montreal)
Abstract
An essay of definitions, this article attempts very briefly to problematize the terminology
employed to discuss or critique media art works. It examines three terms: apparatus, instrument,
and introduces the notion of apparel. This article also attempts a hybrid discourse by navigating
through the definitions of these concepts by way of music and science theories.
Keywords
apparatus, instrument, apparel
Dispositivo, instrumento, aparato: un ensayo de definiciones
Resumen
En el presente artículo se intenta, mediante el ensayo de una serie de definiciones, exponer
muy brevemente la problemática que suscita la terminología empleada en los procesos de
debate o crítica de las obras de arte de los medios. Por otro lado, se examinan tres términos:
dispositivo, instrumento y se introduce la noción de aparato. Asimismo, en el artículo se intenta
formular un discurso híbrido navegando por las definiciones de estos conceptos a través de
la música y de las teorías científicas.
Palabras clave
dispositivo, instrumento, aparato
Jean Gagnon
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Introduction
malleability in capturing, producing, reproducing, disseminating, and
perceiving images and sounds, for reflecting on spectatorship within
the work (Duguet, 1988, p. 223). The apparatus is therefore a device
or set of devices aiming at decentering or displacing the spectator, at
dislodging them from the position of stillness and centeredness that
cinema seemed to impose. The apparatus is thus concerned with
spectatorship and the positioning of an imaginary subject.
This text stems from research about instrumental playing in audiovisual
art. About playing images and sounds with instruments. In that context,
outside of the domain of music, I had to define what I mean by an
instrument, and in doing so I had to distinguish it from other terms
such as apparatus. Looking into what is an instrument, I looked at
how instruments are defined in science and in music, two domains
where the word is of common use. My aim here is rather modest;
it is to give a few hints at definitions, hoping that some discussions
might arise out of these.
Instrument
But this terminology (dispositif/apparatus) is insufficient and
unsatisfactory. Even the term interactive has become outmoded
and insufficient to describe or talk about some types of new media
works. These terms lack the subtlety required to address the specific
features of audiovisual and new media performances or installations.
Tools and instruments are often thought of as being the same or
interchangeable terms. Both tools and instruments are conceived as
body extensions, and as exteriorizations of (a movement towards)
the power of humans to anticipate and imagine. French philosopher
Gilbert Simondon (Simondon, 1958)1 defines the tool as a technical
object extending or gearing up the body to accomplish a gesture,
and the instrument as a technical object that enables the body to
extend and adapt in order to obtain a better perception (Simondon,
1958, p. 114). While instruments can be seen as “extensions” of
the body, or as enhancements of human perception, according to
American philosopher Don Ihde, there exist two orders of relations
for instruments: a relation where we experience the world through
technology and “a second group of relations [that] does not extend
or enhance sensory-bodily capacities but, rather, linguistic and
interpretive capacities”. In addition to the more transparent first
order referred to as “experienced-through” (microscope/telescope),
there is a second order of relations composed of degrees of opacity
where the technology is a “quasi-other”, a relation through which the
world is perceived as “experienced-with” technology (a computer or
spectrographic imagery for instance). This second order is called a
“hermeneutic relation” (Ihde, 1991, p. 75). It requires a more or less
sophisticated hermeneutic knowledge as to how to use the instrument,
and read and interpret its results. Instruments are therefore embedded
in the fact that they are always in use and in situation, intertwined
within the context and the situation in which they occur and oriented
by the intentionality of human embodiment.
Musical instruments also are rooted in human embodiment.
Ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner sees the origin of musical
instruments in human societies in what unites “language and singing,
Apparatus
In French the term dispositif is often encountered in contemporary art
discourse. In English, it is translated as “apparatus” and is probably
less in use outside cinema criticism; one would see “device” as a
common term that shares with the French dispositif a vagueness as
to what it is precisely. Devices are often part of and confused with
installations as the former generally designates any assortment of
electronic or digital equipment intervening in the space or in the
relation of the spectator with the image and with their self-image,
to transform the experiencing subject and the space of the work.
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben questions the concept
of apparatus used by Foucault, who never really defined it. All
apparatuses have to do with the construction of the subject and their
position relating to a concrete and particular situation: “Apparatuses
must produce their subject”, he writes (Agamben, 2009).
The aim of French cinema theoretician, Jean-Louis Baudry, writing
in the wake of the political upheaval in France in May 1968, was
to decode the filmic technical apparatus in terms of an ideological
configuration, meant for replacing the comprehension of reality
(human, material, cultural and economic) by virtues of misrecognition,
suspension of disbelieve and the impression of reality. Baudry defines
the cinematographic apparatus as “support and instrument of ideology
[which constitutes] the ‘subject’ by the illusory delimitation of a central
position” (Rosen, 1986, p. 295). By contrast, for Anne-Marie Duguet,
French theoretician and art critic writing in the late 1980s, when
the apparatus took the form of video installations using electronic
devices, it activates a radical displacement of the experience of the
work. The work becomes a “relational system” (système relationnel),
as she calls it, which returns the spectator to their own perceptive
activity. The electronic apparatus, she writes, allows artists greater
liberty in the arrangement of elements in the work, playing on the
1.I quote from the 1989 French edition. Even though Simondon’s book was first published in French more than 50 years ago, there is still no full English translation
of it. You can find online part one of the book in English translation: <http://accursedshare.blogspot.com/2007/11/gilbert-simondon-on-mode-of-existence.
html>. There is useful information about him on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon. All quotes from this book are my translation.
Jean Gagnon
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dance and instruments” – the human body (Schaeffner, 1994). The
human body’s first impetus is to make noise and to shape instruments
to respond and correspond to its postural and gestural capacities.
Schaeffner also reminds us of music’s relationships with the rhythms
of work, with toys and games (Schaeffner, 1994, p. 108), and with
magic (Schaeffner, 1994, p. 117). According to him, one of the most
significant aspects of music is its perpetual power to limit tonal sources
through the use of a few privileged materials, fixing their sonic contour
or timber to specific degrees of intensity, and through harmonic and
rhythmic conventions that establish tonal scales and measures of time.
This reduction power of music is similar to the magnification/reduction
structure in scientific instruments that Don Ihde noticed (Ihde, 1979,
p. 74). Both are intentional limitations, but for different aims: in music
it is for the production of sounds as music acceptable to a particular
culture; in science it is aimed at producing knowledge by eliminating
irrelevant data and amplifying others in a given experimental situation.
Ihde noted also the similarity between electronic and digital
instruments in music and those in art and science (Ihde, 2007, p. 22):
He noticed in musical instruments what he called their multi-stability
in reference to how their use is transformed by the context just as
scientific instruments are built in reference to a context of use and
observation (telescope-astronomy). This multi-stability of instruments
means they are open machines. They are in a dialogic loop with the
performer (in music) or the observer (in science). Instruments, by
nature, are not immersive. There must be a triangulation between
the instrumentalist, the instrument, and a visible or an audible result,
whether in science or music.
defining them, and they are seemingly grouped together in opposition
to the apparel. But let us retain here that the apparel seems to be
what makes materials useable, conform to a “project”, says Fabbri. In
electronic music, writes Fabbri, electronic audio systems and devices,
which constitute the apparel of the studio, make it possible for the
sound (audio signals) to be a material at the composer’s disposal
(Fabbri, 2005).
While instruments are not immersive, always maintaining or
requiring the triangulation of the player, the instrument and the audible
or visible results, the apparel of the studio can be immersive and
environmental, somehow abolishing the distinction of the viewer/art
object through participative/immersive modes of spectatorship. In this
vein, one can use, as does Fabbri, the notion borrowed from Benjamin
of the reception in distraction, the form of reception Benjamin sees
as our relation to architecture, rather through habits and in a tactile
and kinetic fashion than through distant contemplation and visual
apprehension (Benjamin, 1991). Thus a distinctive mark of the
instrument is its active and singular implementation of imagination
and anticipation in performance within the apparel of the studio.
Following Simondon (1958), I would also add that we must distinguish
form and information; forms are what machines are made of, they are
known already; information is the new and unknown and only human
or living entities can interpret information. Instrumental playing forms
and informs sonic and visual materials.
The apparel can also be what adorns the body of the player/dancer/
spectator: data suit, harness, head-mounted display, and the like. The
body is here appareled; it is immersed in data feedback loops. This
situation abolishes distinctions between the body and the data world; it
favours tactile apprehension over distant visual or aural perception. In
considering virtual reality and augmented reality, the notion of a bodyappareled has to be distinct from the body-playing-instrument, from
instrumental playing, even though they might use similar technologies.
To conclude, if terminology alone does not explain the apparent
great divide between new media arts and contemporary art, it is
certainly part of the equation. So I hope that by refining some of the
concepts we can produce more accurate and productive discourses
about new media. Art historians and critics are rarely well trained
in science and technology and often do not know how to speak
about new media works. A hybrid discourse is necessary as well
as multidisciplinary explorations and research; in that endeavour
we would only be following the lead of many contemporary artists.
Apparel
Jean-Louis Déotte introduced the notion of appareil (Déotte, 2001)
which unfortunately is at times difficult to distinguish from the idea
of episteme as we find it in Foucault. Déotte has had many followers,
particularly in the study of photography and dance (eg, Fabbri, 2005).
I want to translate here appareil as “apparel”.
Interestingly, the English verb “to apparel” is derived from the
Middle English appareillen, from the Middle French apareillier, to
prepare. Dance theoretician Véronique Fabbri sees the distinction
between apparel and instrument lying in the relations of apparel
with material (matériau):
[…] the instrument, the tool, the machine have the common function of
transforming a material, of submitting it to a form. The apparel on the
contrary arranges the material and renders it available for transformation
or for being set in motion (mis en oeuvre). (Fabbri, 2005, p. 95)
References
AGAMBEN, G. (2007). Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? Paris: Éditions Payot
& Rivages.
AGAMBEN, G. (2009). What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Palo
Alto, California: Stanford University Press.
The distinction we find here is poorly expressed and confused,
using the terms instrument, tool and machine without sufficiently
Jean Gagnon
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BAUDRY, J.-L. (1980). “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus”. In Theresa HAK KYUNG CHA. Apparatus,
Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings. New York: Tanam
Press, pp. 25-37.
BAUDRY, J.-L. (1980). “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches
to the Impression of Reality in Cinema”. In: Theresa HAK KYUNG
CHA. Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings.
New York: Tanam Press, pp. 25-37.
BENJAMIN, W. (1991). “L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction
mécanisée”. In: Pierre Klossowski (translator). Écrits français.
Paris: Gallimard, pp. 142-171.
DÉOTTE, J.-L. (Ed.). (2005). Appareils et formes de la sensibilité. Paris:
L’Harmattan (Esthétiques).
DÉOTTE J.-L. (Ed.). (2008). Le milieu des appareils. Paris: L’Harmattan
(Esthétiques).
DÉOTTE J.-L. (2001). L’époque des appareils (Brunelleschi, Machiavel,
Descartes). Paris: L’Harmattan (Esthétiques).
DÉOTTE, J.-L.; FROGER, M.; MARINIELLO, S. (Eds.). (2007). Appareil
et intermédialité. Paris; Montréal: L’Harmattan (Esthétiques).
DUGUET, A.-M. (1988). Dispositifs. Communications. Iss. 48, pp.
221-242.
FABBRI, V. (2005). “De la structure au rythme. L’appareillage des corps
dans la danse”. In: Pierre-Damien HUYGUE (ed.). L’art au temps
des appareils. Paris: L’Harmattan (pp. 93-121).
IHDE, D. (1979). Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht / Boston / London:
D. Reidel Publishing Company.
IHDE, D. (1991). Instrumental Realism: The Interface between
Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology. Bloomington
/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
IHDE, D. (2007). “Technologies - Musics – Embodiments”. Janus
Head. Vol. 10, iss. 1, pp. 7-24.
ROSEN, P. (1986). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: a Film Reader. New
York: Columbia University Press.
SCHAEFFNER, A. (1994). Origine des instruments de musique.
Introduction ethnologiques à l’histoire de la musique instrumentale.
Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
SIMONDON, G. (1958). Du mode d’existence des objets techniques.
Paris: Aubier (1989).
GAGNON, Jean (2011). “Apparatus, Instrument, Apparel: an Essay of Definitions”. In: Edward A.
SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?”
[online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 80-84. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-gagnon/artnodesn11-gagnon-eng>
ISSN 1695-5951
Jean Gagnon
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CV
Jean Gagnon
Director of Collections at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal
jgagnon@cinematheque.qc.ca
Cinémathèque québécoise
335, boul. De Maisonneuve Est
Montréal, Québec, H2X 1K1
Passionate about books and archives, Jean Gagnon has been working
for more than 20 years in the field of audiovisual collection and archive
management. After working for three years in the Media Arts Section at
the Canada Council for the Arts, he served for seven years as associate
curator of media arts (film, video and new media) at the National Gallery
of Canada. In the 10 years that followed, he served as Executive Director
of the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology.
In addition to his career teaching experience at several Canadian
universities, Jean Gagnon has also provided consulting services for
various cultural organisations. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Major
in Film Production and Film Studies and recently started a PhD in Art
Theory and Practices at the University of Quebec at Montreal.
Jean Gagnon
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artículo
Reassembling Components, Hybridizing
the Human and the Machine:
Cross-disciplining Expanded Cinema
and the Possibilities for a Discourse
of Interfacing
Ji-hoon Kim
Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Submission date: July, 2011
Abstract
Since the beginning of the 21st century, Expanded Cinema, a term meant to encompass various
non-normative practices of cinema spanning from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s – multiscreen projections, film/video performances, live projection events, installations, intermedia
environments, electronic/computer film – has been given dramatically growing attention
both by institutions shaping discourses and exhibitions concerned with new media art and
by museums for supporting and developing mainstream contemporary art scenes. While
commonly shedding new light on those practices that had long been heterogeneous and thus
marginal in the histories of cinema and contemporary art, these two worlds have seemed to
spiral closely around each other without ever quite meeting, therefore deepening the schism
between two tendencies of Expanded Cinema: the avant-garde cinema and the digitally driven
cinematic experimentations. In order to overcome this schism, this paper throws new light
on similarities shared by those two tendencies, as the groundwork for a hybrid discourse that
offers insights into the impure and dynamic ontology of cinema and the cross-disciplinary
approaches to art that have questioned the idea of medium specificity. Here the discourse I
propose for elaborating on the commensurability between – and the intersection of – the two
tendencies while maintaining their differences is one of “interfacing” that is grounded in two
overlapping meanings: interfacing (implying both deconstruction and reassembling) material,
Ji-hoon Kim
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Reassembling Components, Hybridizing the Human and the Machine...
technical, and aesthetic components of mediums or media technologies that were perceived as
separate, and interfacing (or hybridizing) the human and the machine for the sake of investigating
and incorporating the idea of the “active spectator” that fundamentally called into question the
subjectivity of spectatorship framed by the apparatus as the techno-institutional-discursive complex
constituting the limits of arts including cinema. For substantiating the “discourse of interfacing”
applied to both tendencies of Expanded Cinema, I will briefly compare two British avant-garde
filmmakers (Steve Farrer and Lis Rhodes) with a couple of digital media artists (Simon Penny and
Ryoji Ikeda) in terms of their explorations of the particular devices, such as panoramic projection
space and synthetic audiovisual projection, which bring into play the phenomenological interaction
between image and spectator.
Keywords
expanded cinema, interfacing, active spectator, apparatus, avant-garde cinema, digital art
Reensamblar componentes, hibridar lo humano y la máquina: cine expandido
interdisciplinario y las posibilidades de un discurso de las interfaces
Resumen
Desde que comenzó el siglo xxi, el cine expandido, un concepto pensado para abarcar diversas
prácticas cinematográficas desde mediados de la década de 1960 hasta mediados de la siguiente
–proyecciones multipantalla, perfomances registradas en cine y vídeo, eventos con proyecciones
en directo, instalaciones, entornos donde se combinan distintos medios o cine electrónico o
informático–, ha recibido una atención creciente tanto por parte de las instituciones que elaboran
discursos y exposiciones dedicadas al arte de los nuevos medios como por parte de museos que
apoyan y desarrollan la escena del arte contemporáneo mayoritario. Aunque ya es habitual que
den un nuevo enfoque de estas prácticas, consideradas durante mucho tiempo heterogéneas y
por lo tanto marginales en las historias del cine y del arte contemporáneo, los mundos del arte
de los nuevos medios y del arte contemporáneo mayoritario parecen dar vueltas muy cerca el
uno del otro sin llegar a encontrarse, acrecentándose así la escisión entre dos tendencias del
cine expandido: el cine de vanguardia y las experimentaciones cinematográficas impulsadas por
la tecnología digital. Para superar esta escisión, este artículo ofrece nuevas reflexiones sobre las
similitudes que comparten esas dos tendencias como planteamiento para un discurso híbrido que
revela la ontología impura y dinámica del cine y los enfoques multidisciplinarios artísticos que
han cuestionado la idea de especificidad del medio. El discurso que propongo para justificar la
conmensurabilidad entre –y la intersección de– las dos tendencias al tiempo que mantienen sus
diferencias es el de la «interfaz», basada en dos significados superpuestos. Uno entiende la interfaz
como la deconstrucción y el reensamblaje de componentes materiales, técnicos y estéticos de
medios o tecnologías de medios que antes se percibían por separado. El otro entiende la interfaz
como la hibridación de lo humano y la máquina para investigar e incorporar la idea de «espectador
activo», que cuestionaba la subjetividad de su experiencia, marcada por el aparato como complejo
tecno-institucional-discursivo que determina los límites artísticos, incluidos los del cine. Para
legitimar el «discurso de las interfaces» aplicado a ambas tendencias del cine expandido, compararé
brevemente a dos cineastas británicos de vanguardia (Steve Farrer y Lis Rhodes) con un par de
artistas de los medios digitales (Simon Penny y Ryoji Ikeda) respecto a cómo exploraron recursos
concretos, como el espacio de proyección panorámica y la proyección audiovisual sintética, que
conjugan la interacción fenomenológica entre imagen y espectador.
Palabras clave
cine expandido, interfaz, espectador activo, aparato, cine de vanguardia, arte digital
Ji-hoon Kim
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During the last decade, attention to expanded cinema of the 1960s
and 70s has grown dramatically both by institutions concerned with
new media art (NMA), and by museums concerned with mainstream
contemporary art (MCA). While commonly highlighting those
practices that had long been marginal in the histories of cinema and
contemporary art, these two worlds have resembled – to use Anthony
McCall’s words – “Crick and Watson’s double helix, spiraling closely
around one another without ever quite meeting” (McCall, quoted from
Iles et al., 2003, p. 7). This gap between two art worlds relates to
different categories of the exhibitions dedicated to expanded cinema.
One type of exhibitions were held by several MCA museums in North
America and Europe, including Into the Light: The Projected Image
in American Art 1964-1977 (Whitney Museum, New York, 2001),
X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s
(MUMOK, Vienna, 2003-2004), and Expanded Cinema: Activating
the Space of Perception (Tate Modern, London, 2009). These events
highlighted filmmakers who had been labeled as US/UK/Austrian
avant-garde (Sitney, 2002; Rees, 2008; Halle et al., 2008) in the history
of experimental cinema, as well as the artists who have made works
in film or video but designed primarily for gallery exhibition since the
advent of Minimalism and Conceptual art, eg, Dan Graham, Bruce
Nauman and Richard Serra. In privileging these two categories of
expanded cinema, the exhibitions excluded a third category, namely,
diverse currents of «digitally expanded cinema» (Shaw, 2002), which
can be interpreted as the heirs to Gene Youngblood’s seminal definition
of expanded cinema as “art-as-technology” (Youngblood, 1970). Such
work has been a mainstay of exhibitions at NMA festivals such as Ars
Electronica (Linz) and Transmediale (Berlin), and was featured by ZKM
Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, in its landmark exhibition, Future
Cinema, 2003, resulting in an extensive, scholarly volume (Shaw et
al., 2003). These three bodies of expanded cinema reflect the different
ways in which institutions champion, discipline and historicize the
extreme diversity and heterogeneity of non-conventional film and video.
Admittedly, these three bodies of expanded cinema differ with
respect to their contexts of production, distribution, exhibition and
underlying conception of medium and aesthetic goals. They were
derived from different “modes of film practices” (Walley, 2008). For
instance, filmmakers such as Paul Sharits, McCall and Takahiko Iimura
elaborated on film installations beyond the standardized formation
of the cinematic apparatus, which is composed of the single-screen,
the immediate positioning of the viewer in front of the screen, the
viewer’s sedentariness and the concealment of the projector as the
originator of spectacles. They foregrounded the three-dimensional
space and materiality of Minimalist sculpture, channeling it into the
exploration of cinema’s spatial parameters and material components
in a theatrical context. Their avant-garde expanded cinema works
contrast with the “artists film and video” (Walley, 2008; Connolly,
2010) installations of Nauman, Graham, and more recently, Douglas
Gordon, Stan Douglas and others, whose modes of production and
Ji-hoon Kim
distribution often focus on using cinema to reflect on the concerns
of painting, sculpture, or performance art. This distinction may run
the risk of blocking the possibilities for a hybrid discourse that offers
insights into the intersection of art, science, and technology, and for
a more diverse and robust historiography of the systems of art that
have envisioned the hybridization of humans and machines since the
wake of the post-industrial society.
To overcome this schism, I will analyze two expanded cinema
works produced in the domain of British avant-garde cinema and
compare them with two interactive digital installations categorized as
“digitally expanded cinema” using a refreshed understanding of the
term interface. Chiefly triggered by the increasing dominance of media
studies, the term denotes the boundaries between components of a
machine or between humans and machines. In the first sense, interface
entails the encounter and exchange between elements constituting
a medium, or between two or more distinct media components. In
the second sense, it points to complex layers of sensory, perceptual
and psychological behaviours that act upon and are acted upon by
the media. Viewed together, both meanings embedded in the term
interface underline more than the constitutive heterogeneity and
plurality of a technological media; more significantly, they imply that
neither a medium as such, nor its effects on the user, are reduced
to the total sum of its separate elements. Interface, then, draws us
towards an array of relational aspects that stitch those elements
together and thereby forge a circuit of intersection between the user
and the artwork. Joanna Drucker (2011) neatly summarizes the two
dimensions of “interfacing” or “interfaciality”, the interfacing between
heterogeneous elements constituting the operation of media, and
the interfacing between the operative media and the viewer/user, as
follows: “Interface […] has to be theorized as an environment in which
varied behaviors of embodied and situated persons will be enabled
differently according to its many affordances” (p. 12, emphasis added).
These two dimensions of interfacing are not exclusively applied
to a field of computational design known as HCI (Human-Computer
Interface), or to the artworks and artifacts based on computer-based
hardware and software. Drucker’s definition of the interface indeed
echoes the concept of the cinematic apparatus, which was developed
by a major thread of film theory developed in the 1970s and early
80s, later known as the “apparatus theory.” According to such
leading theorists as Jean-Louis Baudry (1986a, 1986b), Christian
Metz (1982) and Stephen Heath (1981), the cinematic apparatus is not
a transparent and reified technology, but a multifaceted construct in
which its viewer’s particular system of identification with the look of the
camera and the film image is determined culturally and ideologically
by the material and symbolic relations between its components: that
is, both the movie theater’s arrangement of its elements (the viewer’s
fixed seating in front of the screen, the projection of the image onto the
screen as the central point of perspective and the theatre’s darkened
environment) and the system of continuity editing contribute to the
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construction of the idealist spectator whose unified and disembodied
viewpoint is positioned as the center of the film’s illusory spectacle in
passive and regressive ways. On Heath’s account, this all-perceiving
subject appears inasmuch as “the specificity of the specific codes can
be seen to be connected with certain traits of a matter of expression
or the combination of matters, derives from the particular nature of
the technico-sensorial unity” (Heath, 1981, p. 223, emphasis added).
Heath envisaged “new cinemas” as ways of deconstructing the
“technico-sensorial unity” of the dominant cinematic apparatus,
and of the transcendental subject it mentally produces, through the
“redistribution in specific conjunctures of the operation of cinema,
the redeployments of limits” (Heath, 1981, p. 243-44). The strategies
of avant-garde cinema in the 1970s and 80s, including the British
structural/materialist film lead by Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal,
aimed at “redistributing” or “redeploying” the material components
of the dominant cinematic apparatus in order for the viewer to be
conscious both of the material processes of film production and of
his viewing practice (Gidal, 1976). The British “expanded cinema”
experiments altered the viewing situation of the dominant cinematic
apparatus through the devices of multi-screen and multi-projection,
often coupled with the installation of the equipments inside the gallery
walls for the spectator’s perambulatory, multi-perspectival viewing. In
doing so, they invoked “film as a counter-illusory event that takes place
in the real time of the spectator” (Rees, 2009, p. 63). The experiments’
underlying spectatorship resembles Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion
of a primordial subjectivity that has relation with the world in its
embodied, material perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Although both
the “apparatus theory” and the discourses of structural/materialist
film did not delve into phenomenology (and instead depended upon
psychoanalytic concepts such as suture and identification), their
common emphasis on the conscious subject who is attentive to his
act of perception vis-à-vis the operation of the cinematic apparatus,
brings to the fore the inseparability of the viewer’s vision from his
body and his corporeal immersion in his changing environment (Iles,
2001). These two phenomenological precepts have actually been
what various new media art experiments have undertaken through
developing different viewing interfaces than the screen interface of
previous media, including multi-screen, multi-projection and immersive
ones (Hansen, 2004, 2006). Based on this correspondence, I will
demonstrate how the two dimensions of interfacing are at play in both
the avant-garde mode and digital modes of expanded cinema practice.
My conclusion suggests how these correspondences contribute to a
renewed understanding of the concept of apparatus in hybrid manner.
Recently installed at the Tate Modern’s Expanded Cinema exhibition,
Steve Farrer’s The Machine (1978-88) consists of a camera that can
rotate 360 degrees and functions simultaneously as a projector that
throws a series of images onto the circular screen surrounding it. As
the camera-cum-projector spins around the screen, the images are
perceived as the movement of a number of figures, ranging from a
Ji-hoon Kim
human body to a bird to a sexual behaviour, during the six minute
sequence. Farrer’s projection system recalls nineteenth century
panoramas in terms of the screen’s engulfing of the viewer within
its stream of images. At the same time, the generation of movement
is grounded in the looping of a set of images, which dates back to
the nineteenth-century optical toys (for instance, Phenakistiscope,
Zoetrope and Praxinoscope) that prefigured cinema. For these two
reasons, The Machine is interesting in terms of its media-archaeological
reference. But more importantly, this work is not ensconced within
the convention of panoramic interface that immerses the viewer in
the flow of visual stimuli. Instead, the continuously moving cameraprojector prevents the viewer from being immersed in the image
space, as it undermines a stable perceptual identification with the
image. The turn of the projector defies any totalized control of the
image from the viewer’s side, thereby drawing their attention to their
own acts of perception such as moving about the screen, in contrast
to other moving image installations whose engulfing interface does
“not seek to increase perceptual awareness of the body but rather to
reduce it” (Bishop, 2005, p. 11). Through his embodied involvement
in the decentralized rotation of the camera-projector, the viewer is
then able to be conscious of the two “interfacial” aspects of the
cinematic apparatus: first, the heterogeneity and specificity of each
of its components (the camera, the image and the projector), which
is made visible by Farrar’s transformation and recombination of them;
and second, the degree to which they are organically aligned in its
dominant mode to produce its perceptual and psychic subject effect.
With respect to contemporary digital parallels, Farrer’s The Machine
is closer to Simon Penny’s Fugitive series (Fugitive, 1996-97; Fugitive
2, 2004) than other immersive panoramic installations, such as Jeffrey
Shaw’s Place-Ruhr (2000) or Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin (1997).
Like Farrer, Penny capitalizes on the circular panoramic screen and
the self-rotating projection interface in order to “undo cinema” (Penny,
2004). Here the computer-based projector rotation is comparable
with the rotating camera-projector in Farrer’s The Machine, since the
image presented by the projector is aligned with the position of the
camera that responds to the viewer’s behavior. However, in Penny’s
automated system, the image ultimately eludes our visual control,
thus demonstrating that our immediate visual experience does not
conform to a disembodied, continuous, stable visual field. Following
the logic of Mark B.N. Hansen, the phenomenological assumption of
the relation between the body and its surrounding space serves as
a connective tissue between these two works, despite differences
in modes of production and contexts of reception (Hansen, 2006, pp.
53-66). Similarly, Penny’s observations on his Fugitive series can be
applied equally to Farrer’s non-conventional projection system: “The
illusion is broken by the ongoing dynamics of the user. The central
continuity of conventional virtual worlds is the stability of the virtual
architecture. In Fugitive, the central continuity is that of the users’
embodied temporality” (Penny, 2004).
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Along with Farrar, the Tate Modern’s exhibition spotlighted
Lis Rhodes’ Light Music (1975). This film employs two projectors
that throw light simultaneously across a room filled with smoke.
Here the spectator’s single viewpoint established by the standard
theatrical setting is disrupted, and the beams dissecting the room
are equally important as the imagery – patterns of black-and-white
bars of varying degrees. Like Farrer’s The Machine, Rhodes explores
the extent to which the projection of the moving image in cinema
is inextricably tied to the viewer’s embodied perception and thus
translated into their experience of the three-dimensional space. As
Lisa Le Feuvre notes, “This work is designed for the audience to
move away from the position of a static viewer, to move in and out
of the screening. This creates a set of social relations against the
definition of traditional film – the film becomes a collective event
where the audience is invited to make interventions into the work
itself” (Le Feuvre, 1999). Yet what makes this work distinct from
Farrer’s experiment is the way in which the soundtrack and images
are simultaneously generated: that is, the black and white horizontal
and vertical lines of the images were printed onto the audio track of
the film so that they literally generate the soundtrack. In this sense,
Rhodes can be seen as one of many filmmakers and video artists,
including Vasulkas, Nam June Paik and Guy Sherwin, who have
experimented with a synthetic relation between sound and image.
Indeed, avant-garde practices across experimental film, video art and
contemporary digital media art historically have employed electronic
devices to generate variation in visual imagery corresponding or
discordant with, sonic or musical modulation.
Of contemporary digital examples, Ryoji Ikeda’s Test Pattern
(2008-present) series can be compared to Light Music not simply
because of its presentation of barcode-like abstract imagery
synchronized with explosive noise, but because of its exploration
of “the relationship between critical points of device performance
and the threshold of human perception” (Ikeda, 2008). In Ikeda’s
work, “the velocity of the moving images is ultra-fast, some hundreds
of frames per second, providing a totally immersive and powerful
experience” (Ikeda, 2008), and we realize that this experience is
shared by the viewers of Light Music in different material and technical
configurations. If the former draws the viewer’s perceptual attention
to the processes of the real-time computer interface which encodes
digital information into the sensible audiovisual signal patterns,
then the latter encourages the viewer to see the interfacial nature
of the cinematic apparatus by opening up three intervals between
its components: between the filmstrip and the audiovisual image,
between the image and the projector and between the projector
and the screen.
These brief comparisons between Farrer’s and Rhodes’ avantgarde expanded cinema and the “digitally expanded cinema” works
of Penny and Ikeda illustrate that the two key interfacial aspects
theorized offer new insights into the concept of apparatus in film
Ji-hoon Kim
theory and critical media studies. Viewing the cinematic apparatus
through the prism of interface offers a fresh look at the transition from
film to electronic and digital media, as well as the opportunity to set up
a comparative dialogue between the accounts of the active spectator
that art history, cinema studies and media studies have developed
on their own. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, for instance, has had
a great influence on three theoretical views on expanded cinema:
minimalist and post-minimalist art criticism, film theory about the
corporeality of film experience and new media theory focusing on
the user’s embodied experience. These three strands, however,
have remained exclusive from one another, therefore deepening the
gap between cinema, contemporary art, and digital art. Aided by
historical research, a hybrid discourse on the interfacial aspects of the
expanded cinema from the proto-digital age to the digital era will be
expected to bridge this gap. I propose that it can accomplish this by
characterizing the various alternatives to the standardized cinematic
apparatus as intermedial interfaces. Such an analysis will indicate
the ways in which expanded cinema practices, in response to the
technological innovations inside and outside the cinema, transform
each of the cinematic components and change combinations between
them in order to construct expanded space-time coordinates and
indeterminate, dynamic forms of spectatorship.
Reference
BAUDRY, J. (1986a). “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus”. In: Philip ROSEN (ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology:
A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.
286-298.
BAUDRY, J. (1986b). “The Apparatus: Metaphysical Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema”. In: Philip ROSEN (ed.). Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia
University Press, pp. 299-318.
BISHOP, C. (2005). Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate
Publishing.
CONNOLLY, M. (2009). The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site, and
Screen. London: Intellect.
DRUCKER, J. (2011). “Humanist Approaches to Interface Theory”.
Cultural Machine. Vol. 12, pp. 1-20.
GIDAL, P. (1976). “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film”.
Structural Film Anthology. London: BFI Publishing, pp. 1-21.
HALLE, R.; STEINGRÖVER, R. (2008). After the Avant-garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film. Rochester, New
York: Camden House.
HANSEN, M. (2004). New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press.
HANSEN, M. (2006). Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media.
New York: Routledge.
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HEATH, S. (1981). Questions of Cinema. New York / London: Macmillan.
IKEDA, R. (2008). “Project Description” [online] [Accessed: 11/01/2011].
<http://www.ryojiikeda.com/project/testpattern/>
ILES, C. (2001). “Between the Still and Moving Image”. Into the Light:
The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977. Exhibition cata
logue. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York, pp. 32-69.
Iles, C. [et al.] (2003). “Round Table: Projected Images in Contemporary
Art”. October. No. 104, pp. 71-96.
LE FEUVRE, L. (1999). “Lis Rhodes: Profile,” [online]. [Accessed :
11/01/2011].
<http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/lis_rhodes/essay(1).html.>
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Colin
Smith (trad.). New York / London. Routledge.
METZ, C. (1982). The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the
Cinema. Ben Brewster et al. (trad.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
PENNY, S. (2004). “Project Description: Fugitive 2” [online]. [Accessed:
11/01/2011].
<http://ace.uci.edu/penny/works/fugitive2.html.>
REES, A.L. (2009). “Projecting Back: UK Film and Video Installation in
the 1970s”. Millennium Film Journal. No. 52, pp. 56-71.
SHAW, J. (2002). “Movies after Film: The Digitally Expanded Cinema.”
In: Martin RIESER, Andrea ZAPP (ed.). New Screen Media: Cinema/
Art/Narrative. London: BFI Publishing, pp. 268-275.
SITNEY, P.A. (2002). Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde 19432000. New York: Oxford University Press.
WALLEY, J. (2008). “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-garde”. In:
Tanya LEIGHTON (ed.). Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader.
London: Tate Publishing, pp. 182-199.
WEIBEL, P.; SHAW, J. (eds.) (2003). Future Cinema: The Cinematic
Imaginary after Film. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
YOUNGBLOOD, G. (1970.) Expanded Cinema. New York: Dutton.
KIM, Ji-hoon (2011). “Reassembling Components, Hybridizing the Human and the Machine:
Cross-disciplining Expanded Cinema and the Possibilities for a Discourse of Interfacing”. In:
Edward A. SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid
Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 85-91. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-kim/artnodes-n11kim-eng>
ISSN 1695-5951
Ji-hoon Kim
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CV
Ji-hoon Kim
Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
jihoonfelix@gmail.com
Nanyang Technological University
50 Nanyang Avenue
Singapore 639798
Ji-hoon Kim is Assistant Professor of the Division of Broadcast and Cinema
Studies at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include film
and media theory, digital media arts and culture, experimental film and
video, moving image arts in the gallery, and East Asian cinema and media
culture. His essays and interviews appeared in Screen, Film Quarterly,
Screening the Past, and the anthology Global Art Cinema: New Theories
and Histories (eds. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, Oxford University
Press, 2010).
Ji-hoon Kim
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article
Shot By Both Sides:
Art-Science And The War Between
Science And The Humanities
Philip Galanter
Assistant Professor
Department of Visualization
College of Architecture (Texas A&M University)
Abstract
There is a fundamental philosophical split between the modern culture of science and the
postmodern culture of the humanities. This cultural estrangement is, among other things, the
underlying cause for the lack of acceptance of art-science and technology-based art in the
mainstream art world. However, in the last two decades the study of complexity has introduced
a revolution across the sciences. It is suggested here that complexity thinking can be extended
to usher in a revolution in the humanities as well. The apparently irreconcilable world views
of modernism and postmodernism can be subsumed and unified by a new synthesis called
complexism. And artists working on the complexity frontier can serve a key role in helping to
bring this about.
Keywords
modernism, postmodernism, complexism, generative art, complexity science
Entre dos fuegos: el arte-ciencia y la guerra entre ciencia
y humanidades
Resumen
Existe una división fundamental de orden filosófico entre la cultura moderna de la ciencia y la
cultura posmoderna de las humanidades. Este distanciamiento cultural es, entre otras cosas,
Philip Galanter
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Shot By Both Sides: Art-Science And The War Between Science And The Humanities
la causa subyacente que explica la poca aceptación del arte-ciencia y del arte tecnológico en el
mundo del arte mayoritario. No obstante, en las dos últimas décadas, el estudio de la complejidad
ha traído consigo una revolución en las ciencias. En este trabajo se postula la viabilidad de ampliar
el pensamiento de la complejidad con el fin de iniciar una revolución también en las humanidades.
Las cosmovisiones aparentemente irreconciliables del modernismo y del posmodernismo pueden
subsumirse y unificarse en una nueva síntesis llamada complejismo, algo a lo que los artistas que
trabajan en la frontera de la complejidad pueden contribuir decisivamente.
Palabras clave
modernismo, posmodernismo, complejismo, arte generativo, ciencia de la complejidad
Introduction
The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are
shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand,
the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking
in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep
sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the
existential moment. And so on… (Snow, 1993)
Despite the tremendous increase of activity over the years by new
media artists, critics, and theoreticians, the art-science community has
for the most part been segregated and locked out of the mainstream
contemporary art world.
There are a number of potential surface-level reasons why this may
have happened. The art world and art market have certain expectations
of art; the market virtues of uniqueness, long-term preservation, and
potential resale value; for some the purity of individual expression
as an emotional outlet; for others aesthetic escape and a hedonic
adventure; and yet for others media instrumental in political and
social critique. But the art world has embraced dematerialized and
ephemeral work before (Lippard et al., 1968), and art-science and
new media have much to offer in the way of expression, aesthetics,
and commentary (Wilson, 2002).
This short article theorizes that this relative estrangement of new
media, and especially that engaged in the art-science realm, is a
side effect of much deeper philosophical and worldview conflicts.
A detailed analysis cannot be offered in these few pages, and so a
useful outline using broad strokes will be attempted here.
Art students are now steeped in postmodern and post-structural
thought, though usually without explicit exposure to its derivation and
development or the philosophical alternatives. For most young artists,
postmodernism has become uninspected received wisdom, more of
an inherited culture than a considered position. As a sort of bumper
sticker philosophy, the following notions are simply taken as a given:
Science is not objective discovery, it is merely social construction. (after
Lyotard)
Language has no fixed meaning. There are only traces, differences, and
word games. (after Derrida)
The author is dead, and any meaning is created by the reader. (after
Barthes)
The War Between Science and
the Humanities
There is no truth, merely discourse and (political) power. (after Foucault)
While full of inner complexities and texture, the postmodern
culture of the humanities can be starkly contrasted to the modern
culture of science (Hicks, 2004).
Philosophically, science is rooted in the values of The Enlightenment
and modernity. This includes a metaphysics of naturalism and realism,
and an epistemology that trusts both experience and reason as a
means to knowledge. Science is indeed a relatively optimistic
enterprise in that it posits that real progress and real improvements
in understanding are achievable.
The humanities, on the other hand, have adopted a postmodern
view that includes skepticism towards totalizing narratives, the
simultaneous circulation of contradictory ideas and values, and a
The first popular airing of the growing twentieth century rift between
the humanities and science is usually attributed to C. P. Snow’s 1959
Rede lecture “The Two Cultures.” At least part of Snow’s critique
seems to be a prescient concern about the twentieth century conflict
between modernity in the culture of science, and postmodernity in
the culture of the humanities.
Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and as the most
representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual
incomprehension – sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility
and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. […]
Philip Galanter
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post-structural understanding of language as being unfixed rather
than anchored to stable representations.
From the mid-twentieth century on, rather than staying in a
modernist mode the art world followed the rest of the humanities
towards a postmodern view. Not surprisingly then, when the
mainstream art world does address science it generally presents
dystopic scenarios, metaphors using words detached from their
actual scientific roots, and critiques of economics and social justice
in technological society.
Early practitioners of new media have often situated themselves or
been contextualized in the dominant postmodern humanities culture.
This was, for some, natural because that was the sub-culture they
were already in. However, as an early standard text on new media
art demonstrates, it often required reinterpretations of science into
forms unrecognizable to practicing scientists:
In common language one is reminded of the saying that “the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Examples of complex
systems are familiar to everyone. The weather, for example, forms
coherent patterns such as thunderstorms, tornados, and hot and cold
fronts, yet there is no central mechanism or control that creates such
patterns. Weather patterns “emerge” all over and all at once. Such
systems are often referred to as being self-organizing.
Other complex systems include the stock market, ant colonies,
the brain, the mind, the evolution of species, autocatalytic chemical
and biochemical systems, political systems, and social movements.
These complex systems often develop in ways that are dramatic,
fecund, catastrophic, or so unpredictable as to seem random.
Earlier notions equated complexity with randomness, which is to
say that complexity was viewed as being the opposite of order. The
new view is that complexity requires a balance of order and disorder.
Both crystals and atmospheric gases present emergent properties
that are simple, yet the first is made of highly ordered components
(atoms in a regular lattice structure) and the second is made of
highly disordered components (atoms in random Brownian motion).
Complex systems such as biological life require both order to survive
and maintain integrity, and disorder to allow degrees of freedom for
adaptation, variation, and evolution (Mitchell, 2009).
George Landow, in his Hypertext: the Convergence of Critical Theory
and Technology demonstrates that, in the computer, we have an actual,
functional, convergence of technology with critical theory. The computer’s
very technological structure illustrates the theories of Benjamin, Foucault,
and Barthes, all of whom pointed to what Barthes would name “the death
of the author.” The death happens immaterially and interactively via the
computer’s operating system. (Lovejoy, 1997)
The modern-postmodern conflict presents what seem to be two
directly contradictory and incommensurable world views. The socalled science wars of the 1990s, exacerbated by the Sokal hoax
and the resultant controversy, raised the stakes to a new high (Sokal,
2000; Sokal et al., 1998).
Since then it seems as if both sides have tired. There is something
of a ceasefire. But there has been no reconciliation, let alone unification,
of intellectual paradigms. Today those working on the border of art and
science find themselves caught in a crossfire of contradictory ideas
from opposing world views. Fortunately there is another alternative.
Complexity and Generative Art
Generative art is arguably the practice on the art-science border that
maximizes both scientific understanding and artistic endeavour. The
earliest forms of generative art are as old as art itself. They explore
highly ordered systems of symmetry and tiling, and examples are
found as craft in every known culture. In the twentieth century highly
disordered generative systems using randomization came to the fore
in the hands of artists such as John Cage and William Burroughs.
Both highly ordered and highly disordered forms of generative art
can be viewed as simple in the same way that both crystals and
atmospheric gases are simple.
Contemporary technology-based generative art explores the same
territory as complexity science and is at the apogee of the complexity
curve. Generative artists frequently employ complex systems such as
evolutionary software, artificial life, and synthetic biology (Galanter,
2003).
Complexity
The world of science is itself undergoing a significant transformation
as it takes on the notions of complexity and emergence. This relatively
new (20 to 25 year-old) approach eschews reductionism and embraces
a broad view across all scientific sub-disciplines.
When scientists speak of complex systems they do not mean
systems that are complicated or perplexing in an informal way. The
phrase complex system has been adopted as a specific technical
term. Complex systems typically have a large number of small parts
or agents that interact with similar nearby parts or agents. These
local interactions often lead to the system organizing itself without
any master control or external agent being “in charge”.
Philip Galanter
Complexity Thinking and Culture
Both modernity and postmodernity commit the same error in their
own way. They both seek to explain and understand complexity by
reductionist means, yielding simple, but terribly incomplete, systems.
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Old science steeped in modernity seeks simplicity by reductionist
means resulting in highly ordered systems ill equipped to model nature
in its full complexity. Only by embracing bottom-up complexity will
science be able to deal with life, evolution, the mind, social systems
and the other examples previously mentioned.
The humanities seek the opposite form of simplicity, collapsing
hierarchies, promoting the relative, and otherwise reducing complexity
to the lowest common denominator of disorder. Many have the visceral
feeling that the postmodern humanities have met their own dead-end.
Those on the art-science frontier engaged with the implications of
complexity thinking are outside of the postmodern world and so are
left unseen by the art world mainstream. Caught between cultures,
complexity artists are indeed in a position where they can be shot by
both sides. But they are also standing right where a bridge to reunite
the culture of science and the culture of the humanities can be built.
Consider the competing theories of authorship. In the modern
paradigm the heroic author creates the totalizing masterwork. Both
the author and the theory of authorship more or less ignore the
audience. In the postmodern world the author is dead. All that is
left is the instable text, and that text can yield multiple meaning to
multiple deconstructing readers.
From the perspective of complexism, texts, authors, and readers
are all essential, and in fact all of the active agents are always both
authors and readers. The result is complex networks that those
studying complexity understand in terms of feedback, chaos theory,
and scale-free structures.
In modern art, formalism was a practice executed by the heroic
artist. Formalism in postmodern art has withered as the postmodern
view denies the artist such privilege. But a new kind of formalism
can champion form as a complexity-based, publicly understandable
process (Galanter, 2008).
Those on the art-science frontier who embrace complexity
inhabit a domain where the culture of science and the culture of the
humanities can come together and make discoveries neither could
alone. For art-science complexity artists, the question should not be,
“How can we get our art into the art world?”. The question should be,
“How can we bring the art world to where we already are?”
Modernism as Thesis, Postmodernism
as Antithesis, Complexism as Synthesis
Science is already being transformed by complexity thinking. A
complexity-based world view can also be applied to the humanities.
The apparently irreconcilable differences between modernity and
postmodernity, the cultures of science and the humanities, can be
subsumed into a 21st century synthesis of complexism.
The distributed systems in complexity leverage the relative
relationships of postmodernity while maintaining the absolute
positions of modernity. The notion of co-evolution allows for the
progress suggested by modernism but in the context of unfixed
relationships championed in postmodernism. Chaotic systems
preserve the modern notion of determinism while generating the
unpredictability celebrated in the postmodern.
Modernism
Postmodernism
Complexism
Absolute
Relative
Distributed
Progress
Circulation
Emergence & Co-evolution
Fixed
Random
Chaotic
Hierarchy
Collapse
Connectionist Networks
Authority
Contention
Feedback
Truth
No Truth
Statistical Truth Known
to be Incomplete
The Author
The Reader
The Generative Network
Pro Formalism
Anti Formalism
Form as a Public
Process & Not Privilege
Reference
GALANTER, P. (2003). “What is Generative Art? Complexity theory as a
context for art theory”. In: International Conference on Generative
Art. Milan: Milan Polytechnic.
GALANTER, P. (2008). “Complexism and the role of evolutionary
art”. In: Juan ROMERO, Penousal MACHADO. The art of artificial
evolution: a handbook on evolutionary art and music. Berlin:
Springer, 2008, p. 311-332.
HICKS, S.R.C. (2004). Explaining Postmodernism. Temple / New Berlin:
Scholargy Publishing.
LIPPARD, L.; CHANDLER, J. (1968). “The Dematerialization of Art”.
Art International. Vol 12, iss. 2, p. 6.
LOVEJOY, M. (1997). Postmodern currents: art and artists in the age
of electronic media. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
MITCHELL, M. (2009). Complexity: a guided tour. Oxford / New York:
Oxford University Press.
SNOW, C.P. (1993). The two cultures. London / New York: Cambridge
University Press.
SOKAL, A.D. (2000). The Sokal hoax: the sham that shook the academy.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
SOKAL, A.D.; BRICMONT, J. (1998). Fashionable nonsense: postmodern
intellectuals’ abuse of science. New York: Picador USA.
WILSON, S. (2002). Information arts: intersections of art, science, and
technology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chart 1. Main qualities of Modernism, Postmodernism and Complexism
Philip Galanter
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GALANTER, Phillip (2011). “Shot By Both Sides: Art-Science And The War Between Science And
The Humanities”. In: Edward A. SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary
Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 92-96. UOC [Accessed:
dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-galanter/artnodesn11-galanter-eng>
ISSN 1695-5951
CV
Philip Galanter
Assistant Professor
Department of Visualization
College of Architecture (Texas A&M University)
galanter@viz.tamu.edu
College of Architecture
3137 TAMU
College Station, Texas 77843-3137
Philip Galanter is an artist, theorist, curator and an Assistant Professor
at Texas A&M University, conducting graduate studios in Generative Art
and Physical Computing. Philip creates generative hardware systems,
video and sound art installations, digital fine art prints, and light-box
transparencies. His work has been shown in the United States, Canada,
the Netherlands and Peru.
Philip’s research includes the artistic exploration of complex systems,
and the development of art theory bridging the cultures of science and the
humanities. His writing has appeared in both art and science publications.
Recent publications have focused on computational aesthetic evaluation
and neuroaesthetics.
As a curator Philip collaborated with Douglas Repetto to create the
first ArtBots exhibits in 2002 and 2003, with coverage by CNN, NBC, NPR,
the New York Times, Wired, and Nature. He collaborated with Ellen Levy
to create COMPLEXITY, the first travelling fine art museum exhibition
focused on complex systems and emergence. For more information about the author, visit: <http://philipgalanter.
com>.
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article
The Artist in the Laboratory:
Co-operating (T)reasonably
Jane Prophet
Professor of Art and Interdisciplinary Computing
Goldsmiths College University of London
Abstract
The title uses collaborator in its less popular sense: “To cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy
occupation force in one’s country”. The notion of the collaborator is immediately problematized
and I will briefly introduce ways in which art-science collaborations can be seen as treasonable
co-operations, by arbiters of taste from both the arts and the sciences. In brief, I will suggest
that before rapprochement can take place, we need a more nuanced understanding of the
gaps between art made with new media, mainstream contemporary art and sciart. My paper,
drawing on my own experiences as an artist who has exhibited in all three circuits (with greater
and lesser success) will seek to map this no man’s land, this gap. My intention is to explore
the nature of the gap between the discourses of mainstream contemporary art, new media,
and sciart in order that we might better traverse it.
Keywords
new media art, mainstream contemporary art
El artista en el laboratorio: una cooperación razonablemente traicionera
Resumen
El título de este artículo utiliza la noción de colaborador en el sentido de colaboracionista, es
decir, de «cooperar a traición, como por ejemplo con la fuerza de ocupación enemiga en el
propio país». La idea del colaborador entra en conflicto de inmediato, e introduciré brevemente
modos en los que las colaboraciones entre arte y ciencia pueden considerarse cooperaciones
a traición, tanto para los árbitros del gusto de las artes como para los de las ciencias. En
resumen, sugeriré que antes de que se pueda producir un acercamiento, necesitamos una
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comprensión más matizada de las brechas que se establecen entre el arte de los nuevos
medios, el arte contemporáneo mayoritario y el arte-ciencia o sciart. El artículo, basado en
mis propias experiencias como artista que ha expuesto (con mayor o menor éxito) en los tres
circuitos, procurará delimitar esta tierra de nadie, esta brecha. Mi intención es explorar la
naturaleza de esta brecha entre los discursos del arte contemporáneo mayoritario, los nuevos
medios y el arte-ciencia para poder atravesarla mejor.
Palabras clave
arte de los nuevos medios, arte contemporáneo mayoritario
Introduction
this example there is often an unequal power relationship, similar to
that of a collaborator who works with an enemy-occupier. The artist
‘collaborator’ in this scenario has less power, the scientist and funders
have the upper hand. By contrast, in CELL (Prophet et al., 2006) I was
part of an interdisciplinary collaboration that investigated innovative
theories of stem cell behaviour. We were funded by Wellcome for
R&D and not being tied to the specific ‘outcomes’ that form part of
Wellcome’s larger production grants freed us from many of these
constraints. Each of the individuals in CELL operated within a different
research environment: Neil Theise’s (Beth Israel) medical laboratory;
Mark d’Inverno’s (Goldsmiths College) and Rob Saunders’ (University
of Sydney) respective mathematical and computer science labs; and
my artist’s studio provided different and specific contexts for the work
and came with particular embedded methodologies and ideologies
that influenced the way our research, and resulting artworks and
papers, developed.
Although there was a great deal of altruism between us, at times
we were in opposition to one another (d’Inverno et al., 2005) and
we often felt as though our partnership was frowned upon by peers
from our respective disciplines. As the months went by, and one or
another of us delayed the production of an output in our own field
in order to further the work of one of our partners from another
discipline, we were challenged by peers about our collaboration.
I denied art production in order to make simulations for science;
Theise focused on an arts text rather than another paper for the
journal Nature. Our work together was situated in a no man’s land
of conflicting cultures, ranging from the hypothesis-driven ethos of
the medical research lab, to the reflexive practice of the art studio,
to the empirically driven environment of mathematics. I say no man’s
land because this term is traditionally used to describe a place that
is unoccupied or is under dispute between parties, one that is left
unoccupied due to fear or uncertainty. The negative connotations of
collaboration, the sense of having infiltrated an occupied territory,
were strong in the CELL collaboration, despite the warmth that we
felt for one another. We openly debated whether co-authoring texts
and collaborative artifact production were potentially damaging to
the scientists’ reputations, especially co-authoring with an artist in
peer-reviewed science publications.
I write from my experience as a practicing artist working with new
media and who often collaborates with scientists. Ten years ago
I largely stopped exhibiting my work on the new media art (NMA)
circuit, instead exhibiting in more mainstream contemporary art
(MCA) venues. My decision came from a feeling that, while the
associated technologies, theories and debates of NMA were (and
remain) important to my practice, their primary impact was on my
way of thinking. Explicitly foregrounding these technical issues in
each artwork is of less interest to me. In the late 1990s I found the
debate on the NMA circuit to be highly stimulating, but somewhat
limited and technologically determined. There were other aspects of
my ideas and artworks that I wanted critiqued and discussed and I
found them sidelined in debates. For me, as Nicholas Bourriaud (2010)
said, technology is a part of contemporary art’s production system,
but only a part. In light of the trajectory of my practice, and the fact
that I have not been exhibiting on the NMA circuit for many years, I
will focus my comments on so-called sciart, rather than NMA, though
new media remains central to my ideas, with computing and digital
technologies and processes remaining important to my art production.
The gap that I explore is a no man’s land that lies between three
differing territories: MCA, NMA and the (even less defined) sciart.
Occupied territory
Sciart collaborations (and the art made as a result of them) are often
seen as treason by experts from both the arts and the sciences. Some
scientists, like the British developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert, see
such collaborations as inherently one-sided with the artists mere
parasites feeding off scientists, “[a]lthough science has had a strong
influence on certain artists […] art has contributed virtually nothing
to science” (Wolpert, 2002). A close reading of the criteria for funding
science/art collaborations, implies a subjugation of the art in an
attempt to use such projects to fulfill the ‘public engagement with
science’ remits of major funding bodies like The Wellcome Trust. In
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to market for similar reasons – they do not necessarily prioritize the
production or consumption of an ‘art object’. Both NMA and sciart
have been accused of supporting the production of ‘bad art’. Indeed,
more than a few practitioners have not had formal education in a fine
art context and can be said to operate with little awareness of MCA.
However, what is more prevalent are fine-art educated artists
working in fields of sciart and NMA who do have a keen awareness
of the machinations of MCA and are critiquing it. In doing so, they
are either placing themselves outside MCA or finding themselves
displaced by MCA due to the funding they use for production, the
interdisciplinary partnerships that they are part of, or the form of the
artifacts that they create. It is important to acknowledge that there
is an ‘upside’ to being ‘outside’ MCA (until recent devastating budget
cuts, access to funding for individual artists and small organizations
working with NMA in UK, for example, has been especially good in
comparison to funding for equivalents in painting or sculpture). In
looking at the no man’s land between MCA and NMA, it is important
to acknowledge that positioning oneself ‘outside’ the mainstream
may be deliberate for both reasons of access to such funds and to
position a practice as ‘different to’ MCA.
This problem is common to sciart collaborations. As others have
noted, “[t]here was a sobering moment when [scientist] Y was told
‘don’t put your sciart activities on your science CV, other scientists
won’t like it” (Glinkowski et al., 2009). Initially, we did not co-author
any scholarly articles, but as our trust deepened and our confidence
in the significance of our collaborative work grew, we decided to
take that risk.
Such skepticism is not restricted to the sciences. Given the
importance placed by gallerists and curators on ‘branding’ artists,
problems can arise in exhibition context if an artist wants to name a
scientist as an ‘equal’ partner in the production of an artwork (here
I include computer scientists and programmers that do not identify
themselves as artists but who work with artists). Describing an artwork
as being made by an artist and a scientist challenges the idea of the
artist as a ‘sole producer’ and weakens the aura of the artefact(s).
This was my experience when shortlisted for Imaginaria, a digital art
award in the late 1990s. I arrived at the Institute of Contemporary Art
(ICA) in London, after installing a gallery installation version of the
net.art work, TechnoSphere, made with Gordon Selley, a computer
scientist, and was asked by the curator to remove Selley’s name from
the plaque accompanying the work. The infiltration of new media art
into the space of the ICA was presented to me as conditional on a
denial of equal collaboration with a scientist. I refused and after some
argument the plaque remained, but it was an unpleasant experience.
One hopes that in the intervening decade such prejudice from MCA
towards NMA and interdisciplinary collaboration has changed, but
recently, a biomedical scientist noted, “[i]n one collaboration with
an artist, I said that I wanted to have my name recognised on the
final artistic product. The artist went back to their agent and he said
‘if you put your scientist’s name on the work it would devalue the
artwork…’” (Glinkowski et al., 2009).
Artworks in no mans’ land
One problem for MCA is that many artworks made through sciart
funding schemes have lost their ‘purposelessness’ and become
purposeful, contaminated by their need to educate or engage the
public with science. This ‘education’ is often shared between sciart
and NMA – where many works depend on significant prior knowledge,
not only of the NMA field, but via reading accompanying texts and
instructions displayed alongside artworks, in order for an audience
to fully engage with the works. In many sciart works the ‘obvious’
transfer of knowledge is essential in order that the funders’ ‘public
engagement with science’ remit can be seen to be addressed (see
Wellcome Trust website). The display of dense texts is an anathema
in MCA, contrary to the rhetoric of most gallery exhibitions. Some
art objects made using new media processes or technologies find
themselves in no man’s land because they are not interactive. These
works do not relate strongly enough to NMA’s ‘normative’ forms (of
which interactivity is the most dominant) to be shown on the NMA
exhibition circuit. Many such artworks lie close to the border of MCA,
especially when they are objects or 2D images, and indeed some
infiltrate the gallery system, for example, John F. Simon Junior’s
assemblages of screen-based computational artworks that are
integrated into “elaborate […] wall-hung cabinetry” (Princenthal, 2008).
Half a century ago, faced with a lack of understanding and
acceptance from MCA, and wanting to focus on a markedly different
set of concerns, what we now call new media art exhibited wherever
it could. It thrived, forming its own establishment and developing a
Process-based and socially-engaged
collaboration
MCA is familiar, and more comfortable, with the notion of collaboration
where both, or all, partners are artists. Collaborating partners may
be seen as equal, but the process itself, and its outcomes, can be
problematic. There is a history of antagonism by MCA towards art
made by groups such as the Fluxus artists and Situationists, frequently
cited as the forebears of collaborative art, as their work is often seen
in opposition to, not commensurable with, and deliberately outside
the territory of, MCA. This is in part related to the form of the works
produced, a problem shared with much participatory art, activist
art, live art and site-specific art. These are forms of art experienced
by MCA as anti-commercial, hard to fund (and in need of up-front
funding for production), difficult to sell, and challenging to exhibit in
white cube spaces. Many sciart collaborations are seen as difficult
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separate discourse and a separate international exhibition circuit
from MCA. Many of these venues and festivals, such as Transmediale
in Berlin, had been the ‘home’ of other marginalized art practices:
film and video art. Subsequently, video art has gradually infiltrated
MCA and is no longer seen as ‘outside’ contemporary art (though it
routinely fetches lower prices at auction). As discussions about the
relationship between the cultures of NMA and MCA proliferate, NMA
may similarly be incorporated into the body of what we describe
as MCA. Simultaneously, NMA venues may broaden their selection
criteria to include print-based works, 3D objects, and other noninteractive pieces and expand the NMA debate beyond technologies
and their social implications. It is useful to think of the artist as agent
provocateur, an outsider, to see both NMA and MCA less as territories
to be accepted into and more as ones to be infiltrated. However, I
would rather be moving freely across open borders and hope that
some sort of rapprochement will make that possible.
D’INVERNO, M. ; PROPHET, J. (2005). “Creative conflict in
interdisciplinary collaboration: interpretation, scale and
emergence”. In: E. EDMONDS and R. GIBSON (eds.). Interaction:
Systems, Theory and Practice. New York: ACM.
GLINKOWSKI, P.; BAMFORD, A. (2009). “Insight and Exchange: An
evaluation of the Wellcome Trust’s Sciart programme”. [Accessed:
24 June 2011].
<http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Publications/Reports/
Public-engagement/Sciart-evaluation-report/index.htm>
PRINCENTHAL, N (2008, April). “John Simon Jr. at Gering and Lopez”.
Art in America Magazine. Iss. 4.
PROPHET, J. ; D’INVERNO, M. (2006). “Transdisciplinary Research in
CELL”. In: P. FISHWICK (ed.). Aesthetic Computing. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
WELLCOME TRUST. See the funding criteria for Wellcome in the UK.
The EPSRC in the UK has recently cut its similar programme
completely.
<http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@
msh_grants/documents/guidance/wtx035073.pdf>
WOLPERT, L. (2002). “Which side are you on?” The Observer. London.
[Accessed: 24 June 2011].
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/mar/10/arts.
highereducation>
Reference
BOURRIAUD, N. (19 June 2010). “Art Basel Conversations,
Contemporary Art and New Media: Towards a Hybrid Discourse”.
[Accessed: 24 June 2011].
<http://www.artbasel.com/go/id/mhv/>
PROPHET, Jane (2011). “The Artist in the Laboratory: Co-operating (T)reasonably”. In: Edward A.
SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?”
[online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 97-101. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-prophet/artnodes-n11-prophet-eng>
ISSN 1695-5951
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CV
Jane Prophet
Professor of Art and Interdisciplinary Computing
Goldsmiths College University of London
jane@janeprophet.com
Goldsmiths University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
UK
Jane Prophet graduated in Fine Art in 1987 (Sheffield Hallam University), completing her MA in Electronic Graphics in 1989 (Coventry University) and a PhD
in Arts Education in 1995 (Warwick University).
Recent works include The Withdrawing Room, a series of laser cut dictionaries
for Samuel Johnson’s House (2009); (Trans)Plant (2008), a kinetic aluminium
sculpture based on the structure of a plant; Counterbalance (2007), a light based
installation commissioned for a flood plain in Australia and Souvenir of England
(2007), a preserved apple tree covered in black velvet flocking and displayed
in a giant snow dome.
Some of her art pieces are site specific or temporary resulting in no saleable
art object. However, she also produces art works using materials that enable her
to make Limited Editions of some pieces. Site-specific projects include Conductor,
the inaugural installation at The Wapping Project (74 tonnes of water and 120
electro luminescent cables), Decoy, and The Landscape Room, which combine
photographs with computer simulated landscapes.
Her work includes large-scale installations, digital prints and objects. Her
art reflects her interest in science, technology and landscape. Among her past
projects is the award-winning website, TechnoSphere, inspired by complexity
theory, landscape and artificial life. Prophet works across disciplines on a
number of internationally acclaimed projects that have broken new ground in
art, technology and science.
For 2005 and 2006 she was a NESTA Dream Time Fellow, spending a year
developing her interdisciplinary collaborations.
In August 2007 she became Professor at Goldsmiths College, specialising
in interdisciplinary research in the Computing Department (<http://www.
goldsmiths.ac.uk/computing/research.php>).
Long term projects in development include Net Work, a large floating
installation (comprising hundreds of illuminated buoys) and Big Plastic Tree (an
artwork built by robots).
Jane works in London and the US east coast, where she has recently relocated
her studio.
For more information about the author, visit: <http://www.janeprophet.com>.
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article
Christiane Paul
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Programs
The New School (New York)
Abstract
Over the past decade, contemporary art has increasingly been shaped by concepts of
participation, collaboration, social connectivity, performativity, and “relational” aspects. One
could argue that art responded to contemporary culture, which is shaped by digital and
other new technologies and the changes they have brought about. While art institutions and
organizations now commonly use digital technologies in their infrastructure—“connecting” and
distributing through their websites, Facebook pages, YouTube channels and Twitter tours—they
still place emphasis on exhibiting more traditional art forms that reference technological culture
rather than art that uses these technologies as a medium. The article discusses the historical
roots of the complex relationship between new media and the mainstream art world, as well
as museum exhibitions—media and traditional—that responded to technological culture.
Keywords
new media, relational aesthetics, exhibition, curating, mainstream, YouTube, Facebook
Los nuevos medios en el mainstream
Resumen
Desde la década pasada, el arte contemporáneo se ha visto cada vez más moldeado por
los conceptos de participación, colaboración, conectividad social, performatividad y por los
aspectos «relacionales». Se podría afirmar que el arte ha respondido a la cultura contemporánea, moldeada a su vez por tecnologías digitales y de otra clase, así como por los cambios
que conllevan. Aunque actualmente las instituciones y organizaciones artísticas utilizan con
asiduidad las tecnologías digitales en su infraestructura –de manera que se «conectan» y
promocionan mediante sus páginas web, de Facebook, los canales de YouTube y las cuentas
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de Twitter–, aún otorgan importancia a exponer formas artísticas más tradicionales que remiten a
la cultura tecnológica antes que a un arte que utiliza esas tecnologías como soporte. Este artículo
comenta las raíces históricas de la relación compleja entre los nuevos medios y el mundo del arte
mayoritario, así como exposiciones en museos –multimedia y tradicionales– que se articularon
en relación a la cultura tecnológica.
Palabras clave
nuevos medios, estética relacional, exposición, comisariado, mainstream, YouTube, Facebook
Introduction
to break down boundaries between art and social interaction; or
Tino Sehgal’s This Progress, one of two performance pieces shown
in 2010, which took visitors on a conversational journey with guides
of ascending age. Both Tiravanija’s and Sehgal’s works construct
situations that expand the traditional context of museum and gallery
environments, using social subtleties to emphasize lived experience
rather than material objects.
One could argue that the participatory, ‘socially networked’ art
projects of the past fifteen years or so that have received considerable
attention by art institutions all respond to contemporary culture, which
is shaped by networked digital technologies and ‘social media’ (from
the WWW to locative media, Facebook and YouTube), and the changes
they have brought about. However, art that uses these technologies
as a medium remains conspicuously absent from major exhibitions
in the mainstream art world. While art institutions and organizations
now commonly use digital technologies in their infrastructure—
“connecting” and distributing through their websites, Facebook pages,
YouTube channels, and Twitter feeds—they still place emphasis on
exhibiting more traditional art forms that reference technological
culture or adopt its strategies in a non-technological way.
I like to refer to this phenomenon as the “Relational Aesthetics
Syndrome”. Nicolas Bourriaud first used the term relational aesthetics
in 1996 (in the catalogue for his exhibition Traffic at CAPC Musée d’art
contemporain de Bordeaux). In his book Relational Aesthetics, first
published in French in 1998, he defines this approach as “a set of
artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point
of departure the whole of human relations and their social context,
rather than an independent and private space” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.
142). Obviously this set of artistic practices also is key to most of
new media art in the age of the WWW. Yet the prominent practitioners
of new media art remain absent from the list of artists frequently
cited by Bourriaud—among them Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno,
Carsten Höller, Liam Gillick et al.—despite the fact that he uses
the new media terminology such as user-friendliness, interactivity
and DIY (Bishop, 2004). One could argue that the term relational
aesthetics itself—in its reference to the relational database, which
was formalized in the 1960s and has become a defining cultural
form—is deeply rooted in digital technologies. Bourriaud strives to
find new approaches to open-ended, participatory art that avoid
For decades, the relationship between so-called new media art and
the mainstream art world has been notoriously uneasy, and a lot of
groundwork remains to be done when it comes to an in-depth analysis
of the art-historical complexities of this relationship. Key factors in
this endeavor are investigations of the exhibition histories and arthistorical developments relating to technological and participatory art
forms; and of the challenges that new media art poses to institutions
and the art market.
In order to discuss new media art one first needs to address
the definition of new media. After approximately fifteen years of
discussion, everyone seems to agree that the term itself is unfortunate
since it is not helpful in describing characteristics or aesthetics of
the digital medium. On the upside, the term new media art safely
accommodates new developments in the art form and supports one
of the art’s greatest assets, the successful evasion of definitions. The
term new media has been used throughout the twentieth century for
media that were emerging at any given time. Predominantly referred
to as computer art, then multimedia art and cyberarts, art forms using
digital technologies became new media at the end of the twentieth
century, co-opting the term that, at the time, was used mostly for
film / video, sound art, and various hybrid forms.
New media art is now generally understood as computable art
that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies and
uses these technologies’ features as a medium. New media art is
process-oriented, time-based, dynamic, and real-time; participatory,
collaborative, and performative; modular, variable, generative, and
customizable.
Exhibitions and Historical Developments
Over the past decade, contemporary art has increasingly been
shaped by concepts of participation, collaboration, social connectivity,
performativity, and ‘relational’ aspects. Examples for these participatory
works would be Rirkrit Tiravanija’s seminal soup kitchens (1992 - ),
celebrated by Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), which provide the equipment
and ingredients to prepare meals in a gallery environment, striving
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“to take shelter behind Sixties art history” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.
7). According to Bourriaud, “in the 1960s, the emphasis was on
relationships internal to the world of art within a modernist culture
that privileged ‘the new’ and called for linguistic subversion; it is
now placed on external relationships in the context of an eclectic
culture where the work of art resists the mincer of the ‘Society of
the Spectacle’” (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 31).
In 2002, Bourriaud curated an exhibition at the San Francisco Art
Institute titled Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now, which
he described as “an exploration of the interactive works of a new
generation of artists” (Sretcher, 2002). Exhibited artists included:
Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jens Haaning,
Philippe Parreno, Gillian Wearing and Andrea Zittel.
The table of contents of Claire Bishop’s book Participation itself
is a testament to the RA syndrome: while it includes seminal texts
from the 50s/60s/70s that one finds in publications on the history of
new media art, it does not feature a single text by the contemporary
prominent theorists of new media art. Rudolf Frieling’s exhibition
The Art of Participation at SFMoMA was a much-needed response
to this neglect of new media’s role in the art history of participation.
From an art-historical perspective, it seems difficult or dubious not
to acknowledge that the participatory art of the 1960s and 1970s and
the 1990s and 2000s were responses to cultural and technological
developments—computer technologies, cybernetics, systems theory
and the original Internet/Arpanet from the mid-40s onwards; the
WWW, ubiquitous computing, databasing/datamining, social media
in the 1990s and 2000s. While different in their scope and strategies,
the new media arts of the 1960s and 1970s and today faced similar
resistances and challenges that led to their separation from the
mainstream art world, respectively.
The years from 1945 onwards were marked by major
technological and theoretical developments: digital computing and
radar; Cybernetics, formalized 1948 by Norbert Wiener; Information
Theory and General Systems Theory; as well as the creation of
ARPANET in 1969. The 1950s and 1960s saw a surge of participatory
and technological art, created by artists such as Ben Laposky, John
Whitney Sr. and Max Mathews at Bell Labs; John Cage, Allan Kaprow
and the Fluxus group; or groups such as Independent Group (IG),
Le Mouvement, New Tendencies, ZERO, Groupe de Recherche d’Art
Visuel (GRAV). The fact that the relationship between art and computer
technology at the time was mostly conceptual was largely due to the
inaccessibility of technology (some artists were able to get access to
or use discarded military computers).
Seminal exhibitions mounted from the 1950s to 1970 included:
– This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery (1956)
– Stuttgart University Art Gallery (1965)
– Howard Wise Art Gallery in New York (1966)
– Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T), 9 evenings (1966)
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– The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, MOMA,
New York (1968)
– Some More Beginnings (E.A.T.), Brooklyn Museum (1968)
– Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA, London (1968)
– Event One (Computer Arts Society), London (1969)
– Art by Telephone, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago
(1969)
– Software: Information Technology (curated by Jack Burnham),
Jewish Museum, New York (1970)
– Information (curated by Kynaston McShine), MOMA, New York
(1970)
Art historian Edward Shanken has proposed that there were
significant parallels between conceptual art and art-and-technology
in the Software exhibition (Shanken, 2001). New Media theorist and
researcher Charlie Gere argued that the idealism and techno-futurism
of early computer arts at some point were replaced with the irony
and critique of conceptual art. According to Gere, conceptual art and
systems art, in their early stages were often interchangeable and
indistinguishable and the Information exhibition —which showed
conceptual art, arte povera, earthworks, systems and process art—
marked a break between the two (Gere, 2008).
Several theorists have pointed out that, if there was a “failure”
of new media arts, it could be ascribed to the quality of much of
the work; the failure of the exhibitions to work as intended; the
artists’ refusal to collaborate with industry to realize projects and
exhibitions; a suspicion of systems art, cybernetics, and computers
because of their roots in the military-industrial-academic complex
and their use in the Vietnam War; difficulties in collecting, conserving,
and commodifying such work (Shanken, 1998; Taylor, 2006; Collins
Goodyear, 2008; Gere, 2008).
These factors certainly all played a role in the lack of acceptance of
new media art, and need to be (re)considered against the background
of contemporary media art. After almost 50 years of artistic practice,
lack of quality can hardly be an issue (and art-history has told us that
“master pieces” are also created in the early stages of a medium),
although it (surprisingly) is still occasionally used as an argument, as
in Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, London) director Ekow Eshun’s
explanatory comment for the closure of ICA’s Live and Media Arts
Department in 2008: “New media based arts practice continues to
have its place within the arts sector. However it’s my consideration
that, in the main, the art form lacks the depth and cultural urgency to
justify the ICA’s continued and significant investment in a Live & Media
Arts department” (Horwitz, 2008). Continuous technological support
for projects and exhibitions still remains an issue in mainstream
institutions, and there is continuing resistance to accepting the fact
that technology can always fail. While artists’ collaboration with
industry to realize projects and exhibitions has its problematic aspects
(the artists as content providers showcasing product), artists are now
artnodes
generally more open to it and art/industry collaborations are facilitated
by organizations and funding bodies. In the public at large, suspicion of
the military-industrial complex does not seem to taint the acceptance of
digital technologies any more. The difficulties in collecting, conserving,
and commodifying new media works, however, remain the same.
From the 1970s onwards, traditional art institutions rarely mounted
exhibitions devoted to new media art (among the exceptions were Les
Immatériaux at the Beaubourg in 1985; Mediascape, Guggenheim, New
York, 1996; 010101, MOMA SF, 2001; Bitstreams and Data Dynamics,
Whitney Museum, 2001) while numerous festivals, such as Ars
Electronica in Linz, Austria, and institutions such as ZKM in Karlsruhe,
Germany, began to chronicle, support, and collect digital works.
Apart from historical baggage, the reasons for the continuing
disconnect between new media art and the mainstream art world
lie in the challenges that the medium poses when it comes to 1) the
understanding of its aesthetics, 2) its immateriality (a key element
of the medium’s aesthetics), 3) its preservation, and 4) its reception
by audiences. All of these factors require in-depth consideration to
explain the ongoing tensions between new media art and the art world.
COLLINS GOODYEAR, A. (2008). “From Technophilia to Technophobia:
The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and
Technology’”. Leonardo. Vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 169-73. Paper first
presented at Re:fresh – First International Conference on the
Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology, Banff, Canada,
October, 2006.
GERE, C. (2008). “New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age”.
In. C. PAUL (ed.). New Media in the White Cube and Beyond.
Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
SHANKEN, E. (1998). “Gemini Rising, Moon in Apollo: Art and
Technology in the US, 1966-71”. ISEA97 Proceedings of the
International Society for Electronic Art. Chicago: ISEA, pp. 57-63.
HORWITZ, A (2008, 20 October). “ICA in London Closing Live Art and
Media Program”. Culturebot.
<http://culturebot.net/tag/international/page//>
SHANKEN, E. (2001). “Art in the Information Age: Technology and
Conceptual Art”. SIGGRAPH 2001 Electronic Art and Animation
Catalog. New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, pp. 8-15.
STRETCHER (2002). “Feature: Conversations - Nicolas Bourriaud and
Karen Moss”. Stretcher, visual Culture in the San Francisco Bay
Area and Beyond.
<http://www.stretcher.org/features/nicolas_bourriaud_and_
karen_moss/>
TAYOR, G. (2006, October). “How Anti-Computer Sentiment Shaped
Early Computer Art”. Paper delivered at Re:fresh – First
International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science,
and Technology, Banff, Canada, October.
Reference
BISHOP, C. (2004). “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”. October.
No. 110, p. 51-79.
BOURRIAUD, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du
réel.
PAUL, Christiane (2011). “New Media in the Mainstream”. In: Edward A. SHANKEN (Coord.). “New
Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes.
No. 11, p. 102-106. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-paul/artnodes-n11paul-eng>
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CV
Christiane Paul
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Programs
The New School (New York)
paulc@newschool.edu
The New School
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011
Christiane Paul is MA and PhD at Düsseldorf University, Germany, and
has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on
art and technology. An expanded edition of her book Digital Art (Thames
& Hudson, UK, 2003) as well as her edited anthology New Media in the
White Cube and Beyond (UC Press) were published in 2008. As Adjunct
Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she
curated several exhibitions—including Profiling (2007), Data Dynamics
(2001) and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial—as well
as artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to internet art. Other
recent curatorial work includes Feedforward - The Angel of History (cocurated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation,
Gijon, Spain, Oct. 2009); INDAF Digital Art Festival (Incheon, Korea, Aug.
2009); and Scalable Relations (Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine,
CA; as well as galleries at UCSD, UCLA and UCSB, 2008-09). Christiane
Paul has previously taught in the MFA computer arts department at
the School of Visual Arts in New York (1999-2008); the Digital+Media
Department of the Rhode Island School of Design (2005-08); the San
Francisco Art Institute and the Center of New Media at the University of
California at Berkeley (2008).
For more information about the author, see:
<http://www.newschool.edu/mediastudies/faculty.aspx?id=30843>.
Christiane Paul
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ARTICLE
Ronald Jones
Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design
Abstract
We have arrived at a point where critical theory is being called upon to answer a basic question:
what is the continuing relevance, value, and productive potential of criticality, or “oppositional
knowledge”? I propose a departure from relativism, the ambiguities of postmodernism and
fashionable pessimism for a new “post-critical perspective”. Post-criticality means engagement
with proactive strategies triggering entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary, innovative, scalable and
attainable solutions to collective challenges. In one sense you could say that while locking
out nostalgia for an earlier and simpler time, post-criticality can mean retrofitting Modernism
with what we have learned in the last century in order to begin engineering both methods and
means for producing results across disciplines; not merely grandstanding jingoistic evangelism
promoting a cause. From there the door opens onto inheriting the key parts of Modernism’s
ambition for engagement, and setting agendas for action, without having to accept the ambiguity
of postmodernism.
Keywords
post-critical, postmodernism, transdisciplinary, modernism, design, entrepreneurship,
innovation
El híbrido poscrítico
Resumen
Hemos llegado a un punto en el que apelamos a la teoría crítica para responder una pregunta
básica: ¿hasta qué punto sigue siendo hoy relevante, válida y potencialmente productiva la
criticidad, o «conocimiento opositor»? Propongo que dejemos atrás el relativismo, las ambigüedades del posmodernismo y el pesimismo a la moda para adoptar una nueva perspectiva
«poscrítica». La poscriticidad significa participar de estrategias proactivas que desencadenen
soluciones de tipo emprendedor, interdisciplinarias, innovadoras, redimensionables y realizaArtnodes, no. 11 (2011) I ISSN 1695-5951
Ronald Jones
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bles para los retos de carácter colectivo. De algún modo, podría decirse que, aunque bloquea la
nostalgia de una época anterior más simple, la poscriticidad puede suponer una retroadaptación
del modernismo con todo lo aprendido en el último siglo para empezar a diseñar métodos y medios
que produzcan resultados en las distintas disciplinas; no es un mero lucimiento de evangelismo
jingoísta que impulsa una causa. A partir de aquí se abre una puerta a la posibilidad de heredar
los aspectos esenciales de la ambición modernista por la participación y al establecimiento de
programas de acción, sin tener que aceptar la ambigüedad del posmodernismo.
Palabras clave
poscrítico, posmodernismo, transdisciplinario, modernismo, diseño, espíritu emprendedor, innovación
The premise of this issue of Artnodes, nested in two sentences from
guest-editor Edward Shanken’s framing of the subject, read: “rarely
does the mainstream art world converge with the new media art world.
As a result their discourses have become increasingly divergent”. The
reasons for this cultural divergence, while explicit, are paradoxical,
and will not, according to recent research, be easily overcome. Two
essential reasons sustain this divergence, the increasing irrelevance
of critical theory, and our consistent failure using interdisciplinary
methods.
Years ago, Buckminster Fuller (1963) observed that “A designer
is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective
economist and evolutionary strategist”. Uttering these words, he
was prophetic once again, this time signaling the creative potential
of the interdisciplinary hybrid. Awestruck wonder describes the
current obsession with interdisciplinary innovation; for companies
and research universities it is the topic de jour, and yet the research
on its effectiveness is just reaching us. In an article published in
the Harvard Business Review, Lee Fleming’s (2004) research shows
that the most common outcome of interdisciplinarity is failure.
Fleming looked at 17,000 patents of all sorts – from medicine
to business to design – and his research suggests, and I quote:
“that the […] value of […] innovations resulting from such crosspollination is lower, on average, than the value of those that come
out of more conventional siloed approaches”. But, he continues,
“my research also suggests that breakthroughs that do arise from
such multi-disciplinary work, though extremely rare, are frequently
of unusually high value – superior to the best innovations achieved
by conventional approaches”. In short, while there are many more
success stories employing conventional monodisciplinary methods,
we only see breakthrough innovations of the highest value produced
by interdisciplinary teams. This is promising, if paradoxical news;
we presently lack sufficient imagination to conceive of another
methodology – other than interdisciplinary hybrids – capable of
producing such a high level of creativity. But Fleming’s and other
studies tell us that to converge disciplines into an interdisciplinary
hybrid – be that through a new discourse between new media and
Ronald Jones
mainstream art, or otherwise – we will have to perfect interdisciplinary
methods from where they stand today.
I would like to frame the second reason allowing for the persistent
gap between new media, art-science, and mainstream contemporary
art as a question. We have arrived at a point where critical theory is
being called upon to answer a basic question: what is the continuing
relevance, value, and productive potential of criticality, or “oppositional
knowledge”? This is hardly a new question. In George Orwell’s 1940
essay on Charles Dickens, he framed the same question:
The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively
moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in
his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would
put in their places. […] His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance
looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the
world would be decent.
What Orwell found lacking in Dickens – any actionable solutions
to the misery he so accurately and artistically described – is what is
lacking in oppositional knowledge today. If artists and designers want
to participate in reshaping the political, social, economic and cultural
agendas, they will have to begin to think beyond the exhausted forms
of critical belligerence and mere consciousness-raising. I’m not sure
how long we should continue to grant artists special dispensation just
because what they are producing is merely “worthwhile”.
By now, the ambiguity of post-modernism in general and
relativism in particular has become a paradoxical hindrance. The
sacking of relativism goes like this: The assertion that all truth is
relative is itself either relative or not. If it is relative, then it can be
ignored because its certainty exists only relative to someone else’s
point of view, which we are not obliged to share. If it is unconditional,
and not relative, then it disproves the principle that all truth is relative.
Either way relativism is undone.
Historically, the creative disciplines have been handed few
occasions to make moral decisions, but one such example was the
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conspicuous decisions of the architect Walter Dejaco to design, and
largely oversee, the construction of the gas chambers and crematoria
at Auschwitz. According to relativism, inconsistent claims may have
equivalent legitimacy. But to say “Dejaco’s designs for the gas
chambers at Auschwitz killed innocent people held against their will”
is not about attitudes or ways of thinking, it is a fact in the world
analogous to that spoken truth. If you consider it a mindset, then
it becomes a psychological profile of the narrator, rather than the
physical circumstances of the murders Dejaco facilitated by design.
We must depart from relativism, the ambiguities of postmodernism
and fashionable pessimism for a new “post-critical perspective”.
Broadly speaking, we must engage proactive strategies triggering
creative, entrepreneurial, innovative, and attainable solutions to
wicked problems. This then opens the door to creating hybrids
through a discourse across disciplines, whether new media and art
or otherwise. The good news? While exceedingly rare, as Fleming’s
research shows us, examples of interdisciplinary post-critical hybrids
exist.
In 1972 Hans Haacke exhibited Rhinewater Purification Plant in
Krefeld, Germany. The project was a matter of direct engagement
in gray-water reclamation and an early voice from the culture side
responding to what we now understand as the ecological crisis. Even
more importantly, Haacke’s project was a demonstration of exactly
how to use ecological science to change governmental policy, and
it is fair to say that his Krefeld project played a measurable role in
resetting policy. He pumped the foul water released from the Krefeld
Sewage Plant though an additional filtration system, making it clean
enough for fish to thrive in, and thereby made it evident that the
sewage plant was, itself, collapsing the Rhine river’s ecosystem. In
effect, his project was not a critique but instead pragmatic and postcritical for having presented a scalable and achievable solution to a
wicked problem. Haacke designed a “post-critical system” for water
reclamation and not simply an artwork. He succeeded by merging the
metrics for success from two disciplines – art and ecology – into a
third, creating an instrumentalized hybrid. Is this a work of art or the
pragmatics of gray-water reclamation? Answer: both.
Haacke created a co-dependency across disciplines with
especially low alignment – art and public policy – which is
exceedingly difficult to do. But without motivating new ecological
policies Rhinewater Purification Plant (1972) is little more than
an enthusiast’s science fair experiment, and without responding
to Haacke’s project, public policy makers around environmental
issues become irrelevant.
Tomás Saraceno, my second example of the post-critical, knits
together disciplines with low alignment too, and then using them as
his means, he creates methods promoting their reciprocal relations.
As has been noted, “In Saraceno’s art, such collaborations [with
physics, engineering, and even arachnology] result in visionary and
Ronald Jones
interdisciplinary spectacles but with hard science baked-in. He fuses
customized technology with artistic innovation as evinced by 59
Steps to be on Air, 2003, a solar-powered vehicle capable of lifting a
passenger off the ground” (Jones, 2010). This is hard science – NASA,
DARPA, and Lockheed Martin have long been devoted to developing
solar powered flight – but Saraceno’s original research delivers a
DIY model, and because it is scalable, promises to reduce the carbon
footprint of air travel.
My third and final example of the post-critical comes from Freeman
Dyson, the renowned physicist, and professor at Princeton’s Institute
for Advanced Study. He envisions that in the near future artists and
designers will use genomes to create new forms of plant and animal
life that will proactively reverse the effects of global warming. In the
New York Review of Books, Dyson (2009) writes:
If the dominant science in the new Age of Wonder is biology, then the
dominant art form should be the design of genomes to create new
varieties of animals and plants. This art form, using the new biotechnology
creatively to enhance the ancient skills of plant and animal breeders, is
still struggling to be born. It must struggle against cultural barriers as
well as technical difficulties, against the myth of Frankenstein as well
as the reality of genetic defects and deformities. If this dream comes
true, and the new art form emerges triumphant, then a new generation
of artists, writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses,
might create an abundance of new flowers and fruit and trees and birds
to enrich the ecology of our planet.
An important distinction is to be made at this juncture. Dyson
is hardly talking about so-called Bio Art of the stripe Eduardo
Kac represents. His GFP Bunny (2000), a green fluorescent rabbit
named Alba produced by transgenetic manipulation, stirred more
theoretical moonshine than anything in recent memory. Chimerical
adult mammals were first created in 1971 and so Kac’s rabbit is far
from the kind of research Saraceno is up to. And this goes to the heart
of the matter; Kac stirs tepid sociopolitical critique by breeding a pet
and the art world, once again, is reduced to a mere debating club.
What’s missing with Kac is precisely what’s shared between Haacke,
Saraceno, and Dyson: post-critical, pragmatic, interdisciplinary,
scalable, and achievable solutions to crisis. That is the face of the
post-critical.
If artists and designers are to be post-critical, if they are to
reset agendas, revise their doctrine, they will have to develop the
methodologies that will allow them to affect spheres of influence
beyond their own, as diverse and yet at the same time as interconnected
as the environment and policy-making. We must restart our culture,
as Joseph Kosuth wrote 42 years ago, by changing “the focus from
the form of the language to what [was] being said”. To do this they
will have to be proactive, moral, and courageous.
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Reference
DYSON, F. (2009, August). “When Science & Poetry Were Friends”.
NY Review of Books. Iss. 13, p. 15-18.
FLEMING, L. (2004). “Perfecting Cross-Pollination”. Harvard Business
Review. Vol. 82, iss. 9, pp. 1-2.
FULLER, R.B. (1963). Ideas and Integrities. Engelwood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentice Hall.
JONES, R. (2010). “Tomas Saraceno: BONNIERS KONSTHALL”. ArtForum. Vol. 48, iss. 9, pp. 268-9.
KOSUTH, J. (1969). “Art After Philosophy”. Studio International. Vol.
178, iss. 915, pp. 134-137.
ORWELL, G. (1940). “Charles Dickens”. Inside the Whale and Other
Essays. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
JONES, Ronald (2011). “The Post-Critical Hybrid”. In: Edward A. SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media,
Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes. No. 11,
p. 107-111. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-jones/artnodes-n11jones-eng>
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CV
Ronald Jones
Director
Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design
Ronald.Jones@konstfack.se
Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship
Saltmätargatan 9
Box 6501
113 83 Stockholm
Sweden
Ronald Jones is the director of Konstfack University College of Art, Craft
and Design. He has an MFA degree from the University of South Carolina,
and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Ohio University. He also holds
a Certificate from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
After serving nine years as Senior Critic at the School of Art, Yale
University, he was appointed Professor of Visual Arts in the School of
the Arts, and Director of the Digital Media Lab at Columbia University in
New York City. He then served as Provost at Art Center College of Design
and became member of the Visiting Faculty at the National Institute of
Design in India, and at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste,
Städelschule Frankfurt, Germany.
Furthermore, he has also served on the faculties of The Royal Danish
Academy of Art, Copenhagen, The Rhode Island School of Design, The
School of Visual Arts, New York, among others.
Ronald Jones
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article
Transdisciplinary Strategies
for Fine Art and Science
Paul Rowlands Thomas
University of New South Wales
Abstract
The paper will explore a connection between the historical evolution of media arts education and
the re-emerging symbiosis of fine art and science. The art and science environment is rich with
the potential to embrace, expand and critically reflect on culture in a post-media art context.
This paper explores the potential of transdisciplinary approaches, theoretical practice and a
nomadic discourse to the broader art research culture in a contemporary university framework.
Keywords
art, science, transdisciplinary, education
Estrategias transdisciplinarias para las bellas artes y la ciencia
Resumen
En este artículo exploramos la conexión entre la evolución histórica de la educación en arte
de los medios y el resurgimiento de la simbiosis entre las bellas artes y la ciencia. El entorno
del arte y de la ciencia abunda en posibilidades de adopción, ampliación y reflejo crítico de la
cultura en un contexto de arte posmedios. En este trabajo se exploran las posibilidades de los
enfoques transdisciplinarios, de la práctica teórica y de un discurso nómada sobre la cultura
investigadora del arte en general en un marco universitario contemporáneo.
Palabras clave
arte, ciencia, transdisciplinario, educación
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Transdisciplinary Strategies for Fine Art and Science
New technologies and the body
technologies to further critical examination. Garoian and Gaudelius
refer to such a practice as cyborg pedagogy (Garoian et al., 2001,
p. 333). Contemporary biological art, for example, is reshaping and
rethinking the materiality of the body from a cellular level, confronting
and exploring the bodily inscription of technologies. In the area of
nanotechnological art, artists similarly explore the physical world at
atomic and molecular levels, exposing the instability of its immaterial
substrate as it “dissolves into a posthuman network of distributed
agencies” (Milburn, 2005).
Much current scholarship on Deleuzian methodologies for
education argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy brings
into focus the crucial position that experimentation and experiential
practice have in learning (Smenetzky, 2008). Deleuze and Guattari
demonstrate concepts that can be used for the mapping and
reconfiguration of the pedagogical landscape in light of emerging
technologies.
The contribution, speed and growth of emerging technologies in
media art education is unique and still partly uncharted. However,
many questions now situated in the art and science arena are being
explored by post-media art. This exploration needs to inform the
ways emerging technological and scientific thinking is implemented
into tertiary art education and therefore culture at large. Science and
technology permeate our daily lives under the guise of banners such
as “cultural advancement” and “creative industries”. The ubiquitous
nature of technology that has enabled instant communication and
information exchange is often not critically addressed or analyzed
within fine art pedagogy. What is taken for granted is the way that
science and technologies impose a particular regime and structure on
our bodies, turning the user into a complacent subject. Art and science
collaborations have significant potential for exploring, critiquing
and developing a transdisciplinary approach which demands a
transformative role in institutional fine art education. This paper
looks at the extent to which such theoretical, critical, explorative,
experiential and experimental ideas generated initially in media art
are now, via art and science, demanding a transformative role in
institutional frameworks of art educational organisations.
In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway acknowledges the impact
of new technologies on our subjectivity. Rather than compounding
existing misconceptions about technology and our intimate
entanglements within it, she calls for a closer engagement with it
(Haraway, 1991). Only direct engagement gives way to agency and
interrupts the inscription of technologies on our bodies. This dual
process of opening up combined with a critical engagement also
characterizes the conceptual framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s
(1987) philosophy that can be explored for its applicability for a
transdiciplinary model that extends from media arts education.
As Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius recently argued, the
impact of technologies on our subjectivity needs to be examined
more than ever. Working from a premise that technologies are not
created in a cultural vacuum, Garoian and Gaudelius identify a point
at which the technologies can be demystified, affected and resisted—
because technology does not simply inscribe the body but allows the
construction of body/consciousness/identity to be reconsidered. When
art and science is approached in this way, we can see that emerging
technologies do not simply happen to us but instead emerge out of
a dynamic site of culture and critique.
I want to suggest that the models for such demystification and
resistance can be found in the art and science practice of posthumanist artists, including Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Stelarc, Eduardo
Kac, Vicotria Vesna, Char Davies and Orlan. These artists prove
it is possible not only to be shaped and inscribed by information
technologies, but also to intervene in the arbitrary structuring they
impose on our subjectivity. Their critical artistic practices open
The role of Theory
A profound shift is occurring in our understanding of postmodern
media culture. “Since the turn of the millennium the emphasis on
mediation as technology and as aesthetic idiom, as opportunity for
creative initiatives and for critique, has become increasingly normative
and doctrinaire” (Thomas et al., 2010).
If we are going to critique this profound shift, then we need to
implement research strategies within the fine arts that challenge
past disciplinary orthodoxies and epistemological constraints, in a
quest for more productive and synergistic intellectual and practical
methodologies between art, science and the humanities. To explore
ideas that will provide a basis for generating different and potentially
more expansive understandings of complex issues, demands taking
into account multiple perspectives and contingencies. Institutional
modelling of alternative transdisciplinary approaches to post new
media art curriculum must demonstrate the academic viability, scope
and rigor of art/science.
Educator John Lutz’s (1976) early research on secondary
education joining art and science offers insights into the dilemma
facing art education and can inform contemporary debates regarding
transdisciplinary curriculum at secondary and post-secondary levels.
One of the main findings was the need for theory and its alignment
within course structures for improving scientific research. Lutz
suggests that “a theoretical foundation has generally been recognized
as a prerequisite to meaningful and advancing educational research
[…] If great advances are to be made in all educational science, a
more active interest in and real commitment to theoretical constructs
must be demonstrated by educators” (Lutz, 1976, p. 4).
Drawing on George A Beauchamp’s work on curriculum theory,
Lutz identifies three main areas of focus for theory—‘description,
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explanation and prediction’—which could fit a possible development
of a practice-based research curriculum joining contemporary fine
art and science.
boundaries. Fine art curriculum has to come to terms with the collapse
and absorption of science, media theory and philosophy.
As the prefix trans indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that
which is at once between the disciplines, across the different
disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding
of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of
knowledge (Nicolescu, 1996).
The transdiciplinary space might be analogous to Deleuze and
Guattari’s territory of the nomad. A nomadic methodology can be
used to link fine art and science creating the potential to move from
the studio and laboratory back to the earth (Semetsky, 2008). The
nomadic approach is relevant as a method for transdisciplinary fine
art and science research: the nomad distributes her/himself in a
smooth space; s/he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is her/
his territorial principle (Deleuze et al., 1987 p. 381). Here the smooth
space that the nomad exists within is a territory of ‘description’, which
forms a territorial principle inhabited by the individual.1 The term
description is based on experimentation and is a theory of becoming,
of describing being in the world. The nomad does not pass through
a territory but takes the inhabited smooth space and researches
between, across and beyond. As Deleuze and Guattari note,
– A theory must account for the observations of the organization
of the interrelationships between variables.
– It must also provide at least tentative reasons for or causes of
the described observations.
– Finally a theory must be able to allow predictions of observations
from the explanations suggested.
Describing a territory from which to formulate an opinion links
both disciplines to the first area of observation between variables
identified by Lutz. The second domain, explanation, allows for plastic
process of making to reflect upon and enrich the theory, explore
techniques and material agency in a sequence of ‘detours’ that
increase the stability of the territory. The third area, prediction, crosses
disciplinary borders in imaginative or even fantastic speculations that
allow for the abstraction of ideas to be distilled and processed to
create the potential for new knowledge. The new knowledge would
be a mutation rather than extension of humanities, a series of hybrid
methodologies and a nomadic or travelling theory.
Lutz concludes that “if art education activities can influence the
development of certain affective and psychomotor skills required
for better sciencing, then science instructional processes could
become more efficient through the transdisciplinary integration of
science and art” (Lutz, 1976, p. 12). Lutz’s report demonstrates that
as early as the mid-1970s there was a perceived need to enrich and
enhance science education through a transdisciplinary relationship
with art. In 2001 Stephen Wilson identified some key points for artists
in order to meaningfully participate in the world of science. Artists
must “expand conceptual notions of what constitutes an artistic
education [and] develop the ability to penetrate beneath the surface
of techno–scientific presentations to think about unexplored research
directions and unanticipated implications” (Wilson, 2001, p. 39).
The need to develop alternative curriculum is in part based on
the rhizomatic growth of media art education responding to emerging
technologies. Since media art is being consumed within the fine
arts in Australian universities and art schools, a transdisciplinary
art and science agenda has become the focus of many academic
practitioners. In the context of Australian arts funding, the New Media
Arts Board was collapsed in 2006 into traditional arts and crafts
as the Board recognised the proliferation and absorption of media
within the fine arts (Donovan, et al., 2006). The current thinking on
transdisciplinary education and practice is now seen in the light of
emerging technologies redefining the already corrupted discipline
With the nomad […] it is deterritorialization that constitutes the
relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes
on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that deterritorializes itself, in
a way that provides the nomad with a territory. The land ceases to be
land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or support. (Deleuze et al.,
1987, p. 381)
In this context I would like to create a metaphorical relationship
between the nomadic territory and that of the complex territory of
university. Fine art and science projects that are based on nomadic
deterritorialzation can allow students to move over discipline
boundaries whilst maintaining the smooth space they inhabit.
The smooth space creates a metaphorical ground, a territory of
description. This ‘description’ becomes the most important component
of a transdisciplinary art education concept allowing the individual/
group to develop a heuristic context independent of a fixed ground.
The greater the descriptive context, the more territory the individual/
group has to build to substantiate ideas and to create their principles.
The process of reterritorialisation creates a testing ground for the body
of knowledge as an interaction with the earth. Creating a nomadic
project calls for a transdisciplinary approach to be “there, on the
land, wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends
to grow, in all directions. The nomads inhabit these places; they
remain in them, and they themselves make them grow, for it has
1. George A. Beauchamp states that one of the first functions of theory is description.
114
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been established that the nomads make the desert no less than they
are made by it” (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 381).
The artist Stelarc is an archetypal nomad who moves across
institutions and nations and between discipline boundaries engaging
in and reterritorialising ideas. The work of SymbioticA, in creating
a Master’s of Science (Biological Art), is academic example of
the ability to create a smooth space to move above and beyond
institutional disciplinary boundaries. A nomadic transdisciplinary fine
art and science course would operate between, above and beyond
the territory of the metaphorical institutional landscape as a holistic
topographical site. The nomad/student enriched by a theoretical
context can demonstrate that a transdisciplinarity methodology
creates an art and science strategy that encourages new forms of
thinking and creating. S/he moves above the terrain of the university
stopping in specific areas to reconnect with the earth, to test out
predictions. The combining of different strategies of art and science
through a nomadic approach allows for the engagement in a journey,
establishment of a territory and a discovery that goes beyond all
disciplines and into new areas of knowledge.
DONOVAN, A. [et al.] (2006). “New Media Arts Scoping Study”. Sydney:
Australia Council.
GAROIAN, C. R.; GAUDELIUS, Y. M. (2001). “Cyborg Pedagogy:
Performing Resistance in the Digital Age”. Studies in Art Education.
Vol. 4, iss. 42, pp. 333-347
HARAWAY, D. (1991). “Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature”. In: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. New York:
Routledge, pp. 149-181.
LUTZ, J. E. (1976). “The Potential for Improving Science Education
Through Transdisciplinary Integration with Art Education”. San
Francisco: National Association for Research in Science Teaching.
MILBURN, C. (2005). “Nano/Splatter: Disintegrating the Postbiological
body”. New Literary History. Vol. 36, iss. 2, p. 283.
NICOLESCU, B. (1996). “Transdiciplinary Evolution of Education”. In:
International Congress What university for tomorrow ? Towards a
transdisciplinary evolution of the university. Locarno, Switzerland.
SEMETSKY, I. (Ed.) (2008). “Nomadic Education: Variations on a
theme by Deleuze and Guattari”. Rotterdam, Sense Publisher.
(Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice; 18).
THOMAS, P.; COLLESS, E. (2010). “The first International Conference
on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art,
Science and Culture”.
<http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/welcome/.>
WILSON, S. (2001). Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and
Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press / Leonardo Books.
Reference
DELEUZE, G.; GUATTARI, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
THOMAS, Paul Rowlands (2011). “Transdisciplinary Strategies for Fine Art and Science”. In:
Edward A. SHANKEN (Coord.). “New Media, Art-Science and Contemporary Art: Towards a Hybrid
Discourse?” [online node]. Artnodes. No. 11, p. 112-116. UOC [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].
<http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/artnodes-n11-thomas/artnodesn11-thomas-eng>
ISSN 1695-5951
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CV
University of New South Wales
p.thomas@unsw.edu.au
UNSW KENSINGTON CAMPUS
The University of New South Wales
SYDNEY
NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
Associate Professor Paul Thomas has a joint position as Head of Painting
at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales and Head of
Creative Technologies at the Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin
University. Paul has chaired numerous international conferences and
is co-curating a show of Australian artists for ISEA2011. In 2000 Paul
instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic
Arts Perth.
Paul has been working in the area of electronic arts since 1981 when
he co-founded the group Media-Space. Media-Space was part of the
first global link up with artists connected to ARTEX. From 1981-1986
the group was involved in a number of collaborative exhibitions and was
instrumental in the establishment a substantial body of research. Paul’s
research project Nanoessence explored the space between life and death
at a nano level. The project was part of an ongoing collaboration with the
Nanochemistry Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology and
SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia. The previous project
Midas was researching at a nano level the transition phase between
skin and gold. In 2009 he established Collaborative Research in Art
Science and Humanity (CRASH) at Curtin <http://crash.curtin.edu.au>.
Paul is a practicing electronic artist whose work has exhibited
internationally and can be seen on his website <http://www.visiblespace.
com>.
For more information about the author, visit: <https://research.unsw.
edu.au/people/associate-professor-paul-rowlands-thomas>.
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Artnodes, no. 11 - Journal of Conflictology

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