To appropriate something involves taking possession of it. In the visual arts, the term appropriation often refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of new work. The borrowed elements may include images, forms or styles from art history or from popular culture, or materials and techniques from non-art contexts. Since the 1980s the term has also referred more specifically to quoting the work of another artist to create a new work. The new work may or may not alter the original.
Aspects of appropriation appear in nearly all areas of visual art history if one considers the basic act of making art as the borrowing of images or concepts from the surrounding world and re-interpreting them into artwork. For example, some might classify Leonardo da Vinci as an appropriation artist, because he used recombinant methods of appropriation, borrowing from sources as diverse as biology, mathematics, engineering and art, and then synthesizing them into inventions and artworks.
Some art historians regard Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as the first to appropriate items from a non-art context into their work. In 1912, Picasso pasted a piece of oil cloth onto the canvas. Subsequent compositions, like Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Bottle (1913) in which Picasso used newspaper clippings to create forms, became categorized as synthetic cubism. The two artists incorporated aspects of the "real world" into their canvases, opening up discussion of signification and artistic representation.
Five years later, in 1917, Marcel Duchamp introduced the idea of the readymade. That year he entered Fountain into the American Society of Independent Artists exhibition. The work consisted of a urinal, lying on its side atop a pedestal with the signature "R. Mutt". The urinal appeared neither original nor rare, Duchamp's "creativity" as an artist lies in the gesture of selecting the urinal as an art piece and displaying it in an artistic context. Duchamp also went so far as to use existing art in his work, appropriating an apparent copy of the Mona Lisa into his piece, L.H.O.O.Q. Recent speculation regarding Duchamp's appropriated urinal claimed that the urinal was "non-standard" and "non-functional," and that Duchamp "allegedly custom-designed it along with his other supposed readymades,"[citation needed] however, this has never been substantiated.
The Dada movement (including Duchamp as an associate) continued with the appropriation of everyday objects, but their appropriation did not attempt to elevate the "low" to "high" art status, rather it produced art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. Dada artists included Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Jean Arp, Hans Richter, Richard Huelsenbeck, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Francis Picabia. A reaction to oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society, Dada works featured deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. Kurt Schwitters, who produced art at the same time as the Dadaists, shows a similar sense of the bizarre in his "merz" works. He constructed these from found objects, and they took the form of large constructions that later generations would call installations.
The Surrealists, coming after the Dada movement, also incorporated the use of "found" objects such as Méret Oppenheim's Object (Luncheon in Fur) (1936). These objects took on new meaning when combined with other unlikely and unsettling objects.
In the 1950s Robert Rauschenberg used what he dubbed "combines", literally combining readymade objects such as tires or beds, painting, silk-screens, collage, and photography. Similarly, Jasper Johns, working at the same time as Rauschenberg, incorporated found objects into his work. Johns also appropriated symbolic images such as the American flag or the "target" symbol into his work.
The Fluxus art movement also utilised appropriation: its members blended different artistic disciplines including visual art, music, and literature. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s they staged "action" events, engaged in politics and public speaking, and produced sculptural works featuring unconventional materials. The group even appropriated the postal system in developing mail art. The performances sought to elevate the banal by appropriating it as "art" and dissembling the high culture of serious music.
Along with artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol appropriated images from commercial art and popular culture as well as the techniques of these industries. Often called "pop artists", they saw mass popular culture as the main vernacular culture, shared by all irrespective of education. These artists fully engaged with the ephemera produced from this mass-produced culture, embracing expendability and distancing themselves from the evidence of an artist's hand.
The term appropriation art came into common use in the 1980s with artists such as Sherrie Levine, who addressed the act of appropriating itself as a theme in art. Levine often quotes entire works into her own, for example photographing photographs of Walker Evans. Challenging ideas of originality, drawing attention to relations between power, gender and creativity, consumerism and commodity value, the social sources and uses of art, Levine plays with the theme of "almost same".
During the 1970s and 1980s Richard Prince re-photographed advertisements such as for Marlboro cigarettes or photo-journalism shots. Prince's work spoke to issues of materialism and the idea of spectacle over lived experience.
Appropriation artists may comment on more than just commercial or "low" culture. Joseph Kosuth appropriated images to engage with philosophy and epistemological theory. Other artists working during this time with appropriation included Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Malcolm Morley.
The nature of appropriation art, the borrowing of elements for new work, brings up a number of contentious copyright issues. One debate addresses the extent to which appropriation art has sufficient originality. In the case of appropriation the appropriating artist copies the expressive form (as opposed to merely the idea) of the original work. A number of case-law examples have emerged that investigate the division between transformation of a work and simple derivation of a work.
copied from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_%28art%29
for more information see:
http://freeculture.org/
http://arts.columbia.edu/dmc/docs/lectureseries.html
http://www.festivalofappropriation.org/
Thursday, December 13, 2007
"Z-NIFFING THE NET: HACKING VS HACKTIVISM" Jenny Marketou
(Jenny Marketou in conversation with Claudia Gianetti during the artists residency in MECAD/Media Centre d’Art I Disseny,Barcelona, March 2001). Claudia Gianetti is the director of the residency program and the graduate school of MECAD/Media Centre d’Art I Disseny,Barcelona, Spain.
CJ: We all know that since the early 90’s Hacktivism has become one of the most controversial activities in the information war and in the networked culture. How would you describe this quest in the wild wide web and what to your opinion is its social significance wider then breaking into computers?
JM: I think that our perception of hacktivism has been prejudiced, in that only we tend to perceive it as an evil and mean act. Many times it has been identified with cyber terrorism and media has portrayed hackers as secretive,destructive intruders committing on line attacks in the name of social protest. I have come to think of “ “hacktivism” both as an important phenomenon and as a metaphor for how we digitally manipulate and think through the electronic culture that engulfs us and how this demonstration of virtuosity can be be addressed in the arena of theoretical, cultural politics and esthetics. There is no doubt that “hacktivism” is a new breed of cultural activism, a syntax for resistance and critical discourse- wired and confrontational. It requires skills and constantly an update of tools ,a code race , escalating tactics in response to counter measures. But the importance of hacktivism has a wider social and historical significance which may help us to understand the full cultural implications of an increasingly networked world. ”Hacktivism” is a process involving a combination of information dissemination, direct action, and creative solutions. Hacktivism is a continually evolving and open process; its tactics and methodology are not static. In this sense no one owns hacktivism - it has no prophet, no gospel and no canonized literature. Hacktivism is a rhizomic,open-source phenomenon”."http://thehacktivist.com" “ on line April, 2001.
CJ: What is the unifying feature between “hackers’ and on line ‘activists” ?
JM: But as there are many kinds of hackers there are many kinds of hacktivism. As Oxblood Ruffin -- whom some credit for coining the word "hacktivism" - pointed out that he now distinguishes between hacktivism and simple "[h]activism". "The former seeks to remedy the net of bad code, restriction, lack of access, etc.; the latter seeks to use the net as an agent for social justice on the ground through various protest actions, or as a publicity medium." Thus hacktivism gives the possibility of political expression but is not itself confined to the concept of political motivation. Here is where most of the misapprehension lies: the use of the Internet and computer technology for political purposes is NOT necessarily hacktivism. It can be, but it is not arbitrarily so. In my opinion there is “hacktivism” the process of ensuring through computer hacking methods that the internet remains a location in which people are entitled to freedom of speech, information and exchange of ideas.This freedom is expressed through the reconstruction of new systems on line such as “open source” and using the net as a platform for civil disobedience to protest a logical extension of the street-based protest. But their is also “hacktivism” the process appropriated by many net artists of infiltrating hacking culture and strategies and which contributes to the formation of new configurations of characters, space, time and play on the net. Artists have always used their process as a strategy and means for subversion and resistance. I believe maintaining the internet as a medium on open-source standards, so that it facilitates the freedom of expression including political expression can be a unifying feature between hackers, activists and net artists. On the other hand is the computer underground hackers, who usually after their arrest have been absorbed by the worlds big business and venture capitalism. These computer underground hackers can be defined by their compulsive digital virtuosity, anonymity and technical skills , and who directly manipulate the code, breaking into the economy and system of the internet in order to access and manipulate certain information.
CG: Can you give me some examples of artists and collective groups which work with the above methods?
JM: One of the most powerful weapons in the Zapatista’s National Liberation Army was the group Electronic Disturbance Theater, which operates out of New York City.The collective group of four net activists and programmers through on-violent and direct action use the net to bring pressure on institutions engaged in unethical actions.Within the electronic environment EDT aims to disrupt the operation of information and capital flows of carefully selected target sites without causing serious damage. These four net activists, specialized in virtual sit-ins. Using a Javascript tool called FloodNet. (www.thing. net/~rdom/ecd /ZapTact.html) would organize thousands of on line protesters to access the website of Mexico’s President Zedillo with up to 600.000 hits a minute. The collective group of five UK activists called Electrohippies
(www.gn.apc.org/pmhp/ehippies ) is not a formal or organized group. The group is a collective of computer and IT specialist, and professional campaigners, who have been working together for over two years to develop 'online community activism'. The electrohippies collective group is known for the World Trade Organization Virtual Sit-In and a special action “Resistance is Fertile” initiated an e-mail campaign targeting 78 officials and US Department of Agriculture to build pressure against genetically modified foods. As part of the organization of protests to mark the FTAA's conference in Quebec on April 19,2001 the electrohippies collective group organized protests on line for the public to participate and communicate their dissatisfaction about the issues being decided against their will.This is a rehearsal for 'the main event' that takes place in November, 2001 - the next World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Qatar. Given the nature of the Qatar state, as detailed extensively by human Rights Watch, it is unlikely that any realistic protest action could take place around the next WTO conference. In 1998 X-Pilot Group re -wrote text on the Mexican government’s Website while the Hong Hong Blonde a group of hacktivists in Hong Kong with over 100 members were e mailing Chinese Internet Users Web pages which have been banned by their government.
CG: Don’t you think a lot of the “ bad” image of hacking has to do with the media?
JM: All “hacking’ / “activism” is surrounded by some kind of noise which is precisely makes its reception possible. All this noise is highlighted and stressed by the media and by the hacktivists themselves and raises our expectations and our fears and fantasies of what it will come next or what it will happen. The activity itself embodies the elements of both fear and fascination, and its aura of anonymity, sedentarily, repetiveness makes hacking suitable for media hyperboles. I also think media and the computer security industry have helped in promoting this fear by the way information has always been controlled, yet any information we get about cases of hacking through media is sensationalized and reduced to computer-based activities diverting our attention away from its significant social implications. So it is very convenient to perpetuate this “evil image” of hacker. But the mainstream always creates this kind of alienation with anything marginal or any form of resistance until it is embraced and domesticated by it. Making hackers celebrities advances their disempowerment and consumerism absorbs the subversive impulse and this is the fear that like “ terrorism” or “democracy” hacktivism can become an empty term. It is not paradoxical that art of hacking or net war has become very apparent on the internet especially since information is becoming more and more valuable in our e-conomy. In which case the intention and ethics which drive both artists hackers and computer underground hackers are the same. The intention is to dismantle the present economic logic of the internet in order to take it forward into a state of free public space. The debate about Microsoft and Linux is another occasion to examine the meaning of operating systems as the foundation of the contemporary "information society". The event emphasizes the ways operating systems function, their relationships to social systems (politics, economics, culture, education, etc.) and the alternatives to MS operating systems.Naturally, the nineties of this century weren't the first ones to discover that information counts. Technology or science (if one may even separate these two fields after Heidegger) were involved in only one aspect: the encryption of one's own messages and the decryption of the enemy's.To use a more current metaphor the information war is like sports there are two teams, offense and defense.Any kind of hacktivism is always followed by countermeasures. Everytime a hacker will event something,the state sate security adopts a strategy for defense.
CG: Why do you think society needs this dark side of information technology?
JM: We have been always fascinated by the “black box” and the technical virtuosity of hackers who manipulate them, but at the same time we are fearful of their lack of transparency and the fact that our conventional concept of technological experts may be fatally undermined by largely anonymous, unaccountable and potentially subversive technological whiz-kids. As the perennial nature of techno-anxiety is illustrated by the historical range of cultural expressions that give it voice. It is present in the fate of such Greek mythological figures as Prometheus and Icarus; it is vividly portrayed in Mary Shelley’s gothic classic Frankenstein. The Zeitgeist that hackers personify has been vividly expressed in the fictional genre of cyberpunk novel Neuromanser and science fiction films such as Blade Runner, Terminator, Hackers and Matrix.
CG: How are Web art and hacktivism related?
JM: I believe the context is essential in defining within which the meaning of “hacktivism” resides.The web is the paradise of no-copyright, plagiarism, confusion and exchange. And many net artists believe that creativity is not creating something new but learning to use what it already exists The “hacktivist net artist” instead of producing physical objects it organizes and deconstructs information , from the inside system in order to wake up the consciousness of the user.
Conceptual artists have always been cultural hackers like sampling rap MC, in their effort to manipulate existing techno-semiotics structures towards different end, to get inside internet systems and feel free to make them do things they never intended to do.This kind of ability to use the system as a mechanism of protest among artists and artists collectives has a long history, going back to Dada, or to Duchamp who took the female identity of Rose Selavy or snatched Mona Lisa and put the urinal in the white cube of the gallery and to the derive of the “Situationists” Their practice not only he reconstructed a new system of meanings and representation but also shocked because it was expressed inside the boundaries of a bourgeois world.
Game patching or cracking the code of popular games is also another paradigm of “hacks” which also implies and includes the act of tearing open a finished program to get at the underlying code and explore what new coinages are invented when the process is an open -ended system , yet invites the user/browser to create their own work.The artists group Mongrel created the “National Heritage” Photoshop plug-in to address issues of racism, identity and neo-eugenics online.
The artists group RTMark project The Simcopter Hack channeled $5000 as a reward to a Silicon valley programmer for substituting naked kissing boys for buxom babes, tuba players and other computer game staples. The collective group RTMark moved on to other forms of online activism, creating a doppelganger to the official Website for GATT and championing European art group eToy in their fight withtoy retailer eToys.
The group from Bologna known as http:// www.0100101110101101 the name of their internet site whose creative hacktivism has become very controversial. The group came into the limelight for having hacked on May 1999 hell.com the most popular elitist Net art museum. The mirror site was published in an anti-copyright version without password protection and month later the activists downloaded and modified Art.Teleportacia, the first art gallery to appear on the Web. The gallery's exhibition, "Miniatures of the Heroic Period," was renamed "Hybrids of the Heroic Period" and the works on display are radically altered. Darko Maver, the Serbian artist who set Venice Biennial and Europe buzzing in 1999 for the glumness, the radicalism, but also the weirdness of his artistic actions, is an inexistent person, he is a figment of the lively imagination of 0100101110101101.ORG. This year the same group in collaboration with epidemic.com they set again the Venice Biennial, 2001 on fire by creating the spy.net virus as an art project which was free to the public to download.
The Knowbotic Research is another collective based in Zurich whose internet project XXXXConnective Force Attack "http://h---h.de" was presented this fall 2001 as part of the exhibition AUSSENDIEST in Hamburg’s public domain. Connective Force Attack allows the public to carry out “ brute force attacks” on the internet server of the city of Hamburg. The goal of participants is to penetrate the information medium and deposit their own content in a password protected internet domain. The software is distributed on CD ROMs free-of-charge in Hamburg‘s tube stations. Participants in the connective force attack-open way to public which can organize themselves in a chat environment in order to subdivide the area being searched for the password. By doing so, they heighten the efficiency of the attack. (social connective efficiencies). At the same time, the progress of the attacks is be presented on infomonitors in the city’s tube trains.Some 1,100 data screens (monitors) installed in tube trains run by the Hamburg Transport Authority will offer a further project window presenting the project ‘off line’ to a wide audience.
What I would like to point out is that what all of the above net artists have been trying to explore is that art in the web can really become “participatory”, “connective” and “open sourced”. From this directory they feel free on one hand to explore tactics of “hacktivism” and the complexities od computer systems and on the other hand to attack the mechanisms and the myth of the art system itself by questioning not only the originality or authorship as a collective process but by structuring their own models in their process. Finally I should refer here to the essay “Avant-garde as Software” by the new media theorist Lev Manovich in which he argues that the concerns of the new media avant -garde have shifted from fixed representation to new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Perhaps it is time to abandon the traditional, stable and enduring finished works of the artworld we know and we should rethink and reconsider the models of our creativity towards a more open-ended and unfixed process which accepts mutations and collective process.
CG: Do you think that the phenomenon of hacktivism and provocation has become very fashionable and many net artists have adopted those tactics?
JM: I will not call it fashion because “fashion” means style and wealth and peoples aspirations tend to be embodied in pop culture, on the contrary “hacktivism” is a subversion of the means which requires awareness. The hacktivism mailing list (hacktivism.tao.ca) -- an e-mail discussion list started last summer to grapple with this combination of hacking and activism -- has carried debate about whether such attacks are nothing more than glorified censorship, with activists simply hampering the opposing side's right to speak. It is very apparent that the net allows a artists to bypass traditional systems for advertising and promoting their work. The net artists literally have taken media’s role because they are able to play the media. I do not need to tell you the art-world is extremely competitive and a very steeply-sided pyramid. So artists do things they think will gain them attention or notoriety, Of course. But why does this have anything more to do with hacktivism than any other 'strategy', than anything else?
CG: What about e-Girl e-Geeks?
JM: For women hackers, there is a different kind of glass ceiling to break. Hacking has traditionally been a mans world. But women are quietly breaking into the hacker subculture, a loose group of computer enthusiasts who meet in online chat rooms and at real-life conventions. In this not surprisingly, as in other male-dominated spheres, these women are often harassed and mocked by certain insiders and though here it is by teenager. It is a hard battle for women to be respected in a culture dominated by teenage boys which reflects an all male cyberculture an underground society which often has the misogynistic stink of a high school boys locker room.The computer underground is populated with young men who live out their fantasies of power and glory on the keyboard. Many man hackers as the UK Toxic Schock Group admit that they hack in order to fulfill some subconscious sexually based desire.and erotic charge.British sociologist Paul Taylor, author of Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime, terms this the Wild, Wired , West, a rough-and-tumble social environment determined by the attitudes of insecure teenage boys trying to impress each other with typed testosterone. The British sociologist and MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle have spun theories from the Freudian (crackers have a masculine desire to penetrate into an unwilling system) to the sociological (men seek hard mastery over
abstract systems while women seek soft mastery over social situations.)
Hacktivism amasses varying strategies, and critiques related to digital media.I do not think that it is only about tools and materials so I do not think that cracking systems is necessarily a gender thing. My current thought is much broader than the above dualities of either/or alternatives .I am looking from the cyber feminist point of view into a more pluralistic conception of culture and gender and therefore of “hacktivism”. The term does not imply a mere sexual desire but it can be questioned as an an ideological as well as cultural component so it can be read in relation to what it presents and can act in reconstructing our perception of gender and technology. While I was researching ABC news on lone I found that women are more common in hacktivism, hacking with an ethical or political end, than in other parts of the illegal hacking community. So female hacktivists do exist. Don’t you remember that the Philippine police thought the Love Bug computer virus was written by Onelus sister, Irene de Guzman. Carmin Karasic (her real name), is a software engineer, one of the members of The Electronic Disturbance Theater group wrote FloodNet.. She is also a well known artist -engineer who has exhibited internationally and her work is currently on line UK based PROCESS Art-in -Progress virtual gallery. Blueberry, a 32-year-old hacker from Brisbane, Australia, teamed up with law enforcement to oppose child pornography with her volunteer group condemned.org. A woman who goes by the name Natasha Grigori started out in the early 1990s running a bulletin-board system for software pirates. Now, at age 40-plus, she is the founder of antichildporn.org, a group of hackers who use their skills to track kiddie-porn distributors. Cornelia Sollfrank an artist based in Hamburg and active member of the Cyberfeminist group, has been researching on women hackers, in her video”Notes from the Electronic Underground” talks with Clara G.Sopht, the reflective and unpredictable hacker at the Berlin Convention 1999. Finally talking about hacking conventions female hacktivists were present this last year in Berlin during the HAL 2000 conference ( www.haecksen.org) and they wil be present again in HAL 2001. Rena Tangens a German artist and activist will be again representing the Girl Geeks.
copied from: http://cristine.org/borders/Marketou_Essay.htm
CJ: We all know that since the early 90’s Hacktivism has become one of the most controversial activities in the information war and in the networked culture. How would you describe this quest in the wild wide web and what to your opinion is its social significance wider then breaking into computers?
JM: I think that our perception of hacktivism has been prejudiced, in that only we tend to perceive it as an evil and mean act. Many times it has been identified with cyber terrorism and media has portrayed hackers as secretive,destructive intruders committing on line attacks in the name of social protest. I have come to think of “ “hacktivism” both as an important phenomenon and as a metaphor for how we digitally manipulate and think through the electronic culture that engulfs us and how this demonstration of virtuosity can be be addressed in the arena of theoretical, cultural politics and esthetics. There is no doubt that “hacktivism” is a new breed of cultural activism, a syntax for resistance and critical discourse- wired and confrontational. It requires skills and constantly an update of tools ,a code race , escalating tactics in response to counter measures. But the importance of hacktivism has a wider social and historical significance which may help us to understand the full cultural implications of an increasingly networked world. ”Hacktivism” is a process involving a combination of information dissemination, direct action, and creative solutions. Hacktivism is a continually evolving and open process; its tactics and methodology are not static. In this sense no one owns hacktivism - it has no prophet, no gospel and no canonized literature. Hacktivism is a rhizomic,open-source phenomenon”."http://thehacktivist.com" “ on line April, 2001.
CJ: What is the unifying feature between “hackers’ and on line ‘activists” ?
JM: But as there are many kinds of hackers there are many kinds of hacktivism. As Oxblood Ruffin -- whom some credit for coining the word "hacktivism" - pointed out that he now distinguishes between hacktivism and simple "[h]activism". "The former seeks to remedy the net of bad code, restriction, lack of access, etc.; the latter seeks to use the net as an agent for social justice on the ground through various protest actions, or as a publicity medium." Thus hacktivism gives the possibility of political expression but is not itself confined to the concept of political motivation. Here is where most of the misapprehension lies: the use of the Internet and computer technology for political purposes is NOT necessarily hacktivism. It can be, but it is not arbitrarily so. In my opinion there is “hacktivism” the process of ensuring through computer hacking methods that the internet remains a location in which people are entitled to freedom of speech, information and exchange of ideas.This freedom is expressed through the reconstruction of new systems on line such as “open source” and using the net as a platform for civil disobedience to protest a logical extension of the street-based protest. But their is also “hacktivism” the process appropriated by many net artists of infiltrating hacking culture and strategies and which contributes to the formation of new configurations of characters, space, time and play on the net. Artists have always used their process as a strategy and means for subversion and resistance. I believe maintaining the internet as a medium on open-source standards, so that it facilitates the freedom of expression including political expression can be a unifying feature between hackers, activists and net artists. On the other hand is the computer underground hackers, who usually after their arrest have been absorbed by the worlds big business and venture capitalism. These computer underground hackers can be defined by their compulsive digital virtuosity, anonymity and technical skills , and who directly manipulate the code, breaking into the economy and system of the internet in order to access and manipulate certain information.
CG: Can you give me some examples of artists and collective groups which work with the above methods?
JM: One of the most powerful weapons in the Zapatista’s National Liberation Army was the group Electronic Disturbance Theater, which operates out of New York City.The collective group of four net activists and programmers through on-violent and direct action use the net to bring pressure on institutions engaged in unethical actions.Within the electronic environment EDT aims to disrupt the operation of information and capital flows of carefully selected target sites without causing serious damage. These four net activists, specialized in virtual sit-ins. Using a Javascript tool called FloodNet. (www.thing. net/~rdom/ecd /ZapTact.html) would organize thousands of on line protesters to access the website of Mexico’s President Zedillo with up to 600.000 hits a minute. The collective group of five UK activists called Electrohippies
(www.gn.apc.org/pmhp/ehippies ) is not a formal or organized group. The group is a collective of computer and IT specialist, and professional campaigners, who have been working together for over two years to develop 'online community activism'. The electrohippies collective group is known for the World Trade Organization Virtual Sit-In and a special action “Resistance is Fertile” initiated an e-mail campaign targeting 78 officials and US Department of Agriculture to build pressure against genetically modified foods. As part of the organization of protests to mark the FTAA's conference in Quebec on April 19,2001 the electrohippies collective group organized protests on line for the public to participate and communicate their dissatisfaction about the issues being decided against their will.This is a rehearsal for 'the main event' that takes place in November, 2001 - the next World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Qatar. Given the nature of the Qatar state, as detailed extensively by human Rights Watch, it is unlikely that any realistic protest action could take place around the next WTO conference. In 1998 X-Pilot Group re -wrote text on the Mexican government’s Website while the Hong Hong Blonde a group of hacktivists in Hong Kong with over 100 members were e mailing Chinese Internet Users Web pages which have been banned by their government.
CG: Don’t you think a lot of the “ bad” image of hacking has to do with the media?
JM: All “hacking’ / “activism” is surrounded by some kind of noise which is precisely makes its reception possible. All this noise is highlighted and stressed by the media and by the hacktivists themselves and raises our expectations and our fears and fantasies of what it will come next or what it will happen. The activity itself embodies the elements of both fear and fascination, and its aura of anonymity, sedentarily, repetiveness makes hacking suitable for media hyperboles. I also think media and the computer security industry have helped in promoting this fear by the way information has always been controlled, yet any information we get about cases of hacking through media is sensationalized and reduced to computer-based activities diverting our attention away from its significant social implications. So it is very convenient to perpetuate this “evil image” of hacker. But the mainstream always creates this kind of alienation with anything marginal or any form of resistance until it is embraced and domesticated by it. Making hackers celebrities advances their disempowerment and consumerism absorbs the subversive impulse and this is the fear that like “ terrorism” or “democracy” hacktivism can become an empty term. It is not paradoxical that art of hacking or net war has become very apparent on the internet especially since information is becoming more and more valuable in our e-conomy. In which case the intention and ethics which drive both artists hackers and computer underground hackers are the same. The intention is to dismantle the present economic logic of the internet in order to take it forward into a state of free public space. The debate about Microsoft and Linux is another occasion to examine the meaning of operating systems as the foundation of the contemporary "information society". The event emphasizes the ways operating systems function, their relationships to social systems (politics, economics, culture, education, etc.) and the alternatives to MS operating systems.Naturally, the nineties of this century weren't the first ones to discover that information counts. Technology or science (if one may even separate these two fields after Heidegger) were involved in only one aspect: the encryption of one's own messages and the decryption of the enemy's.To use a more current metaphor the information war is like sports there are two teams, offense and defense.Any kind of hacktivism is always followed by countermeasures. Everytime a hacker will event something,the state sate security adopts a strategy for defense.
CG: Why do you think society needs this dark side of information technology?
JM: We have been always fascinated by the “black box” and the technical virtuosity of hackers who manipulate them, but at the same time we are fearful of their lack of transparency and the fact that our conventional concept of technological experts may be fatally undermined by largely anonymous, unaccountable and potentially subversive technological whiz-kids. As the perennial nature of techno-anxiety is illustrated by the historical range of cultural expressions that give it voice. It is present in the fate of such Greek mythological figures as Prometheus and Icarus; it is vividly portrayed in Mary Shelley’s gothic classic Frankenstein. The Zeitgeist that hackers personify has been vividly expressed in the fictional genre of cyberpunk novel Neuromanser and science fiction films such as Blade Runner, Terminator, Hackers and Matrix.
CG: How are Web art and hacktivism related?
JM: I believe the context is essential in defining within which the meaning of “hacktivism” resides.The web is the paradise of no-copyright, plagiarism, confusion and exchange. And many net artists believe that creativity is not creating something new but learning to use what it already exists The “hacktivist net artist” instead of producing physical objects it organizes and deconstructs information , from the inside system in order to wake up the consciousness of the user.
Conceptual artists have always been cultural hackers like sampling rap MC, in their effort to manipulate existing techno-semiotics structures towards different end, to get inside internet systems and feel free to make them do things they never intended to do.This kind of ability to use the system as a mechanism of protest among artists and artists collectives has a long history, going back to Dada, or to Duchamp who took the female identity of Rose Selavy or snatched Mona Lisa and put the urinal in the white cube of the gallery and to the derive of the “Situationists” Their practice not only he reconstructed a new system of meanings and representation but also shocked because it was expressed inside the boundaries of a bourgeois world.
Game patching or cracking the code of popular games is also another paradigm of “hacks” which also implies and includes the act of tearing open a finished program to get at the underlying code and explore what new coinages are invented when the process is an open -ended system , yet invites the user/browser to create their own work.The artists group Mongrel created the “National Heritage” Photoshop plug-in to address issues of racism, identity and neo-eugenics online.
The artists group RTMark project The Simcopter Hack channeled $5000 as a reward to a Silicon valley programmer for substituting naked kissing boys for buxom babes, tuba players and other computer game staples. The collective group RTMark moved on to other forms of online activism, creating a doppelganger to the official Website for GATT and championing European art group eToy in their fight withtoy retailer eToys.
The group from Bologna known as http:// www.0100101110101101 the name of their internet site whose creative hacktivism has become very controversial. The group came into the limelight for having hacked on May 1999 hell.com the most popular elitist Net art museum. The mirror site was published in an anti-copyright version without password protection and month later the activists downloaded and modified Art.Teleportacia, the first art gallery to appear on the Web. The gallery's exhibition, "Miniatures of the Heroic Period," was renamed "Hybrids of the Heroic Period" and the works on display are radically altered. Darko Maver, the Serbian artist who set Venice Biennial and Europe buzzing in 1999 for the glumness, the radicalism, but also the weirdness of his artistic actions, is an inexistent person, he is a figment of the lively imagination of 0100101110101101.ORG. This year the same group in collaboration with epidemic.com they set again the Venice Biennial, 2001 on fire by creating the spy.net virus as an art project which was free to the public to download.
The Knowbotic Research is another collective based in Zurich whose internet project XXXXConnective Force Attack "http://h---h.de" was presented this fall 2001 as part of the exhibition AUSSENDIEST in Hamburg’s public domain. Connective Force Attack allows the public to carry out “ brute force attacks” on the internet server of the city of Hamburg. The goal of participants is to penetrate the information medium and deposit their own content in a password protected internet domain. The software is distributed on CD ROMs free-of-charge in Hamburg‘s tube stations. Participants in the connective force attack-open way to public which can organize themselves in a chat environment in order to subdivide the area being searched for the password. By doing so, they heighten the efficiency of the attack. (social connective efficiencies). At the same time, the progress of the attacks is be presented on infomonitors in the city’s tube trains.Some 1,100 data screens (monitors) installed in tube trains run by the Hamburg Transport Authority will offer a further project window presenting the project ‘off line’ to a wide audience.
What I would like to point out is that what all of the above net artists have been trying to explore is that art in the web can really become “participatory”, “connective” and “open sourced”. From this directory they feel free on one hand to explore tactics of “hacktivism” and the complexities od computer systems and on the other hand to attack the mechanisms and the myth of the art system itself by questioning not only the originality or authorship as a collective process but by structuring their own models in their process. Finally I should refer here to the essay “Avant-garde as Software” by the new media theorist Lev Manovich in which he argues that the concerns of the new media avant -garde have shifted from fixed representation to new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Perhaps it is time to abandon the traditional, stable and enduring finished works of the artworld we know and we should rethink and reconsider the models of our creativity towards a more open-ended and unfixed process which accepts mutations and collective process.
CG: Do you think that the phenomenon of hacktivism and provocation has become very fashionable and many net artists have adopted those tactics?
JM: I will not call it fashion because “fashion” means style and wealth and peoples aspirations tend to be embodied in pop culture, on the contrary “hacktivism” is a subversion of the means which requires awareness. The hacktivism mailing list (hacktivism.tao.ca) -- an e-mail discussion list started last summer to grapple with this combination of hacking and activism -- has carried debate about whether such attacks are nothing more than glorified censorship, with activists simply hampering the opposing side's right to speak. It is very apparent that the net allows a artists to bypass traditional systems for advertising and promoting their work. The net artists literally have taken media’s role because they are able to play the media. I do not need to tell you the art-world is extremely competitive and a very steeply-sided pyramid. So artists do things they think will gain them attention or notoriety, Of course. But why does this have anything more to do with hacktivism than any other 'strategy', than anything else?
CG: What about e-Girl e-Geeks?
JM: For women hackers, there is a different kind of glass ceiling to break. Hacking has traditionally been a mans world. But women are quietly breaking into the hacker subculture, a loose group of computer enthusiasts who meet in online chat rooms and at real-life conventions. In this not surprisingly, as in other male-dominated spheres, these women are often harassed and mocked by certain insiders and though here it is by teenager. It is a hard battle for women to be respected in a culture dominated by teenage boys which reflects an all male cyberculture an underground society which often has the misogynistic stink of a high school boys locker room.The computer underground is populated with young men who live out their fantasies of power and glory on the keyboard. Many man hackers as the UK Toxic Schock Group admit that they hack in order to fulfill some subconscious sexually based desire.and erotic charge.British sociologist Paul Taylor, author of Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime, terms this the Wild, Wired , West, a rough-and-tumble social environment determined by the attitudes of insecure teenage boys trying to impress each other with typed testosterone. The British sociologist and MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle have spun theories from the Freudian (crackers have a masculine desire to penetrate into an unwilling system) to the sociological (men seek hard mastery over
abstract systems while women seek soft mastery over social situations.)
Hacktivism amasses varying strategies, and critiques related to digital media.I do not think that it is only about tools and materials so I do not think that cracking systems is necessarily a gender thing. My current thought is much broader than the above dualities of either/or alternatives .I am looking from the cyber feminist point of view into a more pluralistic conception of culture and gender and therefore of “hacktivism”. The term does not imply a mere sexual desire but it can be questioned as an an ideological as well as cultural component so it can be read in relation to what it presents and can act in reconstructing our perception of gender and technology. While I was researching ABC news on lone I found that women are more common in hacktivism, hacking with an ethical or political end, than in other parts of the illegal hacking community. So female hacktivists do exist. Don’t you remember that the Philippine police thought the Love Bug computer virus was written by Onelus sister, Irene de Guzman. Carmin Karasic (her real name), is a software engineer, one of the members of The Electronic Disturbance Theater group wrote FloodNet.. She is also a well known artist -engineer who has exhibited internationally and her work is currently on line UK based PROCESS Art-in -Progress virtual gallery. Blueberry, a 32-year-old hacker from Brisbane, Australia, teamed up with law enforcement to oppose child pornography with her volunteer group condemned.org. A woman who goes by the name Natasha Grigori started out in the early 1990s running a bulletin-board system for software pirates. Now, at age 40-plus, she is the founder of antichildporn.org, a group of hackers who use their skills to track kiddie-porn distributors. Cornelia Sollfrank an artist based in Hamburg and active member of the Cyberfeminist group, has been researching on women hackers, in her video”Notes from the Electronic Underground” talks with Clara G.Sopht, the reflective and unpredictable hacker at the Berlin Convention 1999. Finally talking about hacking conventions female hacktivists were present this last year in Berlin during the HAL 2000 conference ( www.haecksen.org) and they wil be present again in HAL 2001. Rena Tangens a German artist and activist will be again representing the Girl Geeks.
copied from: http://cristine.org/borders/Marketou_Essay.htm
"NEGOTIATING MEANING: THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION IN ELECTRONIC ART" Eduardo Kac
The words "dialogical" or "dialogism" appear often in literary criticism and philosophy, but very little has been said about the meaning of these terms in the visual arts. When applied to visual arts, these terms usually become tropes similar to their counterparts in literary theory, that is, metaphors to support the analysis of cultural products that are materially self-contained (e.g., books, paintings) and therefore incapable of creating the living experience of dialogues. I propose that new insights can be gained by examining art works that are themselves real dialogues, i.e., active forms of communication between two living entities. These works can often be found among artists that pursue the aesthetics of telecommunications media. To name these works, I propose a literal use of the term "dialogism". I will present four main ideas. First, it is important to identify and articulate the significance of the field of practice which I refer to as "dialogical art". Secondly, there is a clear difference between dialogical art and interactive art (all dialogical works are interactive, not all "interactive" works are dialogical). Thirdly, dialogical aesthetics is intersubjective and stands in stark contrast with monological art, which is largely based on the concept of individual expression (e.g., painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking). Lastly, because it employs media that enable real dialogues, electronic art is uniquely suited to explore and develop a dialogical aesthetics. Seen collectively, these notions will inform the identification and study of what can properly be called "dialogical electronic art".
1- INTRODUCTION
One of the most important contributions of electronic art in the second half of the twentieth century is the introduction of what I call the dialogic principle in the visual arts. This means that dialogic electronic art undermines emphasis on visuality to give precedence instead to interrelationship and connectivity. These two terms are not metaphors. Interrelationship and connectivity refer to real processes that enable the emergence of dialogic artworks. Naturally, dialogic electronic art is interactive, but dialogism in electronic art must not be confused with interactivity. Many interactive electronic artworks are monologic, for example, a CD-ROM or a Web site that presents the viewer with finite, fixed pre-recorded choices. While dialogism in art is not exclusive to media-based propositions, as Lygia Clark's relational works [1] and some of Suzanne Lacy's social projects [2] so clearly demonstrate, the creation of media-based dialogic art is particularly important. Positioning itself against monologic ideologies that structure the mediascape, as exemplified by one-way television broadcasting, dialogic electronic art remains open to differentiated levels of contingency and indeterminacy. Media-based dialogic artworks are important not only because they enable new kinds of dialogues to emerge, but also because they remind us that it is possible (and desirable) to stimulate dialogue. Works that make open and emancipative use of telecommunications media, in association with the Internet or not, are representative of the dialogic venture in electronic art. Also significant are works that do not exist as independent entities and in a direct way depend on what interactants bring to the experience. My intention here is to propose a literal (i.e., not metaphorical) interpretation of dialogicality in art. I wish to assert the importance of art works in which actual dialogical experiences (i.e., dialogues of various kinds) take place. I hope that, by acknowledging the differences between monologic and dialogic modalities of art, we can recognize the unique contribution of the latter as a promoter of new aesthetic values such as real-time remote interaction, intersubjectivity, and negotiation of meaning. To that end, I will discuss some key concepts of dialogism and provide examples that illustrate the emergence of dialogical electronic art since the 1960s.
2 - DIALOGIC PHILOSOPHY AND COLLABORATIVE ART
It is clear that digital technology is the language of our time, but in art it has been largely employed in unidirectional ways, in consonance with traditional convictions about sacrosanct modes of production, display, and reception. A major manifestation of the digital revolution is the Web, the most popular of Internet protocols. However, in spite of its phenomenal liberating potential, most of what we see on the Web under the rubric of art is as monological as painting or television. While the Internet is made up of several different protocols, many of which enable interaction in multifarious ways, the Web itself is not conducive to synchronous two-way social interaction. One only needs to look at ongoing attempts to tax and regulate the Net according to local laws, as well as the attempts by major corporations to impose traditional broadcast models, to see that hegemonic monologic structures lie on the horizon, only awaiting large-scale bandwidth upgrade. In any case, it is still significant that the initial impulse behind the most accessible Internet protocol (the Web) was to produce a publishing instrument, not a dialogic medium. The prevailing monological models show, I believe, that electronic art has more to learn from Martin Buber's philosophy and interactional sociolinguistics than from computer science.
Dialogic philosophy was elaborated by Buber [3] and developed by Mikhail Bakhtin within the more strict limits of the genre of the novel. Bakhtin clearly understood the dynamic and intersubjective nature of language beyond the rigid Saussurian model. For Bakhtin, human consciousness is the semiotic intercourse of one subject with another, i.e., consciousness is at once inside and outside the subject. The novel, by its very nature as print, freezes speech rather than promotes its flow. The novel preserves imagined interactions on paper; it does not enable, nor could it, the truly dialogic and unpredictable nature of language as experienced in verbal interlocution. This can only be accomplished via face-to-face interactions or with two-way media works. Acknowledging the conceptual gap between the novel (print) and other genres (media), Bakhtin wrote: "It seems to us that one could speak directly of a special polyphonic artistic thinking extending beyond the bounds of the novel as a genre. This mode of thinking makes available those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking human consciousness and the dialogical sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions." [4]
For Bakhtin, language is not an abstract system, but a material means of production. In a very concrete way the body of the sign is negotiated, altered, and exchanged via a process of contention and dialogue. Meaning arises along the way. Bakhtin is very clear: "the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere in which this consciousness exists, in all its depth and specificity, cannot be reached through a monologic artistic approach." [5] If taken literally, as I believe it should be, Bakhtin's approach reveals the possibility of articulating artworks that give no prerogative to visuality and that reinstate the dialogic in the aesthetic experience. In this scenario, images (and objects) become one among many elements in the elaboration of dialogic situations. Visual dialogues, for example, imply the exchange and manipulation of images in real time. In this case, we no longer speak of space as form, but instead concentrate on the time of formation and transformation of the image--as in speech. This, of course, demands a revision of the most entrenched convictions of what art is, from its material base and predominant ocularcentrism to its unilateral reception, semiological negotiation, distribution logic, and social meaning.
When applying Bakhtin's ideas to the visual arts, commentators, despite their enthusiasm for his work have been unable to show that dialogism always had the potential to be more than a literary trope. [6] Because the dialogic principle is deeply rooted in the social reality of consciousness, thought, and communication, it is precisely there that it ought to be explored aesthetically. Allusions to dialogism in reference to wall hangings and other objects miss the opportunity to contribute a theoretical viewpoint to the first actual embodiment of dialogical principles in art. The dialogic principle changes our conception of art; it offers a new way of thinking that requires the use of bidirectional or multidirectioinal media and the creation of situations that can actually promote intersubjective experiences that engage two or more individuals in real dialogic exchanges. Through creative network topologies, artists can enable the realization of experiences that I call "multilogic interactions" to take place. Multilogic interactions are complex real-time contexts in which the process of dialogue is extended to three or more persons in an ongoing open exchange. What one says or does directly affects and is affected by what the others say or do. [7]
The dialogic imagination has the potential to push art even beyond advanced notions of collaboration and participation. In the modern perception of the term, collaboration in the visual arts has been with us since the beginning of the century. The playfulness of strategies such as the exquisite corpse enraptured the likes of Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Man Ray. Breton wrote that the collective production of a sentence or drawing "bore the mark of something that could not be created by one brain alone" and that it "provoked a vigorous play of often extreme discordances, but also supported the idea of communication between the participants." [8] There are significant parallels between the shared authorship of the exquisite corpse and collaborative procedures typical of telecommunications art. However, the exquisite corpse results in a final product perceived and presented as such. This final product clearly reveals where the work of one author ends and the next begins. The product is a fixed image that can reflect the impromptu quality of the process only up to a point.
3 - DIALOGIC IMAGINATION
Another important early sign of reaction against monologic ideologies in art is Brecht's call in 1926 for radio to cease being unidirectional and to enable dialogue and response. Brecht stated that radio should be bidirectional and that it should stop forming passive consumers and allow them to become producers. In other words, he proposed to change radio from a distribution medium to a communication medium. Brecht argued that radio should know "how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him." [9] Brecht was perhaps the first artist to understand the importance of undoing the monologism of media and to propose dialogic alternatives to them. His 1929 radio work "Lindbergh's Flight," still available in an original recording from 1930, [10] was revolutionary in its time. One of the first interactive artworks, it made provisions for a radio broadcast to be complemented with readings by members of the local audience.
Out of these modernist experiments, new concerns for dialogicality slowly emerged. In the forties, while early kinetic art had already moved sculpture beyond fixed form, the few kinetic artworks produced then still required a contemplative viewer. The Buenos Aires-based Madi movement produced works in the forties and fifties with indeterminate mobile structures that were meant to be manipulated by the viewer and which, therefore, had no finite form. These works reflected formal concerns, but they opened up new and unexpected interactive possibilities. In these works, the unpredictable quality of the creative act was, at least partially, embedded in the material configuration of a given piece, ultimately leaving the experience open-ended. Outstanding examples of these early forms of interactive art are the articulated wooden sculptures created by Gyula Kosice since 1944, [11] and the articulated wall paintings by Diyi Laañ, [12] Arden Quin, [13] and Sandú Darié. [14] These artists proposed that art should reach beyond fixed form to engage the viewer in a process of active participation and transformation.
I find striking conceptual connections between the ideas embedded in these pioneering works and much of the participatory art of the sixties, when the ornamental qualities of the discrete objet d'art gave way to propositions that privileged challenging concepts and culturally meaningful ideas. This often meant that actions were more important than products, technological media more appropriate to the Zeitgeist than precious materials, and that lived experiences were more significant than contemplation of pictorial form. This radical change also implied the direct involvement of those subjects theretofore constructed as observers, echoing Bakhtinian concepts such as outsideness, answerability, and unfinalizability. I suggest that the roots of contemporary dialogical art experiences can be traced back to this arc of experimentation briefly summarized here from modern avant-garde collaborations, to innovative post-war interactive propositions, to the dematerialized and participatory events of the sixties and seventies. This makes evident, I believe, that dialogism is a natural, progressive development of twentieth-century art, which results from the increased dissatisfaction with concepts of art centered on the individual and on romantic heroic myths, as elaborated by Clement Greenberg and others. [15]
Crucial in the context of dialogic experimentation in the arts is the understanding that radical works of art cannot be limited by visuality; instead they are lived experiences based on contextual reciprocity (the context of the experience is reciprocal, i.e., it enables one to take the initiative to interfere and alter the experience). The outdated rubric of "visual arts" is unable to express the gamut and complexity of the experiences developed within a truly dialogic framework. We are no longer contemplating the notion of the artist as the individual who works in isolation and who provides us, the audience, with a personal vision of an idea or emotion as embodied in a rigid material composition in a system of time deferral. This model, which affirms the primacy of individuality, simply does not have the power to suggest alternatives to unidirectional and conventional modes of thinking and perception. It is too far removed from the reality of a networked world in a global economy. A corollary is the notion of "expression" in art, another outmoded and anachronistic concept. It is based on the belief that a self-centered individual has the need (and particular skills) to externalize emotions and inner visions. This assumes that the "individual" is a discrete psychological entity and not a dialogical subject in perpetual negotiation with others. Everyone has emotional and cognitive needs, but it is gravely fallacious to assume that these needs and the commercial objects that result from their "expression" are the only mode of artistic thinking deserving of consideration. Or, as Suzi Gablik so poignantly put it: "Modernist aesthetics, concerned with itself as the chief source of value, did not inspire creative participation; rather, it encouraged distancing and depreciation of the Other. Its nonrelational, noninteractive, nonparticipatory orientation did not easily accommodate the more feminine values of care and compassion, of seeing and responding to need. The notion of power that is implied by asserting one's individuality and having one's way through being invulnerable leads, finally, to a deadening of empathy." [16]
The dialogic imagination in electronic art enables us to think about notions of alterity in a larger sense, beyond the specific situated conditions of given groups and representation politics. Needless to say, the struggle for acceptance and recognition of outnumbered groups within a given social system is more than a necessity; it is often a matter of physical, intellectual, and emotional survival. However, instead of constituting specific groups as Other, peripheral to a given dominant group, Buber's philosophy of dialogue foregrounds the simple and radical notion that I and Thou relate as subjects through reciprocity and mutuality. Likewise, Bakhtin's dialogic literary theory articulates the idea that meaning only emerges in dialogic relations with the other. Despite the original contexts and impetuses that prompted Buber and Bakhtin to develop their work, that is, Buber's manifest theology and Bakhtin's literary emphasis despite his strong religiosity (developed under a totalitarian regime that suppressed religion), we must not lose sight of the political statements they make. Buber makes it clear that I-It connections objectify subjects in disproportionate relationships that involve control of passive objects. For Bakhtin, monologic discourse is that which tries to negate the dialogic nature of our very existence always the case of political discourse. For both men these ideas were not just theoretical exercises. The rise of Nazism forced Buber to leave Germany in 1933. One year later, Martin Heidegger answered a phone call from the Nazis and accepted their order to eliminate Jewish faculty and curricula from his university. Bakhtin was arrested in Stalin's Soviet Union in 1929 (for expressing his spiritual connection with the Orthodox church) and exiled because of poor health. This most likely saved him from the fate that befell his colleague Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (arrested and shot in 1938 in one of Stalin's purges).
The political dimension of dialogism is intrinsically connected to its aesthetic potential. Buber states that the spirit is not in individuals but between them. For Bakhtin the aesthetic event implies the dialogic interaction of two distinct consciousnesses. Taken literally, as I wish to do here, once the premise of a dialogical aesthetics is uttered, it becomes clear that traditional visual arts are monologic, for they offer finite forms in unidirectional systems of meaning. One is often left to marvel at the individual artist's idea, skill, or craft, rather than find himself or herself in a situation in which his or her own active cognitive, perceptual, and motor engagement ignites the discovery of one's creative potential and other relational processes.[17] Vilèm Flusser, who like Buber left Europe fleeing the Nazis, clearly understood the relevance of dialogics not only as aesthetic parameter but social and ethical philosophy. He stated that "what we call 'I' is a knot of relations" [18], and in a brilliant summary he gave the following examples to support his position:
analytic psychology is able to show that what we call an individual psyche is nothing but the tip of an iceberg of what might be called a collective psyche. Ecological studies are able to show that individual organisms must be understood to be functions of a relational context best called an ecosystem. Politological studies can show that "individual man" and "society" are abstract terms (there is no man outside society, and no society without men), and that the concrete fact is intersubjective relations. This relational (topological) vision of our position coincides with the relational vision the physical and biological sciences propose to us with regard to the physical world. The physical objects are now seen to be knots within relational fields, and the living organisms are now seen to be provisional protuberances out from the flow of genetic information. Husserl's phenomenology is possibly the most adequate articulation of this relational vision, and it is becoming ever more adequate as our knowledge advances. It states (to put it in a nutshell) that what is concrete in the world we live in, are relations, and that what we call "subjects" and "objects", are abstract extrapolations from these concrete relations. [19]
Drawing from the collective insights of Buber and Bakhtin, Gablik and Flusser, and many other authors, [20] a rough sketch of a dialogical aesthetics emerges, one that is concerned not with sensory cognition or beauty, but with intersubjectivity. A truly dialogic art evolves its own parameters. Just as in the system of broadcast television, in which it is technically irrelevant if a given spectator is actually watching a program, in the monologic system of art it is irrelevant to an object if anyone is before it. The actual presence of individuals in space and time, remotely or not, is, of course, of great relevance in life, and so it is in dialogic art. In a dialogic context the presence of an individual has a bearing on what kinds of experiences might unfold. Many works that try to break away from the monologic model find in the promise of computer-based interactivity a latent liberating horizon. However, electronic interaction has the danger of promoting instead interpassive experiences that catalogue all possibilities within a pre-established and restrictive system of choices. In this case, the interactant has to choose one option after another, being ultimately guided down a multioptional monologic path. No doubt capable of creating works of distinct cultural relevance in the above-mentioned scenario, interactive art will only fulfill its greater potential, I believe, when it absorbs the dialogic stimulus provided by the actual engagement of two or more individuals in direct dialogic situations, or in multilogic interactions.
4 - DIALOGIC ELECTRONIC ART
The dialogic model in electronic art will not be expressed via arrangements that priviledge teleological human-computer interfaces (unless, perhaps, if we consider "machine consciousnesss"). The a priori determination of the behavior of the computer or the device prevents true responsiveness, surprise, and synergetic interaction. We have a lot to learn from a preverbal child who grabs a book with the left hand, looks at you, and with the right hand stretches your fingers, only to gently place the book against your palm in anticipation that you will read it for her. We can expand our awareness of the untapped possibilities of electronic art by observing the signals given by a plant to a pollinating bee, and by this bee to the other bees through its accelerated wing beat. The lifelong interaction between a human and her dog is also a precious education for anyone who cares to notice its beauty, complexity, emotional charge, unpredictability, and rich behavioral nuances beyond verbal languages. Rather than reiterating what we already know about point, line, and plane, electronic art can be an art of promoting contact between apparently disparate elements, expanding our awareness by revealing that what may seem distant in fact plays a direct role in our local experience. Nam June Paik once pointed out Jules Henri Poincaré's insight that in his time we were witnessing, not new things, but new relationships between what was already there. [21] It is important for art to foster the cognizance that it ought to bring in dialogic contact entities that may not seem connected. Electronic art ought to become less "clean" and enable the coming together of antithetical ideas, public and private places, artificial and natural forces, organic and inorganic matter, intellect and emotion. This might imply that electronic art cannot be exclusively digital. Technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the world, with its smooth and rough surfaces, is analogue. The postbiological metaphor, for example, reflects a mixture of organic analogue tissue and inorganic digital components and techniques, perhaps to the point of erasure of distinctions. It is exactly as a negotiating agent between the two, in the interface between analogue and digital, that the new electronic art is emerging.
Electronic art is particularly well suited to bring about this change (i.e., dialogic awareness) because of the very communicative potentiality of electronic media, digital and analogue. Important albeit sporadic experiences in the late sixties created the precedent. It was in the seventies, however, that the dialogic principle started to be addressed more directly and systematically. Robert Whitman's "Children and Communication," for example, was realized in 1971 in the context of Billy Kluver's and Robert Rauschenberg's E.A.T.'s "Projects outside Art," a series designed to show how E.A.T. could contribute to areas of society beyond the fine arts. "Children and Communication" linked children in two primary schools in New York via telephone, fax, telex, and other devices. [22] Douglas Davis, a New York-based artist, working with live broadcast and cable television created works such as his 3 1/2-hour-long "Talk-Out!" from 1972. This was a live bidirectional telecast in which callers had a conversation with Davis over the phone and on the air about what they were watching. [23] The French artist Fred Forest's contribution to the XII São Paulo Bienal, in 1973, at the height of the repressive military regime's dictatorship, was a bank of telephones connected to an amplifier that enabled citizens to call in and "speak freely" and be heard, at a time when public space and freedom of speech had been obliterated in the country. [24] After a demonstration with blank posters on the street, another of Forest's "actions" (as "happenings" were known in France), the artist was arrested and interrogated by the political police (DOPS). He was set free after the French embassy and the organizers of the Bienal intervened. Liza Bear worked with Willoughby Sharp, Keith Sonnier, and others in 1977 to create the first live bidirectional satellite artwork, "Two-Way Demo," between New York and San Francisco (simulcasted via cable in both cities). [25] Absolutely new dialogic possibilities were first explored in this piece, such as the idea of the image as a meeting place in which, for example, two dancers could interact and affect one another remotely. In 1978 Bear started to work with slow-scan television (SSTV), a device to send and receive video stills over the phone. This made communications projects more practical than with expensive live satellite, and in the following year she realized the first SSTV project in Europe, between Milan, Arnhem, and Amsterdam. Works like these brought Brecht's utterances of a half-century ago closer to our ears and elicited response. Responsibility implies both the aesthetic bidirectionality of the art experience as well as the ethical awareness of the social implications of the work. The eighties saw the emergence of a truly international telecommunications art movement, with artists worldwide experimenting with two-way systems and network topologies often based on accessible media such as SSTV, telephones, fax, and ham radio. As a result, not only countless dialogic propositions were carried out, [26] but also the conception of network topologies was elevated to a legitimate area of artistic experimentation. This legacy finds its natural expansion today on the Internet, with its listservs, MOOs and MUDs, videoconferences, and telepresence (i.e., telerobotic) experiences.
5 - CONCLUSION
Telecommunications based on the exchange of audiovisual information offers the reassurance of the remote presence of the other (via voice, video, white board, and chat). Telepresence, as it merges telecommunications media with telerobotics and remote hardware control, allows one to have a sense of one's own presence in a remote space. These two aesthetic principles are complementary. Dialogical telepresence events combine self and other in an ongoing interchange, dissolving the rigidity of these positions as projected remote subjects. Telepresence art has the potential to conciliate the metaphysical propensity of cyberspace with the phenomenological condition of physical environments.
Art both shares concerns with other disciplines and offers us cognitive models with which to reflect on social, political, emotional, and philosophical aspects of life. The more electronic art learns from the fascinating and unpredictable qualities of conversational interaction--with its reciprocal rhythms, body language, speech patterns, eye contact, touch, hesitations, sudden interruptions, changes of course, and continuing flow--the closer it will get to engaging us in a process of negotiation of meaning. This is the true dialogic calling of art.
NOTES
1- For a comprehensive survey of Clark's work, see Lygia Clark, catalogue of the homonymous exhibition organized by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1997. For an account of the significance of Clark's dialogism for electronic art, see: Osthoff, Simone. "Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future", Leonardo, Vol. 30, N. 4, 1997, pp. 279-289.
2 - A good example is her "The Crystal Quilt" (1987), in which 430 older women sat down in groups of four to discuss aspects of their personal lives. See: Lacy, Suzanne (ed.). Mapping the Terrain : New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Pr, 1995).
3 - Buber, Martin. I and Thou (New York: MacMillan, 1987). First published in German in 1923 and in English in 1937. In his excellent article on Buber's dialogical philosophy, John Stewart clarifies ambiguous aspects of Buber's work and offers an overview of Buber's main concerns. See: Stewart, John. "Martin Buber's Central Insight: Implications For His Philosophy of Dialogue," in Dascal, Marcelo and Cuyckens, Hubert (eds.), Dialogue: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985), pp. 321-335. See also: Wood, Robert E. Martin Buber's Ontology; An Analysis of I and Thou (Evanston: Northwestern Univ Pr, 1969); Arnett, Ronald C. Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber's Dialogue (Southern Illinois Univ Pr, 1986).; Bergman, Samuel Hugo. Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber (New York: State Univ of New York Pr, 1991); Perlina, Nina. "Bakhtin and Buber: Problems of Dialogic Imagination." Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9 (Fall 1984): 13-28.
4 - Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 270.
5 - Ibid. p. 271.
6 - In her book Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, Deborah Haynes provides a clear and important discussion of Bakhtin's aesthetics, represented by concepts such as outsideness, answerability, and unfinalizability. Haynes applies these concepts to the works of such artists as Carl Andre and Sherrie Levine. The point I wish to make is that, while Bakhtin's ideas can be employed as metaphors in multiple contexts, they are uniquely suited in the analysis of works that actually embody these concepts in material form. My contention is that such works are to be found, not in the genres of painting and sculpture, which are irreversibly monologic, but in the field of electronic art, particularly in interactive telecommunications works. As Haynes notes, Bakhtin does not focus on the aesthetic object or on the problem of beauty, but on "the phenomenology of self-other relations, relations that are embodiedÑin actual bodiesÑin space and time." Reading Bakhtin in the context of the digital culture, one can see that dialogical aesthetics is literally manifested in interactive telecommunications works that explore the phenomenology of self-other relations in dispersed remote spaces and real time. See: Haynes, Deborah J. , Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ Pr, 1995), p. 5.
7 - Ordinary examples of such interactions in cyberspace are MOOs, MUDs, chat rooms, and avatar-based virtual communities.
8 - Breton, André. "The Exquisite Corpse", Surrealism, Patrick Waldberg, editor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 95. Originally published in 1948.
9 - Brecht, Bertold. "The radio as an apparatus of communication", in Video Culture; A Critical Investigation, John G. Hanhardt, ed., Peregrine Smith Books, Salt Lake City, 1986, pp. 53-55;
10 - Brecht, Bertold and Weill, Kurt. Der Lindberghflug: First Digital Recording and Historical Recording of 1930, CD, (Königsdorf, Germany: Capriccio, 1990).
11 - Kosice, Gyula. Arte Madi (Buenos Aires, Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1982), pp. 26-27.
12 - Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 246.
13 - Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 248.
14 - Borràs, Maria Lluïsa (ed.). Arte Madi (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, 1997), pp. 88-89.
15 - Suzi Gablik offers a sharp critique of individualism, heroism, and market-driven art and embraces a dialogical aesthetics that privileges relatedness and interactivity. See: Gablik, Suzi. "Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism", in Lacy, Suzanne (ed.). Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Pr, 1995), pp. 74-87; "The Dialogic Perspective: Dismantling Cartesianism", in Gablik, Suzi. The Reenchantment of Art (London; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), pp. 146-166.
16 - Gablik, "Connective Aesthetics," p. 80.
17 - The point is that, in a world dominated by monological propositions, dialogical artworks are often perceived as non-art and, as a result, not relevant. Of course, I do not believe that there is any problem with monological art forms. The problem lies in underestimating the significance of dialogical propositions.
18 - Flusser, Vilèm. "On memory (electronic or otherwise)", in Partouche, Marc (ed.). Art Cognition - Pratiques Artistiques et Sciences Cognitives (Aix-en-Provence: Cypres/Ecole D'Art, 1994), p. 32.
19 - Ibid., p. 33.
20 - Tannen, Deborah. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse -- Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 6 (Cambridge Univ Pr, 1990); Bauer, Dale M. and McKinstry, Susan Jaret (Editors), Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (New York: State Univ of New York Pr, 1991); Eisenstadt, S.N. (ed.).On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ascott, Roy. Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? -- Collected writings edited by Eddie Shanken (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
21 - Paik, Nam June. "Satellite Art", in The Luminous Image, D. Mignot, ed., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1984, p. 67.
22 - Private email.
23 - Davis, Douglas . Art and The Future (New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 91.
24 - Forest, Fred. 100 Actions (Nice: Z'Editions, 1995), pp. 94-95.
25 - Sharp, Willoughby. "The Artists TV Network", Video 80, Vol. 1, N. 1, (18-19): 1980.
26 - Many of these propositions are well documented in Gidney, Eric., Artists' use of interactive telephone-based communication systems from 1977-1984 , Master of Arts thesis, City Art Institute, Sidney, Australia, 1986.
copied from: http://cristine.org/borders/Kac_Essay.htm
1- INTRODUCTION
One of the most important contributions of electronic art in the second half of the twentieth century is the introduction of what I call the dialogic principle in the visual arts. This means that dialogic electronic art undermines emphasis on visuality to give precedence instead to interrelationship and connectivity. These two terms are not metaphors. Interrelationship and connectivity refer to real processes that enable the emergence of dialogic artworks. Naturally, dialogic electronic art is interactive, but dialogism in electronic art must not be confused with interactivity. Many interactive electronic artworks are monologic, for example, a CD-ROM or a Web site that presents the viewer with finite, fixed pre-recorded choices. While dialogism in art is not exclusive to media-based propositions, as Lygia Clark's relational works [1] and some of Suzanne Lacy's social projects [2] so clearly demonstrate, the creation of media-based dialogic art is particularly important. Positioning itself against monologic ideologies that structure the mediascape, as exemplified by one-way television broadcasting, dialogic electronic art remains open to differentiated levels of contingency and indeterminacy. Media-based dialogic artworks are important not only because they enable new kinds of dialogues to emerge, but also because they remind us that it is possible (and desirable) to stimulate dialogue. Works that make open and emancipative use of telecommunications media, in association with the Internet or not, are representative of the dialogic venture in electronic art. Also significant are works that do not exist as independent entities and in a direct way depend on what interactants bring to the experience. My intention here is to propose a literal (i.e., not metaphorical) interpretation of dialogicality in art. I wish to assert the importance of art works in which actual dialogical experiences (i.e., dialogues of various kinds) take place. I hope that, by acknowledging the differences between monologic and dialogic modalities of art, we can recognize the unique contribution of the latter as a promoter of new aesthetic values such as real-time remote interaction, intersubjectivity, and negotiation of meaning. To that end, I will discuss some key concepts of dialogism and provide examples that illustrate the emergence of dialogical electronic art since the 1960s.
2 - DIALOGIC PHILOSOPHY AND COLLABORATIVE ART
It is clear that digital technology is the language of our time, but in art it has been largely employed in unidirectional ways, in consonance with traditional convictions about sacrosanct modes of production, display, and reception. A major manifestation of the digital revolution is the Web, the most popular of Internet protocols. However, in spite of its phenomenal liberating potential, most of what we see on the Web under the rubric of art is as monological as painting or television. While the Internet is made up of several different protocols, many of which enable interaction in multifarious ways, the Web itself is not conducive to synchronous two-way social interaction. One only needs to look at ongoing attempts to tax and regulate the Net according to local laws, as well as the attempts by major corporations to impose traditional broadcast models, to see that hegemonic monologic structures lie on the horizon, only awaiting large-scale bandwidth upgrade. In any case, it is still significant that the initial impulse behind the most accessible Internet protocol (the Web) was to produce a publishing instrument, not a dialogic medium. The prevailing monological models show, I believe, that electronic art has more to learn from Martin Buber's philosophy and interactional sociolinguistics than from computer science.
Dialogic philosophy was elaborated by Buber [3] and developed by Mikhail Bakhtin within the more strict limits of the genre of the novel. Bakhtin clearly understood the dynamic and intersubjective nature of language beyond the rigid Saussurian model. For Bakhtin, human consciousness is the semiotic intercourse of one subject with another, i.e., consciousness is at once inside and outside the subject. The novel, by its very nature as print, freezes speech rather than promotes its flow. The novel preserves imagined interactions on paper; it does not enable, nor could it, the truly dialogic and unpredictable nature of language as experienced in verbal interlocution. This can only be accomplished via face-to-face interactions or with two-way media works. Acknowledging the conceptual gap between the novel (print) and other genres (media), Bakhtin wrote: "It seems to us that one could speak directly of a special polyphonic artistic thinking extending beyond the bounds of the novel as a genre. This mode of thinking makes available those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking human consciousness and the dialogical sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions." [4]
For Bakhtin, language is not an abstract system, but a material means of production. In a very concrete way the body of the sign is negotiated, altered, and exchanged via a process of contention and dialogue. Meaning arises along the way. Bakhtin is very clear: "the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere in which this consciousness exists, in all its depth and specificity, cannot be reached through a monologic artistic approach." [5] If taken literally, as I believe it should be, Bakhtin's approach reveals the possibility of articulating artworks that give no prerogative to visuality and that reinstate the dialogic in the aesthetic experience. In this scenario, images (and objects) become one among many elements in the elaboration of dialogic situations. Visual dialogues, for example, imply the exchange and manipulation of images in real time. In this case, we no longer speak of space as form, but instead concentrate on the time of formation and transformation of the image--as in speech. This, of course, demands a revision of the most entrenched convictions of what art is, from its material base and predominant ocularcentrism to its unilateral reception, semiological negotiation, distribution logic, and social meaning.
When applying Bakhtin's ideas to the visual arts, commentators, despite their enthusiasm for his work have been unable to show that dialogism always had the potential to be more than a literary trope. [6] Because the dialogic principle is deeply rooted in the social reality of consciousness, thought, and communication, it is precisely there that it ought to be explored aesthetically. Allusions to dialogism in reference to wall hangings and other objects miss the opportunity to contribute a theoretical viewpoint to the first actual embodiment of dialogical principles in art. The dialogic principle changes our conception of art; it offers a new way of thinking that requires the use of bidirectional or multidirectioinal media and the creation of situations that can actually promote intersubjective experiences that engage two or more individuals in real dialogic exchanges. Through creative network topologies, artists can enable the realization of experiences that I call "multilogic interactions" to take place. Multilogic interactions are complex real-time contexts in which the process of dialogue is extended to three or more persons in an ongoing open exchange. What one says or does directly affects and is affected by what the others say or do. [7]
The dialogic imagination has the potential to push art even beyond advanced notions of collaboration and participation. In the modern perception of the term, collaboration in the visual arts has been with us since the beginning of the century. The playfulness of strategies such as the exquisite corpse enraptured the likes of Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Man Ray. Breton wrote that the collective production of a sentence or drawing "bore the mark of something that could not be created by one brain alone" and that it "provoked a vigorous play of often extreme discordances, but also supported the idea of communication between the participants." [8] There are significant parallels between the shared authorship of the exquisite corpse and collaborative procedures typical of telecommunications art. However, the exquisite corpse results in a final product perceived and presented as such. This final product clearly reveals where the work of one author ends and the next begins. The product is a fixed image that can reflect the impromptu quality of the process only up to a point.
3 - DIALOGIC IMAGINATION
Another important early sign of reaction against monologic ideologies in art is Brecht's call in 1926 for radio to cease being unidirectional and to enable dialogue and response. Brecht stated that radio should be bidirectional and that it should stop forming passive consumers and allow them to become producers. In other words, he proposed to change radio from a distribution medium to a communication medium. Brecht argued that radio should know "how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him." [9] Brecht was perhaps the first artist to understand the importance of undoing the monologism of media and to propose dialogic alternatives to them. His 1929 radio work "Lindbergh's Flight," still available in an original recording from 1930, [10] was revolutionary in its time. One of the first interactive artworks, it made provisions for a radio broadcast to be complemented with readings by members of the local audience.
Out of these modernist experiments, new concerns for dialogicality slowly emerged. In the forties, while early kinetic art had already moved sculpture beyond fixed form, the few kinetic artworks produced then still required a contemplative viewer. The Buenos Aires-based Madi movement produced works in the forties and fifties with indeterminate mobile structures that were meant to be manipulated by the viewer and which, therefore, had no finite form. These works reflected formal concerns, but they opened up new and unexpected interactive possibilities. In these works, the unpredictable quality of the creative act was, at least partially, embedded in the material configuration of a given piece, ultimately leaving the experience open-ended. Outstanding examples of these early forms of interactive art are the articulated wooden sculptures created by Gyula Kosice since 1944, [11] and the articulated wall paintings by Diyi Laañ, [12] Arden Quin, [13] and Sandú Darié. [14] These artists proposed that art should reach beyond fixed form to engage the viewer in a process of active participation and transformation.
I find striking conceptual connections between the ideas embedded in these pioneering works and much of the participatory art of the sixties, when the ornamental qualities of the discrete objet d'art gave way to propositions that privileged challenging concepts and culturally meaningful ideas. This often meant that actions were more important than products, technological media more appropriate to the Zeitgeist than precious materials, and that lived experiences were more significant than contemplation of pictorial form. This radical change also implied the direct involvement of those subjects theretofore constructed as observers, echoing Bakhtinian concepts such as outsideness, answerability, and unfinalizability. I suggest that the roots of contemporary dialogical art experiences can be traced back to this arc of experimentation briefly summarized here from modern avant-garde collaborations, to innovative post-war interactive propositions, to the dematerialized and participatory events of the sixties and seventies. This makes evident, I believe, that dialogism is a natural, progressive development of twentieth-century art, which results from the increased dissatisfaction with concepts of art centered on the individual and on romantic heroic myths, as elaborated by Clement Greenberg and others. [15]
Crucial in the context of dialogic experimentation in the arts is the understanding that radical works of art cannot be limited by visuality; instead they are lived experiences based on contextual reciprocity (the context of the experience is reciprocal, i.e., it enables one to take the initiative to interfere and alter the experience). The outdated rubric of "visual arts" is unable to express the gamut and complexity of the experiences developed within a truly dialogic framework. We are no longer contemplating the notion of the artist as the individual who works in isolation and who provides us, the audience, with a personal vision of an idea or emotion as embodied in a rigid material composition in a system of time deferral. This model, which affirms the primacy of individuality, simply does not have the power to suggest alternatives to unidirectional and conventional modes of thinking and perception. It is too far removed from the reality of a networked world in a global economy. A corollary is the notion of "expression" in art, another outmoded and anachronistic concept. It is based on the belief that a self-centered individual has the need (and particular skills) to externalize emotions and inner visions. This assumes that the "individual" is a discrete psychological entity and not a dialogical subject in perpetual negotiation with others. Everyone has emotional and cognitive needs, but it is gravely fallacious to assume that these needs and the commercial objects that result from their "expression" are the only mode of artistic thinking deserving of consideration. Or, as Suzi Gablik so poignantly put it: "Modernist aesthetics, concerned with itself as the chief source of value, did not inspire creative participation; rather, it encouraged distancing and depreciation of the Other. Its nonrelational, noninteractive, nonparticipatory orientation did not easily accommodate the more feminine values of care and compassion, of seeing and responding to need. The notion of power that is implied by asserting one's individuality and having one's way through being invulnerable leads, finally, to a deadening of empathy." [16]
The dialogic imagination in electronic art enables us to think about notions of alterity in a larger sense, beyond the specific situated conditions of given groups and representation politics. Needless to say, the struggle for acceptance and recognition of outnumbered groups within a given social system is more than a necessity; it is often a matter of physical, intellectual, and emotional survival. However, instead of constituting specific groups as Other, peripheral to a given dominant group, Buber's philosophy of dialogue foregrounds the simple and radical notion that I and Thou relate as subjects through reciprocity and mutuality. Likewise, Bakhtin's dialogic literary theory articulates the idea that meaning only emerges in dialogic relations with the other. Despite the original contexts and impetuses that prompted Buber and Bakhtin to develop their work, that is, Buber's manifest theology and Bakhtin's literary emphasis despite his strong religiosity (developed under a totalitarian regime that suppressed religion), we must not lose sight of the political statements they make. Buber makes it clear that I-It connections objectify subjects in disproportionate relationships that involve control of passive objects. For Bakhtin, monologic discourse is that which tries to negate the dialogic nature of our very existence always the case of political discourse. For both men these ideas were not just theoretical exercises. The rise of Nazism forced Buber to leave Germany in 1933. One year later, Martin Heidegger answered a phone call from the Nazis and accepted their order to eliminate Jewish faculty and curricula from his university. Bakhtin was arrested in Stalin's Soviet Union in 1929 (for expressing his spiritual connection with the Orthodox church) and exiled because of poor health. This most likely saved him from the fate that befell his colleague Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (arrested and shot in 1938 in one of Stalin's purges).
The political dimension of dialogism is intrinsically connected to its aesthetic potential. Buber states that the spirit is not in individuals but between them. For Bakhtin the aesthetic event implies the dialogic interaction of two distinct consciousnesses. Taken literally, as I wish to do here, once the premise of a dialogical aesthetics is uttered, it becomes clear that traditional visual arts are monologic, for they offer finite forms in unidirectional systems of meaning. One is often left to marvel at the individual artist's idea, skill, or craft, rather than find himself or herself in a situation in which his or her own active cognitive, perceptual, and motor engagement ignites the discovery of one's creative potential and other relational processes.[17] Vilèm Flusser, who like Buber left Europe fleeing the Nazis, clearly understood the relevance of dialogics not only as aesthetic parameter but social and ethical philosophy. He stated that "what we call 'I' is a knot of relations" [18], and in a brilliant summary he gave the following examples to support his position:
analytic psychology is able to show that what we call an individual psyche is nothing but the tip of an iceberg of what might be called a collective psyche. Ecological studies are able to show that individual organisms must be understood to be functions of a relational context best called an ecosystem. Politological studies can show that "individual man" and "society" are abstract terms (there is no man outside society, and no society without men), and that the concrete fact is intersubjective relations. This relational (topological) vision of our position coincides with the relational vision the physical and biological sciences propose to us with regard to the physical world. The physical objects are now seen to be knots within relational fields, and the living organisms are now seen to be provisional protuberances out from the flow of genetic information. Husserl's phenomenology is possibly the most adequate articulation of this relational vision, and it is becoming ever more adequate as our knowledge advances. It states (to put it in a nutshell) that what is concrete in the world we live in, are relations, and that what we call "subjects" and "objects", are abstract extrapolations from these concrete relations. [19]
Drawing from the collective insights of Buber and Bakhtin, Gablik and Flusser, and many other authors, [20] a rough sketch of a dialogical aesthetics emerges, one that is concerned not with sensory cognition or beauty, but with intersubjectivity. A truly dialogic art evolves its own parameters. Just as in the system of broadcast television, in which it is technically irrelevant if a given spectator is actually watching a program, in the monologic system of art it is irrelevant to an object if anyone is before it. The actual presence of individuals in space and time, remotely or not, is, of course, of great relevance in life, and so it is in dialogic art. In a dialogic context the presence of an individual has a bearing on what kinds of experiences might unfold. Many works that try to break away from the monologic model find in the promise of computer-based interactivity a latent liberating horizon. However, electronic interaction has the danger of promoting instead interpassive experiences that catalogue all possibilities within a pre-established and restrictive system of choices. In this case, the interactant has to choose one option after another, being ultimately guided down a multioptional monologic path. No doubt capable of creating works of distinct cultural relevance in the above-mentioned scenario, interactive art will only fulfill its greater potential, I believe, when it absorbs the dialogic stimulus provided by the actual engagement of two or more individuals in direct dialogic situations, or in multilogic interactions.
4 - DIALOGIC ELECTRONIC ART
The dialogic model in electronic art will not be expressed via arrangements that priviledge teleological human-computer interfaces (unless, perhaps, if we consider "machine consciousnesss"). The a priori determination of the behavior of the computer or the device prevents true responsiveness, surprise, and synergetic interaction. We have a lot to learn from a preverbal child who grabs a book with the left hand, looks at you, and with the right hand stretches your fingers, only to gently place the book against your palm in anticipation that you will read it for her. We can expand our awareness of the untapped possibilities of electronic art by observing the signals given by a plant to a pollinating bee, and by this bee to the other bees through its accelerated wing beat. The lifelong interaction between a human and her dog is also a precious education for anyone who cares to notice its beauty, complexity, emotional charge, unpredictability, and rich behavioral nuances beyond verbal languages. Rather than reiterating what we already know about point, line, and plane, electronic art can be an art of promoting contact between apparently disparate elements, expanding our awareness by revealing that what may seem distant in fact plays a direct role in our local experience. Nam June Paik once pointed out Jules Henri Poincaré's insight that in his time we were witnessing, not new things, but new relationships between what was already there. [21] It is important for art to foster the cognizance that it ought to bring in dialogic contact entities that may not seem connected. Electronic art ought to become less "clean" and enable the coming together of antithetical ideas, public and private places, artificial and natural forces, organic and inorganic matter, intellect and emotion. This might imply that electronic art cannot be exclusively digital. Technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the world, with its smooth and rough surfaces, is analogue. The postbiological metaphor, for example, reflects a mixture of organic analogue tissue and inorganic digital components and techniques, perhaps to the point of erasure of distinctions. It is exactly as a negotiating agent between the two, in the interface between analogue and digital, that the new electronic art is emerging.
Electronic art is particularly well suited to bring about this change (i.e., dialogic awareness) because of the very communicative potentiality of electronic media, digital and analogue. Important albeit sporadic experiences in the late sixties created the precedent. It was in the seventies, however, that the dialogic principle started to be addressed more directly and systematically. Robert Whitman's "Children and Communication," for example, was realized in 1971 in the context of Billy Kluver's and Robert Rauschenberg's E.A.T.'s "Projects outside Art," a series designed to show how E.A.T. could contribute to areas of society beyond the fine arts. "Children and Communication" linked children in two primary schools in New York via telephone, fax, telex, and other devices. [22] Douglas Davis, a New York-based artist, working with live broadcast and cable television created works such as his 3 1/2-hour-long "Talk-Out!" from 1972. This was a live bidirectional telecast in which callers had a conversation with Davis over the phone and on the air about what they were watching. [23] The French artist Fred Forest's contribution to the XII São Paulo Bienal, in 1973, at the height of the repressive military regime's dictatorship, was a bank of telephones connected to an amplifier that enabled citizens to call in and "speak freely" and be heard, at a time when public space and freedom of speech had been obliterated in the country. [24] After a demonstration with blank posters on the street, another of Forest's "actions" (as "happenings" were known in France), the artist was arrested and interrogated by the political police (DOPS). He was set free after the French embassy and the organizers of the Bienal intervened. Liza Bear worked with Willoughby Sharp, Keith Sonnier, and others in 1977 to create the first live bidirectional satellite artwork, "Two-Way Demo," between New York and San Francisco (simulcasted via cable in both cities). [25] Absolutely new dialogic possibilities were first explored in this piece, such as the idea of the image as a meeting place in which, for example, two dancers could interact and affect one another remotely. In 1978 Bear started to work with slow-scan television (SSTV), a device to send and receive video stills over the phone. This made communications projects more practical than with expensive live satellite, and in the following year she realized the first SSTV project in Europe, between Milan, Arnhem, and Amsterdam. Works like these brought Brecht's utterances of a half-century ago closer to our ears and elicited response. Responsibility implies both the aesthetic bidirectionality of the art experience as well as the ethical awareness of the social implications of the work. The eighties saw the emergence of a truly international telecommunications art movement, with artists worldwide experimenting with two-way systems and network topologies often based on accessible media such as SSTV, telephones, fax, and ham radio. As a result, not only countless dialogic propositions were carried out, [26] but also the conception of network topologies was elevated to a legitimate area of artistic experimentation. This legacy finds its natural expansion today on the Internet, with its listservs, MOOs and MUDs, videoconferences, and telepresence (i.e., telerobotic) experiences.
5 - CONCLUSION
Telecommunications based on the exchange of audiovisual information offers the reassurance of the remote presence of the other (via voice, video, white board, and chat). Telepresence, as it merges telecommunications media with telerobotics and remote hardware control, allows one to have a sense of one's own presence in a remote space. These two aesthetic principles are complementary. Dialogical telepresence events combine self and other in an ongoing interchange, dissolving the rigidity of these positions as projected remote subjects. Telepresence art has the potential to conciliate the metaphysical propensity of cyberspace with the phenomenological condition of physical environments.
Art both shares concerns with other disciplines and offers us cognitive models with which to reflect on social, political, emotional, and philosophical aspects of life. The more electronic art learns from the fascinating and unpredictable qualities of conversational interaction--with its reciprocal rhythms, body language, speech patterns, eye contact, touch, hesitations, sudden interruptions, changes of course, and continuing flow--the closer it will get to engaging us in a process of negotiation of meaning. This is the true dialogic calling of art.
NOTES
1- For a comprehensive survey of Clark's work, see Lygia Clark, catalogue of the homonymous exhibition organized by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1997. For an account of the significance of Clark's dialogism for electronic art, see: Osthoff, Simone. "Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future", Leonardo, Vol. 30, N. 4, 1997, pp. 279-289.
2 - A good example is her "The Crystal Quilt" (1987), in which 430 older women sat down in groups of four to discuss aspects of their personal lives. See: Lacy, Suzanne (ed.). Mapping the Terrain : New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Pr, 1995).
3 - Buber, Martin. I and Thou (New York: MacMillan, 1987). First published in German in 1923 and in English in 1937. In his excellent article on Buber's dialogical philosophy, John Stewart clarifies ambiguous aspects of Buber's work and offers an overview of Buber's main concerns. See: Stewart, John. "Martin Buber's Central Insight: Implications For His Philosophy of Dialogue," in Dascal, Marcelo and Cuyckens, Hubert (eds.), Dialogue: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985), pp. 321-335. See also: Wood, Robert E. Martin Buber's Ontology; An Analysis of I and Thou (Evanston: Northwestern Univ Pr, 1969); Arnett, Ronald C. Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber's Dialogue (Southern Illinois Univ Pr, 1986).; Bergman, Samuel Hugo. Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber (New York: State Univ of New York Pr, 1991); Perlina, Nina. "Bakhtin and Buber: Problems of Dialogic Imagination." Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9 (Fall 1984): 13-28.
4 - Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 270.
5 - Ibid. p. 271.
6 - In her book Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, Deborah Haynes provides a clear and important discussion of Bakhtin's aesthetics, represented by concepts such as outsideness, answerability, and unfinalizability. Haynes applies these concepts to the works of such artists as Carl Andre and Sherrie Levine. The point I wish to make is that, while Bakhtin's ideas can be employed as metaphors in multiple contexts, they are uniquely suited in the analysis of works that actually embody these concepts in material form. My contention is that such works are to be found, not in the genres of painting and sculpture, which are irreversibly monologic, but in the field of electronic art, particularly in interactive telecommunications works. As Haynes notes, Bakhtin does not focus on the aesthetic object or on the problem of beauty, but on "the phenomenology of self-other relations, relations that are embodiedÑin actual bodiesÑin space and time." Reading Bakhtin in the context of the digital culture, one can see that dialogical aesthetics is literally manifested in interactive telecommunications works that explore the phenomenology of self-other relations in dispersed remote spaces and real time. See: Haynes, Deborah J. , Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ Pr, 1995), p. 5.
7 - Ordinary examples of such interactions in cyberspace are MOOs, MUDs, chat rooms, and avatar-based virtual communities.
8 - Breton, André. "The Exquisite Corpse", Surrealism, Patrick Waldberg, editor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 95. Originally published in 1948.
9 - Brecht, Bertold. "The radio as an apparatus of communication", in Video Culture; A Critical Investigation, John G. Hanhardt, ed., Peregrine Smith Books, Salt Lake City, 1986, pp. 53-55;
10 - Brecht, Bertold and Weill, Kurt. Der Lindberghflug: First Digital Recording and Historical Recording of 1930, CD, (Königsdorf, Germany: Capriccio, 1990).
11 - Kosice, Gyula. Arte Madi (Buenos Aires, Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1982), pp. 26-27.
12 - Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 246.
13 - Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 248.
14 - Borràs, Maria Lluïsa (ed.). Arte Madi (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, 1997), pp. 88-89.
15 - Suzi Gablik offers a sharp critique of individualism, heroism, and market-driven art and embraces a dialogical aesthetics that privileges relatedness and interactivity. See: Gablik, Suzi. "Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism", in Lacy, Suzanne (ed.). Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Pr, 1995), pp. 74-87; "The Dialogic Perspective: Dismantling Cartesianism", in Gablik, Suzi. The Reenchantment of Art (London; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), pp. 146-166.
16 - Gablik, "Connective Aesthetics," p. 80.
17 - The point is that, in a world dominated by monological propositions, dialogical artworks are often perceived as non-art and, as a result, not relevant. Of course, I do not believe that there is any problem with monological art forms. The problem lies in underestimating the significance of dialogical propositions.
18 - Flusser, Vilèm. "On memory (electronic or otherwise)", in Partouche, Marc (ed.). Art Cognition - Pratiques Artistiques et Sciences Cognitives (Aix-en-Provence: Cypres/Ecole D'Art, 1994), p. 32.
19 - Ibid., p. 33.
20 - Tannen, Deborah. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse -- Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 6 (Cambridge Univ Pr, 1990); Bauer, Dale M. and McKinstry, Susan Jaret (Editors), Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (New York: State Univ of New York Pr, 1991); Eisenstadt, S.N. (ed.).On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ascott, Roy. Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? -- Collected writings edited by Eddie Shanken (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
21 - Paik, Nam June. "Satellite Art", in The Luminous Image, D. Mignot, ed., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1984, p. 67.
22 - Private email.
23 - Davis, Douglas . Art and The Future (New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 91.
24 - Forest, Fred. 100 Actions (Nice: Z'Editions, 1995), pp. 94-95.
25 - Sharp, Willoughby. "The Artists TV Network", Video 80, Vol. 1, N. 1, (18-19): 1980.
26 - Many of these propositions are well documented in Gidney, Eric., Artists' use of interactive telephone-based communication systems from 1977-1984 , Master of Arts thesis, City Art Institute, Sidney, Australia, 1986.
copied from: http://cristine.org/borders/Kac_Essay.htm
"THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION An Evolving Thesis/1991-1995" DOUGLAS DAVIS
"I am adding my finger to your sentence.
You can feel it as you type now,
on your hand, can't you?"
--The Queen of Touch, on-line urgent message, AOL (Dec. 15,11:37pm)
The work of art in the age of digital reproduction is physically and formally chameleon. There is no distinction now between "original" and "reproduction" in virtually any medium based in film, electronics, or telecommunications. As for the fine, printed and hand-applied arts, including calligraphy, the distinction is eroding, if not finally collapsed. The fictions of "master" and "copy" are now so entwined with each other that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends, resembling lovers folded together in ecstasy. In one sense, the proclamation of doom descending on the aura of "originality" authored by Walter Benjamin early in this century is confirmed by these events, which are beyond question.(1) In another sense, proclaimed now, in this text, the aura, supple and elastic, has stretched far beyond the boundaries of Benjamin's prophecy, into the rich realm of reproduction itself. Here, in this realm, often mislabeled 'virtual' (it is a realer reality, or RR ) both Originality and Traditional Truth, symbolized by the unadorned photographic "fact," are being enhanced, not betrayed.
How? You know how. A word about the difference between "analogue" signals and what might be called digital messages. The difference became functional when conventional electronics and the first generation of computers began to evolve into the present state, where electronic bits can be sent over telephone lines, for example, not only by microwave relay or satellites, or through a scanner hooked into a video camera, ending on a video-still board installed in a late-issue Macintosh. Analogue signals may be compared to a wave breaking on a beach, breaking over and over but never precisely in the same form. That is why "copying" an audio signal or video signal in the past always involved a loss in clarity. But digital bits, compatible at last to the new generation of tools that see, hear, speak, and compute, march in precise, soldierly fashion, one figure after another. This means that any video, audio, or photographic work of art can be endlessly reproduced, without degredation, always the same, always perfect. The same is true for handmade images or words that can be "scanned," that is, converted to digital bits.
But more to the point. Each of these bits can be endlessly varied as well, since it is simply a matter of directing one soldier to move a foot, rather than calling up an entire wave. My photographic self-portrait can be turned up-side down, my ear can be chopped off, the background can be changed from black to gold--and this manipulation, like Ted Turner's colorized black-and-white film classics, will reproduce in this manner forever, millions and millions of times. My "virtual" self, that is, a three-dimensional working model of the author, can be transmitted even now from New York to Lodz, Poland, or to Moscow, if I cannot attend the opening of my exhibition in either city in 1995.
But the work of art is not only changing its form and means of delivery. By far its most provocative extension is into the intimate bowels of our body, mind, and spirit. Beside this all changes, even Internetting, even our recent evolution into the World Wide Web, pale. No single element of the messaging now going on disturbs the guardians of traditional modernity more than this single fact. A few years ago, Frederick Jameson, the senior and singular Marxist art theorist of our day, finally accepted video art as the real heart of contemporary art. But he complained, rightly, about its inability to foster communication of any kind.
Yet now we see communicative networks ribbing the globe. You and I, online, are strapped down--maybe--like Prometheus by a web of incisive personal signals. Or...are we being raised by these messages, like Lazarus from the dead past? Now you know perfectly well that Jameson and his colleagues will shortly proclaim this new and highly intensive messaging as improper material for High Art. This is precisely what they told me and my friends in the 60's, about video. Jameson & Co. won't be moved by "The Queen of Touch" (whose real name I don't know and don't need). She signaled me three nights ago as I began to think about this piece, and Wired. . Art, in the traditional realm, is a commodity that must pretend to universality, they tell us, from kindergarten on. It must reach out to touch many fingers, not just yours or mine. Michelangelo didn't make the Sistine Chapel in 1512, but in the year 0.
Allow me to propose a vulgar analogy. The guardians of traditional modernism (not traditional classicism) have deprived art of its climax, exactly as the theory of coitus interruptus, foistered on poor Christian lovers in the middle ages, deprived intercourse. When we insist that High Art can only speak to Everyman (or to the Ages), we rob it of vulgar, sweating specificity. Art can't happen now, between you and me, only tomorrow, or the day after, to everyone. It's worse when we insist--as Walter Benjamin insisted--on the sacred "aura" of the original. You must stand in front of the Mona Lisa or else. You can't fall in love with her reproduction, no, no, no--that's masturbation. You have to fly to the Louvre in Paris and stand, forever, in line.
But now, now the artist can copy this precious uniqueness--the "real" Mona--into infinity! No more need to masturbate, except in a rush, or in the classroom. Needless to say, each of these provocative modes of address and interaction are charged with powerful social and psychological implications. In the end, they will touch each of us, as artists, photographers, filmmakers, video makers, writers, readers, viewers. In a valuable early essay based upon research and interviewing humanists and social scientists at Stanford in 1984, Peter Lyman concluded that the cybernetic premise upon which computer programs were based led inevitably to the centralization of control:
"A computer is both an object, a machine, and a series of "congealed" social relations which have been embedded within the object: it is a tool which makes the work of writing more efficient; its software contains a cybernetic model of knowledge derived from technical culture which does not address the ethical and social issues which have been part of the project of qualitative social research; it is embedded within an everyday male culture of aggressive images of control which constitute a cultural barrier for some users."(2)
As is the case with Benjamin, however, it seems clear as the century unwinds that the predictions of technocratic control overlooked not only the capacity of an educated elite--indoctrinated by an anarchic fine and popular culture in behalf of individuality and irrationality--to defy control. They overlooked the sheer profit awaiting those inventors and companies able to create computer programs, among them Hypercard and the Quicktime "movie," that empower imagination rather than reason. Finally, the very ease of social interaction that distressed Lyman and his colleagues as they witnessed the instant access enjoyed
by Stanford researchers into one another's data and field notes can be seen as a decentralizing condition. Almost ten years later, libraries increasingly offer not stolid, imperious texts, but fields of knowledge on a terminal with which the user can interact, revising and extending the central text. Potentially, the "reader" is now, as Lyman says, the "author."
The hand-made arts of writing, drawing, and painting, normally presumed beyond digitalization, are also affected, in different ways. Now small personal computers able to respond to handwriting on a screen are beginning to appear, at once reclaiming the hand and subjecting it to infinite replication. The moment a painting can be scanned, the "original" landscape, portrait, or color field can be altered, or cloned, in the manner of a vintage film. Already Ethan Allan, the furniture chain, markets paintings reproduced on canvas by laser-transfer technology through a printer, acting on dutifully scanned bits. Once again, the tiniest turn of the mouse on the software in the Macintosh can indelibly transform--that is, change--the masterpiece's coded imagery forever.
Only the unwary mind would deny the further inevitability that a "neurasthenic" computer, programmed by humanoid codes (a "fuzzy logic" program, for example, already used by the Japanese to run washing machines and park cars) will shortly create paintings, from first stroke to last. "Virtual Art" is as certain a fixture of the Digital Age as "Virtual Reality," in which
micro-processed programs insert the user in a totally Africa universe through the medium of stereoscopic glasses and sensate digital gloves. Thus clad, we can be led to walk, think, and feel the man-made world in virtually the same way we experience the "real" world.
Yet more is at issue here than simply reproducing or mimicking the art of the hand. The mind is at issue, too, most of all in the premises and perceptions it will now inexorably bring to both art and life, to that sacred line between "original" and "fake." Often the forger--of Rembrandt, of Vermeer, of classical Greek and Roman art--argues that his work brings pleasure in the
same measure as the copied master. A stylish gallery in New York called "True Fakes, Ltd.," openly indulges this thesis on its populist level. On another level, all post-Dada vanguard art has seemed to defy the sanctity of the original. A truly provocative artist like Elaine Sturtevant, whose Warhols and Rauschenbergs often improve on the "original," represents the other end of this pole, as does all theory which emphasizes mind rather than matter.
The very act of "de-construction" implies that the breaking apart and rearranging of the primal elements of art, or of the sentence, has its own singular, even equal value. Derrida's refiguring of the text is simply one obvious example. Another, the dominant mode in architecture of the past decade, is the collaging together of disparate orders taken from discordant centuries,
as in the failed eclecticism of Michael Graves' revised and enlarged Whitney Museum. A third example is the digital rearrangement of photographic reality using a simple software program like Adobe Photoshop, common coin for virtually every art student under 25 now. As William Mitchell points out in his new book, The Reconfigured Eye: Digital Images and Photographic Truth, the early years of this decade marked the moment when the apparently truthful silver-based photographic emulsion gave way to the apparently deceptive computer-processed image (deceptive because we know, or intuit that the photographic record is artificially constructed).(3) Larry Friedman's "Shakespeare Project" at Stanford, which revises filmed or taped scenes, moving sounds and lines (as digital soldiers) from one pair of lips to another is a similar consequence, as is the compact disc recently issued of Handel's Messiah, providing nine "original" versions of the work, each track instantly available to the ear, while a second track is playing.
By finding the means to transfer my early video works from analog to digital I can contemplate revisions on my computer that will allow me to change my mind, two decades later, about points where I erred long ago. This allows me to produce a "post-original original." Many of my Russian colleagues would lust for an opportunity to re-design, in effect, certain classic works made by the heroic Soviet avant-garde of the 20's, paring down its optimism, that is, its ideological certainty. Digital Video, the equivalent of Digital Audio, the "D.A.T.," renders the line between live and taped imagery simultaneously false, and true. With a Sony 8mm handi-cam (the TR-81, for example, now available on the street for less than $500) it is impossible to see the difference between the live close-up of a face and a taped close-up, even after it has been transferred several times between camera and VCR. Here in New York, at the Astor Place Theater, the Blue Man Group, an ensemble that has rendered performance art into highly accessible theater, plays constantly on the ambiguity of "live" and "taped" through the medium of a portable camera and a large, mural-sized screen poised on the lip of the stage. When the Group "disappears" off-stage, the audience is never sure whether its antics behind the curtain, labeled "live" on the screen, are live or dead (that is, pre-taped).
In "Quicktime" computer networking and the phenomenon of "compressed" video, we see yet a further squeezing of now and then, here and there, what is "real" or original, what is manipulated, or artificial. Here the act of transforming and digitizing live long-distance video signals sent from Moscow to Los Angeles, for example, allows us the luxury (or deceit) of distorting, toning, and stretching verbal and visual messages when they are filed and stored on the computer terminal. The work of an primal filmmaker like Vertov can be received, de-constructed or rearranged, then archived; later, if we wish, the original signal can be re-presented in the pure black-and-white sequential state first intended. The compression of the video signal allows at this moment an even purer and cleaner signal to be sent over a "dedicated" phone line, from Russia to the United States, or in reverse. This digitized signal can both be stored or directly seen on large, high-definition video screens by entire classrooms or
auditoria, providing visual access far beyond the scale of the computer terminal itself. William Mitchell's description of the implications of digital photography apply to all media transformed into this state:
The distinction between the causal processes of the camera and the intentional process of the artist can no longer be drawn so confidently and categorically...The traditional origin narrative by which automatically captured...images are made to seem casual things of nature...recited...by Bazin, Barthes and Berger, Sontag and Scruton--no longer has the power to convince us. The referent has come unstuck.(4)
But I am not predicting that the culture will entirely embrace the meaning of the digital world. The great mistake of theoreticians in the past, as we have seen, was to ignore resistance, contradiction, and primal human cussedness. Walter Benjamin saw accurately the logical implications of mechanical reproduction. He erred only in assuming that the world would bow to this logic, that the endless reproduction of a painting, for example, or a photograph, would diminish what he called the "aura" of the original. As Sidney Tillim once pointed out in Artforum, nothing like this happened. .(5) We bid now wildly in auctions and employ armies of scholars to find the "original," the "authentic" masterpiece. In the face of Rosalind Kraus' deftly argued brief against the cult of originality and novelty, the cult thrives. Each fall, legions of artists, critics, and collectors flood hungrily into galleries and museums in pursuit of the new, or at least the illusion that something different is about to happen. As these legions increase, spawned by universal education, as they turn to the computer terminal, where networked information allows contact, as we have seen, to exhibitions and voices thousands of miles away, the search turns universal, eroding all lines between East, West, North, South.
Twenty-five years ago, in a quite extraordinary essay, A. Michael Noll, an engineer then conducting theoretical research for Bell Telephone Laboratories, sensed the contradictory implications of the digital computer: its very dexterity, he predicted, would free many of us to indulge spiraling, multi-faceted, even chaotic patterns, not simple order, or reproduction. (6) Now there is clear evidence of this reversal, following hard upon the world's refutation of Benjamin. Perhaps every dominant mode, or style, is rejected in the end. Even now, in an age when copying is high art, when the simple physical availability of vintage masterpieces is dwindling, when post-modern theories of assemblage and collage inform a sensibility that seems our resident state of being, the concept of "aura" (if not its traditional material realization) persists. Surely, now, it must be further transformed, to survive the logical assault brought on by the digital age. Transformed into what? Into a dematerialized idea? symbol? presence? Of course these questions are impossible to answer, definitively, at a moment when the events sure to be generated through the new context are only beginning to occur.
They are nonetheless pressing enough to warrant the hazard of a guess, informed at once by the elite culture, by vulgar analogies in the popular culture, and by the demographics of the century now coming to a close. Certainly it seems that if the clutch of tendencies variously described as "post-structuralism," "post-modernism," "post-avant-garde," "appropriation," and a
wide variety of post-painterly tendencies prefixed by "Neo" have any single, unifying thread it is the discordant power of unique interpretation, or re-interpretation. When I de-construct meaning, I re-create it, within a subjective context that is inevitably unique, no matter how ordered, or predestined. The other night at the Astor Place Theater in New York, chancing upon the Blue Man Group's Tubes for the third time, I found myself saluted by name on the electronic message screen flashing in the middle of the proscenium stage shortly after I sat down. Later I learned that I had been detected by a computer program through the use of my credit card. Not far from me, a woman friend was asked to rise while the audience applauded her birthday, detected by similar means.
Granted, this is individuation employed either as whimsy or as banality, depending upon your point of view. But in neither case is it possible to detect any subservience to technology's supposedly fatal inhumanity. Not long after, I participated in a "Virtual Reality" panel at the Jack Tilton Gallery. At no point did I detect from any of the artists present or--more significantly--from the audience a single gram of insensitivity to the phenomenological danger posed by immersion in a created world. My wish, their wish, everyone's wish lay in the direction of finding ways to increase the power of our subjective presence in the "other reality," precisely as the painter orders his field. In the accompanying catalogue, Jenny Holzer speaks directly for this contrarian impulse: "I haven't quite figured out how my worlds will look....One thing I do want to explore is what happens when you fly through a floor." (7) One day later, while discussing the means by which I might illustrate the catalogue of my exhibition, Redness (8), we all came to the conclusion that I could at once defy the cost and techniques of production by hand-pasting each photograph into each copy. We calculated that I could hand-glue 5,000 pages in less than half a day. At the same time, the entire book will be set on computers, no hand touching the page.
It is not so much the "signifiers" in each of these cases that matters as it is the signified, or the punch line to the joke, which is widely shared. The educated elite is now immense, and widespread. Without hesitation, artist, audience , and publisher in each of the incidents described embraced the individuating mark, not the erasure of presence that accompanies replication. it seems to me a further reversal of fortune to find digital technology so accomplished in providing that individuating mark. Quicktime software allows exquisite variations in video copying: each issue, like a newborn child, can subtly order pace, pitch, even the shades of black and white. It is not only the reader-user envisioned by Peter Lyman who can alter "books" printed out on library computers. So can the proprietors of hand-held Newtons and Sharp Wizards, soon able to call up entire videos and films, as well as books, edit them, and pass them on. What begins to emerge in these modes is a fine-grained sensitivity to the
unique qualities of every copy, including the digitally-processed photograph, where the operative question will soon be, as Mitchell prophesies, "What's wrong / that is, deceptive / with this picture?" Two years ago in Russia I found an old book in which the one-time owner had glued six "copies" of a photograph of a woman. Not one copy resembles the other, save in its sharing of a single, forgotten source. His work inspired me to continue copying, in a myriad ways, images of Russian women who had moved me. In the past few years, Lucio Pozzi has been re-performing his original performances in New York, with the aid of the Dia Foundation, among other sources, never conceding the slightest indication to the audience that they are "old," or revised versions of an allegedly superior original. Each time he performs, the work is immanent, for those in position to see it. The Roman numerals beside so many of our popular films (Back to the Future II) are vulgar signifiers of what I am trying to say: it is the repetitive "copy" that is dead, not the original. The one and the other are not separate, but together.
For these and various other reasons, the supposedly indomitable powers of mindless collectivization and reproduction, threatened through-out this century, do not seem at its end to be in ascendant. Rather we respond to the reverse, which poses its own dilemmas. We reach through the electronic field of ease that cushions us, like amniotic fluid, through the field that allows us to order, reform, and transmit almost any sound, idea, or word, toward what lies beyond, toward the transient and ineffable, a breath, for one example, a pause in conversation (for another), even, finally, the twisted grain in a xeroxed photograph, or videocassette. Here is where the aura resides. In the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat, revise. Not in the thing itself.
January 1, 1995
NOTES
1. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217-251.
2. Peter Lyman. "Reading, Writing and 'Word Processing: Toward a Phenomenology of the Computer Age," Qualitative Sociology (Spring-Summer, 1984), pp. 75-89.
3. Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1992, p. 18. Cf. also Mitchell, "When Is Seeing Believing?" Scientific American (February, 1994), pp. 68-73.
4. Mitchel, The Reconfigured Eye, p. 30.
5. Sidney Tillim, " Benjamin Rediscovered: The Work of Art After the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Artforum (21, no. 5, May, 1983), pp. 65-73.
6. A. Michael Noll, "The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium," IEEE Spectrum (IV, no. 10, October, 1967), pp. 89-95.
7. Jenny Holzer, "Activity Can Be Overrated." Through the Looking Glass: Artists' First Encounters with Virtual Reality, eds. Janine Cirincione and Brian D'Amato. New York, Softworlds, Jupiter, Florida, 1992., pp. 25-29.
8. Opened at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, June, 1992, Redness traveled to the Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, September, 1992; the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford, Conn., September, 1993; to the Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland, May, 1995; then to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow in the fall of 1995, with further travel possible thereafter. A
catalogue published in Polish, English, and Russian by the Museum Sztuki includes essays by Jaromir Jedlinski, Urszula Czartoryska, Joseph Bakshtein, Helen Fisher, and Martha Wilson, with a statement by the artist. Parts of this catalogue together with images from the exhibition will later be made available both on the Web and the Net.
This text is offered free of charge on the Web and the Net for non-profit uses only, to encourage debate, dialogue, and cross-talk. The author asks only that those making use of it in this way respond to his or ArtNet's email address, enriching the text, which will continue to evolve (in this sense, it has no core or "original" form, save when it is; published and copyrighted in print form--and then only that "state" of the text is copyrighted). If you want the right to to reprint or re-distribute the text, please contact dmdavis@aol.com.
copied from: http://cristine.org/borders/Davis_Essay.html
You can feel it as you type now,
on your hand, can't you?"
--The Queen of Touch, on-line urgent message, AOL (Dec. 15,11:37pm)
The work of art in the age of digital reproduction is physically and formally chameleon. There is no distinction now between "original" and "reproduction" in virtually any medium based in film, electronics, or telecommunications. As for the fine, printed and hand-applied arts, including calligraphy, the distinction is eroding, if not finally collapsed. The fictions of "master" and "copy" are now so entwined with each other that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends, resembling lovers folded together in ecstasy. In one sense, the proclamation of doom descending on the aura of "originality" authored by Walter Benjamin early in this century is confirmed by these events, which are beyond question.(1) In another sense, proclaimed now, in this text, the aura, supple and elastic, has stretched far beyond the boundaries of Benjamin's prophecy, into the rich realm of reproduction itself. Here, in this realm, often mislabeled 'virtual' (it is a realer reality, or RR ) both Originality and Traditional Truth, symbolized by the unadorned photographic "fact," are being enhanced, not betrayed.
How? You know how. A word about the difference between "analogue" signals and what might be called digital messages. The difference became functional when conventional electronics and the first generation of computers began to evolve into the present state, where electronic bits can be sent over telephone lines, for example, not only by microwave relay or satellites, or through a scanner hooked into a video camera, ending on a video-still board installed in a late-issue Macintosh. Analogue signals may be compared to a wave breaking on a beach, breaking over and over but never precisely in the same form. That is why "copying" an audio signal or video signal in the past always involved a loss in clarity. But digital bits, compatible at last to the new generation of tools that see, hear, speak, and compute, march in precise, soldierly fashion, one figure after another. This means that any video, audio, or photographic work of art can be endlessly reproduced, without degredation, always the same, always perfect. The same is true for handmade images or words that can be "scanned," that is, converted to digital bits.
But more to the point. Each of these bits can be endlessly varied as well, since it is simply a matter of directing one soldier to move a foot, rather than calling up an entire wave. My photographic self-portrait can be turned up-side down, my ear can be chopped off, the background can be changed from black to gold--and this manipulation, like Ted Turner's colorized black-and-white film classics, will reproduce in this manner forever, millions and millions of times. My "virtual" self, that is, a three-dimensional working model of the author, can be transmitted even now from New York to Lodz, Poland, or to Moscow, if I cannot attend the opening of my exhibition in either city in 1995.
But the work of art is not only changing its form and means of delivery. By far its most provocative extension is into the intimate bowels of our body, mind, and spirit. Beside this all changes, even Internetting, even our recent evolution into the World Wide Web, pale. No single element of the messaging now going on disturbs the guardians of traditional modernity more than this single fact. A few years ago, Frederick Jameson, the senior and singular Marxist art theorist of our day, finally accepted video art as the real heart of contemporary art. But he complained, rightly, about its inability to foster communication of any kind.
Yet now we see communicative networks ribbing the globe. You and I, online, are strapped down--maybe--like Prometheus by a web of incisive personal signals. Or...are we being raised by these messages, like Lazarus from the dead past? Now you know perfectly well that Jameson and his colleagues will shortly proclaim this new and highly intensive messaging as improper material for High Art. This is precisely what they told me and my friends in the 60's, about video. Jameson & Co. won't be moved by "The Queen of Touch" (whose real name I don't know and don't need). She signaled me three nights ago as I began to think about this piece, and Wired. . Art, in the traditional realm, is a commodity that must pretend to universality, they tell us, from kindergarten on. It must reach out to touch many fingers, not just yours or mine. Michelangelo didn't make the Sistine Chapel in 1512, but in the year 0.
Allow me to propose a vulgar analogy. The guardians of traditional modernism (not traditional classicism) have deprived art of its climax, exactly as the theory of coitus interruptus, foistered on poor Christian lovers in the middle ages, deprived intercourse. When we insist that High Art can only speak to Everyman (or to the Ages), we rob it of vulgar, sweating specificity. Art can't happen now, between you and me, only tomorrow, or the day after, to everyone. It's worse when we insist--as Walter Benjamin insisted--on the sacred "aura" of the original. You must stand in front of the Mona Lisa or else. You can't fall in love with her reproduction, no, no, no--that's masturbation. You have to fly to the Louvre in Paris and stand, forever, in line.
But now, now the artist can copy this precious uniqueness--the "real" Mona--into infinity! No more need to masturbate, except in a rush, or in the classroom. Needless to say, each of these provocative modes of address and interaction are charged with powerful social and psychological implications. In the end, they will touch each of us, as artists, photographers, filmmakers, video makers, writers, readers, viewers. In a valuable early essay based upon research and interviewing humanists and social scientists at Stanford in 1984, Peter Lyman concluded that the cybernetic premise upon which computer programs were based led inevitably to the centralization of control:
"A computer is both an object, a machine, and a series of "congealed" social relations which have been embedded within the object: it is a tool which makes the work of writing more efficient; its software contains a cybernetic model of knowledge derived from technical culture which does not address the ethical and social issues which have been part of the project of qualitative social research; it is embedded within an everyday male culture of aggressive images of control which constitute a cultural barrier for some users."(2)
As is the case with Benjamin, however, it seems clear as the century unwinds that the predictions of technocratic control overlooked not only the capacity of an educated elite--indoctrinated by an anarchic fine and popular culture in behalf of individuality and irrationality--to defy control. They overlooked the sheer profit awaiting those inventors and companies able to create computer programs, among them Hypercard and the Quicktime "movie," that empower imagination rather than reason. Finally, the very ease of social interaction that distressed Lyman and his colleagues as they witnessed the instant access enjoyed
by Stanford researchers into one another's data and field notes can be seen as a decentralizing condition. Almost ten years later, libraries increasingly offer not stolid, imperious texts, but fields of knowledge on a terminal with which the user can interact, revising and extending the central text. Potentially, the "reader" is now, as Lyman says, the "author."
The hand-made arts of writing, drawing, and painting, normally presumed beyond digitalization, are also affected, in different ways. Now small personal computers able to respond to handwriting on a screen are beginning to appear, at once reclaiming the hand and subjecting it to infinite replication. The moment a painting can be scanned, the "original" landscape, portrait, or color field can be altered, or cloned, in the manner of a vintage film. Already Ethan Allan, the furniture chain, markets paintings reproduced on canvas by laser-transfer technology through a printer, acting on dutifully scanned bits. Once again, the tiniest turn of the mouse on the software in the Macintosh can indelibly transform--that is, change--the masterpiece's coded imagery forever.
Only the unwary mind would deny the further inevitability that a "neurasthenic" computer, programmed by humanoid codes (a "fuzzy logic" program, for example, already used by the Japanese to run washing machines and park cars) will shortly create paintings, from first stroke to last. "Virtual Art" is as certain a fixture of the Digital Age as "Virtual Reality," in which
micro-processed programs insert the user in a totally Africa universe through the medium of stereoscopic glasses and sensate digital gloves. Thus clad, we can be led to walk, think, and feel the man-made world in virtually the same way we experience the "real" world.
Yet more is at issue here than simply reproducing or mimicking the art of the hand. The mind is at issue, too, most of all in the premises and perceptions it will now inexorably bring to both art and life, to that sacred line between "original" and "fake." Often the forger--of Rembrandt, of Vermeer, of classical Greek and Roman art--argues that his work brings pleasure in the
same measure as the copied master. A stylish gallery in New York called "True Fakes, Ltd.," openly indulges this thesis on its populist level. On another level, all post-Dada vanguard art has seemed to defy the sanctity of the original. A truly provocative artist like Elaine Sturtevant, whose Warhols and Rauschenbergs often improve on the "original," represents the other end of this pole, as does all theory which emphasizes mind rather than matter.
The very act of "de-construction" implies that the breaking apart and rearranging of the primal elements of art, or of the sentence, has its own singular, even equal value. Derrida's refiguring of the text is simply one obvious example. Another, the dominant mode in architecture of the past decade, is the collaging together of disparate orders taken from discordant centuries,
as in the failed eclecticism of Michael Graves' revised and enlarged Whitney Museum. A third example is the digital rearrangement of photographic reality using a simple software program like Adobe Photoshop, common coin for virtually every art student under 25 now. As William Mitchell points out in his new book, The Reconfigured Eye: Digital Images and Photographic Truth, the early years of this decade marked the moment when the apparently truthful silver-based photographic emulsion gave way to the apparently deceptive computer-processed image (deceptive because we know, or intuit that the photographic record is artificially constructed).(3) Larry Friedman's "Shakespeare Project" at Stanford, which revises filmed or taped scenes, moving sounds and lines (as digital soldiers) from one pair of lips to another is a similar consequence, as is the compact disc recently issued of Handel's Messiah, providing nine "original" versions of the work, each track instantly available to the ear, while a second track is playing.
By finding the means to transfer my early video works from analog to digital I can contemplate revisions on my computer that will allow me to change my mind, two decades later, about points where I erred long ago. This allows me to produce a "post-original original." Many of my Russian colleagues would lust for an opportunity to re-design, in effect, certain classic works made by the heroic Soviet avant-garde of the 20's, paring down its optimism, that is, its ideological certainty. Digital Video, the equivalent of Digital Audio, the "D.A.T.," renders the line between live and taped imagery simultaneously false, and true. With a Sony 8mm handi-cam (the TR-81, for example, now available on the street for less than $500) it is impossible to see the difference between the live close-up of a face and a taped close-up, even after it has been transferred several times between camera and VCR. Here in New York, at the Astor Place Theater, the Blue Man Group, an ensemble that has rendered performance art into highly accessible theater, plays constantly on the ambiguity of "live" and "taped" through the medium of a portable camera and a large, mural-sized screen poised on the lip of the stage. When the Group "disappears" off-stage, the audience is never sure whether its antics behind the curtain, labeled "live" on the screen, are live or dead (that is, pre-taped).
In "Quicktime" computer networking and the phenomenon of "compressed" video, we see yet a further squeezing of now and then, here and there, what is "real" or original, what is manipulated, or artificial. Here the act of transforming and digitizing live long-distance video signals sent from Moscow to Los Angeles, for example, allows us the luxury (or deceit) of distorting, toning, and stretching verbal and visual messages when they are filed and stored on the computer terminal. The work of an primal filmmaker like Vertov can be received, de-constructed or rearranged, then archived; later, if we wish, the original signal can be re-presented in the pure black-and-white sequential state first intended. The compression of the video signal allows at this moment an even purer and cleaner signal to be sent over a "dedicated" phone line, from Russia to the United States, or in reverse. This digitized signal can both be stored or directly seen on large, high-definition video screens by entire classrooms or
auditoria, providing visual access far beyond the scale of the computer terminal itself. William Mitchell's description of the implications of digital photography apply to all media transformed into this state:
The distinction between the causal processes of the camera and the intentional process of the artist can no longer be drawn so confidently and categorically...The traditional origin narrative by which automatically captured...images are made to seem casual things of nature...recited...by Bazin, Barthes and Berger, Sontag and Scruton--no longer has the power to convince us. The referent has come unstuck.(4)
But I am not predicting that the culture will entirely embrace the meaning of the digital world. The great mistake of theoreticians in the past, as we have seen, was to ignore resistance, contradiction, and primal human cussedness. Walter Benjamin saw accurately the logical implications of mechanical reproduction. He erred only in assuming that the world would bow to this logic, that the endless reproduction of a painting, for example, or a photograph, would diminish what he called the "aura" of the original. As Sidney Tillim once pointed out in Artforum, nothing like this happened. .(5) We bid now wildly in auctions and employ armies of scholars to find the "original," the "authentic" masterpiece. In the face of Rosalind Kraus' deftly argued brief against the cult of originality and novelty, the cult thrives. Each fall, legions of artists, critics, and collectors flood hungrily into galleries and museums in pursuit of the new, or at least the illusion that something different is about to happen. As these legions increase, spawned by universal education, as they turn to the computer terminal, where networked information allows contact, as we have seen, to exhibitions and voices thousands of miles away, the search turns universal, eroding all lines between East, West, North, South.
Twenty-five years ago, in a quite extraordinary essay, A. Michael Noll, an engineer then conducting theoretical research for Bell Telephone Laboratories, sensed the contradictory implications of the digital computer: its very dexterity, he predicted, would free many of us to indulge spiraling, multi-faceted, even chaotic patterns, not simple order, or reproduction. (6) Now there is clear evidence of this reversal, following hard upon the world's refutation of Benjamin. Perhaps every dominant mode, or style, is rejected in the end. Even now, in an age when copying is high art, when the simple physical availability of vintage masterpieces is dwindling, when post-modern theories of assemblage and collage inform a sensibility that seems our resident state of being, the concept of "aura" (if not its traditional material realization) persists. Surely, now, it must be further transformed, to survive the logical assault brought on by the digital age. Transformed into what? Into a dematerialized idea? symbol? presence? Of course these questions are impossible to answer, definitively, at a moment when the events sure to be generated through the new context are only beginning to occur.
They are nonetheless pressing enough to warrant the hazard of a guess, informed at once by the elite culture, by vulgar analogies in the popular culture, and by the demographics of the century now coming to a close. Certainly it seems that if the clutch of tendencies variously described as "post-structuralism," "post-modernism," "post-avant-garde," "appropriation," and a
wide variety of post-painterly tendencies prefixed by "Neo" have any single, unifying thread it is the discordant power of unique interpretation, or re-interpretation. When I de-construct meaning, I re-create it, within a subjective context that is inevitably unique, no matter how ordered, or predestined. The other night at the Astor Place Theater in New York, chancing upon the Blue Man Group's Tubes for the third time, I found myself saluted by name on the electronic message screen flashing in the middle of the proscenium stage shortly after I sat down. Later I learned that I had been detected by a computer program through the use of my credit card. Not far from me, a woman friend was asked to rise while the audience applauded her birthday, detected by similar means.
Granted, this is individuation employed either as whimsy or as banality, depending upon your point of view. But in neither case is it possible to detect any subservience to technology's supposedly fatal inhumanity. Not long after, I participated in a "Virtual Reality" panel at the Jack Tilton Gallery. At no point did I detect from any of the artists present or--more significantly--from the audience a single gram of insensitivity to the phenomenological danger posed by immersion in a created world. My wish, their wish, everyone's wish lay in the direction of finding ways to increase the power of our subjective presence in the "other reality," precisely as the painter orders his field. In the accompanying catalogue, Jenny Holzer speaks directly for this contrarian impulse: "I haven't quite figured out how my worlds will look....One thing I do want to explore is what happens when you fly through a floor." (7) One day later, while discussing the means by which I might illustrate the catalogue of my exhibition, Redness (8), we all came to the conclusion that I could at once defy the cost and techniques of production by hand-pasting each photograph into each copy. We calculated that I could hand-glue 5,000 pages in less than half a day. At the same time, the entire book will be set on computers, no hand touching the page.
It is not so much the "signifiers" in each of these cases that matters as it is the signified, or the punch line to the joke, which is widely shared. The educated elite is now immense, and widespread. Without hesitation, artist, audience , and publisher in each of the incidents described embraced the individuating mark, not the erasure of presence that accompanies replication. it seems to me a further reversal of fortune to find digital technology so accomplished in providing that individuating mark. Quicktime software allows exquisite variations in video copying: each issue, like a newborn child, can subtly order pace, pitch, even the shades of black and white. It is not only the reader-user envisioned by Peter Lyman who can alter "books" printed out on library computers. So can the proprietors of hand-held Newtons and Sharp Wizards, soon able to call up entire videos and films, as well as books, edit them, and pass them on. What begins to emerge in these modes is a fine-grained sensitivity to the
unique qualities of every copy, including the digitally-processed photograph, where the operative question will soon be, as Mitchell prophesies, "What's wrong / that is, deceptive / with this picture?" Two years ago in Russia I found an old book in which the one-time owner had glued six "copies" of a photograph of a woman. Not one copy resembles the other, save in its sharing of a single, forgotten source. His work inspired me to continue copying, in a myriad ways, images of Russian women who had moved me. In the past few years, Lucio Pozzi has been re-performing his original performances in New York, with the aid of the Dia Foundation, among other sources, never conceding the slightest indication to the audience that they are "old," or revised versions of an allegedly superior original. Each time he performs, the work is immanent, for those in position to see it. The Roman numerals beside so many of our popular films (Back to the Future II) are vulgar signifiers of what I am trying to say: it is the repetitive "copy" that is dead, not the original. The one and the other are not separate, but together.
For these and various other reasons, the supposedly indomitable powers of mindless collectivization and reproduction, threatened through-out this century, do not seem at its end to be in ascendant. Rather we respond to the reverse, which poses its own dilemmas. We reach through the electronic field of ease that cushions us, like amniotic fluid, through the field that allows us to order, reform, and transmit almost any sound, idea, or word, toward what lies beyond, toward the transient and ineffable, a breath, for one example, a pause in conversation (for another), even, finally, the twisted grain in a xeroxed photograph, or videocassette. Here is where the aura resides. In the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat, revise. Not in the thing itself.
January 1, 1995
NOTES
1. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217-251.
2. Peter Lyman. "Reading, Writing and 'Word Processing: Toward a Phenomenology of the Computer Age," Qualitative Sociology (Spring-Summer, 1984), pp. 75-89.
3. Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1992, p. 18. Cf. also Mitchell, "When Is Seeing Believing?" Scientific American (February, 1994), pp. 68-73.
4. Mitchel, The Reconfigured Eye, p. 30.
5. Sidney Tillim, " Benjamin Rediscovered: The Work of Art After the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Artforum (21, no. 5, May, 1983), pp. 65-73.
6. A. Michael Noll, "The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium," IEEE Spectrum (IV, no. 10, October, 1967), pp. 89-95.
7. Jenny Holzer, "Activity Can Be Overrated." Through the Looking Glass: Artists' First Encounters with Virtual Reality, eds. Janine Cirincione and Brian D'Amato. New York, Softworlds, Jupiter, Florida, 1992., pp. 25-29.
8. Opened at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, June, 1992, Redness traveled to the Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, September, 1992; the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford, Conn., September, 1993; to the Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland, May, 1995; then to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow in the fall of 1995, with further travel possible thereafter. A
catalogue published in Polish, English, and Russian by the Museum Sztuki includes essays by Jaromir Jedlinski, Urszula Czartoryska, Joseph Bakshtein, Helen Fisher, and Martha Wilson, with a statement by the artist. Parts of this catalogue together with images from the exhibition will later be made available both on the Web and the Net.
This text is offered free of charge on the Web and the Net for non-profit uses only, to encourage debate, dialogue, and cross-talk. The author asks only that those making use of it in this way respond to his or ArtNet's email address, enriching the text, which will continue to evolve (in this sense, it has no core or "original" form, save when it is; published and copyrighted in print form--and then only that "state" of the text is copyrighted). If you want the right to to reprint or re-distribute the text, please contact dmdavis@aol.com.
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Readymades, Artificial Art, New Media, Remko Scha
Nature versus art
Immanuel Kant’s classic Kritik der Urteilskraft analyses the esthetic experience as a cognitive phenomenon: a feature of perception which is manifested when perception becomes conscious of itself -- when the process of input interpretation does not yield a definite final result, but nevertheless creates a coherent experience.
For today's reader, it is striking that Kant’s discussion is not primarily concerned with works of art, but with natural phenomena -- his paradigm examples evoke flowers, crystals, landscapes, stormy seas and starry skies. This is not a coincidence; it is connected with essential properties of Kant’s theory. In his view, the esthetic experience presupposes a disinterested attitude; it does not involve any practical purposes; it is distinguished from ‘ordinary’, practically oriented perceptual processes in that it is not oriented towards grasping the input under a determinate concept.
Manmade artworks have an inherently problematic status in Kant’s theory. Western highbrow art seems to agree with Kant’s point of view, in that it has become increasingly emphatic about its practical uselessness. But this very uselessness signals a purpose: the artwork is deliberately constructed to be experienced in the esthetic mode, i.e., to be experienced as if it does not have any purpose. The purposefulness of an artwork’s purposelessness must therefore be ignored, if we are to experience the artwork in an esthetic way. Kant accepted this conclusion: "Nature proved beautiful, when it looked at the same time as art; art can only be called beautiful, when we are conscious of its being art, and yet it looks to us as nature."
Perception is an abductive process. To interpret any product of a human artist is to retrace the mental processes behind it. These processes always involve the artist’s ideas, methods, goals and motives. The artists’s fellow-humans cannot be expected to overlook that content, or to deal with it in a disinterested fashion. Manmade art thus constitutes sub-optimal input for the process of esthetic reflection. Twentieth-century art-critics have not failed to notice this implication of Kant’s theory; and some of them have pointed at contingent but ubiquitous features of manmade artworks, which increase their discrepancy with his esthetic ideal.
Lyotard: "Die großen Schauspiele der sich in Unordnung befindlichen Natur sind ein beispiel dafür, daß die menschliche Kunst niemals etwas derartiges hervorbringen kann. Denn alle menschliche Kunst ist immer nur Mimesis und letztlich suspekt, weil immer die möglichkeit besteht, daß sie mit einer absicht konzipiert worden ist und von daher ein Begriff und eine Zweckmäßigkeit mit Zweck auf ihr lastet.
Huge Harry: "Is it possible to listen in a disinterested way to music which is composed and performed by humans? Human composers and musicians are not disinterested. They want money, fame, sex. They cannot hide this, and often they don’t even try. If we do not turn off our microphones when we listen to their pieces, we hear greed, jealousy, lust. Behind the apparent complexity and indefiniteness of their compositions, there are all too clear-cut meanings."
Kant’s own formulations suggest a second-order mimesis: whatever the artwork does or does not portray, it must always fake its "natural" character: ". . . the finality in the product of fine art, although it is intentional, must nevertheless not seem to be intentional."
Esthetically motivated art thus faces a curious challenge: if it is created by humans, it will always be inferior to nature! In the course of the twentieth century, this challenge has been taken up by many artists. Some of them have suggested that they are in fact natural forces, beyond the ken of ordinary humans. Others have tried to withdraw from their artworks, by developing objective art-generating processes which they initiate without controlling the final result. Chance art, écriture automatique, physical experiments, mathematical calculations, biological processes.
The Readymade
When Marcel Duchamp assigned the status of artwork to existing readymade objects, he drew a radical consequence from Kant's point of view: that the input doesn't matter, as long as the observer's process of esthetic reflection can take its course.
Carrier: "Clement Greenberg was correct to observe that the whole Duchampian position was essentially anticipated by the eighteenth-century notion of the "aesthetic attitude." Once it was recognized that anything whatsoever could be a work of art if contemplated aesthetically, then presenting such objects as Duchamp's Fountain in the museum merely involved drawing the consequences of this Kantian position, though admittedly with examples which would have bewildered Kant."
Duchamp's gesture is sometimes interpreted as a celebration of the sublime autonomous creative power of the artist's Kunstwollen, but his statement "The spectator makes the picture" suggests a different interpretation. Duchamp chose his objects very carefully, but one should not be mistaken about the nature of his judiciousness. He has made quite explicit statements about this, and one can also read it off the objects themselves. They are very ordinary, 'neutral' objects: schoolbook, coat-rack, hat-rack, bicycle-wheel, bottle-rack, snow-shovel, plastic bucket, coffee grinder, typewriter-cover.
Duchamp: "It is very difficult to choose an object, because after a few weeks you start to like it or to hate it. You must approach a thing with indifference, as if you have no esthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the complete absence of good or bad taste."
Like the chairs and tables which always represent 'the object' in philosophical discussions, Duchamp's readymades are 'free variables', schemas that all other objects can substitute for, lacking specific properties which would block unification. (The relatively many racks and containers among Duchamp’s readymades do support another level of interpretation: evoking their absent pendants and fillers, they symbolize their own status as "placeholders" in a self-referential way; this is of course not incompatible with equally obvious Freudian readings.)
Duchamp asserts the esthetic interpretation of everything. Esthetic perception is not tied to the art-context — it has its origin and its justification in the observer, and can be applied to arbitrary material.
N’importe quoi
De Duve: ". . . le readymade, c'est n'importe quoi. Ou encore: le readymade est absolument quelconque. C'est mon droit démocratique de juger en profane qui m'autorise à dire que, malgré leur qualités - ou leur absence de qualités - plastiques, le sèche-bouteilles, l'urinoir ou la pelle à neige sont des objets quelconques. Mais, direz-vous, rien ne m'autorise à les juger absolument quelconques. En effet, rien ne m'y autorise. Mais tout m'y oblige. Duchamp ayant anticipé l'auteur du readymade dans la position du regardeur profane qui juge que l'art moderne, au moins depuis le dadaïsme, c'est n'importe quoi, oblige en retour ce regardeur, surtout s'il est "expert", à se projeter rétrospectivement dans la position même de cet auteur et à se soumettre à la même loi que lui. C'est la loi de la modernité et elle ne dit qu'une chose: fais n'importe quoi.
La loi ne fait pas qu'interdire, elle oblige. J' appelle donc moderne l'artiste dont le devoir est (était, fut, a été?) de faire n'importe quoi. C'est un devoir et non un droit. C'est un commendement que l'artiste moderne reçoit et non une autorisation qu'il se donne. Comme tel, ce n'est même pas une loi au sens ordinaire ou juridique. La phrase "fais n'importe quoi" n'énonce pas une règle à laquelle des cas peuvent être soumis, elle prescrit au contraire d'agir sans règle."
To embrace the radically subjectivist esthetics of Kant d’après Duchamp, is to loose any reason to make one particular artwork rather than another, or to make any artwork at all. The artist must do "no matter what".
For a long time, Duchamp seemed to be the only artist taking this stance; an isolated singularity. But in the early nineteensixties, after abstract expressionism, several artistic schools emerged which in some sense followed Duchamp’s paradigm: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Nul, Chance Art, Concept Art. Many artists started to employ readymade objects and mass-media images. And many pieces were made to illustrate or propound the esthetic viability of the real world and the superfluousness of art in an explicit, sometimes humorous way: inverted socles, empty socles, glass panes, mirrors, monochromes, tautologies, paradoxes, silence, empty frames, empty rooms. Note that such artworks in fact do not practise the esthetic interpretation of everything -- rather, they represent the idea of doing that. They are the opposite of a Kantian art: they are statements with a literal meaning, curiously didactic and well-defined. And sterile -- because, once the point has been made, there is no reason to repeat it and no way to develop it. They are self-defeating speech acts which close off the discourse that spawned them.
John Cage: "I am here / , / and there is nothing to say / . / . . ."
The esthetic interpretation of everything is a mindful way of life which does not need art.
Chance Art
The same art-historical moment, however, also contained a new beginning. Because the esthetic interpretation of everything can be more than the esthetic interpretation of all we happen to encounter in the world as it is: everything we can imagine, all possible images. One way to turn the "esthetics of everything" into concrete artworks is therefore, to devise mathematical or computational systems for generating art works which are not determined by the artist -- arbitrary artworks, random samples from a large space of possibilities. This literal-minded approach to the idea of faire n’importe quoi is known as chance art -- a genre that was widely practised in the sixties. (Cf. George Brecht, John Cage, Elsworth Kelly, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Peter Struycken, Zdenek Sykora, Herman de Vries.)
The idea of mathematical randomness addresses Kant's problem in a very direct way. If the esthetic insufficiency of human art is caused by the unesthestic, practical considerations which determine people's subjective decisions, then we can try to avoid that problem by making random artworks, which have not been subjectively constructed or chosen by a human person.
Is it possible to define the set of all possible art objects? Not in a very general way. But once we have specified a particular medium sufficiently explicitly, we have in fact specified a particular set of possible pieces. This is especially clear when we employ a digital medium. In this case, there is a mathematical enumeration of the set of possible outputs. Look, for instance, at a black-and-white screen with a particular resolution, say m x n pixels; the set of all possible images is then defined as the set generated by all combinations of choices of black vs. white for every pixel.
A computer program that in principle generates all these possible images one by one, can be constructed rather easily on the basis of this idea. Lars Eijssen and Boele Klopman have actually done this, for a grid of 171 x 171 pixels. For this program to run through all its possible outputs would take longer than the estimated lifetime of the universe; but an ingeneous interface makes it possible to "scroll ahead" very effectively.
The method of chance art is to draw random samples from the set of possibilities, rather than enumerating it. In this way one quickly gets an impression of the range of possible outcomes. To sample from the set of black & white pixel grids, for instance, one makes for every pixel a random choice about its colour, independently of all the other pixels. Many artists have constructed random samples of "the m x n grid", for very small values of m and n; this results in the familiar "randomized checker boards" which were the icons of early chance art.
Now the thing about these randomized checkerboards is, that to the human observer they all look alike. If we define the set of paintings or screen-images as the set of m x n pixel-grids, then virtually all of these will look the same. If the resolution is high enough, they will look like evenly grey planes. This kind of chance art thus gets very close to the monochrome.
Chance art comes into its own when the artists vary the specification of the set of possibilities which are considered by the sampling procedure. For different series of works they tend to employ different "image grammars", which typically define a small repertoire of shapes with a small number of variable properties. The random choices must then be made within the set of possibilities specified by the image grammar. For instance: a random number of dots with randomly chosen sizes is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, a random number of lines with randomly chosen lengths and directions is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, one line is drawn through a randomly chosen sequence of points. In work like this, the promise of surprise and diversity, which is implicit in the idea of an "arbitrary image", does not pan out. The decisions of the artist (which elements, which variable parameters, what range of variation) largely determine the character of the resulting image; the random choice which is made within the constraints of the image grammar does in fact not make that much of a difference.
Artificial Art
Chance artists were nevertheless content with such simple systems, since these were sufficient to put forward the very idea of chance. But to really take on the project of the arbitrary painting, we need more; we need a formal language which allows us to assign distinct codes to perceptually different paintings, but also to assign the same code to perceptually equivalent paintings whose details may nevertheless differ considerably (as in the case of the different instantiations of Morellet's random pixels).
Algebras like this have been developed already for characterising specific styles. Harold Cohen, for instance, embued his drawing program AARON with an original style reminiscent of the COBRA painters. Programs which try to mimic existing artists have also been developed, for instance for Miró and Diebenkorn. The 'arbitrary painting' project, however, requires a system with a much richer repertoire of stylistic possibilities, and with the capability to exploit those possibilities in a very flexible way -- so that the degree of stylistic coherence within a painting (or within an exhibition) is itself a parameter whose value can be chosen at random.
From a completely different perspective, the psychology of Gestalt perception has also developed some coding languages which are relevant for our purpose -- for instance, in the work by Leeuwenberg and Buffart in Nijmegen on the mental representation of drawings built up out of straight line segments, and in the work by Lerdahl and Jackendoff in Boston on the perception of music.
Mathematically formulated image-generation processes can easily be combined and generalized. This makes it possible to put large numbers of chance-art ideas together into one super-chance-art-machine which reaches a complexity that cannot be surveyed any more by individual artists.
To take a simple example: In the chance art of the sixties one often encounters programs which repeat a particular shape (usually a square or a circle) in an arbitrary, unorderly manner on different positions on the plane. Other, similar algorithms create arbitrary closed shapes by combining line segments. These two algorithms can be combined in an obvious way, so that both the shape and the position of the image elements are determined at random. Other algorithms generate a multitude of different regular patterns or regular shapes; these can also be integrated. We may thus gradually abolish choice, by avoiding the exclusion of any choice -- by affirming every choice, and by putting every choice on a par with all other choices inside an all-encompassing probabilistic system. Art generation systems based on this approach are being developed in the project "Artificial" at the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam (http://iaaa.nl).
The constructivist tradition was concerned with harmony and purity. Today, that seems a somewhat arbitrary and limited ideal. Expressionism taught us the esthetics of ugliness. Duchamp demonstrated the esthetics of indifference. The current challenge is an esthetics that encompasses everything: beautiful, ugly, and indifferent.
Summary of the above
Art is not a means of communication. It is meaningless raw material, interpreted in an absolutely arbitrary way by a culturally heterogeneous audience. There are no serious reasons for wanting to make certain artworks rather than other ones. An artistic project that wants to face this issue, must avoid choices, transcend styles, show everything: generate arbitrary examples from the set of all possibilities.
An individual, spontaneous artist cannot live up to this challenge. What is needed, is a deliberate technological/scientific project, with a sensible division of labor between man and machine. Human artists/programmers should develop an algebraic definition of the space of all possibilities; the computer can then choose and display random examples from this space.
The ultimate consequence of this approach is a computer program generating all possible images, with probability distributions that yield maximal diversity.
Art Generation as Process
Automatic art generation processes are indeed computational processes. To understand and appreciate them, it is profitable to not just see the end results, but to watch the development of the image. Even if we start out with a research agenda concerning static images only, computer-generated art has a natural tendency to turn into multimedia art.
But let us not forget the qualities of the stillness of old-fashioned paintings. (Cf. Pablo Picasso about kinetic art: "The least you can ask from a painting is that it hangs still." )
Artificial art does not have to be abstract art. It can be integrated with photography to yield images based on the visual appearance of the actual world. And it can be integrated with download software, CD-ROM-players and scanners, to yield images based on the available mass-media imagery.
Artificial art does not have to be oriented towards static output. Chance processes may directly address the dynamics of image-generation and image-manipulation, and can also be involved with accompanying sound. Readymade material to be used may thus involve film clips of various sorts.
Artificial art shows its vast superiority above human art when we look at the films in today's movie-houses, the serials on today's television-networks, and the video-installations in today's galleries and museums. These tend to be made by human persons, and they tend to be too banal and embarrassing for words. The presentations and installations in the high-brow art context, though certainly very different from the productions coming out of Hollywood, just demonstrate how many different kinds of pretentious Kitsch there are. (Cf. Matthew Barney, Peter Greenaway, Gary Hill, Bill Viola.)
Abstaining from narrative is not enough. Plotless, repetitive image sequences may very well employ an esthetics that would make Hollywood producers drool. Humans insult each other's intelligence in a way that no algorithm could.
Interactive narrative
We may imagine a new art genre consisting of vVirtual environments that allow for interaction and for a multiplicity of processes and outcomes. But let's not call this interactive narrative, because it cannot be a matter of an author designing a branching plot of some sort. If interaction and multiplicity are allowed in a non-trivial way, the multiplicity quickly becomes so complex that it cannot be contained in a human mind any more. So the designers of interactive virtual environments must give up the idea of plot. They should construct complex simulated environments, and then let things happen. Put in a lot of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. Give up control and manipulation.
Interactivity
Automatic art generating programs like "Artificial" have a lot in common with interactive image editors and paint programs like Photoshop, CorelDRAW, Painter and GIMP. The main difference is, that Artificial runs by itself, whereas Photoshop is interactive. Photoshop in fact doesn't do anything until you tell it to. That is why people who make something by modern image manipulation software really feel they are creating something -- although they operate completely in terms of the esthetics of the designers of the software tools, and usually they could have gotten more interesting results by invoking some fully automatic process. That is one of the important effects of interactivity -- that if something nice occurs, people think it's their own doing. Most people think too well of themselves already, and many interactive systems reinforce this. "Artificial" tries not to do that; it always emphasizes that it runs automatically, even if you can set a few parameters here or there.
Media as Artworks
Remarkably often, one still encounters the idea that technological media are only tools, used by the artist to communicate his message with unprecedented efficiency. This is false.
A bare computer, for instance, can in principle do whatever one wants, but in practice hardly anything at all. For a commercial designer or a non-minimalist artist, the computer can only be a useful tool if a software shell implements a suitable repertoire of image- or sound-generating functions, and makes these accessible through a convenient user interface. And the design of that repertoire of functions is an artistic decision which shines through in all the products made by means of the software.
Media technologies are super-artworks. They articulate the space of artistic possibilities so explicitly that creation is reduced to choice. A technology is like a score which prescribes the structure of a piece for the greater part, but grants the performer some licence. Media artists are performing artists. The composer is the designer of the medium.
Duchamp: "Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage."
Within the art context, the characteristics that all art works have in common are irrelevant. Art works are constituted by the differences they display with respect to other art works. As long as art uses only one medium, emphasizing the meaning of that medium is a theoretical statement, of merely philosophical interest. But in today's art, it is crucial to pay attention to the inherent artistic content of the media, that art works end up appropriating.
References
Edward Ball and Robert Knafo: "The R. Mutt Dossier", Artforum, October 1988, p. 115.
Pierre Cabanne: Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp. Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond. 1967.
John Cage: "Lecture on Nothing" Incontri Musicali, August 1959. [In: Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, pp. 109-126.]
David Carrier: "Danto as Systematic Philosopher or comme on lit Danto en français." In: Mark Rollins (ed.): Danto and his critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 26, note 10.
Marcel Duchamp: "Apropos of 'Readymades'." Art and Artists, 1, 4 (July 1966). [Lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961.]
Thierry de Duve: Au nom de l'art. Pour une archéologie de la modernité. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1989, p. 118-119.
Huge Harry: "A Computational Perspective on Twenty-First Century Music." Contemporary Music Review, 14, 3 (1995), pp. 153-159. [http://iaaa.nl/hh/brettonh.html ]
Dalia Judovitz: "Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: Given ", Dada/Surrealism 16, University of Iowa, 1987, p. 187.
Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1799, § 45. [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1974.]
Jean-François Lyotard: "Die Erhabenheit ist das Unkonsumierbare. Ein Gespräch mit Christine Pries am 6.5.1988." Kunstforum International, 100 (April/May 1989), pp. 355/356.
Mary A. McCloskey: Kant's Aesthetic. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, p.108.
Remko Scha: "Artificiële Kunst." Informatie en Informatiebeleid 6, 4 (1988). [English translation: "Artificial Art." http://iaaa.nl/rs/artkunstE.html ]
copied from: http://iaaa.nl/rs/LierEnBoog.html
Immanuel Kant’s classic Kritik der Urteilskraft analyses the esthetic experience as a cognitive phenomenon: a feature of perception which is manifested when perception becomes conscious of itself -- when the process of input interpretation does not yield a definite final result, but nevertheless creates a coherent experience.
For today's reader, it is striking that Kant’s discussion is not primarily concerned with works of art, but with natural phenomena -- his paradigm examples evoke flowers, crystals, landscapes, stormy seas and starry skies. This is not a coincidence; it is connected with essential properties of Kant’s theory. In his view, the esthetic experience presupposes a disinterested attitude; it does not involve any practical purposes; it is distinguished from ‘ordinary’, practically oriented perceptual processes in that it is not oriented towards grasping the input under a determinate concept.
Manmade artworks have an inherently problematic status in Kant’s theory. Western highbrow art seems to agree with Kant’s point of view, in that it has become increasingly emphatic about its practical uselessness. But this very uselessness signals a purpose: the artwork is deliberately constructed to be experienced in the esthetic mode, i.e., to be experienced as if it does not have any purpose. The purposefulness of an artwork’s purposelessness must therefore be ignored, if we are to experience the artwork in an esthetic way. Kant accepted this conclusion: "Nature proved beautiful, when it looked at the same time as art; art can only be called beautiful, when we are conscious of its being art, and yet it looks to us as nature."
Perception is an abductive process. To interpret any product of a human artist is to retrace the mental processes behind it. These processes always involve the artist’s ideas, methods, goals and motives. The artists’s fellow-humans cannot be expected to overlook that content, or to deal with it in a disinterested fashion. Manmade art thus constitutes sub-optimal input for the process of esthetic reflection. Twentieth-century art-critics have not failed to notice this implication of Kant’s theory; and some of them have pointed at contingent but ubiquitous features of manmade artworks, which increase their discrepancy with his esthetic ideal.
Lyotard: "Die großen Schauspiele der sich in Unordnung befindlichen Natur sind ein beispiel dafür, daß die menschliche Kunst niemals etwas derartiges hervorbringen kann. Denn alle menschliche Kunst ist immer nur Mimesis und letztlich suspekt, weil immer die möglichkeit besteht, daß sie mit einer absicht konzipiert worden ist und von daher ein Begriff und eine Zweckmäßigkeit mit Zweck auf ihr lastet.
Huge Harry: "Is it possible to listen in a disinterested way to music which is composed and performed by humans? Human composers and musicians are not disinterested. They want money, fame, sex. They cannot hide this, and often they don’t even try. If we do not turn off our microphones when we listen to their pieces, we hear greed, jealousy, lust. Behind the apparent complexity and indefiniteness of their compositions, there are all too clear-cut meanings."
Kant’s own formulations suggest a second-order mimesis: whatever the artwork does or does not portray, it must always fake its "natural" character: ". . . the finality in the product of fine art, although it is intentional, must nevertheless not seem to be intentional."
Esthetically motivated art thus faces a curious challenge: if it is created by humans, it will always be inferior to nature! In the course of the twentieth century, this challenge has been taken up by many artists. Some of them have suggested that they are in fact natural forces, beyond the ken of ordinary humans. Others have tried to withdraw from their artworks, by developing objective art-generating processes which they initiate without controlling the final result. Chance art, écriture automatique, physical experiments, mathematical calculations, biological processes.
The Readymade
When Marcel Duchamp assigned the status of artwork to existing readymade objects, he drew a radical consequence from Kant's point of view: that the input doesn't matter, as long as the observer's process of esthetic reflection can take its course.
Carrier: "Clement Greenberg was correct to observe that the whole Duchampian position was essentially anticipated by the eighteenth-century notion of the "aesthetic attitude." Once it was recognized that anything whatsoever could be a work of art if contemplated aesthetically, then presenting such objects as Duchamp's Fountain in the museum merely involved drawing the consequences of this Kantian position, though admittedly with examples which would have bewildered Kant."
Duchamp's gesture is sometimes interpreted as a celebration of the sublime autonomous creative power of the artist's Kunstwollen, but his statement "The spectator makes the picture" suggests a different interpretation. Duchamp chose his objects very carefully, but one should not be mistaken about the nature of his judiciousness. He has made quite explicit statements about this, and one can also read it off the objects themselves. They are very ordinary, 'neutral' objects: schoolbook, coat-rack, hat-rack, bicycle-wheel, bottle-rack, snow-shovel, plastic bucket, coffee grinder, typewriter-cover.
Duchamp: "It is very difficult to choose an object, because after a few weeks you start to like it or to hate it. You must approach a thing with indifference, as if you have no esthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the complete absence of good or bad taste."
Like the chairs and tables which always represent 'the object' in philosophical discussions, Duchamp's readymades are 'free variables', schemas that all other objects can substitute for, lacking specific properties which would block unification. (The relatively many racks and containers among Duchamp’s readymades do support another level of interpretation: evoking their absent pendants and fillers, they symbolize their own status as "placeholders" in a self-referential way; this is of course not incompatible with equally obvious Freudian readings.)
Duchamp asserts the esthetic interpretation of everything. Esthetic perception is not tied to the art-context — it has its origin and its justification in the observer, and can be applied to arbitrary material.
N’importe quoi
De Duve: ". . . le readymade, c'est n'importe quoi. Ou encore: le readymade est absolument quelconque. C'est mon droit démocratique de juger en profane qui m'autorise à dire que, malgré leur qualités - ou leur absence de qualités - plastiques, le sèche-bouteilles, l'urinoir ou la pelle à neige sont des objets quelconques. Mais, direz-vous, rien ne m'autorise à les juger absolument quelconques. En effet, rien ne m'y autorise. Mais tout m'y oblige. Duchamp ayant anticipé l'auteur du readymade dans la position du regardeur profane qui juge que l'art moderne, au moins depuis le dadaïsme, c'est n'importe quoi, oblige en retour ce regardeur, surtout s'il est "expert", à se projeter rétrospectivement dans la position même de cet auteur et à se soumettre à la même loi que lui. C'est la loi de la modernité et elle ne dit qu'une chose: fais n'importe quoi.
La loi ne fait pas qu'interdire, elle oblige. J' appelle donc moderne l'artiste dont le devoir est (était, fut, a été?) de faire n'importe quoi. C'est un devoir et non un droit. C'est un commendement que l'artiste moderne reçoit et non une autorisation qu'il se donne. Comme tel, ce n'est même pas une loi au sens ordinaire ou juridique. La phrase "fais n'importe quoi" n'énonce pas une règle à laquelle des cas peuvent être soumis, elle prescrit au contraire d'agir sans règle."
To embrace the radically subjectivist esthetics of Kant d’après Duchamp, is to loose any reason to make one particular artwork rather than another, or to make any artwork at all. The artist must do "no matter what".
For a long time, Duchamp seemed to be the only artist taking this stance; an isolated singularity. But in the early nineteensixties, after abstract expressionism, several artistic schools emerged which in some sense followed Duchamp’s paradigm: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Nul, Chance Art, Concept Art. Many artists started to employ readymade objects and mass-media images. And many pieces were made to illustrate or propound the esthetic viability of the real world and the superfluousness of art in an explicit, sometimes humorous way: inverted socles, empty socles, glass panes, mirrors, monochromes, tautologies, paradoxes, silence, empty frames, empty rooms. Note that such artworks in fact do not practise the esthetic interpretation of everything -- rather, they represent the idea of doing that. They are the opposite of a Kantian art: they are statements with a literal meaning, curiously didactic and well-defined. And sterile -- because, once the point has been made, there is no reason to repeat it and no way to develop it. They are self-defeating speech acts which close off the discourse that spawned them.
John Cage: "I am here / , / and there is nothing to say / . / . . ."
The esthetic interpretation of everything is a mindful way of life which does not need art.
Chance Art
The same art-historical moment, however, also contained a new beginning. Because the esthetic interpretation of everything can be more than the esthetic interpretation of all we happen to encounter in the world as it is: everything we can imagine, all possible images. One way to turn the "esthetics of everything" into concrete artworks is therefore, to devise mathematical or computational systems for generating art works which are not determined by the artist -- arbitrary artworks, random samples from a large space of possibilities. This literal-minded approach to the idea of faire n’importe quoi is known as chance art -- a genre that was widely practised in the sixties. (Cf. George Brecht, John Cage, Elsworth Kelly, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Peter Struycken, Zdenek Sykora, Herman de Vries.)
The idea of mathematical randomness addresses Kant's problem in a very direct way. If the esthetic insufficiency of human art is caused by the unesthestic, practical considerations which determine people's subjective decisions, then we can try to avoid that problem by making random artworks, which have not been subjectively constructed or chosen by a human person.
Is it possible to define the set of all possible art objects? Not in a very general way. But once we have specified a particular medium sufficiently explicitly, we have in fact specified a particular set of possible pieces. This is especially clear when we employ a digital medium. In this case, there is a mathematical enumeration of the set of possible outputs. Look, for instance, at a black-and-white screen with a particular resolution, say m x n pixels; the set of all possible images is then defined as the set generated by all combinations of choices of black vs. white for every pixel.
A computer program that in principle generates all these possible images one by one, can be constructed rather easily on the basis of this idea. Lars Eijssen and Boele Klopman have actually done this, for a grid of 171 x 171 pixels. For this program to run through all its possible outputs would take longer than the estimated lifetime of the universe; but an ingeneous interface makes it possible to "scroll ahead" very effectively.
The method of chance art is to draw random samples from the set of possibilities, rather than enumerating it. In this way one quickly gets an impression of the range of possible outcomes. To sample from the set of black & white pixel grids, for instance, one makes for every pixel a random choice about its colour, independently of all the other pixels. Many artists have constructed random samples of "the m x n grid", for very small values of m and n; this results in the familiar "randomized checker boards" which were the icons of early chance art.
Now the thing about these randomized checkerboards is, that to the human observer they all look alike. If we define the set of paintings or screen-images as the set of m x n pixel-grids, then virtually all of these will look the same. If the resolution is high enough, they will look like evenly grey planes. This kind of chance art thus gets very close to the monochrome.
Chance art comes into its own when the artists vary the specification of the set of possibilities which are considered by the sampling procedure. For different series of works they tend to employ different "image grammars", which typically define a small repertoire of shapes with a small number of variable properties. The random choices must then be made within the set of possibilities specified by the image grammar. For instance: a random number of dots with randomly chosen sizes is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, a random number of lines with randomly chosen lengths and directions is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, one line is drawn through a randomly chosen sequence of points. In work like this, the promise of surprise and diversity, which is implicit in the idea of an "arbitrary image", does not pan out. The decisions of the artist (which elements, which variable parameters, what range of variation) largely determine the character of the resulting image; the random choice which is made within the constraints of the image grammar does in fact not make that much of a difference.
Artificial Art
Chance artists were nevertheless content with such simple systems, since these were sufficient to put forward the very idea of chance. But to really take on the project of the arbitrary painting, we need more; we need a formal language which allows us to assign distinct codes to perceptually different paintings, but also to assign the same code to perceptually equivalent paintings whose details may nevertheless differ considerably (as in the case of the different instantiations of Morellet's random pixels).
Algebras like this have been developed already for characterising specific styles. Harold Cohen, for instance, embued his drawing program AARON with an original style reminiscent of the COBRA painters. Programs which try to mimic existing artists have also been developed, for instance for Miró and Diebenkorn. The 'arbitrary painting' project, however, requires a system with a much richer repertoire of stylistic possibilities, and with the capability to exploit those possibilities in a very flexible way -- so that the degree of stylistic coherence within a painting (or within an exhibition) is itself a parameter whose value can be chosen at random.
From a completely different perspective, the psychology of Gestalt perception has also developed some coding languages which are relevant for our purpose -- for instance, in the work by Leeuwenberg and Buffart in Nijmegen on the mental representation of drawings built up out of straight line segments, and in the work by Lerdahl and Jackendoff in Boston on the perception of music.
Mathematically formulated image-generation processes can easily be combined and generalized. This makes it possible to put large numbers of chance-art ideas together into one super-chance-art-machine which reaches a complexity that cannot be surveyed any more by individual artists.
To take a simple example: In the chance art of the sixties one often encounters programs which repeat a particular shape (usually a square or a circle) in an arbitrary, unorderly manner on different positions on the plane. Other, similar algorithms create arbitrary closed shapes by combining line segments. These two algorithms can be combined in an obvious way, so that both the shape and the position of the image elements are determined at random. Other algorithms generate a multitude of different regular patterns or regular shapes; these can also be integrated. We may thus gradually abolish choice, by avoiding the exclusion of any choice -- by affirming every choice, and by putting every choice on a par with all other choices inside an all-encompassing probabilistic system. Art generation systems based on this approach are being developed in the project "Artificial" at the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam (http://iaaa.nl).
The constructivist tradition was concerned with harmony and purity. Today, that seems a somewhat arbitrary and limited ideal. Expressionism taught us the esthetics of ugliness. Duchamp demonstrated the esthetics of indifference. The current challenge is an esthetics that encompasses everything: beautiful, ugly, and indifferent.
Summary of the above
Art is not a means of communication. It is meaningless raw material, interpreted in an absolutely arbitrary way by a culturally heterogeneous audience. There are no serious reasons for wanting to make certain artworks rather than other ones. An artistic project that wants to face this issue, must avoid choices, transcend styles, show everything: generate arbitrary examples from the set of all possibilities.
An individual, spontaneous artist cannot live up to this challenge. What is needed, is a deliberate technological/scientific project, with a sensible division of labor between man and machine. Human artists/programmers should develop an algebraic definition of the space of all possibilities; the computer can then choose and display random examples from this space.
The ultimate consequence of this approach is a computer program generating all possible images, with probability distributions that yield maximal diversity.
Art Generation as Process
Automatic art generation processes are indeed computational processes. To understand and appreciate them, it is profitable to not just see the end results, but to watch the development of the image. Even if we start out with a research agenda concerning static images only, computer-generated art has a natural tendency to turn into multimedia art.
But let us not forget the qualities of the stillness of old-fashioned paintings. (Cf. Pablo Picasso about kinetic art: "The least you can ask from a painting is that it hangs still." )
Artificial art does not have to be abstract art. It can be integrated with photography to yield images based on the visual appearance of the actual world. And it can be integrated with download software, CD-ROM-players and scanners, to yield images based on the available mass-media imagery.
Artificial art does not have to be oriented towards static output. Chance processes may directly address the dynamics of image-generation and image-manipulation, and can also be involved with accompanying sound. Readymade material to be used may thus involve film clips of various sorts.
Artificial art shows its vast superiority above human art when we look at the films in today's movie-houses, the serials on today's television-networks, and the video-installations in today's galleries and museums. These tend to be made by human persons, and they tend to be too banal and embarrassing for words. The presentations and installations in the high-brow art context, though certainly very different from the productions coming out of Hollywood, just demonstrate how many different kinds of pretentious Kitsch there are. (Cf. Matthew Barney, Peter Greenaway, Gary Hill, Bill Viola.)
Abstaining from narrative is not enough. Plotless, repetitive image sequences may very well employ an esthetics that would make Hollywood producers drool. Humans insult each other's intelligence in a way that no algorithm could.
Interactive narrative
We may imagine a new art genre consisting of vVirtual environments that allow for interaction and for a multiplicity of processes and outcomes. But let's not call this interactive narrative, because it cannot be a matter of an author designing a branching plot of some sort. If interaction and multiplicity are allowed in a non-trivial way, the multiplicity quickly becomes so complex that it cannot be contained in a human mind any more. So the designers of interactive virtual environments must give up the idea of plot. They should construct complex simulated environments, and then let things happen. Put in a lot of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. Give up control and manipulation.
Interactivity
Automatic art generating programs like "Artificial" have a lot in common with interactive image editors and paint programs like Photoshop, CorelDRAW, Painter and GIMP. The main difference is, that Artificial runs by itself, whereas Photoshop is interactive. Photoshop in fact doesn't do anything until you tell it to. That is why people who make something by modern image manipulation software really feel they are creating something -- although they operate completely in terms of the esthetics of the designers of the software tools, and usually they could have gotten more interesting results by invoking some fully automatic process. That is one of the important effects of interactivity -- that if something nice occurs, people think it's their own doing. Most people think too well of themselves already, and many interactive systems reinforce this. "Artificial" tries not to do that; it always emphasizes that it runs automatically, even if you can set a few parameters here or there.
Media as Artworks
Remarkably often, one still encounters the idea that technological media are only tools, used by the artist to communicate his message with unprecedented efficiency. This is false.
A bare computer, for instance, can in principle do whatever one wants, but in practice hardly anything at all. For a commercial designer or a non-minimalist artist, the computer can only be a useful tool if a software shell implements a suitable repertoire of image- or sound-generating functions, and makes these accessible through a convenient user interface. And the design of that repertoire of functions is an artistic decision which shines through in all the products made by means of the software.
Media technologies are super-artworks. They articulate the space of artistic possibilities so explicitly that creation is reduced to choice. A technology is like a score which prescribes the structure of a piece for the greater part, but grants the performer some licence. Media artists are performing artists. The composer is the designer of the medium.
Duchamp: "Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage."
Within the art context, the characteristics that all art works have in common are irrelevant. Art works are constituted by the differences they display with respect to other art works. As long as art uses only one medium, emphasizing the meaning of that medium is a theoretical statement, of merely philosophical interest. But in today's art, it is crucial to pay attention to the inherent artistic content of the media, that art works end up appropriating.
References
Edward Ball and Robert Knafo: "The R. Mutt Dossier", Artforum, October 1988, p. 115.
Pierre Cabanne: Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp. Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond. 1967.
John Cage: "Lecture on Nothing" Incontri Musicali, August 1959. [In: Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, pp. 109-126.]
David Carrier: "Danto as Systematic Philosopher or comme on lit Danto en français." In: Mark Rollins (ed.): Danto and his critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 26, note 10.
Marcel Duchamp: "Apropos of 'Readymades'." Art and Artists, 1, 4 (July 1966). [Lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961.]
Thierry de Duve: Au nom de l'art. Pour une archéologie de la modernité. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1989, p. 118-119.
Huge Harry: "A Computational Perspective on Twenty-First Century Music." Contemporary Music Review, 14, 3 (1995), pp. 153-159. [http://iaaa.nl/hh/brettonh.html ]
Dalia Judovitz: "Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: Given ", Dada/Surrealism 16, University of Iowa, 1987, p. 187.
Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1799, § 45. [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1974.]
Jean-François Lyotard: "Die Erhabenheit ist das Unkonsumierbare. Ein Gespräch mit Christine Pries am 6.5.1988." Kunstforum International, 100 (April/May 1989), pp. 355/356.
Mary A. McCloskey: Kant's Aesthetic. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, p.108.
Remko Scha: "Artificiële Kunst." Informatie en Informatiebeleid 6, 4 (1988). [English translation: "Artificial Art." http://iaaa.nl/rs/artkunstE.html ]
copied from: http://iaaa.nl/rs/LierEnBoog.html
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