Technology and Art
After the exhibition
held in 2014, at the Beijing Meishuguan/ 北京美术馆/NAMOC.
‘Thingworld – International Triennial of
New Media Art’. Curated by Zhang Ga/张尕
Introductory. Technology in art, reproducing… everything: Nature and Culture
(material culture, the ‘housing’ of our ‘spiritual culture’), in image and more
(from information to 3D printing). An extension of traditional art
(representational) through the new technologies of information management
(recording, manipulation, storage, reproduction and distribution) as applied to
the image… Or, of process, as technique, method, also conceptual as well as
action, in doing something… (as for example in Minimalism, not least in music,
as ‘process music’, several decades later technology catches up… with computer aided
compositional technique) and so in art normally taking the form of the
installation (or short film). Also representing the invisible... the conceptual
and the unconceptualised, the sublime… From 19th
century Romanticism and since, different takes on the sublime do not disguise a
family resemblance. Invisible as potentially frightening, vast, beyond
comprehension and control; so the usual combination of ’outside’ and fear (just
add superstition to obtain its manifestation in popular culture as the Gothic,
or the varieties of religion…).
And see how quickly
we got here (the first paragraph just read); ‘Nature’, ‘Culture’… ‘the Sublime’
– the latter already indicting, as it has done for well over a hundred years
now, that in the face of mass culture, we are dealing with Art culture, or just
plain ‘Art’ (what once was ‘High Culture’ and has now been absorbed into the
‘Big Middle’ of the newly educated and expanded art public).
So first, logically,
historically and… ideologically (‘Ideologically’? Yes.
As what follows is a key aspect of any description of the dominant ideology of
our time – and the ideology of the intelligent at that…). We are talking of
(and have never ceased to talk about) the ever popular Heideggerian/Romantic
critique of technology and the mindset, the world view it is supposed to
encourage. Yet despite the many apt (generally environmental) warnings
contained within it, the ‘naturalist’ (Nature Good: Culture Bad), ‘authenticist’, and ‘Romantic’ argument (actually an
argument as old as civilization, East and West, the first philosophers were
divided on which had priority) that technology and the modes of thought allied
to it are ‘alien’ with respect to what it is to be human and so ‘inhuman’, is
invalid because, machines and technology, including the technologies of
thought, artificial (and ‘arty’!) languages, are all, in the final analysis,
made by humans - a gift of our creativity and not inhuman at all. More
generally the argument that culture is ‘fallen’ with respect to Nature is made
from within Culture itself, and so self-contradictory, (This Romantic reaction,
now also with a Modernist aspect, as well as sometime Post-modern position, is
perennially popular, informing the ‘authenticism’ of
the 1960s as well as Marx’s romantic anti-industrialism as represented in the
concept of ‘alienation’; mathematic, for example is not some alien order, or
external a priori, but a net of our own making which we cast over things to
measure, to ensnare them, use them). This reaction reaches a modern peak in
recent social phenomena such as tourism and exoticism, as well as underpinning
the search for authenticity and genuine life as a spectacle (a kind of
illusionist anthropology) peak experiences, extreme sports, etc. (and their
analogues in popular culture… and in art cultures too). Also
including ‘authenticity’ in interpreting and recording music - if taken too
far. To rule out much (in the future perhaps most of what is human will
be definable as ‘inauthentic’ from the Romantic point of view). This critique
has already been tried with capitalist commodity relations – all well and good…
until we finally remembered that the previous social system was feudalism… and
that the myth of its organic totality is at the core of Romantic responses to
the present. This reaction is clearly divisive (who is ‘authentic’ and who
isn’t?) and encourages lazy thinking, as well as giving succor to all manner of
old fundamentalisms and participating in the birth of a new (or maybe not so
new) batch of secular fundamentalisms…
‘Again.’ (But we
have barely begun…). In a topic that will occur, re-occur,
over and over again (to be repeated, like the actions of a machine, a thought
machine, circling its topic, a hermeneutic machine…). Again… to rise
‘the question concerning technology’ and art, and of technology as art, mechanised or digitalized technique, as art (from the art
require to do art, the techniques to be learnt and evolved). For the art of
doing something in a particular way is its culture, a cultural practice, so
technology as a part of the evolution of Culture, of high Culture too. Culture
regardless of content, regardless of its claims to a place in the ‘put-aside’,
‘found above’, (or below…). As in the techniques of expression evolved as a key
part of the world’s art languages, the ‘Classical’ languages, or rather the
‘classical’ forms, foremost the written forms, of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit,
Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic, to name but a few, all cultures have them, so all
literate cultures now have them (its why our educations take so long) a product
of the more complex governmental or religious functions, their dependence on
writing and the accompanying evolution of their art cultures). The evolution of
writing and its technologies – now again revolutionized… refreshed…
Technology to be
reread with respect to new media, as mediation… the new technologies of mass
communications, as the circulation of images and words, of information,
relating/mediating, idea and thing, Nature and Culture (as an extension of
Culture, as the reframing of Nature). For if we ask: what is mediated, then the
above terms immediately, if perhaps a little surprisingly, again become cogent.
Speed and extension of range are the main gift , together with a certain short
circuiting of traditional, and time consuming, techniques of encoding and
replicating information in all its forms (of writing, of painting, of
manipulating the image and the word). In all these respects we have an
improvement; convenient, enabling, democratic.
Technology, as driver of the communication revolution. Driver of our
shrinking proximity to other (in speed and possibility of communication if not
in emotion…). Labour-saving devices means just that
(until the advent, or novum of self-aware Artificial
Intelligence); it’s all ‘just’ quantitative; an extension or a means of rapid
exchange or rapid transit or energy saving…And the content? What of the content
of the expression so communicated?
Technology as means
(of expression) or object (content of expression) or both (so self-referential,
permissible in art -and computer languages- if not in logic, otherwise put, performative, the form performs the content). And for the
means, for the object, not just any technology, but the latest technology,
technology influenced technology… So if not exactly the medium become the
message then a certain set of fresh possibilities with respect to expression
and its combination with the new means of expression. (for the signifier,
carries the signified, but not as a neutral medium, a surrogate mother whose
genes are beside the point, rather as a new signifier implies the possibility of
new meanings – yet this process itself is an aesthetic or experimental
formalism until we remember that our rapidly changing world precisely requires
new ideas, concepts and the apposite modes of
conveying these, even forming these very concepts, to permit us access to our
runaway world…)
So, over and above
the fact that all art is already a matter of technique, so of technology in the
broad sense, over and above this basic foundation, this logical ‘ALL’, how is new
technology, the logical ‘SOME’, used in art?
To use (new)
technology in art to do what?
Basically (based
upon the forms used in the exhibition) several kinds of use:
a) To use new means
to create images or illusionisms (a continuation of
mimetic or representative art).
b) To use new means
to create new ideational puzzles or puns (a continuation of Global Post
Conceptualism) usually ironic; but most often simply exploiting lowest common
denominator forms of transgression (also conceptual illusionism as a feature of
‘90s installations).
c) To experience
technology as a marvel (almost a continuation of abstract art, an art of
textures and form… technological installations whose subject is themselves) the
machine aesthetic. Product of a machine… The Machine Sublime.
d) Machines (as
before) but whose result is in process and aleatory
or not completely worked out – apparently self-forming. The
Machine as Mimesis of Nature.
e) Machines (as
before) but where there is a high degree of audience interaction (interactive
installations) – so perhaps including some degree of aleatory
(but generally predictable) outcomes. The Machine as mise-enabime
of our interaction with (our) technology…
Giving us the following types and
effects:
a) Digital, computer
generated or manipulated images to extend traditional image making (often
making use of the particular texture of the resulting image, its means of
expression, as part of the content of expression, its general meaning-making
effect on the viewer). Mimetic through abstract.
b) (Globalised) Post Conceptual installations featuring
technology, from ‘collections’ to ‘moving parts…’ catch the pun, spot the key
contrast or transgression and move on… (you have just
exhausted the art work).
c) Machine
installations as inciting interest, through texture and complexity, especially
connoting the machine as organic, as organism; so imitating a forest, or plant,
copying Nature, again. (But not illusionistially,
but by suggestion, as with stone anthropomorphism…). Q: Machines and
moving parts as already outdated?
d) The aleatoric or unplanned process is perhaps the most
interesting… because… (a technological repetition of
art as seeing in general, and on a higher technological plane…) as seeing
beauty and as finding beauty (as also the sublime) in the world; what we do as
humans (as well as value bestowing, of which this faculty is a part…). So as
with other aspects of life (tourism, ‘travel’, adolescent/generational revolt,
fashion and politics) the furthest away is the closest to ‘home’ or perhaps I
should say ‘home page’ … (the customised home page
from which we guess the identity propositions of the user). So manifesting the
habit we have of running away (from ourselves) only to re-find ourselves;
performing the moment when believing we are ‘heading out’, we have in fact hit
the edge and are heading back home, thinking we are ‘outside’ but are still
firmly inside… (there are a set of interesting logical
paradoxes associated with these thought processes).
So to create automatic or aleatory art,
of (relatively) unplanned processes (echoes of 70’s minimalism) at which we
marvel, a technological sublime. Then paradoxically
we have a… recreation of Nature, (a ‘second Nature’ indeed) as we attempt to
recreate the marvels of Nature by ‘other means’ (one such art work employs
green ribbons of plastic, another recreates an egg, or cell like structure),
its landscapes, etc., are as a machine process, something unwilled (except for
by the unmoved mover, God the Artist), as ‘accidental’ as result of natural
processes, or that which mimics them, accidental conjunctures such as the
weather, the landscape, the city (on aggregate un-planned) with choice or
accident of point of view, to use Culture (technology) to recreate natural
aesthetic effects (by other means to be sure)… These works generally draw on
sublime type effects, as in the question of the cause to the effect that we
witness. Where does it come from? The technology enables or translates, we
feel, but what began it, what secret does it reveal… there is the hint of a
disturbing mystery… And so we are back to a scientific or technologically
mediated version of a mountain river or a starry sky… it is as if…the further
we tried to get from nature the more we returned… Master Mimesis. Back to… Nature.
e) If involving
people (as more than just ‘passive’ viewers or interpreters), the audience as
input, ‘interactive’, then we also have an imitation of life. As with the above, the landscape is not longer
just natural but also human … so also mimetic of life or Nature. A version of ‘people watching’. We also have something like
our involvement in choosing a point of view in life, in landscape and in the
perusal of city life, in the lives of others, of art as life, as extended
notion of ‘performance’ into all of us and what we do… late 19th century aestheticisation by other means. Also society or the city
as art… a technological version of aestheticism… we are part of a giant work of
performance art… Art as theology. God
in the Machine v deus ex machina.
If willed, then we
have good old fashioned illusionism… often found in the ‘hit’ or short lived
moment of connection making (akin to a visual pun) that is Post-conceptual art
at its worst – a twin to advertising and its attention grabbing psychologies (or
should that be … technologies).
And if beyond the
Beautiful and the Sublime then…they can only be…ironic!
Like history… the
mapping out of the range of interaction of humans and (their) technology…
Technology in the Frame (Art/Machines; Art machines; the Art
Machine).
The machine
aesthetic (history) not too surprisingly, much in evidence and, as in
architecture, may be read as a continuation of the Art Deco fashions of the
1920s. However, much of this kind of art, often precisely because conceptual,
is short on depth (more like ‘allusionism’, than
illusionism, or conceptualism, yet like much globalised
Post-conceptual art, now the international standard, or international
default…). Even when it is interactive, the gimmick or ‘hit’ is short lived
and, outside of the theoretician’s generalizing habit, low on memorability…
The influence of the
machine in the history or art and design, and not least in architecture, often
cites forms that suggest energy-using, collecting or indicating a source… much
as previous art pointed to the heavens… now the energy that is the blood of the
machine is electricity. Electricity (our society runs on it) is Sublime. And
its creation (coal burning) is destroying us (global warming is sublime…).
(The) Sublime; one
of those concepts that refuses to die but, like history, just keeps going,
keeps on evolving, beyond the place where we would have it stop… like
economics, like society, like politics, and (of course) like science, like
technology…) like culture , like language… (…)
(The) Sublime: a
buzz word, a meaning for every (aesthetic) epoch: here the technological
sublime…What we feel whenever we see a vast new building, a web of scaffolding,
or a ship being launched, a space ship, say the Space Shuttle or a Saturn
rocket, images of the International Space Station are always sublime, or a room
full of old fashioned computers…all that wire and circuitry – all that
repetition, similar to Pop art, to the numerical sublime of large numbers or
infinity.
The machine
aesthetic; beauty in form and texture and yet the inorganic is as if alive, is
sublime - like ‘Neo-Deco’ architecture at the turn of the century (2000). So
the aesthetics of the machine are in certain ways beyond the simply beautiful.
Yet if order usually does connote beauty then the sublime in the machine is
found in its varieties of repetition. A repetition that suggest life, a process
we may or may not have begun, but which may outlast us… The sublime, need we be
reminded, is always already, pointing out… beyond the human. So suggesting the
oracular, predicting an unpalatable future (so anti-technology; technology as
leading elsewhere – leading us elsewhere... And the test of sublimity, as ever,
is: an over-awedness, a certain sense of over-load,
of being overcome (of Being overcome) implying eternity by mystery or by number
(infinity) and a concomitant sense of human limitation, and fear of the Beyond.
Of being in the presence of ultimate truth, but uncomprehending, a terror;
which like all anxiety includes a fear of the future, immediate or distant
(again those twin pillars of the sublime, the Outside and Terror – albeit one
step removed, representation…).
However we are no
longer in the machine age… software, programs, computer languages, are the
cutting edge of the information technology revolution, which in turn sustains
the communication revolution, with its new technology based upon digitalization,
computerization, miniaturisation and speed – of
process as of access (key to personal enablement and the resetting of the
private/public balance) and governs the behaviour of
machines… also invisible, even more invisible than electricity, so … sublime.
Beyond us, even as of us… a language we have created, but which escapes us…
The everywhere and
nowhere of the Social (Durkheim) is augmented, paralleled, by the everywhere
and nowhere of the virtual world, our parallel digital ‘second culture’ or
‘third nature’ - the web. Parallel which will soon enter our thoughts,
recording memories and enabling a ‘telepathy’, the age-old dream of ‘direct’,
‘unmediated’ communication, direct presence of the other (as of the past, a
‘return; of memory as ‘unfaded’… robbed of the
semi-presence that informed us that it was , after all, only a memory,
something gone…). But in reality mediated, so an illusion, as art, like art an
art of illusion, because mediated by technology… Mediation.
The very source of the Romantic notion of the lack of full presence, plenitude,
so estrangement and separation - or Fall…
The Sublime is
always Inhuman (in deixis it ‘points’ ‘outside’); but
we should not forget that humans create this feeling… (we
have the feeling, it is our feeling, so ‘inhuman’). It is perhaps one of the
oldest feelings in terms of human survival and of our emotional responses as
geared towards this end (confronting the Other in the
world…). So also of conferring a special kind of value, once called religion,
or making sacred… (again, I want to insist, always
accompanying the human, because human – ‘in our nature’…). A part of how we
once dealt and apparently how we still deal with, what is outside of us… (and when we don’t, then there will be no more ‘sublime’).
Art and the sublime
again! Basically, in the modern age, this issue is about Art and Discomfort…
(once the depiction of mountain vistas, of avalanches or other disasters,
shipwrecks, was sublime, but we have moved on… as witness the disaster movie
and the history of special effects, now of CGI, as cinematic spectacle….). This discomfort; a disquiet over lack of understanding, of the
nature of origin of the art effect, not in ‘order’ (as in ‘pure’ beauty) but as
‘elsewhere’. We know not were or can not
fathom the cause or process… Or it is its very size that is deemed a spectacle,
threatening… Many of these elements remain in the technological sublime (whence
the question of ‘from where’, and what effect it has upon us…) the basic
question of the sublime is narrowed down to incomprehension and a concomitant
disquiet). But the depicted content and the materials used, are replaced by a rebarbativity of texture or content (chaos in form is
hardly new) in art that features technology or the machine - just as art from
the ‘60’s on (or even from the advent of the 100 year old Found Object
Tradition) featured rubbish as part of its post-modern, transgressive,
Pop Art sublime… (And whose best moment, or interpretation, was its
philosophical, aesthetic and political inclusivity, but whose persistence
today, outside of a certain anti-consumerist cache, is hard to justify…)
Again, there is no
secret (and perhaps this is what is most shocking, most unacceptable), the
sublime is made by us, as response to a given range of stimuli, the question
only remains do we close our eyes to this fact, and remain in metaphysics,
religions or do we use it, to make art, to makes sacred, as and when necessary…
and do we do it cynically, as in playing gods, gurus, or playing politics, or
as extending the range of human creativity and value in the world… including
its technological products.
The technological
sublime in art (as in life) functions as a system of suggestions, a rhetoric of
suggestion, aimed at raising the sublime effect in the viewer…a kind of prosopopoeia, a trope evoking the absent, the inanimate or
the dead (perhaps the leading trope of technological sublime?). Inanimate/animated. The Lazarus trope… life where there was
no (longer) life… Origin, cause, invisible mover (‘the invisible
hand’ as one of our own very modern ‘myths’) suggesting… origin as elsewhere,
as other - as (Absolute) Other. Whence Sublime. (We begin with technology, we end with theology… or at least metaphysics).
Most technology-based or new media-based art is sublime (perhaps, beyond any
requirement of mimesis, that’s what makes it art), it points elsewhere…
Interactive… the
audience as part of the pre-planned effects, as part of the techniques of
making the art work… concepts as technique, as technology the audience is part
of the loop…. a biological random response technology or circuit!
Found object
tradition also included (return of the excluded) as waste… a 100 year old trend…
now as machine waste which is still…. ‘alive’ (a supernatural technological
sublime) still retaining some functions as if on ‘a half-life’, the half-life
of machines… also a mourning theme, waste(d) life, pity, etc… as well as the
uncanny effect of life in death… of life… in the machine. (Personification?
Perhaps foremost of our ‘received’ techniques of thought…)
’Tech Goth’ is the
use of technology in art to suggest gothic effects. ‘The uncanny’ writ popular,
suggests supernatural origins, a ‘pop sublime’. All achieved by the suggestion
of origins as ‘elsewhere’ - and by suggestion, as on the edge of vision, on the
edge of cognition (Armstrong’s art work). Illusionism joins technological
terror; the terror that results from technology in the biological world, as in
the Zombie film genre, and the ‘Resident Evil’ film series (the audience view
from the popular cultural frame…). So as with many works in the exhibition,
featuring an imitation of life or new life as evolving from machine or machine
waste, we have, a popular cultural tradition, a pop cult myth, that of
Frankenstein’s monster… as the line between making images of life (subject to
critique of the image as by Levinas and Lacan, a latter day iconoclasticism)
and making life, is crossed…
So art imitates
life; art techniques, technologies, imitate life; Culture imitates Nature … (i)
So what is new... (ii) But Art is not Truth (Nature
viewed cognitively, for correspondence/truth value). If it is, or if it
pretends, to show truth, as in the epochs of the
Christian past (and post/neo Christian ‘secular’ ideologies that followed it),
then it is mere propaganda…. Whence the rise of ‘autonomous art’…
(In philosophy, art
and technology also meet, as techniques of thought: new concepts and methods of
thought; the art of making as technique and thinking, the thinking process, as
technique… (concepts/axioms, hierarchies, structures,
methods, systems, logics and meta-languages). The arts of
thinking; the techniques of thinking. So showing an
(unsurprising) parallel between matter and mind, natural and cultural making
and conceptual work. Are these parallels automatic or conscious? How
conscious might they be? Does this art (of making art, of thinking, of the
thinking of making art, the conceptual stage of ‘creation’) imitate Nature
unconsciously (we cannot help it, it is prior to ourselves, so naturally
informs all levels of making and thinking), or consciously (as part of a
deliberate strategy, a making conscious and then changing the default forms).
Again we have the idea of techniques as applicable to thought – but not in a
negative (Heideggerian way, designed to critique our
thought process as ‘inauthentic’ and so replace them with etymological time
travel) but as a positive description, and possible exploration of
parallels… But if all art is
illusionism, then so is thought; because… not the thing itself, but of a
separate order, or sub-set, of that of the ‘thing’… Whence its
creative open-endedness. This creative un-anchoredness
applies also to measure, logic and all artificial languages. Gift of the
open-ended creativity of natural languages (they and so culture are always
evolving) which constitute the ultimate meta-set (starting place) of formalized
languages…).
Art as illusion is
also art as self-delusion… playing god…? The shaman as
self-deceiving charlatan. Working (as before) at the
behest of power and identity, of reputation and economics.
‘The Big Picture’? Technology in art as rebarbative. Discomfort and independence? Discomfort as aesthetic
alienation. Independence as not to, or a part of, due to… but
from, (market) autonomy. So also a return to
’Aesthetic Alienation’ in art, as part of a bigger picture. A return to art propaganda (Bernstein, on Kant, Adorno
and Derrida). Art as the consciousness of that
alienation as loss (the distance from truth) as part of most self-aware art work.
In technological art a rebarbativity
that encapsulates humanity’s fears for technology (but is this just a
generational or, again, a Romantic reading… the ‘alternative’ dream of… the
dream of an alternative, of our epoch). Such a truth is ‘interested’, that is
comes with the readers baggage (and has become something of a knee-jerk abuse
of Adorno, in current art criticism). Even if we have
the ‘truth’ as a future predicted… (but the truth must
have happened or be happening, how else to tell). Then we have art as oracle
(so not quite as ‘truth’). As oracular. (But this need
not be ‘negative’, part of a purely ‘negative dialectic’). The future (like the
past, but with even less certainty) is the other tense that always accompanies
us.
And is not exhausted
by fore-warning; but augmented by the promise of fulfillment, the force of
attraction, of desire. What drives us… on. Positive
dialectic. (Often found today in the … advertisement)!
Yet all attempts to
show the future, to show, more precisely our anxieties of the future, usually
show us precisely our anxieties of the present… (and
this is the case for almost any moderately intelligent sci-fi movie). Again the
vexed question, topic or not a little, closed shop among professionals, does
(advanced) thought and art lead culture, or follow it… follow human
developments… and attempt to understand it (Spinoza, ‘we do not know what a
body can do’… but must learn, art as experiment, as interrogative). The former
position, the vanguard position, is pure arrogance, has no empirical standing,
and contains not a little moralizing and attention grabbing, and usually turns
out to be some version of 19th century Romanticism… that is, a reaction
(reactive) against modern social forms and an assertion of elite (‘above it
all’) identity.
Technological art as
(part of) ‘aesthetic alienation’ (as using the ‘estrangement effect’, as art
for art’s sake, not as truth, or propaganda, but the question the topic,
technology and media, is a comment on society and the future… ‘autonomous art’,
if it means anything useful at all, must mean not serving a particular limited
brand of ideology - so as interrogative… (but not at
the behest of a particular master).
So a return to art as finding (or expressing) truth. In technological
art, a truth beyond topic and description, a truth… beyond the art versus truth
distinction… (with art as artifice or ideal,
simultaneously as above and below truth). And also (in this
context) as beyond the art and technology distinction (art as artifice as
‘mere’ technique; technology as a means, a technique, an art). So
highlighting the necessity of bridging (but not closing or removing) the fact
and value distinction… in actual life. Perhaps the only common ground (in
art/beauty and science/truth) is giving value (making good). ‘Making good’ by
giving value… to the environment (its protection), to things (their
preservation), to ideas (making them ‘key’), to people (‘rights’), to truths
(‘universal’) - of making sacred as means of protection as well as prioritisation). (Usually called ‘will’,
or human action, or … politics). A performative
(a ‘speech act’, if I say so, so it is). A promise.
Here we might
conveniently remind ourselves of the truth, that science and reason, thinking,
so philosophy, itself is descriptive and/or prescriptive (and often this
difference itself is controversial or part of the problem under discussion,
their putative separation or unity): but art (including architecture in is
relation to our visual consumption) is performative…
(so more akin to ritual). Moreover, art as ritual is
fundamentally repetitive, from the actions of processes, to repeated viewings
and exposures… so ritual and performative, now in the
sense that the form performs the meaning, as in a given restriction of
space/time and the claim to eternity (underpinning a given identity) made
through the ritual performed there. Which is another way of saying that all art
is finally subsumed in the human… we do it. Not the object, nor a narrow
(excluding, elite-making) interpretative point of view. We may separate
prescriptive and descriptive, as with subject and object, and art into
institutions (art school, research lab) as descriptive, or apportioning ( or denying) value as prescriptive; but these are all
moments simultaneously present in all individuals…. As we perform life, their
identity is our identity…. (even
the most destructive, divisive, deconstructive and ‘critical’, negative, art is
- perhaps even more so - concerned with identity; all ‘outsides’ are finally
inside).
(Concluding…). The
anthropological element in art, in recent decades a feature of the best of
post-conceptual art (as of the best of installation art and performance art),
has switched focus from recording, or documentary, documenting forms of life
(urban, minority, ‘critical anthropology’) to reflecting the human and its
relation to its products, its technology, the results of which it does not
control (just like the art which would mimic this effect, or the audience, we
do not know what conjunction will arise as we watch it and anticipate). So the
art process, if aleatory, then also indicates that
the result or next step is unknown, like the future… But the real future is
safely beyond all fortune-telling: or perhaps it is art that is the fortune
telling - just as the genre of science fiction imagines the future through the
lens of the present (in truth addressing questions of the present), so like the
products of technology, the economy and the unintended consequences which
(will) make up our future… (‘riding the tiger’). Or
soothsaying (politicians like to do this) making predictions… promises…, the
other word for this of course is ‘divining’. Art as Oracle.
Art as oracular.
As opposed to just
‘ocular’, so concerning ‘vision’ in both senses of the word.
(Again) Art from an
anthropological point of view: as addressing its ritual function, its function
as ritual, as identity, as the problem of a community, and as an epochal agon, a question (‘concerning technology’) aestheticized -
its function. A mis-en-abime. So the audience; the art elite (the apposite students, practitioners and professionals), in the
past gendered, but pleased to say, here present in equal numbers, if not more,
more women at this exhibition (technology no longer gendered ‘male’…). Also,
generational; an aesthetic community (artists, critics, and art exchangers),
art consumers, the market…. ‘us’.
At best then to make
a culture as if nature…
At best then (the
best works) to make (us look, aesthetically, at) a culture as if nature (a
machine culture…). How we deal with, value, or fear, what is outside of us…
what we are making ‘outside of us’. And as ‘outsides’
are never such (definitively NOT Absolute Other or Sublime Unknowable Other) so
‘outside of us’ means our outside, our digital skin, or expanding outer limit –
transgressing previous boundaries, redefining previous selves, previous Self
(our Collective Self).
At this stage
humanity begins to read the German Idealists (yet) again (and not for their
Romanticism). For Hegel’s Collective World Spirit is incarnate through machine,
by matter, the ghost in the machine, a digital ghost. A ‘spirit return’ gifted
by technology.
Such art then looks
at…technology; (but using technology) which looks back on ourselves…
For art, like
cinema, is part of that part of society (together with philosophy, anthropology
and history) that reflects on human life and its prospects, not necessarily
directly (in this it is unlike the human sciences just mentioned) but through
the media of entertainment, the Media in general, regardless of its medium of
origin, and as entertainment. So like dreams, they deal both with things we
worry about, and dare to prophesy; but, also like dreams , wrap ‘the message’
in a distinctive envelope (with the art genre of ‘Surrealism’ dreams and a
style of presentation of ‘reality’ converge (Kon Mitchiko, David Lynch)). So art represents, not only
humanity’s, or society’s, attempts to show concentrated forms of meaning, in a
continuation of past traditions and the introduction of new material,
sanctified by its social position and institutional frame (elevating and
engaging, so a form of cultural capital, ‘elite culture’ for the renewal of an
‘elite identity’ – but one, with the recent (global) changes of social
structure and patterns of education, increasingly available to all) and the
market, but also attempts do deal , intelligently, with the problems of our
epoch – those which define it. In short, art is that part of society which
reflects on itself, and maintains an emotional punch which pulls at our
identities. (Conceptualism meets the Sublime): so it is that, in this
exhibition, the world’s foremost technology meets rituality. Some of the newest
means (techniques, technologies) are used to evoke some of the oldest of
meanings. The very latest means of expression to reproduce
the very oldest of contents of expression. A ritual content: a machine
form. The evocation of the Sublime (at the heart of every
successful ritual with its call on ’the outside’ to guarantee identity ‘this
side’) by means of machine format. By that part of ourselves, of
society, of our species, which continues the life of the sacred (rituality and
religion) into the modern world. The Art Machine: the social techniques of
producing art. Always self-reflexive; never more so than when combining
technique, reflection on technique and the resulting forms of beauty, sublimity
and irony. The sublime aspect of technology as witnessed in
art; the irony of the union of art and technology.
Looks back on
ourselves… Redeemable in our digital being as it cannot be in our physical
incarnation.
Looks back on
ourselves… Just when we believe we are most outside, catching a privileged
glimpse of a new thing… an inhuman thing… an uncharted thing… so we discover
that we are firmly back … inside (again).
Whence the
discovery, earlier on, of a recreation of Nature, a ritual, if you will,
recreation or renewal, but a call on Nature nevertheless, a mimesis of Nature,
of its function (and myth) as life giving, that we found to lie in many of the
most effective of the art works in this exhibition…
(‘Again’ , the
element of repetition that tells us we are participating in a ritual, that this
invoking of the sublime has been as ritual as the attendance of any other event
or performance of culture. The nature of that culture.)
Again.
Again. The nature of that culture… OUR hardwiring.
Ritual, OUR re-programming. Renewal through Repetition; Ritual. Again…
With art as ritual framing…
So the foregoing
offers a sequence of frames… but what of the content… technology, technique
that which is usually the means is the end, the means of expression is the
content of expression; so indicating the major worry of our times, of the major
driver of our times… That is to say that what is in the frame, space,
institutional, functional (ritual) etc… the new means of doing things… The topic framed…
The topic framed…
human and reliance on technology, speed and use of computers, evolution of
Artificial Intelligence, its ubiquity through globalisation,
the world as universal communion, and its mechanism, its means, a media… the
collision course or end trajectory of all these fears and process as…
elsewhere, as other, as her , ubiquitous but not so, like the generalisation of ‘society’, invisible in totality but all
enveloping, the internet, the virtual world, our ‘parallel universe’. A collision course which evades us,
sidetracks us, sidelines us, going elsewhere. So again the question
(‘concerning technology’), do we fuse with it or are we bypassed… ?
The grounds of that
fusion (if one may use such a metaphor) our unity as ‘telepathy’ on the net,
‘unmediated’ ... but present to another intelligence… as if (re)creating our
relation to god, who knows us all too well, as ‘it’ (’he’/’she’) is the means
of our union…the all-knowing god because we (our thoughts) will be part of it
as we live online… our union also the union with it, part of a collective soul,
our digital ‘soul’ . For finally we will have one… (digital) idea to (physical) matter, the two realms, but now
‘made flesh’… incarnate, but still elsewhere… Culture lifts of from Nature. A
‘Second Culture’, become our ‘second Nature’.
*
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2014