New Media, Art-Science, and Mainstream Contemporary Art: Toward a Hybrid Discourse
Leonardo Education Forum

Ed Shanken’s write up and recordings here

Philip Galanter

• Positing ‘complexism’ as a new paradigm for art-sci fusion
• new media and art-science (are these the same?) are here again… “locked out of the mainstream art work”
• PG suggests this is possibly because of…
  • expectation of uniqueness – presumably ‘unique’ here referring to object singularity?
  • long term preservation
  • potential re-sale value
• PG is here addressing the “art world and market”
  • question here is if there is a difference between these two things – what do we mean by mainstream contemporary art world?
  • See Burnham’s point that the “art world” is not actually interested in most forms of ‘innovation’ – this is a lie. Perhaps this is because we assume that there is an assumption about the existence of an “art world” in the first place…
• Mentiones ‘hedonic adventure’, ‘asthetic escape,’ ‘political and social critique’ as values in the art world – to which art-science and new media have much to contribute
• locates the rift as a deeper conflict – CP snow – the two cultures…
  • 1959 Rede lecture “The Two Cultures”
  • modernity vs. science
  • post-modernity vs. humanities
• PG’s PROBLEM: “bumper sticker philosophy”
  • post modernity is a destabilisation of prior conjectures
  • art students learn postmodern cultural theory as ‘bumper sticker philosophy’
  • science is the opposite of this destabilisation (stable, factual, data-driven)
• MODERN V POSTMODERN:
  • Modern:
    • scientistic
    • positivistic
    • realistic
    • metaphysical
  • Postmodern
    • humanistic
    • skeptical
    • unstable
    • contradictory
  • Not sure I agree here – science may be ‘negative’ in its predeliction deconstruction – it’s very epistemology. Perhaps these are are different kinds of ‘skepticism’ – material skepticism of science and the humanistic (e.g.: ‘all the world’s a stage’) skepticism of the humanities?
  • Art became post-modern, science ‘remained’ modern – so when art involves science it is skeptical, dystopic, and detached from material science itself
  • My biggest issue with this is that it doesn’t acknowledge my of the cross-linking of these cultures that has been on-going (computing culture, the postmodern having been informed by, if not inspired by things like ‘virtual reality’ or networked rhizomatic structures – again much ado about nothing. The good life behind our backs…?)

• Lovejoy
  • Early art-science practitioners were post-modernists already? (what does this mean?)
  • By abandoning modernism, and killing progress, the post-modern artist could not ‘move forward’ into a new era

• Wilson
  • art-scientists are accepted by neither community – ‘in-group peers’
  • so called “science wars” of the 1990’s
  • Sokol hoax

• Complexity
  • PG posits complexity and emergence as a way forward
  • complex systems are large individual systems with large numbers of interactions (Flusser and structural vs. functional complexity)
  • self-organization, emergent phenomena
  • e.g.: weather, the middle east, brain (, the mind!!??), culture… Burnham’s analysis of the art world again relevant here
  • measured in terms of the DISORDER (DoF, freedom) <–> ORDERED (structure, historicity- stability in time)
  • disordered without being random
  • structured without being reductionist

• Generative Art
  • Tiling and the age-old use of simple elements related
  • Cage / Burroughs
  • evolutionary programming, artificial life, synthetic biology – a bridge where science and humanity meet in complexity

• World Views
  • Modernity and post-modernity are reductionist in their approaches to complexity
  • “Old science” and its modernist and simplistic models
  • Humanities with its simplistic reduction to ‘randomness’ and relativism

• Authorships
  • modern: author –> master work –> audience
  • postmodern: author is dead. audience –> work
  • complexity: author –> work –> audience becomes author –> work –> etc.

• Will cutting edge complexity artistic be a bridge or be ‘shot from both sides’ by humanities and science (sounds like the same question art science has been asking for a long time…?)
• My notes on PG’s presentation
  • My own take on this is that the divergence described by CP Snow may have been much ado about nothing – or a self-unfulfilling prophesy. In the terms (conceptual, world-views, epistemologies) developed here, the humanities and science are not as different culturally as they may first (on PG’s “surface”) appear. More to the point – these cultures, if they are in fact distinct – inform one another ‘behind the scenes’… cybernetics, emergences, ecologies – Stiegler’s “co-originarity of technics and the human,” epiphylogenesis. I.e.: Cubism was a reaction to the camera, and post-modernity a reaction and result of networks. Derrida wrote on a word-processor.
  • “art-science” is an interesting term – a little like ‘digital media.’ is there any other kind of media?
  • Fostering difference within related communities to counteract propensities towards amalgamation in both post-modern and modern discourse (epiphilogenesis under economic force, for example, becomes the unfortunate singularity of MySpace? But critical epiphilogenesis is… ??? something better maybe… )
• culture of science and culture of humanities can be built…
• science of complexity -

Ji-hoon Kim – Networks of Interfaces: Expanded Cinema and the Pursuit of the Active Spectator Since the 1960′s

• cinema as artform
• different forms of user involvement – different than the immobile audience position in a cinema
• cinema becomes blended with television, video, internet, mobile media –> architecture, performance, installation
• prefigured by Paik, Warhol, Sharits, Nauman, Grice, Conrad, etc.
• correspondences between 60s/70s spectatorial activities (does JK mean cinema here?) and participatory digital interactivity
• Project: “Networks of Interfaces: “Expanded Cinema and the Pursuit of Active Spectator Since the 1960s”
  • remapping expanded cinema
  • avant-garde artists and filmakers
  • today’s artist-engineers
  • looked at an ‘intersection of forms’ – video art + architecture + performance (is this right? are these new forms or an intersection of forms?)
  • the active spectator, active in the following ways
    • mentally
    • aesthetically
    • physically
    • affectively (i don’t get this)
  • “genealogical approach to the reconfigurations of human sense and mind”
    • human-machine interaction
    • “technologically mediated situations where… phsychophysical interaction takes place”

• Participatory spectator of 1960s versus today’s “interactive user”
  • kinds, types, what is activity

• Active spectator comes about for JK via:
  • phenomenology
  • critical media theory
  • cybernetics
  • information theory

• cinema and digital media art are compared
• digital networking systems are unique
  • grounded in theoretical-discursive tripartite formation…
  • … but different from pre-digital and proto-digital expanded cinema
  • fundamental hybridization between heterogeneous technical and aesthetic elements (man and machine)

• Youngblood
  • “intermedia network”
  • expanded cinema as transformative of human consciousness, co-evolution
  • important implications of “expanded cinema”
    • artistic principles for the rethinking of the art object, practice and human subjects (audience)
    • overlaps with concepts of televisual and computational media – systems, processes, cybernetics, real time, feedback

• JK’s project uses Youngblood’s expands expanded cinema in two ways:

1. term includes artists who explictly adapt film and cinema in their work (McCall – Line Describing a Cone / 1973, Sharits – Shutter Interface / 1975, CCTV art by Graham and Naumann), information technology principles (Les Levine, Hans Haacke), performance-driven film projection (Le Grice After Leonardo / 1973, Conrad Four Squares / 1971)
   • JK is critical of oppositional definitions of expanded cinema:
     • the ‘taking up’ of cinema through television, video and computer (technological genealogy)
     • the use of the cinema-as-theatre to explore performance, viewing situations (cinematic apparatus approach)
   • art-and-technology and art since minimalism and conceptualism are both rooted in phenomenology, critical media studies and cybernetics and information theory (I basically agree with this – just saying that art is an intellectural activity – drawing on culture)
2. expanded cinema – a heuristic terminological device for dissolving medium boundaries
   • Higgins, Kaprow, Fluxus, Burnham – borders of a medium are historically conditioned and ontologically unstable
   • e.g.: modern sculpture – Krauss, Annette Michelson, Morris and Serra – phenomologising of sculpture
   • N. K. Hayles, M. B. N. Hansen – embodied perception
   • Vivian Sobchack – film studies
   • Graham – CCTV works – Maurice Merleau Ponty / Lacan / Bateson updated with a little Dourish / Damasio / Activity Theory

• new media theory overlooks how the concept of the active spectator has developed – much as the art world failed to look at the body-technology in evaluating critical distance
• JK’s dissertation “Between Film, Video, and the Digital: The Art of the Moving Image, Medium Specificity and Intermediality”
  • hybrid images – ontology of impure form as interrelation of different media forms: film, video, digital
  • intermediality – a mediums multidimensional interactions with other media shape in response to the impact of electronic and digital technologies
  • digitization and ‘the digital’ is a site and catalyst of this hybridization
  • this research shares with this current postdoctoral project key elements:
    • engagement with the discourses on medium specificity
    • quest for conceptual space for explaining convergence of media resulting in divergent artistic practices
    • intermediality as a concept for artistic forms that spring from media in plural/heterogeneous forms

• video installation – Doug Aitken, etc. – relationships of image and its ‘apparatus’ (viewer’s frontal position, etc.)
• larger spatio-temporal structure of experience: IMAGE, APPARATUS and SUBJECTIVITY

• Working on the term INTERFACE:
  • point of interaction between user / computer – mouse
  • means of communication between user / computer -
  • much like the “apparatus” of film theory and critical media studies (social / ideological determinations via…)
    • camera and object – image
    • image and screen – projection
    • screen and spectator
  • hope to get out of this a comparative dialogue between active-spectator-in-art and, active-spectator-in-cinema-studies, and active-spectator-in-media-studies
  • e.g.: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology influences art criticism, film theory, and new media (embodied experience)

• My notes on JK’s presentation
  • basically positing expanded cinema as another field for bridging shisms between art-technology and mainstream art. i.e.: two discourses that don’t match up which both come out of treatments of cinema:
    • digital cinema is related to art-and-technology, interaction, etc.
    • avant-garde film, or experimental film is related to the ‘art world’
    • possibility of the “hybridization of machines and humans”! Awesome.
  • going beyond technological determinis

Paul Thomas

• a reemergent symbiosis of fine art and science
• contemporary university/educational framework
• medi arts education as a trans-disciplinary model – opening up along with critical engagement (i.e.: going towards that which you do not agree with in order to become “directly entangled” – e.g.: Nam June and the “I use technology in order to more properly hate it”) s
• Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Char Davies, Orlan – show that you can be critical of what technology imposes on our subjectivity -
• Garoian and Gaudelius 2001 – “cyborg pedagogy”
• I.e.: studying technologies through artistic practice
• Experimentation and experimental practice in learning through Deleuzian methodologies for education
  • science and technology come into our lives via “cultural advancement” and “creative industries”
  • fine artists don’t critically address or analyze communications/information

• Theory
  • research strategies within fine art – critical engagement, reflection, plastic processes
  • post-new-media art alternative curriculum approaches
  • John Lutz – “The potential form Improving Science Education Through Transdisciplinary Intergration with Art Education”
    • commitment to theory is important
    • Beauchamp
      • theory accounting for observations
      • causes and effects
      • predictions of observations
    • Fitting this to fine art curriculum:
      • territory from which to formulate an opinion
      • plastic process of making
      • fantastic speculation, imagination – new knowledge!

• Stephen Wilson – Information Arts book
  • artists need to participate in science
  • “expand conceptual notions of what constitutes and artistic education”
  • motivation here was to “help” researcher – give it new directions, give science a hand…

• Transdciplinarity is the space of the nomad – Deleuze & Guattari
  • the nomad exists to occupy, inhabit, research
  • territory of description – experimentation as a theory of becoming
  • nomadic transdisciplinarity: “interacts with the space within the institution (desert) as a holistic topographical site”

• My notes on PT’s presentation

Christine Paul – New Media in the Mainstream

• Historical account
• Identifies historical baggage of new media and mainstream art’s difficult relationship
• New media and art world uneasy relations:
  • exhibition histories – art-historical developments – technology / participatory
  • “Challenges that new media art poses to institutions and the art market”
• New Media: computable art that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies. Aspects:
  • process-oriented
  • time-based
  • dynamic
  • real-time
  • participatory
  • collaborative
  • performative
  • modular
  • variable
  • generative
  • customisable
• Exhibitions and Historical Developments:
  • Art has been shaped by concepts of participation, collaboration, social connectivity, performativity, and relational aspects
  • Bourriaud – Rirkrit Tiravanija – meals
  • 2008 Whitney Biennial – inverting the object-oriented operations of the art market – ephemerality: Yet no “New Media” appears.
  • Tino Sehgal’s This Progress - social interaction as a medium
  • Culture is networked, digital and so the art world is reacting to this – yet works that use these technologies is “conspicuously absent” from major exhibitions
• Relational Aesthetics Syndrome
  • “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the hole of thuman relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space”
  • artists sited by Bourriaud are never new media artists – even through he uses terms like “user-fiendly” “interactive” and “DIY”
  • does “relational aesthetics” come from the “relational database”?
  • Bourriaud doesn’t like the 1960s associations – he wants new analyses that are not internal to the artworld – but external and resistant of the “Society of the Spectacle”
• Claire Bishop’s book – Participation – table of contents has no contemporary prominent theorists of new media art
• 1960′s participatory art was obviously related responses to scultural and tcechnological developments
• Similarity between the 60s and 70s separation between art world and technology -
• Relational Aesthetic Symptoms – collecting conserving and commodifying the work

Jamie Allen – Could This Be What It Looks Like?

• Youtube intro re: popular culture (“mainstream”), counter-culturalism, and technology
• Historical discussion of the counter-cultural roots of new media / art-and-technology
  • Conceptualism and artistic practices emerging from a moment of intense experimentation with new technologies
  • Technological development as informed by counter-cultural ideals (Menlo Park, Stewart Brand, Cage, Happenings)
  • Resulting in a short-lived techno-artistic avant garde – which was “split” in 1970. Burnham vs. McShine
    • conceptual art went one way – artlike art?
    • art-and-technology went another – lifelike art?

• We should be surprised that new media is difficult to absorb into mainstream art world culture – that’s where its roots lie – in a radically anti-art and anti-establishment practice
• “hippie computer nerd” sensibilities of new media artists
• the “liquidation of the artist” being proposed was full – and may have taken place with YouTube

• My notes on my own presentation
  • Contradictions here about a counter-culture that doesn’t want to enter into the artworld, but does want to enter into popular culture (Adorno would say that this is the point of high-art, to prevent such vulgarisation)
  • Materialism – where do we ‘locate’ the force of technology/material in all these human vectors of artistic and technological practice. Are there materials/technologies which are ‘counter-cultural’?

Jane Prophet – Professional Fish Out of Water

• 20 years of practice – challenged – most productivity – complexity
• “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art”
• relationships of film and video -
• sci-art – subjugated sci-art – public engagement / understanding of sciecnce – illustrated scientific theory

Ronald Jones – please stand by….

• Fuller – a designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic
• Harvard Business Review – the common outcome of interdisciplinary practice is FAILURE
• breakthroughs that do arise – though rare – are incredibly value
• methods -
• critical theory – what is the continuing relevance of oppositional knowledge
• orwell – on dickens… moral criticism of Dickens – if men would behave decently the world would be a decent place.
• beyond the exausted forms of ‘mere consciousness raising’ – ‘merely worthwhile’
• modernism and relativism
• relativism is undone.
• post-critical perspective – pragmatism
• 1972 – grey water reclamation – Haacke – not a critique but a pragmatic and post-critical design of a system…
  • merely a work of art
• thomas tharacino -
  • ArtForum – hard science baked in – customized technology
• new life – dyson – the dominant science is biology – then biotechnology should be about new forms of animals and plants
• (joseph beuys)
• theoretical moonshine created by “BIO ART” – not real research…
• Art world is a debating club when approached as Eduardo Kac
• Restart culture – joseph kasuth
• POST CRITICALITY – awesome!

Paul Thomas – Transdisciplinary strategies for fine art and science …

• Haraway – direct engagement
• Culture and critique – explore the physical world
• Orlan Halekin Coat
• Theoretical constructs – educators
• George Beauchamp -

Things to look at before the session:

from JK

• affective interaction – what is this?
• “theoretical-discursive tripartite formation”
  
• McCall – Line Describing a Cone / 1973, Sharits – Shutter Interface / 1975, CCTV art by Graham and Naumann
  
• JK’s dissertation “Between Film, Video, and the Digital: The Art of the Moving Image, Medium Specificity and Intermediality”

from PG

• science wars of 1990s
• complexity theory
• latour – we have never been modern
• pamela lee book on time (modernism / post-modernism debate)

from PT

• Garoian and Gaudelius 2001 – “cyborg pedagogy” – sound useful in positing technology art practice in terms of how “technologies can be demystified, affected and resisted”
• how do we do this without being “in the service of…” or didactic…? “didactic arts…”

from JA

• Adorno – valuation of the real work – the ‘artistic’ community