[Amit Pitaru / Sonic Wire Sculptor / 2003] The challenge in writing about these systems, appraising them in the terms of objects or discrete moments of time, is that one is invariably describing cybernetic systems, artificial eco systems, experiences within them, data sets, user narratives. These can all be radically divergent in ways that are not particularly well accounted by what we have currently as an aesthetic discourse. Generally data, causal relationships, and complexity are dealt with mathematically, and specifically by the language of statistical prediction, and are modeled through research, algorithmic iteration, and rigid experimentation. These are all types of discourses that aesthetic practices have used as material before, it isn’t the ideas that seem so new, it’s that they shape working practices, the discourse, the way in which material is adapted and used, and the nature of the discourse. A cursory glance through Leonardo shows a serious and radically different approach to the sublimation of materials, creation of dialogue, and even to the notion of a working practice. Many of these objects and systems created by these working practices are not only supposed to be something, they’re supposed be able to be used to do something in particular. We’re talking about, more or less, the relationship of the object and it’s employment to the established patterns of life. In an interactive system the action of the participant/user can be very different from the effect that those actions have, we end up with a working experience which is just as often as not an expanding consciousness of how the users actions are mapped onto the data sets that the system reads and fed into the system as new operations. The goal of an interactive piece, of an interactive object, is to be used. It succeeds in its employment. Usually they fail when they are simply observed or when the effect is not legible. I’ve mentioned that the medium is the action, and this is partially true, but the medium is also the extension and transformation of action. The material of the work, the medium in which it operates, is in some respects a cybernetic one: a feedback loop that engages consciousness as a medium, the consciousness of self, the indivisibility of the self from action, and the interplay of multiple actors.
[Toshio Iwai / Tenori -On / 2005-] It might be that the aesthetic discourse requires behaviors, systems, objects, and networks that can be appraised at distance, that this is in some way one of the conditions for inclusion in a critical aesthetic discourse. Truly dynamic systems and actors (in the sense of objects or people who are acting upon a situation) might not make good artworks because their experiences are not so easily reproducible, they might require gifted users, they might require variable scales and lengths of time akin to architectural work, they may require a necessary goal by the participant/user, they may change radically over time in ways which alter the original artistic intent. So why work in these difficult territories? A simpler answer could be that the artist and a designer to a lesser degree have an obligation to work with the materials of their time and situation. The contemporary materials of work and communication, of social construction are quite often a Blackberry, a computer, multiple levels of networks maintained across different levels of productivity, surveillability, whimsy, and interconnectedness. We’re perpetually in control of any great number of nodes in digital networks, data parsing engines, driving any number of machines. In our networked mode of existence our actions are perpetually being recorded, analyzed, and added to any number of feedback loops to change the state of some machine, of some system, to alter however so slightly, the result of some statistical sampling or equation. Or at least, this is how it appears. Another answer, which perhaps more complex and neither aids or excludes the previous, is that as the context of usage, consumption, and communication changes, so too does the notion of participation, of reading, and of enacting. The definitions of how one arrives at the aesthetic experience and how that experience is contextualized and analyzed may have changed to a degree. In short, these sorts of practices seem to speak to radically different kinds of goals both in terms of their creation and in terms of their usage by a user. The technology of these practices is not always that important. Artwork has always been technologically mediated. Richard Serra's Cor-ten steel, George Antheil's Ballet Méchanique, the entire history of photography from chemical to digital, all have leveraged innovations in manufacturing technology, chemical engineering, and electronic engineering to create artworks. Art does not exist outside of separate from technology. To assume that the employment of a technology is what defines the work is to misread the dialogues with which the work in conversant. Technology is not actually a field of research or a genre, it is simply a facet of human culture. Much new media work is actually in conversation with computing, the generic catchall term for the use of computer driven processes in daily life. It is not the computer itself that is of interest to the artist, it is position in the life of the user, its role in structuring society, and its relationship to the knowledge of our time. As with most tools, much interactive art relies on its employment in the pursuit of a goal. Art that deals with computing as its medium is a different form of practice than the interactive piece. Algorithmic art, aesthetic computing, these practices often tend towards a much more engaged relationship with the underlying technology, processing, and the relationship between the technological apparatus of the work and the user of the work. Contrast this to Zachary Lieberman, who writes '…it might sound really silly to say this, but I don't care all that much about it [technology]. It's a tool and a language for me, and I study it intensely in order to make my work, but at the end of the day, I could care less about the fact that my work requires electricity.' The goal seems to be primarily the creation of a novel action by the user through the use of a system that re-formulates common goals or patterns and provides new ways of achieving them and it is this that seems most like an interesting position to take at the borders of aesthetics, interaction, and computing. |
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