The Sirens of Change: A Cubist Report on
Technology and Art at the beginning of the 21st Century
Momilani Ramstrum
March 21, 2001
"Our brain is our nature. The paradigm shift
in art leads us to art as process- from external culture towards inner nature.
Art is a departure into our inner world or, to use a less dramatic phrase,
the transmission of the world of art into our nature. In this, our brains
are both model and object of the transmission, both beginning and end."
Richard Kriesche [1]
Wherever we have change, the department in charge of the
extremes can only be found if we are vigilant. Therefore, in terms of traditional
instruments, we are heading towards the person in charge of the difference.
Only to seem befuddled, we turn towards the front of the tradition. It
remains what we left. The stormfront is only a step beside the edge. If
only we could jump the chasm, we see the aftermath of the upset and can go
along quietly.
"...the proliferation of a technology might
bring about profound species transformation. It seems a lot to ask, even
of something as big as electronic digital computing. The critics are concerned,
of course, that what's happening is bad--that by consorting with these machines
we are losing something precious. But what if it were the other way around?
Could the undeniably radical transition from analog to digital information
processing-- historically great and philosophically momentous as it surely
is--leave humanity not only changed utterly but changed utterly for the
better? Is it possibly that in the process of achieving a vastly improved
and connected organization of our collective mentality and creativity, we
might manage to effect a great planetary draining of our bathwater while
somehow hanging onto the baby? And what exactly is the baby anyway?"
[2]
Terrible names have seen there are never anyways to
avoid the standard. When left alone, there ignites a certain breadth of
anxiety, and we only know what is put into our mouths.
"Malevich was very well aware that every trend
in art is linked with the view of the world, the totality of a particular
culture." [3]
So how long do musicians wait for a new frontage to
sweep along the path. The artists of the 21st century haven't long as the
telematic beginnings of existence encroach on the perspective of loneliness.
Extending themselves into the connected hypercortex, they meet, merge and
become extinct.
"One of the pertinent issues in this immaterial
cyberspace of forms and ideas is the telepresent extension of our bodies
through space and time that these technologies afford us. The technological
deconstruction and artistic reconstruction of our identities in the digital
ether is an almost meta-physical enterprise. One can say this despite the
apparent ludic simplicity of the games we create (on the Internet for instance)
to embody this surreal multiplicity of our newly discovered telematic being."
[4]
What if this was alone the only chance for their bread.
Severing our strength and cornering our market, technology
is central to the concerns of prosthetic imagination and intelligence, but
standing by the wall of funded stairs. How do we know it?
"The innate dynamism of the modern economy,
and of the culture that grows from this economy, annihilates everything
that it creates--physical environments, social institutions, metaphysical
ideas, artistic vision, moral values-- in order to create more, to go on
endlessly creating the world anew. This drive draws all modern men and
women into its orbit, and forces us all to grapple with the question of
what is essential, what is meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom in
which we move and live." [5]
Forgetting the cyclic bantering siren, we find only
noise in accelerating standards. Our world is challenged by robot toys and
computer mediated relations. We worked with symbols representing sound in
mind. Now the sound is directly related to audience and response. The audience
reaches the technology through telekinetic glasses. We reach the audience
through similar manipulations.
Traditions and pasts are transformed into technoetic connectivity.
In an endless sea of choice, the electronic composer balances his control
of extended substance. New timbres, new controls, new sound paths, new gale
force winds are straining the aesthetic literature of sound.
"Will I recognize the sound I want when I have
heard it?
Will I want the sound I have heard when I recognize
it?
Will I recognize the sound I have heard when I want
it?
Will I have heard the sound I want when I recognize
it?
Will I want the sound I recognize when I have heard
it?
Will I have heard the sound I recognize when I want
it?" [6]
Compelling us to proliferate the Arts and Crafts of
our collective shallowness, we are only beginning to reach the beginning
point of art. As electronics and music turn and move, we are always remaining
in the same between. The solution is no more figures, and only nature.
"We can't point to any technology as the source
of our collective "shallowness. ."The tube is not the "source"or
it. The source of our collective shallowness is us. We may worry that
living in a thoroughly digital, networked world will slowly warp our consciousness
until we no longer value "traditional"experiences such as.,
say, reading serious literature. But who is "we"and what is
"our"consciousness? As far as I know, serious literature has
never been of any interest to most citizens of my country. [7]
Celebrating our links to the past and frequently rationing
the unbidden fruits of chaos, we perceive only the stumbling charred bodies
of the never stopped ridden boats. The frequency of the ratios of mortgaged
belief to free, is staggering in its flame.
"As entropy increases, the universe, and all
closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their
distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state from
a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms
exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibb's universe order is least
probable, chaos most probable." [8]
Where is the noticed boy that is standing unknowing
by the bed? In the digital domain, the observer becomes reconnoiterer becomes
imbedded in the landscape. Aesthetic assumptions are allowed only in a context
controlled event sequence. We are no closer to the total control of the
experiential constructions than when we first projected into the new arena.
"What postmodernist repetition creates . .
. is not a temporality ruled by cause and effect, a medium of stability
and continuity, but an agent of contingency and dispersion. If certain
forms of repetition disrupt the causality that was traditionally associated
with temporal sequence in the novel, systematic violations of the boundary
between frame narrative and embedded story destabilize another kind of conventional
narrative causality: the narrator's control of the story. The nesting of
diegetic levels or recursion is, of course, not specific to postmodernist
novels, or indeed to the novel at all. In literature, the embedding of
stories within stories and of plays within plays is the most obvious corresponding
form. This type of pattern in itself does not necessarily cause any disruption
of linear time; instead, time simply seems to be suspended at one level
while it proceeds at another." [9]
Sorry, not that way. And even if the temporary truce
held, we would only find ourselves caught by the time of presentation. Here
is the coaxing aspect of the sordid promise. We are enveloped. We are lulled.
We are killed. We are born again.
"Each new medium is justified because it fills
a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept
promise of an older medium. (Typically, of course, users did not realize
that the older medium had failed in its promise until the new one appeared.)
. . . In each case that inadequacy is represented as a lack of immediacy.
. . Photography was supposedly more immediate than painting, film than
photography, television than film, and now virtual reality fulfills the
promise of immediacy and supposedly ends the progression. The rhetoric
of remediation favors immediacy and transparency, even though as the medium
matures it offers new opportunities for hypermediacy." [10]
Hardy and stupid, we are perverted and nosy. A hidey-ho
and there are no more babies irradiated.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
explained by stupidity.. . . Never attribute to technology that which
is adequately explained by people. Technology is value-neutral. Any disappointments
we have with technology are disappointments we should rightly have with
ourselves.. . . Like all technology, digital computing will reflect everything
about the people who use it. And so we should be much more concerned about
who we are and what we're doing to ourself than about what "computers
will do to us."Our insatiable desire for complete passivity has allowed
the marvel of broadcast television to be misused to the point of perversion."
[11]
Surreptitiously, we creep over the entangled artifices
of forgotten branches. There we meet ourselves, coming and going like Alice
in the Looking Glass. At the beach of our mind, we seem to mind the waves
washing over our severed limbs. But what of the noise? It leaps up from
the throats of millions as they join in the search for new rested shores.
They are engulfed by sorrow, they are shrouded in mystery, they are forever
lost. Unless they fuse their noise with our noise.
"[A]rt, like reality [is] a negotiation; the
product, never finite, of interactions and transformations with the realm
of consciousness. This realm, we have come to understand includes both
the observer and the observed, and constitutes a dance of meaning and perception,
in which no aspect is stable, no relationship definitive, no process complete,
no system closed or indefinitely looped." [12]
How about it, sailor? The new sounds whirl around our
heads, seducing and selecting our trembling minds. The only one unaffected
is the novice and the salivating bystander. They both go on without troubling
themselves overly about the new media. Fair weather friends are only there
for yesterday's meal. Today they are off tracking the dogs of retreat.
"Now, forced by circumstance to relocate the
locus of information and knowledge from the object to the hour, we re-externalize
ideas and make them continuous rather than discrete, reciprocal rather than
empowered, contextual rather than hierarchical. Value once again becomes
embedded in the social fabric rather than the distributed product. In the
silence of the empty hypermedia classroom we are aware of the reciprocal
power of the community of ideas that await the hour when we can plug into
them. We can imagine ourselves bathed in the flow of knowledge from the
space of the hour itself." [13]
Stretched to the limits of our awareness, we are external
to the object of our directions. They linger in our field of endeavors but
are unclouded by the remains of our struggle. We test our frontiers and
free ourselves of explanations. It is about time.
"And it is about time that we free ourselves
from the causal, analytical, reductive, linear time axis elemental explanations
which have ruled our 20th century world view. The important thing is in
finding clues from the works "change,"and relationship"which
line up their genres, bridging the interior and exterior worlds, piling
the past on the present on the future, creating inroads between "real
life"and imaginative power. Through doing so we go beyond the time
space paradigms, realities and concepts we have been so bound to and peer
at the thrilling flows and dynamism that unfold in this universe known as
the 20th century." [14]
The power brokers of marginal economies are only able
to negotiate an investment in the past. The system of negotiation is congruent
with the stretch of imagination necessary to the endeavor. We have just
enough.
"What is possible for science to know science
must know. What is possible for technology to do technology is obliged
to do. Whatever is possible is obligatory.""Knowledge-based
power can thus become an end in itself. In the absence of any clear vision
of the proper purposes of technology, it is all too easy to let technology's
agenda be set by little more than a self-interested search for novelty.
Should this happen, life becomes, in the phrase of the philosopher Alfred
North Whitehead, "a welter of minor excitements completely devoid of
any sense of plan or purpose." [15]
In our understanding of machine as man we bend the furniture
to fit our expectations. The machine remains behind an unsilent monument
to our arrogance and inability to fit into our existence.
"I have developed a gentle respect for the machine,
although I do not
know
anymore than I did about whether it is I who have a
resistance
to
it or the other way around. . . . Without wishing
to establish
an equivalence statement, I believe
it
to possess human-like qualities. It is not infallible,
nor is it infinite in its musical attributes. It is as temperamental as
I and frequently much clearer.. . . A
given
module, moreover, is unquestionably idiosyncratic.
The trick is to treat the music-machine as if
it were human in order to maintain
its
uniqueness." [16]
In joining together in our daily routine of communion,
we are engaged to know our neighbor of distant galaxies. It is brought home
when on reentering our waking world, we cannot distinguish between the friend
of our reality and a cousin of our hyperlink.
"Telematics is all about mind, it involves
the technology of consciousness, what I describe as the technoetic principle
(noetic is derived from Greek "nous", mind). Technoetics brings
into our experience a fourth irreducible quality of existence, to compliment,
as it were, space and time and connectivity. This is the dimension of consciousness.
With connectivity, the "hyperlinks"in mutimedia
terminology, of widely ranging associative links and conceptual interaction,
our experience of space and time is null and void. This is to speak of
mind-at-large, mind unfolding, blossoming within the net. It is telematic
mind, the collective intelligence of which is reaching that level of complexity
which augurs the emergence of a kind of hypercortex within our evolutionary
flow. New collaborative strategies, new interactive behaviors working through
the medium of the Internet, enrich the connectivity, heighten the interneticity,
of this hypercortex. It is the hypercortex which is now at the core of
our reality engine. Heinz von Forster concluded his seminal essay 'On
constructing a reality"with the simple formula: reality = community.
The development from there is clear. Our community is telematic community,
society online. Our social behavior is virtual behavior, Art now occupies
the domain of a radical connectivism, in which the transformation fo consciousness
is the primary condition of our telematic culture. The consequences of
a hypercortex for the future of art are likely to be quite unprecedented.
We can foresee the importance of the hyperconcept, that is the layered
idea which exists always and only in a constellation of associative links
of extreme subtlety: [17]
Time enough to restrain us. Time enough to enslave
us. Time has no benefit except as the passion of the unordained cyber-entity
who shall remain connected so that the rest of us can live. We are unable
to make the jump into full consciousness while entwined. Another connection
is needed. The question is regarding the nature of art and its relation
to the participant/observer.
"When art and technology enter a truly symbiotic
relationship, many assumptions relative to the art object become unreliable.
For example, in artworks that utilize the computer, where is the art object
located - in the machine, the printout or the mind of the artist? Furthermore,
what constitutes the original when nothing is authentic, non-reproducible?
As Walter Benjamin clearly outlined, the unique aura of a traditional artwork,
which distances it from life and gives it it's cult value in society, has
been irreversibly altered, and technological developments are largely responsible.
There are others besides Benjamin who predict that as art and technology
become more intertwined, distinctions will continue to disappear: between
art and non-art, one discipline and another, author and public."
[18]
But where is the observer of art? The voyeur as a professional
is unemployable in the vast reaches of telepoetic centers. We wish to have
the immediacy of reaction and distance of insulation. For both we wear harnesses
that lift us from the dirt and keep our psychic shoes virginal.
"The traditionally passive role of the observer
in art is thus abolished; he turns from a position external to the object
to become part of his observed visual realm, whose virtual scenarios will
react to this presence and will in turn effect a feedback from him. The
interactive installation has undermined our traditional assumptions about
the image as a static object." [19]
Art is constrained by circumstance, lightning bolts and
unbelievable states of giddiness.
"The question of where the music was/is --in
the machine, in the head, or neither one exclusively--often had/had to be
temporarily arrested as one faced/faces the problems of impedance mismatching,
channel noise, audio fatigue, recalcitrant engineers who refused/ refuse
to take us seriously, or electrical shock due to improper grounding."
[20]
We are interacting with ourselves, each other. We can't
know what will be inside until we arrive. Direct experience, redolent haven
or capital punishment?
"Interactive media art, the most avant-garde
position of contemporary art in general, realized the heritage of another
ideology in modern thinking: the possibility, now shifted into the field
of the technically feasible, the visitors of a museum or an art exhibition
could react directly to the aesthetic structure of a work of art with the
help of the computer controlled constellations of the machines, the interfaces,
as it is now, seem to let the utopias of a whole school of thought in the
modern age become a reality": the tendency towards the open work of
art, or better, to "works of art in motion"as Umberto Eco put
it." [21]
Where do we advance our conscious participation in the
projects of postmodern art? It is in the direction of the domain specific
interactive changelings that we have to be drawn. It is no longer affordable
to ignore our inclinations toward restlessness. It will resolve itself as
we are unable to stand the alternatives.
"The meaning of hypermedia is ultimately spiritual,
working at the level of a kind of associative consciousness, an interpenetration
of minds, or better put, the seamless merging of mind fields.
But for all the richness of interactive, telematic
projects at the poetic and sometimes visionary level of practice, the history
of digital art by and large has been the history of craft. We have been
living through a kind of Arts and Crafts movement not unlike that of the
19th century. Formal conceits, decorative flourishes, fractal flashiness
have constituted the commonality of practice. In the evolving discourse
of digital art the line between hype and necessity has been a thin one.
Similarly in science, despite the best intentions, and great technological
sophistication, we can only scratch at the surface of events. All our phenomena
are 'envelope'phenomena, with an immense number of elementary phenomena
escaping our observation. The problem is not the degree of resolution,
the analytical acuity of our investigative instruments or experimental apparatus,
instead it lies in the degree of granularity, as it were, of our own minds.
The subtlety of thought required to penetrate further into the nature of
reality, depends on a dynamic cognition of greater complexity than the singular
human mind can sustain. It is to the hypercortex that we must look for
the evolution of our intellectual and creative powers." [22]
Our own beliefs will come to reflect the only benchmark
of our success. It will of course be obvious to the future recipients of
this art, that we only knew it after we arrived at the scene of our imminent
transformation. And once there, we knew ourselves eleemosynarily.
Selected Bibliography
Ascott,
Roy. "The Technoetic Dimension of Art."Art@Science.
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag
Wien, 1997.
Berman, Marshall.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin.
Cook, Nicholas.
Fiske, Harold E. Music
and Mind: Philosophical Essays on the Cognition and Meaning of
Music. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990.
Gaburo, Kenneth. "Murmur."
Heise,
Itoh, Toshiharu. "ICC (InterCommunication Center):
The Matrix of Communication and Imagination,"
Joyce, Michael.
Kriesche, Richard.
Lombreglia, Ralph. "Humanity's Humanity in the Digital
twenty-first."
Rubinoff, Lionel. "Technology and the Crisis of
Rationality: Reflections on the Death and Rebirth of Dialogue,"
Schwartz, Hans-Peter. "New Art Needs New art Venues
- Art, Technology and the Museum."
Show, Jeffrey. "Convergence of Art, Science and
Technology?"
Stern, Peter.
Thompson, George W. Jr.
Weivel, Peter. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of
the Methodological Convergence of Art and Science."
Whitehead, Alfred North. quoted in Elting E. Morison,
Winner, Langdon.
Autonomous Technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1977.
Zolberg, Vera L. Constructing as Sociology of the Arts.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
[Note 1] Richard Kriesche, Siting Technology. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1988, 39.
[Note 2] Ralph Lombreglia, "Humanity's Humanity in the Digital twenty-first."The Graywolf Forum 1 Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. Sven Birkerts, ed., Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1996, 166.
[Note 3] Peter Weivel, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Methodological Convergence of Art and Science."Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 168.
[Note 4] Jeffrey Show, "Convergence of Art, Science and Technology?"Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 165.
[Note 5] Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books, 1988, 288.
[Note 6] Kenneth Gaburo, "Murmur."On the Wires of Our Nerves, Robin Julian Heifetz, ed., Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1989, 41.
[Note 7] Ralph Lombreglia, "Humanity's Humanity in the Digital twenty-first."The Graywolf Forum 1 Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. Sven Birkerts, ed., Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1996, 240.
[Note 8] George W. Thompson, Jr., Technology and Human Fulfillment, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc., 1985, 38.
[Note 9] Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 59.
[Note 10] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation, Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999, 60.
[Note 11] Ralph Lombreglia, "Humanity's Humanity in the Digital twenty-first."The Graywolf Forum 1 Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. Sven Birkerts, ed. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1996, 238.
[Note 12] Roy Ascott, "The Technoetic Dimension of Art."Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 279.
[Note 13] Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 93.
[Note 14] Toshiharu Itoh, "ICC (InterCommunication Center): The Matrix of Communication and Imagination," Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 205.
[Note 15] Lionel Rubinoff, "Technology and the Crisis of Rationality: Reflections on the Death and Rebirth of Dialogue,"Philosophy Form, 15, 3-4 (1977): 273,278. and Alfred North Whitehead quoted in Elting E. Morison, Men Machines, and Modern Times, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1966, 14, as quoted in Rudi Volti, Society and Technological Change. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, 6.
[Note 16] Kenneth Gaburo, "Murmur."On the Wires of Our Nerves. Heifetz, Robin Julian, ed., Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1989, 42.
[Note 17] Roy Ascott, "The Technoetic Dimension of Art."Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 282.
[Note 18] "Turtles and Trains: Technology and the pace of Change,"Richard Kazis, 10. Siting Technology. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1988, 23.
[Note 19] Peter Weivel, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Methodological Convergence of Art and Science."Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 187.
[Note 20] Kenneth Gaburo, "Murmur."On the Wires of Our Nerves. Heifetz, Robin Julian, ed., Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1989, 38.
[Note 21] Hans-Peter Schwartz, "New Art Needs New art Venues - Art, Technology and the Museum."Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 208.
[Note 22] Roy Ascott, "The Technoetic Dimension of Art."Art@Science. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1997, 286.