Final Paper
Final Paper Proposal
Oguibe's article is a great to mark the ending of the term. While many of the theorists we have read have argued for the materiality of the body being of primary concern to their desired trajectories of “new” media, Oguibe brings it back to the real material conditions of the masses of people who have little or no access to the technological world. For, as Oguibe asserts, the insertion into that world implies that material needs have been met, which is not true of a large portion of the globe.
For me, as someone who is interested in exploring the possibilities for democracy and activism that is promised by new technology, the fact that my analysis only includes the privileged accessors of that technology must not be overlooked. Not only that, but as Oguibe points out, that lack of access might further problematize the identities of marginalized communities:
Given the relative ease with which participants in the network can generate and disseminate information, sometimes on a bewildering scale, has this medium entrusted some of us with the power to fabricate and disseminate possibly fictive and potentially injurious constructs and narrative of the Other to the rest of the world, when such populations have no equally enabling devices to encounter, evaluate, critique, challenge or seek to invalidate images and representations of their selves and their state of being?
One could argue many institutions function in this way and that the internet is just a mirror of larger oppressive social forces. For instance, academia is an exclusionary institution that often appropriates and exploits cultures for “research” and represents marginalized identities without channels of critique by those represented. From this perspective, Oguibe's analysis and proposed remedies are applicable to a host of exclusionary, privileged institutions.
He calls for a move towards increased “sensitivity and responsibility” within networks (I agree with this point, but don't see his call for legal enforcement as necessarily effective) . And secondly, he calls for a movement to include more people in networks. He rejects the position that privileges the fulfillment of material necessities over including people in these networks. He says it's an unnecessary dichotomy and that the privileged (those who hold power) are not the ones who should make assumptions about the needs or wants of those or not included in these new “global” networks. I think it's an important point he makes which especially resonates with me as a privileged person who has argued on the other side of the issue, but which really represents an assertion of my power to speak for those who should be able to speak for themselves.
As artists, how do we negotiate this terrain? Surely, we must critically analyze how representations play out in our work. But we must go further, and give critical assessment to which voices are being heard in our field. And, then, how do we go even further to include other voices without us appropriating them to further our own work or give them a very narrow acceptable means of transmission. For instance, I have hesitations about artists who create projects, with rules defined by themselves, who then “give voice” to marginalized peoples, but only within the confines of the rules that the artist has defined. True democracy can only happen once marginalized people have the power to create their own rules and, thus, are able to speak without filter put in place by those with access.
Tanaka's writing is compelling in that it recognizes new possibilities for cultural expression afforded by new technologies. His writing is rooted in a historical/theoretical analysis of music theory, but he recognizes that the techniques of older technologies cannot be mapped onto new technologies: "If music is made in networks, the network infrastructure becomes the space the music occupies". And he recognizes the "democratic" possibilities of music that works collectively using new technologies.
In my recent work, I have been drawn to sound as a means to engage with viewers. As Tanaka points out, sound has been relatively untapped as a means to propagate experiences. Perhaps, this is why I find sound so engaging in interactive work. As "new media" work is saturated with interactive visuals, interactive sound provides new compelling possibilities for the work to immerse bodies into the logic of the work. During my recent visit to the 
Art of Participation Show at SF MOMA, I found pieces that worked with sound to be endlessly fascinating and immediately engaging. Whereas other digital art was sometimes harder to engage with, even for someone who is very much invested in that world.
Also interesting to Tanaka's analysis is his desire for new musical experiences to engage with relational/dialogical models of art creation. That is, music that is the product of people's interaction with it and music as a response to "streams of cultural thought". While Tanaka sometimes throws around the term "democracy" haphazardly, I think the analysis of new media art as a possible site for community interaction is of crucial importance to understanding the yet unrealized possibilities for digital media.
Hansen, like Lyotard, proposes the materiality of the body as central to his philosophical/theoretical analysis. Hansen begins with Bergson's analysis of the body as “a center of indetermination within an acentered universe” and applies Bergson's concepts of affection to the interaction of a viewer with a digital artwork.
I appreciate Hansen's analysis of the process by which images in digital media are created:
...the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience.
This is analysis points to new ways that digital artists can work with digital images and problematize the ways in which a digital image is perceived by the viewer. But I wonder about his assertion that the process behind the creation of digital images necessarily points to a changing in the way images are filtered by the viewer. Hansen moves past Bergson's analysis of the body filtering images by saying that the body “enframes” digital information “that is originally formless”. Perhaps digital art affords the possibility of this enframing and sometimes achieves this, but is this really an idea that is intrinsic to our everyday interaction with digital images? Are our bodies really the ones enframing “formless” digital information or is this done by the hardware/software and then fed to the body in the form of images that work in the traditional way that Bergson asserts?
As I read through Hansen's work , I was excited by the possibilities for affective digital art and his analysis of the processes by which information is created in new ways in the digital realm. But I have a hard time grasping his theoretical aims of creating a “new philosophy” as I wondered whether this philosophy was actually “new” or necessarily linked to “new” media. Sure, the computer does create events that cannot be fully experienced by the body, but aren't events created all around us that can never be fully experienced? Or at least experienced in a singular way?
I do think the exploration of information that “addresses the constraints of human perception” is an extremely interesting mode of inquiry. I found myself drawn in by the idea of “non-spaces” and work that actively functions to trigger affective responses in the viewer. Perhaps some of my theoretical confusion regarding Hansen's work points to the need for me to explore these ideas in concrete work and see if this essay has resonance with my experiences.
Discussion questions for "Toward a Philosophy of Technology" by Hans Jonas
David Byrne on Machines and Souls
The Listening Post
Discussion questions for "Can Thought go on without a Body?" by Jean-Francois Lyotard or "Virtual Disaster Intervention"
Expansion of the Simulcra in the lives of the Body
Laptops to Save People of Developing Countries?
In her essay, Hayles rejects the prevailing idea that technology is a disembodying experience that moves us towards an “immaterial realm” of information. She states, “The efficacy of information depends on a highly articulated material base”. Information can never be free from the material world, so to understand the virtual, we must understand how it is made possible by the material. As digital artists, we work within the material/information duality and must constantly make decisions about how the information/data within our work is presented in its material instantiation. And then how the material representation of the information conveys meaning to the (material) bodies of the viewers. We have the choice to create the illusion of information being separate from material reality (a dangerous split, according to Hayles), or we can highlight the materiality of the informational world.
For artists to really explore issues in virtuality, I think they need to examine the dialectics that underlie our understanding of these issues:
signal/not-signal, information/noise, and pattern/randomness. Although I cannot avoid using these constructions, I want to show that they function as dialectics rather than dichotomies. For each of these dualities, the bifurcated terms tangle and interact with each other. The slashes turn out to be permeable membranes rather than leakproof barriers.
Digital technologies give us new ways to explore these dialectics, as the art we make can be in a constant state of flux. It can respond to information and viewers and its environment. In can grow and evolve and really avoid getting caught up in dichotomies or attempts to explore a single “idea”, but be open to exploration.
Massumi is interested in exploring this space between dialectics: the movement between beginnings and endpoints; the process that precedes the coding of bodies into the “grid” of acceptable classifications. How do we make art that does not “stop time” to understand the workings of bodies, but embraces the movements between points in this grid?
I like some of the quotes he puts forth about his own writing method as possible methods to explore the process of art-making:
Vague concepts, and concepts of vagueness, have a crucial, and often enjoyable, role to play
Generating a paradox and then using it as if it were a well-formed logical operator is a good way to put vagueness in play.
Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to surprise yourself writing things you didn't think you thought.
His complicating of the methods of cultural studies leads him to a process of writing that in many ways captures my interests in the art-making process(which might lend to his text being obtuse at times); the notion that play and exploration are important aspects to examining issues. That a merely critical project with a known end does little to adding to the debate. The real challenge is how to make art that effectively encompasses a complexity of ideas in both its process and presentation.
This week's reading all point to the importance of art engaging with critical discourses within biotechnology. They all posit science as a social institution, rather than a neutral practice, with real political and ethical dimensions that must be exposed and analyzed:
If, as it seems, the body is in the midst of being radically reconfigured by science, then the social, political, and emotional implications of these advances need to be mapped, made visible, by parallel artistic research
Most interesting to me is the analysis of the successes and failures of art that attempts to take an oppositional or critical stance towards institutionalized structures—in this case the biotech industry. Lynch's article really emphasizes the fact, which I think must be central to a critical art practice, that art cannot work effectively with single issue politics, but must take into account the multiplicity of factors that affect every aspect of life in our ever-complex world. Her analysis of how art that is made to be used as a critical tool (Paradise Now) can easily be co-opted by commercial interests, is of crucial importance to anyone working in this critical way. If we want to talk about biotechnology, we really have to also engage with capitalism, which is the central driving force behind the biotechnology industry. For, if we ignore the economic factors, we run the risk of these critical discourses being subsumed and co-opted by the same business forces that the work is attempting to criticize.
It is also a challenge to create critical work that is not propaganda, that is nuanced and open to interpretations, and that does not attempt to patronize the audience by assuming that they are not smart enough to read about the issues. Art should really be a way to express ideas in ways that writing cannot. CAE approaches these dilemmas by creating participatory performances that bring scientific knowledge to non-scientists as a way to problematize the authority of the scientific specialist. But what if, as Jacqueline Stevens proposes:
speculative visions of technological futures, even if they are critical, help to convince us of the inevitability of such futures
or as Jeremy Rifkin similarly points out:
the melding together of genetic science and artistic expression could help ease the way to a popular acceptance of Venter's new microbes, as well as cloned, transgenic and chimeric animals and designer babies.
Which brings me back to my original reaction to reading about Kac's bunny. Upon hearing about it, I immediately thought that the project was unethical in it's use of animals experimentation and genetic modification, and doesn't seem like something that will inspire a critical response by viewers (although, in light of the controversy surrounding the project, I may be wrong). What if all of these art projects work towards desensitizing consumers to the growth of biotechnology and don't success in engaging people with these issues? Maybe artists will decide that they should have been writing papers and making speeches this whole time. Engaging with these critiques and praises of critical art practices really problematizes the ways in which I, as an artist interested in social change, can navigate these tough issues.
The inquiries into the social/cultural ramifications of technology by Haraway and Kember point to the critical importance of analyzing the new technologies and methods that we engage with as “new media” artists. For both authors, technology holds liberatory potential, but only through a critical analysis can we understand the functioning of power within the technologies and move towards creating a critical framework for rejecting the uses of such technology that runs counter to a liberatory future. Crucial to both authors' analyses is the investigation into the role that power plays within these discussions, which refers to and builds on last week's reading of Foucault.
Haraway's concept of the cyborg seems at times to be a discursive tool, while other times a potential reality (or maybe a reality that already exists). She is arguing for post-gender cyborg identities that reject the essentialism of a singular female existence and of related taxonomies. Here she seems to invoke Foucault's analysis of the functioning of power as it systematically names, quantifies, and organizes identities as a method to subjugate them.
The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.
In my research, I hope to explore these dialectics of technology: the promise and threats of the technological world. It is interesting that Haraway suggests the cyborg as a possible breakage from these dialectics:
Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.
She talks about the construction and deconstruction of boundaries and the building and destroying of identities and categories. She seems to point to the liberatory potential of a technological reality that is fluid and beyond categorization and essentialism.
Arguments like Haraway's make me hopeful for the potential of new technologies and points to the necessity for artists to employ technologies that investigate her idea of changing identity. Kember's description of Artificial Intelligence, however, while not a research subject I am pursuing, seems like a logical progression from my interest in creating generative, emergent systems. But it is really a realm of exploration that I find frightening and potentially dangerous. Kember, of course, recognizes the danger inherent, and points to the inevitability of this exploration concretely affecting our lives. She argues for critical investigation into these technologies from a social/cultural perspective, specifically feminist, post-colonial and queer theory, so we can shape these technologies in liberatory ways. Kember applies Haraway's idea of the “god-trick”--the masculine pursuit of harnessing the monolithic, colonialist power of the creator—to critique current discussions in artificial life.
Both authors bring up a plethora of discursive strategies that can be used to critique, dissect and analyze these new technologies. They both show potential avenues for liberatory and dystopian futures (and maybe present). I keep coming back to wondering at what level should we include technologies in our vision of a liberatory futures? Should there be limits? Surely, we must develop an ethical code and always interrogate our relationship with new technologies (and this can surely be an investigation that the digital artist contributes to). Both authors bring up a lot of questions for me to explore in my own work and can serve as a starting point for our analysis of the constant evolution of technologies.
In his article, Michel Foucault exposes the functioning of power in modern society through the example of the Panopticon and shows how the individual is profoundly influenced by the internalization of disciplinary power. Victor Burgin and Slavoj Zizek illustrate current examples of individuals operating under the “gaze” of modern technology, which can be analyzed using Foucault's idea of the Panopticon to expose the ways in which modern technologies extend and/or change Foucault's analysis of power. For Foucault, as he explained in his debate with Noam Chomsky, analyzing the functioning of power must be at the heart of any movement that looks to work for social change:
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
If we view Jenni Cam as the ultimate surrender to the gaze of the Panopticon, what does it mean in terms of the functioning of power? Could the total surrender to power—the invitation from the disciplinary subject to be monitored/viewed/inspected at any time—be a subversive act that exposes the true nature of power? For, as Burgin points out, “If from this position we judge (Jenni) Ringley to be an exhibitionist, we have done no more than acknowledge our own voyeurism”. We are in the position of the observer within the center of the Panopticon while, “From Ringley's position, her camera is a mirror”. Can this surrender to power, weaken it's influence by exposing it, or, as Zizek explains, is power so ingrained in ourselves that we need it to convince us that we exist?
What we obtain here is the tragic-comic reversal of the Bentham-Orwellian notion of the Panopticon-society in which we are (potentially) “observed always” and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the Power: today, anxiety seems to arise from the prospect of NOT being exposed to the Other's gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera's gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his/her being.
Zizek argues that we “play ourselves” under the Other's gaze, a gaze that is ever present; the internalization of this disciplinary power in Foucault's analysis. Nowhere is this more evident than in our online lives. We cultivate careful personalities that aim to present ourselves in a specific light as we participate in social networking, blogging, photo-sharing, etc. We often view these technologies uncritically as neutral institutions that offer the new hope of participation and democracy in the tech world. While some of these hopes are well-founded, our online lives are also about building up these tremendous databases of information that are easily observed, quantified and surveilled by disciplinary power. We are even creating new kinds of observable data using technology. Here I am thinking of the idea of “ambient awareness” as written about in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html).
For some, like Hardt and Negri, new technologies hold the promise of the creation of a true democracy in society. One that is maintained through the networks we have created as labor moves toward the immaterial and digital. But, if we are to maintain that hope, we must look critically at the functioning of power within these networks and to prevent, as Foucault explains, the reemergence of those same power structures. For, while these networks may hold the hope of the future, they also contain clear avenues for disciplinary power to function within the framework set forth by Foucault.
Foucault Debates Chomsky
Both Benjamin and Aarseth are concerned with the trajectories of the new art-making techniques of their time. Benjamin seems hopeful of mechanical reproduction freeing art from “its parasitical dependence on ritual” and shifting it to a practice rooted in politics. Central to his thesis is the idea that reproducible art strips the piece of it's “aura” or it's authenticity as a singular work. This allows the “reproduction to meet the beholder... in his own particular situation”, which signals a democratization in the availability and intent of art-making. While he provides valuable insights into the development of art that would follow (the idea that the reader is ready to turn into the writer and his analysis of film), I think technology has reached a new phase that has the potential to bring back the “aura” in a new, technological form that will be explained later by Aarseth.
I'm hesitant to subscribe to the theory that the “aura” ever left art-making (or that this is a worthy goal of art), even in the beginnings of mechanical reproduction. To me, it signals a loss of exploration, self-expression, and the ineffable within art-making, which is so important to art practice. He explains the shift in photography away from the sentimentality of portraiture to a more documentary style that represents the final stripping away of the “aura”. Benjamin seems to subscribe to a more functional art, probably in line with the functionalist Marxism of his time. His rejection of the ritual is also probably based on a rejection of Fascism, which he sought to escape and which eventually killed him. In reaction, he sought to destroy the cult and ritual that Fascism advanced, while he looked to rational socialism as a means of liberation in both art and politics.
Looked at in another way, this destruction of the “aura” and the process of the “adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality” can be seen as a scary approximation of our current world as so much of our understanding of reality is mediated through the endless stream of media (ie: mechanical reproductions). In them remains the revolutionary potential of Benjamin's analysis, but they overwhelmingly advance the interests of capitalism. Although, they could still be said to be rooted in the practice of politics. (We might go so far as to say that Benjamin's analysis foreshadows the idea of virtuality)
Also interesting to artists working in the political realm is the epilogue which state “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war”. This too is a clear indictment of Fascism and Fascist art movements like Futurism, but I wonder about its implications to the process of art-making. Does he mean here that no political systems can be rendered aesthetic and that all art should be brought into the political sphere? In my own practice, I hope to strike a balance between this idea of politicized art while maintaining a semblance of the “aura” and the “magic” of art that is such a hard concept to pinpoint. “New” technologies seem allow the possibility for the intersection of reproducibility and the “aura” (or at least singularity), which is hinted at in “We All Want to Change the World” by Aarseth and beyond the scope of Benjamin's analysis.
Aarseth analyzes the terms “interactivity”, “hypertext” and “virtuality”, rejecting the first two and pointing to “virtuality” as a useful term to describe the “new” possibilities offered by computer technology. In some ways, Aarseth's argument is over the semantics of terminology, but what he is really pointing to is the possibilities for innovation offered by “new” technologies. He sees virtuality as a potential challenger to the “hegemonic means of communication”: storytelling. Perhaps in this notion of virtuality (“dynamic representations of an artificial world”), we can start to see the melding of reproducibility and singularity. For example, a generative artwork can be shown simultaneously in multiple locations. Each showing is reproducible in that sense, but the results of the output can be wholly dependent on both chance and the input of the viewers creating an artwork that is at once a copy and an original.
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