As a result of the computer revolution, the world is witnessing an unprecedented shift in modes of social, economic and cultural production. The rise of informational networks as social and economic forms simultaneously contain new possibilities for a democratic society and new threats to individual liberty. Within these networks lie new possibilities for resistance against power, the creation of new forms of subjectivity, collaborations and democracy. But they also contain new forms of disciplinary power, subjugation, exploitation and oppression. Art practitioners working within the realm of digital media must develop a new critical framework for understanding how their work can either work for a liberatory future or merely reinscribe forms of oppression that permeates these networks.
The rise of the digital network as a dominant social and economic form is the result of the shift of relations of production to the informational sphere. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri assert, “In the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged 'immaterial labor,' that is, labor that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response”(108). It is important to note that they recognize industrial labor as still being the dominate form of labor in quantitative terms, but argue that “immaterial labor” is the dominant form in qualitative terms. In other words, the ideology of labor is shifting towards the informational realm, a realm which posits networking and communication as central to its functioning.
To understand how artists can help shape the trajectory of new technologies, we can look to Walter Benjamin's method of analysis of the artist as a producer. He states, “Rather than asking, 'What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of the time?' I would like to ask, 'What is the position in them?'”(81) Artists who work in the digital sphere are inextricably linked to these new relationships of production in a myriad of ways. Their work as cultural producers influences the future of technological progress through their innovations and visions. Most important for our purposes is the ability of artists to envision and/or problematize new communicative possibilities afforded by new technologies.
Digital artists cannot be thought of as subjects functioning in a mythical realm outside of capitalism, but must be conceptualized as being active producers of technological innovation and progress. Therefore, digital artists concerned with social transformation must create strategies to ensure that their output works towards the positive transformation of society. For the purpose of this analysis, I will look at new possibilities for communication, participation and collaboration as holding the liberatory hope of new technologies. I will use the term “networking aesthetics” to refer to art which utilizes new technological forms of communication in its creation and which works for progressive social change.
Much has been written about participation and collaboration in contemporary art. While digital media contains properties and possibilities unique to the medium, work by contemporary art theorists can provide a starting point for understanding the possibilities and pitfalls of a “networking aesthetics”. Nicolas Bourriaud analyzes what he calls “relational art”, which he defines as, “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (14). Bourriaud argues for art that does not look ahead to future utopias, but that which creates micro utopias in the here and now (45). He claims that such art works represent a social interstice, which he defines (summoning Marx) as a space of social interaction that exists outside of the rules of profit (16). Bourriaud's ideas have garnered a lot of debate and criticism from art critics. For my analysis of “networking aesthetics”, I will look at the idea of micro utopias and of the social interstice and apply them to new technological modes of communication.
The limitations of Bourriaud's approach become evident if we examine the work of Rirkit Tiravanija, an artist championed by Bourriaud as someone who represents relational aesthetics. Tiravanija's work creates “open spaces” for gallery patrons to cook food and socialize. This social engagement is the central content of the work—the physical objects that create the space are secondary to the social relations that the work inspires. These “open spaces” of social interaction lie at the heart of Bourriaud's political project. For him, they represent the project of artists to “patiently re-stitch the relational fabric” of a world marked by increasing social alienation.
But Bourriaud's analysis of this work ignores the complicity of artists like Tiravanija with existing systems of power. As Claire Bishop points out, his work “produces a community whose members identify with each other, because they have something in common”. This commonality is their involvement in the art world as either art dealers or art lovers. In Tiravanija's account of his first solo exhibition, he describes chatting and networking with art dealers and patrons. In the account, as Bishop points out, there is no real friction in the situation, so it doesn't represent “democracy” in any kind of way (67). For Bishop, a healthy democratic society is one in which there is sustained antagonism and debate. Tiravanija's work doesn't include that antagonism because it works within and perpetuates a system of exclusionary power—that of the art world. In that way, we can view his work as working towards the further consolidation of power, as those with a certain amount of social capital are able to access these exclusionary networks and use them to their advantage.
Bourriaud's assertion that such work exists in a social interstice is then found to be a problematic assertion, as the work very much feeds back into systems of capital. Benjamin warned against this reconfiguration of political struggles into objects of “distraction” or “amusement” (88), a problem with Bourriaud's treatment that Bishop has also railed against (52). This example also points to why Benjamin's method of analyzing work in terms of its position within relations of production is of critical importance to the creation of a “networking aesthetics”.
One could argue that this critique is unfair—that any work that finds its exclusive home in the gallery could be critiqued using the same criteria. While this may be true, I find the description of how a relational art work functions within existing structures of power to be of crucial importance for an analysis of art in the networking sphere, for the networking sphere is made up of complicated and overlapping systems of power and possibility. Analyzing how a digital art supports, resists, problematizes or creates news relationships of power is essential to creating a framework for understanding a “networking aesthetics”.
A second and related critique of Tiravanija's work is that the artist ignores the context in which his work functions. During one of his shows that was billed by some as a model of “intercultural exchange”, a nearby homeless settlement was being evicted. As artist Stefan Roemer observes:
'They act as if they are being so generous in making this room available when they are really doing nothing at all. It is a meaningless statement. At the same time they are making this grand gesture fifty homeless people are being ordered to clear out their camp and go... It fits perfectly with the rhetoric of globalism, with its empty platitudes and its commitment to image over real change.' (Kester, 105)
For Grant Kester, artists working in the relational sphere must understand the context of the situation that they are working within. His examination of “dialogical aesthetics” represents a radical repositioning of Bourriaud's analysis. Kester argues that artists working in the relational sphere should give agency to their participants and understand the social context in which the work takes place. In this way, art is created through a dialogical process that is much more open-ended, exploratory, flexible, and, hence, socially transformative than the art works championed by Bourriaud.
Kester uses the London-based artist Stephen Willats as an example of an artist working in the dialogical sphere who pays close attention to the social context of his work. Willats has participated in several art projects throughout Europe in which he works collaboratively with public housing tenants to create the work. Through the dialogue that is initiated, Kester states, “both the artists and his or her collaborators will have their existing perceptions challenged; the artist may well recognize relationships or connections that the community members have become inured to, while the collaborators will also challenge the artist's preconceptions about the community itself and about his or her own function as an artist. What emerges is a new set of insights, generated at the intersection of both perspectives and catalyzed through the collaborative production of a given project” (95). One of the possible insights that Kester says the work can point to is the power relationships that permeate the given context.
Kester's analysis of collaboration working towards revealing power relationships is a promising angle for the development of a “networking aesthetics”. Much more so than Bourriaud who seems to be content to praise social interaction while ignoring its complicity with power and capital. Kester borrows heavily from Paulo Freire (who he mentions once in his introduction) and his idea of the liberatory potential of a problem-posing, dialogical pedagogy (Freire). Both Kester and Freire are interested in mutual, dialogical processes that create knowledge, reveal truth and work towards a liberatory future.
Collaborative, dialogical approaches to knowledge production can easily be mapped onto technological networks which are created by and rely on forms of communication. The relationship of these networks to power, both internal and external, and their possibilities for the creation of new liberatory forms must be of central importance to the digital artist who is interested in developing a liberatory “networking aesthetics”. There has been plenty of mainstream attention paid to forms of online social networking that has painted their inclusive nature as a sign of a new participatory “democracy”. We must be careful here to examine these claims and expose those networks who champion participation, but which are really tools to turn users into consumers (Kelty, 303). For while new technologies provide unprecedented communicative possibilities across geographical space, they are also informed by the logic of disciplinary power and profit.
Examples do exist, though, that can provide us glimpses of a democratic future. Christopher Kelty analyzes the free software movement and its potential for new forms of governance. His analysis revolves around the concept of the “recursive public”, which he defines as:
A public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of existing alternatives (3).
While I question Kelty's assertion that such publics exist independent of other forms of constituted power, his analysis of alternative organizational forms is an important idea to help us differentiate between the liberatory and oppressive potentials of new network forms. Kelty applies his conception of the “recursive public” to groups who are organized around the creation of free software. His hope is that such forms can give us insight into new forms of political organization: “With it, we are in possession of a range of practical tools, structured responses and clever ways of working through our complexity toward the promise of a shared imagination of legitimate and just governance”(310).
Hardt and Negri go further in their hope for new network forms holding the potential for a new democratic society. They argue that for the first time ever, democracy is possible on a global scale through networks created within the economy of immaterial labor:
The balance has tipped such that the ruled now tend to be the exclusive producers of social organization. ... The rulers become ever more parasitical and... sovereignty becomes increasingly unnecessary. Correspondingly, the ruled become increasingly autonomous, capable of forming society on their own. We spoke earlier of the newly hegemonic forms of 'immaterial' labor that rely on communicative and collaborative networks of intellectual, affective, and social relationships. Such new forms of labor, we explained, present new possibilities for economic self-management, since the mechanisms of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labor itself. Now we can see that this potential applies not only to economic self-management but also political and social self-organization (336).
While it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine the merits of such optimistic hopes of democracy rising from technological networks, it is imperative for digital artists to explore the possibilities for new modes of social organization and communication afforded by these technologies.
In conjunction with this exploration, digital artists can also create works that expose exclusionary networks by highlighting the functioning of disciplinary power within them. In her critique of Bourriaud, Claire Bishop describes several artists whose work exposes relationships of hierarchical power. One such artists, Santiago Sierra, uses his work to expose racial and class antagonisms that permeate society. In one such project for the 2001 Venice Biennial, Sierra allowed street vendors to occupy his allocated space within the gallery. As Bishop explains, this clashing of cultures (the art public and street vendors) brought the rift in the relational sphere to the forefront of everyone's consciousness: “Foregrounding moments of mutual nonidentification, Sierra's action disrupted the art audience's sense of identity, which is founded precisely on unspoken racial and class exclusions, as well as veiling blatant commerce. It is important that Sierra's work did not achieve a harmonious reconciliation between the two systems, but sustained the tension between them” (73).
This sustained tension is an important first step towards recognizing systems of difference and exclusion that plague our society. Recognizing one's own responsibility in the perpetuation of exclusionary and oppressive social systems is an uncomfortable, but necessary step if we wish to build a more inclusive and egalitarian society. One project for a “networking aesthetics” must be exposing and problematizing these relationships of power. Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension is one such digital project that works towards exposing antagonisms as a way to work towards social transformation.
In his project, Bilal lived for a month in small room. During that time he was in the line of fire of a paintball gun that visitors to his website could control and use to shoot the artist. Viewers were also invited to engage in a dialogue with each other about the Iraq war on a message board on his site. His work functions on a number of levels that have been outlined as important to the development of a “networking aesthetics”. For one, Domestic Tension highlights systems of power as a way to interrogate them: the disconnect between virtual war and physical consequence, the use of technology as a means to surveil subjects of power, and the use of terror as a war tool, to name a few. The project also engages viewers in a dialogical process as a way to produce new forms of knowledge and understanding of the piece. In an interview, Bilal speaks of the transformative impact that the dialogical process in conjunction with the interaction with the project had on viewers (Regine).
Bilal's work serves another important function for the investigation of a “networking aesthetics”: it firmly places the materiality of the body in relationship to informational networks. This relationship is of crucial importance to a critical framework that looks to incorporate technological networks with movements for social change. The dichotomy that separates information and materiality, as Katherine Hayles has shown, is false. Information is always rooted in a material base, despite narratives that dream of the possibility of “free” information (75). An abstraction of technological networks from the materiality of bodies, with their wants, needs and desires, is an easy mistake to make. For the possibility of the reorganization of society using the model of informational networks to succeed, these networks must take into account the very real relationship between physical bodies and their virtual representations in technology.
Part of the project of artists working in a “networking aesthetics” must be to problematize narratives of the informational economy that make claims of “participation” or “democracy” while ignoring the real material conditions of society. Movements for social change must be rooted in the recognition of the very real political violence that is exercised on bodies through the functioning of disciplinary power. And as the functioning of political power shifts into informational networks, it becomes easier for power to abstract its relationship with the material bodies of those who it rules. A goal of a “networking aesthetics” must be to erase this disjunction while simultaneously creating alternative networking models that are rooted in and work in service to the material needs of humanity.
In this way the task of a “networking aesthetics” is further complicated by its technological base. Relational and dialogical models of modern art can help inform the beginnings of a theoretical framework, but the ever-changing and evolving landscape of technological innovation complicates the analysis. Not only does the introduction of subjects into informational networks abstract the material conditions of their existence, it also changes and complicates that relationship. New forms of interaction and communication within technology can have the effect of changing our relationship with ourselves and each other in both their informational and material forms.
For instance, social scientists have dubbed the “incessant online contact” that typifies social networking and microblogging as “ambient awareness” (Thompson). This mode of communication is typified by users who send short updates about what they are doing or thinking to people within their social networks. This kind of contact provides a new way of understanding and relating to each other: “Taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating” (Thompson).
As this example illustrates, new modes of communication can have real consequences on our formation of subjectivity in the world. The imaginations of digital artists working with new forms of technology can have an important impact on the creation of such communicative possibilities. Not only that, but artists can also work in ways that creates new imaginative possibilities for the formation of subjectivity through work that explores and/or problematizes technological communication. The social imagination that technology can inspire can be seen in the theoretical writings of Donna Haraway who envisions a post-gender world that is made possible by the imagination of a technological future.
Artists working toward the creation of new communicative forms can work in ways that are congruent with what I have described as “networking aesthetics”. For instance, artists may create new modes of communication that privilege the body as an integral part of the communicative process. In that way, they can highlight the material base of technology and reject the notion of an disembodied flow of information. They can also create new forms of communication that facilitate participatory democratic organizing. Free software models that enable widespread collaborations facilitate their organizing through the creation of software that forms the decision-making and collaborative processes. Other new forms of communication could investigate power relationships within network forms. Bilal's piece is a good example of this as he creates a form of communication that takes inputted information and converts it into a form of violence—that of being shot by a paintball gun.
Grant Kester, in his examination of dialogical aesthetics, recognizes unequal power relations within dialogue and proposes ways to remedy such discrepancies. His method is important for the analysis of a “networking aesthetics” as communication is now possible on a vast geographical scale, across continents and cultures. He explains that participants in a dialogue have differing levels of social and cultural capital which creates an imbalance of power in the dialogical relationship. For instance, participants with a background in academia have access to forms of language and rhetoric which are privileged forms of power in debates. Using feminist epistemology as a basis, Kester argues for an empathetic form of listening that takes into account the social and historical background of the speakers. This form of dialogical interaction makes listening an important and active component of the exchange as participants attempt to identify and empathize with their counterparts (113-114).
Creating more equal dialogical forms is an important element in working towards a more equal society that embraces, rather than denies difference. Hardt and Negri's hope of the possibility of democracy on a world-wide scale rests on the unity of singularities who maintain their difference, but who can work in cooperation (99-100). This hope relies on the creation of dialogical models that can work across difference while minimizing imbalances of power. While this is no easy goal, the innovative approaches of those working towards the creation of new technological communications should recognize and attempt to remedy such power imbalances.
In some ways, technology holds the promise of new forms of representation that challenge such power imbalances: the promise of self-representation that is less mediated by power. In the bulk of examples of relational and dialogical art, communities are represented in forms that are mediated by an artist. This artists is someone with access to cultural capital through the exclusionary networks of the art world. And while the artist's collaborators may represent themselves through a dialogical process with the artist, that representation is mediated through the rules of the artist who is ultimately the “author” of the work. In contrast, those with access to technology have the possibility to represent themselves in their own terms and according their own rules (although they are limited by the rules of the technology they use and by their own technological skills) to an increasingly global public.
Which brings me to the final, and perhaps the most important point in the formation of a “networking aesthetics”: the problem of access. Much of this discussion has focused on networks of power and ways in which artists can resist and problematize power or create new forms of social organization. But those most oppressed by disciplinary power are also those who are least likely to have access to technology. This not only excludes them from the discussion but, as Olu Oguibe points out, “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?” (173)
Coming back to Kester's idea of context being important to the dialogical exchange, digital artists must be aware of context in terms of the accessibility of their work. In other words, they should realize who is granted access to these technological networks and who is excluded. Furthermore, they must take into account the forms in which access is granted. For example, do people have access to the information via computers or mobile devices? And what are the limitations of the forms that they are using to access the information? If digital artists use their medium as a means for social change, then they must also work toward connecting the unconnected, or at the very least, problematize the fact that large portions of the world are excluded from the benefits of technology.
As cultural producers, digital artists have the potential to play a pivotal role in trajectory of new technologies. Developing a framework for a “networking aesthetics” is an attempt to help understand the myriad of possibilities and pitfalls of one aspect of the constantly evolving technological world. While no one can foresee the forms that new technologies will take, digital artists interested in progressive social change can work towards highlighting the liberatory potentials and exposing the workings of disciplinary power within them. This process can be facilitated by the collective and ongoing development of a critical framework that seeks to analyze the relationship of new forms of technology to society. This essay is an attempt to join that dialogue.
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/12/book-review-shoot-an-iraqi-art.php
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