Art as Product of Cultural Technology: From Aesthetic to Data Theory

Art as Product of Cultural Technology: From Aesthetic to Data Theory By Claudia Edwards April 2014.

With modernity, and then with the conceptual turn in art, paintings jumped off the wall, ephemerality was embraced and sculpture became fluid: living people on plinths. The sanctity of the exhibition space blew up, and installation art was born, a self-reflexive gesture regarding the lack of neutrality within the art institution. Performance art and Happenings gained recognition; relational art emerged and gave way to what is now often called ‘social practice.’ And now also, the digital realm has established itself as both a viable space for artistic production and as a social and information network heavy with its own politics. Generationally speaking, we are safely past the post-modern era. A new moniker has yet to stick, but some have called it PostInternet1, at least in relation to the digital realm and how the internet has reconstructed our social fabric and the dissemination of information. This term still limits itself geographically to places where use of the internet is widespread. In 1966 Allan Kaprow predicted that in the future, art will have become a kind of "communications programming.” 2 Today the steadily dematerializing nature of art and information itself manifests in an endless stream: feeding, looping, apparently self-generative. While human history has never been better documented, it is just as quickly lost, forgotten, and impossible to find again in our struggle with oversaturation of information. Globalization has altered the individual’s self-perception and sense of agency, as well as the personal ethics of making in relation to the world at large. This text will seek to interrogate the act of making 1

Artie Vierkant, "Artie Vierkant // The Image Object Post-Internet," JstChillin, 2010, Allan Kaprow, "Manifesto (1966)," In Essays on the blurring of art and life, ed. by Jeff Kelley, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003 Expanded ed. 2

today, as well as the actor: who or what influences an artwork, or the identity of the artist themselves? Who or what is producing culture? Kaprow concluded that art itself could be understood as a kind of communications technology. Today, technology is now capable of producing art, and in turn, the artist acts as a form of technology. By instrumentalizing the self as technology, it becomes possible to serve alternative motives than those to which technology has typically advanced. To reach this conclusion, first the dismantling of the aesthetic order will be addressed, followed by an exploration of the individual as an extension of the culture. The emergence of self-generating art online and in life will serve as a counterpoint to the notion of the artist as a form of technology, capable of serving atypical functions or motives. Technology as a set of practices will then be compared to governance. In 1962, Marshall McLuhan predicted and prescribed that, in order to co-exist with our creations in the electric age, an interplay between the private senses and our technologies must manifest itself, deeming our technologies, our extended faculties and senses, to be part of “a single field of experience,” one which must become “collectively conscious.”3 The primary theory of this text is grounded in Marshall McLuhan’s famed communication theory4 and appears as a proof: Technology = extension of the self Art = technology Art = extension of the culture ∴ I am culture's technology 3

‘Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible.’ Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. 4 Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message," Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Definition of the artist or creative individual as an extension of the greater culture reduces the creator’s significance and their particular identity to a set of influences and circumstances, where the creator becomes the technology, aka the medium, of the culture. This notion also takes root in Allan Kaprow’s essays regarding the blurring space between art and life, where emerging art practices of the time, Fluxus scores and Happenings, started to resemble and become difficult to distinguish from life.5 The invention of aesthetics, or “the thought of the new disorder,” meant the dismantling of a prior hierarchy in art, where doubt was cast upon ‘civilization’ of the classical age, and paintings and sculptures no longer needed to refer to their patrons or to a religious doctrine, instead becoming a document of their own processes.6 Artworks were given a museological framework, and art or the capacity to legislate on it was no longer tied to social status, allowing for an undifferentiated public. Aesthetics thence gives way to two divergent philosophies, either for sublime or relational ends. The sublime seeks to relieve art from utopian ambitions, instead maintaining its power through a total distance from ordinary experience. In opposition, the relational aesthetic embraces banality, modest “not only as regards its capacity to transform the world, but also as regards claims about the singularity of its objects.” 7 Its purpose then, is to materially and symbolically reconfigure our relation to the common, to promote new confrontations and forms of participation.8 Both the sublime and relational aesthetics, then, seek to create a specific space which exposes the common, in a kind of suspension. This particular creation of new spaces is what constitutes art as political. Rancière defines politics as not the

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Allan Kaprow, Essays on the blurring of art and life. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 8-13. 7 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 21. 8 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 21. 6

exercise of power, but the organization of a specific space for discussion and debate of negotiated common objects, in short, the “reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible.” 9 Duchamp’s introduction of the ‘readymade’ to the institutional framework can be understood as a continuation of the process of dismantling the traditional hierarchy or valuesystem regarding the order of aesthetics, where now any thing, man-made or not, may be considered as having an ‘aesthetic.’ Artie Vierkant, a Post-Internet theorist and artist, summarizes, “everything is anything else.” 10 If what the artist makes is not of greater intrinsic value than what already exists in the world, this frees the artist from necessarily producing things, which at this point in time may be physically and ethically unsustainable, especially as regards its use of space and resources. Culture is now producing art; the artist may produce culture through their participation in it. In our globalized, ‘post-utopian,’ ‘post-identity’ world, the individual, as an extension of the culture, ceases to exist. The Third Wave feminist project has revealed, for example, that marginalization is not caused by specific individuals deserving fewer opportunities, but is actually a process, a systemic framework which blocks access and promotes a lack of agency. Lower standards of living are typically not the individual’s fault, but further, much of their experience and attitudes will derive from their circumstances - the city and the country they live in, their skin colour, language, gender, and so on. Seeing things from this ‘post-identity’ framework problematizes the artist’s role further, since their production and their experience cannot be unique. Naturally it is understood that 9

‘Politics, indeed, is not the exercise of, or struggle for power. It is the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them… Politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible which defines the common of a community, to introduce it to new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been…”’ Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 24. 10 Artie Vierkant, "Artie Vierkant // The Image Object Post-Internet."

works of art derive from and contribute to a continuous genealogy of production and thought, and therefore no thought or act represents a moment of uninfluenced singular genius. However, this lack of uniqueness now extends to each and every person, who can be theorized and reduced to their social conditions. John Keats wrote that “the poet has no identity” 11, but the implication of this statement was similar to Da Vinci’s remarks on the mind as mirror: the poet or artist must become the material they engage with in order to speak of it; must attempt to meticulously and neutrally observe the world, before recreating it and installing their own judgment upon it. He was not suggesting that the artist’s ability to understand and interpret the world should not be unique. Yet in today’s globalized world, the resemblances between movements and styles from different cities or from totally different continents has become evident, such as the mass mediáticos conceptual art movement of the 70s in Latin America, in relation to media-based art practices in the US and UK. While the politics of each geographic space differed hugely, their conceptual forms came down to very similar practices. Today this post-identity reality has been reduced to a joke; one example of this can be found on the popular Tumblr page, Who Wore It Better,12 which posts regular comparisons between two images found on the web of artworks which feature striking aesthetic resemblance. These may consist of comparisons between one contemporary work with one work from an earlier period, or two older works, or two contemporary works, but it is because of the worldwide accessibility and distribution of images offered up by online searches that two disparate originals may seem to be copies. 11

‘A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women…’ "To Richard Woodhouse,” John Keats, John-Keats.com, October 27, 1818. http://www.john-keats.com/briefe/271018.htm (accessed April 20, 2014). 12 Who Wore It Better, http://whoworeitbetter.info/ (accessed April 20, 2014).

The virtually instantaneous speed at which artworks can be made and then disseminated globally today seems to have rendered personal style and craftsmanship obsolete; an installationshot which takes three days to stage, light and finally photograph will harbor as much viewingtime as a meme one-liner, while the style or approach of an artist from, say, Japan, can be immediately absorbed and reproduced by a Brazilian artist, emptied of the original work’s content and politics. This also has a homogenizing effect, where exposure to aesthetics, based in the image, from across the globe, has become so accessible and thus imitable. The impression left on many viewers of image-based websites such as Tumblr, but throughout web search more generally, is that artworks appear to be generating themselves. The artist Jonas Lund approached this problem by compiling a database of specifications about contemporary artists, such as age and birthplace, the details of their works, along with curators and then the galleries according to their locations and physical layouts.13 He then created an algorithm, into which he could submit details of a hypothetical artist, the country in which they are showing, the number of spaces in the gallery and so on, and the algorithm would generate an entire exhibition of artworks according to the current aesthetic trends noted in the database, but predicted according to the details of that artist’s own identity. In Lund’s piece, The Fear Of Missing Out, the creative act occurs not primarily in the literal interpretation of the works, but in the matrix of their conception: in the archival and organizational process. As stated by data theorist Kate Crawford in 2013, “prediction is the new production,” 14 thereby identifying creativity not in the act of producing things, but occurring within the structure instead, of how we interpret, forecast and restructure products, information, and knowledge. Another position 13 Mallika Rao, "Controversial New Project Uses Algorithm To Predict Art," The Huffington Post, November 5,

2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/05/jonas-lund-art-algorithm_n_4214211.html 14 Sky Goodden, "INTERVIEW: BOCA Gallery on Shaq and ‘Prediction as Production,’" BLOUIN ARTINFO, December 31, 2013, http://ca.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/998661/interview-boca-gallery-on-shaq-and-prediction-asproduction

Lund’s approach takes is one of infinite possibility, where no particular piece in the exhibition holds more weight, content or personal significance. Indeed, this work can be seen as a perfect manifestation of the sublime, since each artwork is at a total remove from the artist’s and the viewer’s own emotions – rendered inaccessible through their absence of any sentiment or particular significance. The resulting malaise of today’s artist that the process may be autopiloted and still look good is coupled by art’s inherent defining nature as needing to be somehow transgressive, since the futural knowledge that any transgressive act will and must be canonized “drains all energy from the gesture” 15, endorsing art’s apparent futility. If an emerging space for artistic production is through the use of technologies, archival processes and the digital realm, re-examining our relationship to the digital and the weight that technologies carry in our lives is crucial at this time. Making our lives convenient is an understatement; it has totally restructured our makeup and daily functioning. Whether the implications are social (pulling out one’s phone and receiving an article suggested by a friend), or mental (trying to last for one week without a computer), the Internet as a social and information network carries as many disadvantages as it does advantages. By making organization, movement, and correspondence vastly simpler, it affords more time towards the actual content such tasks engender. If profitable for the user, the Internet is equally profitable for the self-promoting business or corporation, which saturate social platforms and search engines with advertisements and distractions. It is also instrumental to the State apparatus in tracking and compiling the movements and search patterns of each of its citizens.

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‘The recent, romantic history of art is a history of alleged transgression. So many of today’s standard art moves began as small deviances and transgressions. And while it does seem there are now no rules left to break, more to the point is that knowing a transgression, if successful, will soon be canonized and therefore de-fanged, drains all energy from the gesture.’ Jacob Wren, "Resistance as Paradox," A Radical Cut In The Texture Of Reality, January 21, 2013, http://radicalcut.blogspot.ca/2013/01/resistance-as-paradox.html (accessed April 20, 2014).

It is natural then, that many people feel anxiety over developing technologies, of their uses and abuses. In order to address this concern, art practice must grow and be reconceptualized: as technology itself. If technology is making art, be it through humancompiled algorithms and databases or through online image and poetry generators, a further objective of re-positing the artist as technology is the removal of malaise regarding technology’s own evolution and emergent consciousness as many people experience it today, the concern that McLuhan was pointing towards. If we too are a form of technology, we are equally capable of serving an alternative function or motive to that of the conventional aims of technological advancement, i.e. increased profit, efficiency, or mass collection of data. Taking it beyond the digital realm and beyond the gallery, art, or products of cultural technology may now also be generated in life, found in-situ: objects or momentary interactions, embodying a transcendent discourse, specific to the context in which they are found. It is possible to find artworks in the street or elsewhere: authorless, yet doubtless filled with intentionality, discourse, and an ‘aesthetic’ of their own. Yet, in opposition to Duchamp’s ‘readymade’, or to Stendhal’s descriptions of sensory micro-events16, it is no longer necessary to recontextualize the work institutionally or authorially in order to establish it as a work of art. The context in which it is found speaks volumes about the work, which reframing it would fail to include. This may be seen as a continuation of relational art’s modesty, as Rancière puts it. Spaces which materially or symbolically reconfigure and expose the territory of the common have now become capable of exposing themselves. What makes this transition possible, where life actually is art and may expose itself as art, is born out of necessity, since modern art’s mission is “to bear witness to the fact of the unpresentable” and “[the] singularity of appearing is therefore a 16

Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 4.

negative presentation”17. Since anything now goes within the exhibition space, and relational art permits art to be made outside this space through constructed performance and happenings, the next transgression is for art to exist and to be experienced as authorless: as generated and constructed by life. However, this transgression of the perceived actor of art should not be understood as exclusive – artists, the human producers of cultural technology, may still contribute to the field – but they are no longer its sole producers, and what they produce may not always qualify as art.18 They can be seen as one of several cultural technologies. William Walter’s makes a useful comparison in his discourse on the ‘governmentalization of Europe,’ investigating government not as a given or self-evident entity but rather as a technology, as a set of practices.19 This relation of technologies to sets of practices easily lends itself to the vocabulary of art. By relating Foucault’s method20 of analyzing practices, rather than subjects or objects, in order to reveal how these are really constituted by practices, Walter’s examines the governmentalization of the state and identifies that government should not be seen as originating from within the state, but rather, that the state connects itself to the techniques, programs and networks of an already existing governmental structure.21 This has the outcome of a governmental state, or social state. “One should not essentialize it or think that 17

Lyotard in Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 20. ‘There are not always occurrences of politics, although there always exist forms of power. Similarly, there are not always occurrences of art, although there are always forms of poetry, painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance.’ Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 24. 19 Antti Tietäväinen, Miikka Pyykkönen, Jani Kaisto, "Globalization and Power - Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters," Foucault Studies, 2008, 63-72. 20 ‘Foucault’s great revolution conceptually is to place practices at the centre of analysis. The subjects and objects that social sciences are often obsessed with are themselves the effects of practices. And Foucault’s innovation is to place the practices first, to reveal in very concrete and empirical terms how practices are constitutive for objects and subjects. By doing that he is able to denaturalize and historicize whole sets of things that are simply assumed to be stable entities: Citizens, individuals, states, corporations, parties, and classes, just to mention a few.’ Tietäväinen, Pyykkönen and Jani Kaisto, "Globalization and Power - Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters," 64. 21 Tietäväinen, Pyykkönen and Jani Kaisto, "Globalization and Power - Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters," 66. 18

[political science’s categorization of state, economy and civil society] are somehow transcendent political categories… [but should say] what are the different ways in which political space or economic space are being imagined and classified and acted on.” 22 He examines the process of governmentalizing Europe specifically, which necessitates firstly the identification of Europe, “a particular combination or club of states who want to speak in the name of Europe, as though they are its destiny or embodiment.” 23 This action of identification alone reinforces a certain cultural and geographic notion of space. Looking at the emerging territorializations of governments, such as ‘regions’ or ‘zones,’ as it is used in the administrative term ‘employment zones,’ along with ‘networks’ and ‘areas’, Walter’s interrogation of these kinds of spaces and social arrangements created through our current political practices, or technologies, opens a line of questioning into to whether these technologies are actually politically effective or dangerous.24 So, once again, the benefit to understanding government as a technology is that it becomes possible to deconstruct and examine its parts separately: to question and steer its functions and motives, rather than regarding it as an uncontrollable beast. “Man, said Aristotle, is political because he possesses speech, a capacity to place the just and the unjust in common.” 25 This last comparison of aesthetic practices to that of direct political practices is quite fitting, since both take root in the reconstruction of common spaces and relations between subjects and objects, be they social, material or symbolic, through a sublime distance from ordinary existence, through redisposing relations to common images and 22

Tietäväinen, Pyykkönen and Jani Kaisto, "Globalization and Power - Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters," 67. 23 Tietäväinen, Pyykkönen and Jani Kaisto, "Globalization and Power - Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters," 66. 24 Tietäväinen, Pyykkönen and Jani Kaisto, "Globalization and Power - Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters," 68. 25 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 23.

objects to provoke new forms of confrontation and participation, or politically through the creation of space for debate of the common. Both aesthetic and political practice invests in ‘reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible,’ by redistributing place, identity, space, time and visibility.26 From Kaprow and McLuhan’s early predictions regarding art as a communications technology and the necessity of a collectively conscious co-existence with our technological instruments – to today’s dematerializing and dissociating art processes – the continual ruptures and novel spaces which aesthetics has provoked from its outset continue to occur and to reformulate. Once the aesthetic order was taken down, enabling objects of art to be found rather than made, it now follows that the objects of art need not be spatialized within institutions or claimed by an author in order to be interpreted as works of art, as products of a cultural technology. This process has transpired in both the real and virtual realms, outside of exhibition walls. Culture can now be seen as instrumentalizing life and its participants to produce its works, yet by contrast, artists may understand their practices as technologies which may function in opposition to the dominant technologies, so as to redirect their practices away from conventional technology’s often violent or profit-directed ends. As these ruptures and new spaces of aesthetic production continue to emerge, their effects as either useful or dangerous must be continually reassessed and reformulated, as necessity requires.

26

Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 25.

Bibliography :

Tietäväinen, Antti, Miikka Pyykkönen and Jani Kaisto. "Globalization and Power ‐ Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters." Foucault Studies, 2008: 63-72. Jacques Rancière, translated by Steven Corcoran. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, c2009. Kaprow, Allan, and edited by Jeff Kelley. "Manifesto (1966)." In Essays on the blurring of art and life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003 Expanded ed. Keats, John. "To Richard Woodhouse - John-Keats.com - Letters." John-Keats.com. October 27, 1818. http://www.john-keats.com/briefe/271018.htm (accessed April 20, 2013). McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium is the Message." In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Vierkant, Artie. "Artie Vierkant // The Image Object Post-Internet." JstChillin. 2010. http://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf. Who Wore It Better. n.d. http://whoworeitbetter.info/ (accessed April 20, 2013). Wren, Jacob. "Resistance as Paradox." A Radical Cut In The Texture Of Reality. January 21, 2013. http://radicalcut.blogspot.ca/2013/01/resistance-as-paradox.html (accessed April 20, 2014).