|
Posted by Christiane on December 02, 1999 at 22:03:59:
The following is an article Nik wrote for my magazine Intelligent Agent. Still unpublished... =========================
petite forays
by Nik Williams Art and Science are western culture's Terrible Twins. They track each other over great distances, spontaneously share the same dream on full-moon nights and generally make a mess when left alone in the same room. Whether one subscribes to the idea that Art and Science are at bottom sibling disciplines is really not the issue. Perception being the cognitive equivalent of Hassan ibn al-Sabbah's First Law ("Nothing is true, everything is permitted"), there is compelling evidence pointing to a symbiosis of sorts—if it just appears that the Futurists and their hammy manifestos were hardwired to the technocratic tendencies of the early electronic age or that the light emanating from Kandinsky and Miró was bent by Relativity Theory. Art and Science share another trait... their umbilical attachment to "stubborn problems" which make for irreversible, if not amusing, change. Let's say you are building a house. After a meaningful dialogue with your Inner Architect, you decide to alter the size of the front door. This is a minor change, however it does require that you increase the wall height which in turn modifies the kitchen layout which shifts the stairwell and so forth. Stubborn problems notwithstanding, experiments in Art and Science have an "undo" threshold somewhere between the midpoint and the point of no return. Yet in their ultimate attempt to reveal a hidden emotion or solve a knotty problem, they can only succeed or fail. Art might fail from the point of view of the artist, the audience, or both. Science, on the other hand, is rooted in proof and repeatability, thus the notion of failure is not subject to aesthetic debate. This is the root of the collaborative tension between the Twins, something which technology, in all its splendid determinism, might help to reconcile. How this blending/mending process might occur is a separate topic and I would only say that technology in search of an aesthetic is the artist's opportunity for aggressive, expressive insertion. Among the topics of particular interest in this context are the scientific advancement that has led to the emergence of new genres of Art in the networked environment; the role that network-based communities play in narrow-band research and artistic experimentation; the political implications of these communities' capacity for collective change; and the economics of sale underlying these virtual communities and the Information Age. NeoBio and the technoethic arts If we allow that scientific advancement is fresh food for artistic formulations, it is not surprising to witness the emergence of a genre of Art rooted in artificial life and self-regulating systems (the works of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are most notable). Artists are thinking more and more about the effects of biological research on the human-machine interface—physics having lost its sex appeal largely due to Hollywood's prodigious output of pseudo-scientific visualization. Our man in Linz, Gerfried Stocker, has this to say: "To the extent that the membranes of our body and our thinking are penetrated by the elements of a network-linked, intelligent environment, an ever more substantial magnitude is assumed by this environment, such that we find ourselves in a relationship of such intensive intimacy that a clear separation in the sense of a subject-object differentiation is no longer possible." (1) The notion is that mutations are at first transformative, then invisible and finally irreversible. In 1950s America, televisions were magical time space decoders until the miracle of molded plastics and the horror of executive programming decisions ("Remember, kid, after 6 PM noone wants to think"...) descended upon us. Suddenly, they vanished like camouflaged militiamen at an Idaho picnic. Mr. Minnow's "vast wasteland" was transformed into the Elysian Fields of the Silent Majority... muted, intolerant, transparent. Today, the attitude held by hard-line techno-pragmatists goes something like, "If mutations (in this case avant-garde art or pure scientific research) are not suitable for memetic transference, they should hurry up and die and decrease the surplus information." But neither Art nor Science are living things, they are disciplines through which humans transduce concepts and theories, no matter how misguided or spurious, into tangible form. Dark matter, virtual reality, abstract expressionism, what are these but metaphors for a sense of something purposeful residing in the interstitial zone which connects the larger, more dominant forces of change. These dominant forces can be misleading in that they presuppose absolute knowledge as it pertains to the direction of adaptive evolution, whether on a biological or cultural level. Moreover, this knowledge appears to assume that "adaptive" and "progressive" are synonymous. In Science, you can have a sound structure, one that works well but was not built by natural selection for its current utility. Just because something arises as a side consequence does not condemn it to secondary status. The brain probably got big for a small set of reasons relating to adaptation and survival on the African savannas. But by virtue of its computational power, the brain can do thousands of things that have nothing to do with why natural selection made it large in the first place. Junk DNA and Mail Art share a similar generative function. A more enlightened approach than dismissing the apparent superficiality of fringe experimentation would be to value the less forceful work, even to elevate and sustain it beyond what Darwinian determinism might accommodate. Of course, fringe experimentation must, by definition, remain outside the mainstream since the moment it is accepted and embraced by the host culture it loses its viral content and dies. But even if Stelarc is unsuccessful in his bid for Next Millennium poster boy, you can bet that the pre-cyborg fashion hybrids, fresh from the East Village Implant Parlor, will soon be loose amongst us, scratching where the "other" itches. Yeah verily, there is no true extinction. Art movements die, are resurrected and transferred into fresh, expressive forms. Scientific research dead-ends, is picked up and re-interpreted in the light of new facts. The simple truth is that in the long view, we do not know what is important and what is not. What we do know is that destruction of diversity leads to disequilibrium and loss of complexity. Perhaps we need a conservation movement for the past fifteen minutes. the network giddy-app But a new twist has been added, one that promises a great deal. It is nothing less than that ubiquitous network apparatus to which Mr. Stocker was alluding. It is obvious to anyone with a dial-up account that there is a tremendous amount of spontaneous activity being generated by developing on-line communities. The capacity for network-based communities to act as venues and repositories for narrow-band research and artistic experimentation is already bearing fruit, and their potential for growth into all aspects of offline culture is probably limitless. Memetic transfer of intellectual currency is running at an untrackable rate and those neo-Darwinian notions, with all their quaint post-industrial assumptions about adaptive, gradual evolution are losing hold. The life span of ideas is approaching that of adolescent mood swings, with focused groups of four to ten bonded intellects making tremendous headway in seeding a flourishing global sub-culture within which "reality" is hacked and consciousness expanded through philosophical and technological links woven across a deeply embedded internal neurology and external network topology. Collectively, they (we) constitute the "emergent mind" of artificial consciousness (Roy Ascott's "technoethics"). It's a place where new ideas and paradigms playfully mingle and the academic boundaries between creative disciplines are largely ignored. Within this community, cross-disciplinary thinking is the norm. It is also where Art and Science might be at their asymptotic best. bogus men in fuzzyland Recently, the techno-progressive community has been energized by attacks from politicians and reactionary culture thugs who mask their neophobic proclivities as conscientious, socially responsible "corrections" orchestrated by Citizens for the Greater Good. The simple fact is that a broad spectrum of people see themselves as potential victims of an informational tsunami. Clearly, the capacity for collective change driven by network-based communities and cultural rhizomes is potentially disastrous for entrenched power bases. The sense is that we are previewing jump cuts from a cataclysmic blockbuster which forecasts a mass transformation unseen since the Industrial Revolution. In an eerie déjà vu, the dinosaurs are going hungry while fuzzy mammals grow larger and more numerous through their ability to adapt and develop survival skills in a dynamic environment. It is clear that the egalitarian ideals formulated in the 1960s that postulated man as an enlightened citizen of planet earth have been gradually stripped of their utopian tone and now serve as practical guidelines for solving problems of intercultural relations, world hunger relief and environmental degradation. But there is another side to networked communities and the processes they spawn. Research conducted by doctors Turoff and Hiltz of the New Jersey Institute of Technology shows that solutions to problems derived from face-to-face group interaction are generally more successful than those made through electronically mediated consensus. Elements of communication that we now take for granted in a roundtable context are lost in virtual spaces. Visual language cues, status identifiers, and group domination by individuals or sub-groups no longer operate. The democracy of the virtual meeting space resides in its anonymity coupled with the invisibility of class and cultural differentiation. With the advent of the immaterial persona as disembodied representation of Self in virtual space, the temptation to reinstall these conventions will be compelling. Will it be enough for small groups of dedicated individuals to accurately assess and pursue their own self-interests and, as an unintended consequence, create a shift in the dynamics of world power? The challenge is to refine the lateral communication skills necessary, to dovetail them with the power of an evolving technology whose intellectual foundation is only now being constructed. Perhaps a little less Art here than Social Science, but cross-disciplinary thinking is preferable to life inside a curly bracket. economics of sale and the global village These uncertainties notwithstanding, ye olde Global Village has been revisited by the corps of cybercadets and they like what they see. Marshall McCluhan was brought to America by a group of advertising mavens to deliver a gospel built on one of his most penetrating insights, that television did not merely advertise but delivered consumers wholesale to producers. It is interesting to watch as this golden nugget of Madison Avenue wisdom is melted and reshaped by the apparent collapse of producer-controlled markets in favor of demand-based markets. As our disembodied personas wander through the shopping malls of Virtualville, it is easy to envision the Time Machine Scenario wherein our avatars are whisked through the gaping doors of the Consumer Cafeteria by an inaudible siren's song written in an as yet unknown cross-platform language called Lava. Write once, burn forever. In his paper "The Capitalist Threat," George Soros, that most unlikely advocate of activist government, harpoons the scientific underpinnings of laissez-faire capitalism which state that free and competitive markets bring supply and demand into equilibrium, thereby ensuring the best allocation of resources. In place of a reiteration of his thesis, it is enough to say that imperfect knowledge is part of what we live with and that any theory which depends on perfect knowledge—such as the separation of the notions of supply and demand—without the introduction of uncertainty and human nature is flawed. Further, when put into practice without an ethical compass any theory becomes a major threat to an open society. So let us take heed. When we glibly speak of replacing reason-based logic with chaos-based logic, when we forecast the splintering of social, economic, and political organization and predict the collapse of producer-controlled consumer markets, all due to the inexorable shift from an Industrial Age to an Information Age, we had better ask the question, "What are the overarching principles shepherding this convergence of forces?" And what role will virtual life play? Whatever the answer, the humanization of virtual communities and the problem of aesthetics within virtual realism are topics for serious investigation. towards an activist future Freeman Dyson talks about the value of thinking about the future, as opposed to futurism, and the lessons to be drawn from past failures of governmental and social policies as they relate to the development and application of technology. In his book Imagined Worlds, he shows how the orchestrated proliferation of nuclear power, a thoroughly "reasonable" and technically feasible energy resource, was derailed by an activist group of conservationists who objected to a technology supported by an industry, and by extension a government, unwilling to submit to the rules of public engagement. The undoing of nuclear power was not its inadequacy as a technology (it functions well in small, localized environments) but rather the unwillingness of its supporters to offer it up to broad public scrutiny and market testing. This is an instance where the Darwinian metaphor applies, probably for the better. Natural selection occurs on many levels and as technology-based change increases its rate of acceleration, more and more of the earth's population is placed in deeper isolation. Since the idea of a permanent underclass deprived of access to the benefits of Art or Science is wholly unacceptable, how do we extend the range and size of the envelope so that those not yet participating will have the chance to make their own contributions, to make their own mistakes and invent new ways of exercising their own freedoms. As dubious as it may sound, I believe the answer lies somewhere in a mixture of open but monitored capital markets, judicious social activism and a healthy dose of Suzuki's Postulate, "If you want to change the world, leave it alone." If Art and Science can continue to "just get along," the stuff that will forever stick to the bottom of our shoes might not smell so badly. Bullshit, as you know, is what makes the flowers grow. (1) "The Flesh Factor" Ars Electronica 97, p. 17
Follow Ups:
|