Re: [-empyre-] making a meta-living / a-life & generative art

["Mauro Annunziato" <mauro.annunziato@tiscali.it>]

> the artworks I have seen, as an observer of this discussion, appeal to me 
> as
> having only an allusive relationship to aesthetic categories. They may
> inspire an aesthetic experience - I find the work beautiful - but it is by
> allusion. Because the Britart thing's popped up here, I might say, that
> however decentered the artist, that work communicates and those artists
> communicate in a divergent way to what I've seen here of a-life art. Mauro
> Anunziato's emphasis on 'social context' I find interesting in this 
> regard.
> He seems to imply an intentionality and the possibility that something is
> being communicated - by whom?
>
> Part of the current discussion has centred on the problem of authorship 
> and
> copyright. Art is being made here that warrants appreciation but is the
> instigator, the first mover, of the self-organising principle to be
> appreciated? Ownership of communication points to receiver of 
> communication.
>
> The Britart - or art-as-game - strategy of communication stands at some
> distance from the positivist but - on the face of it and on the evidence 
> of
> work - allusive conceptual work in a-life. Artists of the latter, from 
> this
> discussion, ask for pure aesthetic appreciation without taking on board 
> that
> their work is radically post-humanist (and post-social - in the humanist
> sense) - however humanist their assumptions.
>
> simon taylor

What surprised me in my first works based on a-life approach was exactly the 
possibility to escape from a pure algorithmic aesthetical research (as 
mentioned by Mitchell). Maybe it could appears strange, but I consider the 
images of the Artificial Societies collection as a sort of self-biography of 
my mental states. The name of the first collection of these images was in 
fact "Nagual", an ancient Toltech myth about the unknown part of the human 
being reviewed as a configuration of luminous interacting filaments (see 
Carlos Castaneda, "Tales of Power"). By my personal interpretation of  the 
"Nagual" it was very close to an idea of the mind as a self-organization of 
a multitude of fragments. Continuing that work, I discovered another scale 
of reading at the social level so I tried to enrich the exploration to 
enhance the possibility to reflect a social dynamics in that images.



Your question: by whom ?  the answer: by the artworks itself.

Obviously I don't pretend to be able to communicate this content to the 
people interacting in my installations. For me it is enough to evocate this 
kind of emotion: - a society/mind in building -.  Than, the visitor can 
decide to think about "artificials" or "ecosystems" or "humans" as he wants. 
I am not interested in forcing this dialectic in a single direction.

But I can say, that after personally monitored at least about 50.000 
visitors of these installation/images in different places, the most common 
comments are equally oriented like: "it's alive !", "it is sociology !", 
"do they can come out from the computer ?".

When I saw for the first time "Autopoiesis" of Ken Rinaldo, my first emotion 
was to stay in front to primordial mechanisms which I recognize in the 
dynamics of human groups or wolf pack.



Finally, I passed last three years to study (and video-recording) how my 
little son became happy when learns a new word from me. Then I implemented 
this "empathy by communication" mechanism in the creatures that learn words 
from visitors in "E-Sparks" and mutate it in the communication to the other 
creatures. By my point of view artificial creatures are anyway a reflex of 
the humans. Their life will be strictly connected and coevolved with humans 
and the terrestrial biological ecosystem.



Finally you say: "ownership of communication points to receiver of 
communication ? "

I used a different term: "contribution" instead "ownership".  Maybe the 
evolutionary metaphor could explain better this point. You can claim an 
action over the ecosystem but not control its evolution.  Could I claim 
ownership of my son ?

In the same sense in "Relazioni Emergenti", the visitor can only "influence" 
the evolution. Therefore he is a "contributor" of a creative process 
involving the visitor itself, the artwork and the artist. Probably the 
difference is in the starting point. I prefer the idea (obviously 
subjective) that the artwork could be a "metaphor generator" instead the 
idea I have necessarily to send a clear packed message to a receiver.



mauro annunziato