Re: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 29, Issue 9

Hi all,

So I'm meant to be a guest starting today and to begin with an introductory statement on the topic--anyway, perhaps i'll jump into the ongoing discussion thread instead.

Here is generally my stance on working in emerging media forms. Emerging Media forms are those new technologies that have yet to become standard communication tools--they tend to be surrounded by hype, fear, disinformation, hyperbole, etc. Their very unusualness makes them massively signifying--non-neutral--non-transparent forms of communication, so that the "medium" tends to strongly impact "the message". For instance if you cast one statue out of bronze, another as a detailed, 3-d stereo halograph, and another identical shape out of putrid, live, glowing transgenic slime-mold the average viewer will describe primarily the content of the first and the material/ medium of the second and third.

Thus, I don't believe that the familiar argument that a given bleeding edge technology "allows me to best portray my inner dreamscape" is very defendable since such technologies are not particularly amenable to transparency. Artists need to understand that their particular medium is not invisible and therefore its use will transform/inform the viewer in some way. It may frighten, seduce, normalize, create associations, etc.

Artists working within these forms are essentially forcing a relatively arcane techno-scientific tool and transforming it into a tool of cultural communication--or forcing a highly specific discourse into a broader cultural language. This is a space of radical interdisciplinarity.

Within many disciplines, workers often say that they are engaging such particular problems that the "big picture" is beyond their scope. However, in emerging interdisciplinary spaces ethics can't be excluded. (Even the human genome project realized that science exists within a culture and the two mutually shape each other--thus they set aside 15% of gov. funding for ethical discussion...) While artists may define their ethical stances differently they do need to admit that ethical issues permeate new fields and that they are transforming/informing the audience in some way about their techno medium.

I think that the field becomes particularly vibrant when we examine the tactics that can be used to inform. I mean there is didactic criticism, hyperbolic fiction, subversive re-use or appropriation, irony, hands-on teaching and de-mistification and tons of others that have been used by activists and critics through the years. I'm really interested in this issue of particular tactics as I think its an underexamined topic and I think that techno art types have yet to examine all the possible modes or tactics through which we might inform...

For example, here are two really new projects and how I think that they function:

The "Active-Stimulation Feedback Platform" really looks at the issues that Brooke described of "locative media"--I wanted viewers to have an interface that they very intentionally created their imprint-- unlike surveillance cameras or satellites "locating" them. I wanted to INVERT the active/passive nature of contemporary locative tech.
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~pv28/asfp.html

The "Latent Figure Protocol" looks very seriously at the idea of translating a highly technological discourse into a broader cultural one and essentially creates a scientific PROOF of the fallacy of DNA Fingerprints as "natural".
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~pv28/lfp2.html

Anyway, running out of steam here;-) I wanted to add some fodder to the fire. Now, I will return to lurking for a moment ...

PV

On Apr 14, 2007, at 8:30 PM, brooke singer wrote:


I am hard pressed to come up with any "ultimately neutral material reality"
and am also not a believer that one can just strip something of its cultural
connotations through sheer will. This is the traditional framework for
science and engineering, but not one I embrace or find particularly useful.
There are many ways to challenge, expose, invert, rewrite or customize our
technologies and I am very interested in all of them as political acts. I am
not saying all new media artists have to do so explicitly but these
directions (especially in relation to our present conditions and the future)
interest me most and that is where I find encouragement and inspiration. I
personally don't feel like I live in a time where I can just "get on with
it" and focus my energies on formal properties & new possibilities without
the serious consideration of my material realities.

On 4/13/07 2:22 PM, "Brett Stalbaum" <stalbaum@ucsd.edu> wrote:

I agree with what Alan is saying - I'd condense it as technologies
representing instantiations of ultimately neutral material realities,
and while it can be a challenging sort of mental gymnastics for artists
to strip these of their cultural connotations (which might be bound to
their military origins or past applications, and which certainly
deserves initial interrogation), it can also be useful for artists to
move productively beyond the social and political critique of the
technology and go onward to examine the formal properties and new
possibilities for any new media. These too can be political, but more in
the sense of creating new applications or configurations of practice
than to reveal (or worse restate for too long, over and over) the
political problematics implied by any technology's social past.

Brooke's point about locative media is a great one. Much of the
potential of locative media has been lost in an exclusionary obsession
with the social impact of the technology, the urban, surveillance,
geo-annotation and mapping. The imaginary of the artist as want-to-be
sociologist who is going to visualize our problems, behavior and expose
the social potential of locative media has dominated the field, so I too
worry about this, as these are the exact same approaches to the
technology companies and government surveillance have taken. Probably it
is time to see what else we can make locative media do that rewrites our
assumptions. Formally or politically, this is a way out of the sociology
rut.



_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre



This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.