[-empyre-] what is to be done?

[odyens@alcor.concordia.ca]

What is to be done?

More than ever the question of our relationship to both art and the aesthetic 
process must be address. In a world of shifting boundaries, of profound and 
fundamental changes, a world where universals such as life, death, 
consciousness and uniqueness are being challenged by technological reality, 
the question of art, of our relationship to it, the question of its purpose 
and of its objectives must be tackled. 

(What is technological reality? It is the perception of the world through both 
human *and* non-human senses. With technological reality, we now have access 
to numerous strata of reality that were formerly impenetrable to us: those of 
genetics and neurology, of protons and photons, of relativity and quantum 
physics. Technological reality questions the fundamental distinctions between 
life and death, consciousness and non-consciousness, the organic and the non-
organic that we once believed to be universal. In fact, the more we get access 
to different slivers of reality, the more difficult it becomes to clearly 
distinguish between these phenomena. On our own biological scale for example, 
the difference between a table and a man is clear. The man is alive while the 
table is not. But on an atomic scale of reality, to which we only have access 
through technological reality, there are no differences between one and the 
other). 

What is to be done? What is to be understood by art today should probably be 
our starting point. For how should we define art in the 21st century when 
machines, technologies and software provide most of the actual artistic 
process, when some ?machines? (such as Ray Kurzweil?s Cybernetic Poet) even 
produce the entire artwork? 

If art is now as specific to machine?s ontology as it is to humanity?s, then 
the question of what is to be done must be dealt with differently. Art 
embedded in machines and technologies is art embedded in the profound 
transformation of our world. It?s art within video games, themselves within 
the culture of war. It?s art spreading technological reality. It?s art 
intruding into the physical reality (where special effects become genetic 
manipulations). It?s art initiating the Inhuman Condition. Art embedded in 
machines is art slipping away from human control, art creating territories of 
emotions outside our realm of understanding, of sensitivity.

The question of ?what is to be done? must thus be understood as including the 
whole concept of art. What is to be done with a process that helped create our 
perception of the metaphysical, but whose operations, whose forms and 
sometimes even content are now within the control of machines? When most of 
what art produces today ignores humanity?s need for the transcendent, when 
what most of what art produces today responds to machine?s perceptions of the 
world?

?What is to be done? when humanity is confronted with research clearly showing 
that art, as well as the aesthetic process, are nothing else but algorithmic 
structures, structures that can be identified, defined and reproduced 
mechanically (when we respond to Jackson Pollock?s paintings, we actually 
respond to fractals in his images. When we respond to a film or a musical 
piece, we respond to certain structures, pitch, tone, location, dialogue, that 
are clearly algorithmic)?

On Pollock:
http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/art/scientificamerican.pdf

Music and Film:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061016fa_fact6 

What is to be done when a simple computer program can decipher the algorithmic 
structure of a work of art? When a simple computer program (Kurzweil?s 
Cybernetic Poet for example) can generate an aesthetic experience? What is to 
be done when beauty appears to be nothing else but a harmonious mathematical 
structure? When the transcendence of art appears to be nothing else but a 
numerical pattern? What does it mean to be human when splendor is not a 
mystical experience but a mathematical configuration? When machines will soon 
produce beautiful and moving works of art? 

What is to be done when machines and technologies force us to confront our 
inhumanity through the process of art? 




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