What is to be done?
I have a PowerPoint mentality Multiple choice is preferable I read three lines per screen I move on in 2 seconds I am always networked I like bytes I want more I want it now
The sense and sensibility of the statement ³education seems to offer one
viable alternative to the devil (didacticism, academia) and the deep blue
sea (commodity fetishism)² are both problematic. To attempt to walk a middle
ground between these two supposedly opposing cultural forces seems to be
particularly fraught.
Perhaps I¹m a little rusty (to use an iron age term I'm not sure what the
appropriate silicone age equivalent is) in the online arena as I¹ve been
away from it for a while doing things like developing artist skill
augmentation programs and designing projects that aspire to be
understandable by and appeal to a general public who don¹t have the benefit
of the sort of ³education² we are talking about here.
I'm afraid that the most probable outcome of alternative educative cultural
design, based on concepts accessible only to an elite, is that it will be
found to be either boring, incomprehensible, unengaging or irrelevant by a
mass audience.
So: What is to be done? Who is supposed to do it? and Why should we care?
Melinda Butting in b4 I'm introduced
On 8/1/07 8:28 AM, "odyens@alcor.concordia.ca" <odyens@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
Thanks to all of you for your answers and comments. As you may have gathered
by reading my first post, I, like, you do not have definite answers to the
questions I asked.
Here¹s a very brief summary of what some of you have written (my apologies in
advance for what was left out):
According to Jim, machines have shown us how complex human beings are
(research in AI have clearly proven that intelligence is a much more complex
structure than first thought).
Brian sums up Bernard Stiegler¹s book in which Stiegler makes his case for a
return to what seems to me a romantic notion of humanity. Brian also asks me
to suggest some possible answers to the questions I asked.
Brett makes a crucial distinction between beauty and the sublime and suggests
that a productive strategy would be to let go of the Oour received assumption
about the ontology of both art and theory¹.
Now what is to be done? How should we tackle the profound transformation of
our world? As you know, the questions about the role of art and its
relationship to humanity, are just a symptom of a much deeper metamorphosis. I
do not use this word lightly. To me, we are in the process of a true
transformation
(there are, all around us, many proofs of that. Kurzweil¹s law of accelerating
return being just one of them.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
Alexandre Leupin¹s Theory of Epistemological Cuts being another. http://www.alexandreleupin.com/lectures/cummings.htm
According to Leupin, a paradigmatic revolution can be clearly seen when words
become homonyms. Before and after Galileo, for example, the word cosmos,
though the same, does not mean the same thing. Before and after Christ, the
word God means something completely different. Today, words such as life,
death, consciousness and even art do not mean the same as they did only a few
years back).
As Leupin and Kurzweil clearly show, we are right in the middle of a deep
transformation of the very fabric of life. Xenotransplantation, genetic
therapy, genetically modified organisms are not just exotic events: they are
signs of a great alteration in the foundation of life. Life is becoming one
great genetic pool out of which forms emerge. Some are Onatural¹ (i.e. age-
old), others not so (i.e. created in labs), but all are present in today¹
world.
Here, then, are my thoughts:
In my initial post, I mentioned technological reality. Technological reality
is the human/machine perception of the world. As opposed to biological reality
(which is the physiological perception of reality, i.e. that which is gathered
by our senses), technological reality lets us see slivers of reality we are
not cognitively or psychologically equipped to see and understand (the quantum
level of reality, for example). In Consilience, E.O. Wilson wrote: The brain
is a machine assembled not to understand itself but to survive. This, I
believe, is fundamental. Biological reality is our brain trying to decipher
the world in order to survive. Technological reality is our brain trying to
cope with the world as technology sees it. But these new levels of reality are
so alien to our understanding of the world (to our brain¹s structure of
survival), that they become true fiction. We might intellectually understand
their existence but we cannot truly grasp what they mean (what does 9, 10 or
11 dimensions, as string theory suggests our world is made of, actually
mean?).
Thus, technological reality offers us a perception of the world which is both
frightening and beautiful. Frightening because it questions all of our notions
of what it means to be alive, to be human, to be conscious and intelligent,
all of our notions of what the fabric of reality is. Beautiful because it
shows us that Oreality¹ is infinite, that the universe is made of strange and
exotic structures, that what we thought were the universal (and simple) laws
of physics are but a tiny fraction of the fabric of the universe. Frightening
because it suggests that the world is beyond our understanding; beautiful
because it celebrates the observer (as defined by quantum theory) as an
essential component of reality. Technological reality does not deconstruct;
rather, it fragments objects, forms, individuals into an infinite series of
layers. Technological reality folds and enfolds phenomena until the
microscopic meshes into the macroscopic. Thus, through technological reality
the world appears both beautiful and inhuman.
This is why I call our present situation, The Inhuman Condition. I do not use
inhuman pejoratively (as in horrible) but rather in the proper sense of the
word (that which is not human). The inhuman condition tells us that since our
age-old understanding of life, death, individuals, intelligence and especially
groups and families, are specific to our biological level of reality, since
these notions are only constructions of our physiology (itself build from the
challenges of evolution), we must completely redefine what it means to be
human, we must completely rethink our notions of the fabric of life. The
inhuman condition also tells us that beauty and the sublime can co-exist with
the unnatural, the inhuman. To me, the inhuman condition creates many
troubling consequences. The most obvious one is a deep malaise. According to
the inhuman condition, what our senses tell us of the world is nothing but a
familiar and comfortable fiction. We may feel human, we may feel unique,
conscious and intelligent but science (and technological reality) tells us
otherwise (as you know, Richard Dawkins has labeled living beings Osurvival
vehicles¹ for genes. Recent research has shown that the actual genetic content
of the bacteria living in our stomach is 99 times bigger than our own genetic
material (Gill, Steven R: The Institute for Genomic Research, in Harper¹s
Magazine, vol 313, no 1876, septembre 2006, p. 13). Thus, are we survival
vehicles for our genes or for our bacteria¹s? Who¹s the vehicle here?).
If humanity becomes inhuman, what, then, are the consequences on the artistic
process? But first, we must ask ourselves what, exactly, is art? We could, of
course, spend an entire year discussing it. Let me suggest my own definition
here (which is as flawed as any other). To me, art is the sensitive
questioning of metaphysics (science would be the objective questioning of
metaphysics). But since the fabric of life must be redefine, so must be
metaphysics: how can we question life, death, suffering if we do not know what
life is, when death occurs, what or who is suffering? If we don¹t even know
what reality is, where it originates, where it ends? How can we question
metaphysics if its basis, humanity, suddenly appears to be just one level of
reality (what are life and death if one is considered an colony of different
living beings, beings that can actually keep on living after the colony¹s
death? There are more than 200 different living species in each human. Death
does not occur at the same time for each of them. Further, the actual process
of life and death is quite different for many of them).
Art, I believe, must address and reflect this deep transformation. How? Well,
what the inhuman condition tells us is that the world that surrounds us is not
made of frontiers but of overlapping dynamics and levels (both horizontal,
between species, and vertical, between levels of reality). Art must then
search for beauty and the sublime within this new condition, i.e. by letting
go of the human as its founding and exclusive phenomena. How should it do
that? I¹m not quite sure but I¹ll suggest the following: By using machines as
co-creators. Not only do machines makes us see a deeper, stranger, more exotic
universe than we ever thought possible, they also help us understand the
world, make sense of it, they help us extract a new beauty, a different
sublime out of that world (e.g.: fractals). Machines are not only instruments,
they have become an extension of our senses (as McLuhan mentioned), they have
become an extension of consciousness. Thus, they play a vital and fundamental
role in art. Now, is that something completely new? Well, not really,
especially if we consider language as a machine, one that opened the world for
us, made it much richer, much more beautiful, language is a machine that
filled the world with signs, symbols and representation. The original machine
(language) is what enabled humans to create art. Today¹s machines are doing
the same, albeit with a different entity, that of the inhuman.
But for that to be possible, we must abandon our notion of humanity, of what
it means to be human, we must accept that today¹s humanity is shaped by a new
reason, by a new rationale, one which might seem irrational to our age-old
notions of what it means to be human (humanity is now a colony of bacteria,
genes and memes; it¹s a swarm of many collective intelligences, themselves
part of larger collective intelligences; it¹s a mass of many different
survival vehicles, themselves feeding larger collective intelligences such as
civilization). Once we are able to do so, we will see the rise (I believe) of
a new form of art, one that seamlessly integrates the inhuman into its forms
and content. What is the inhuman in art? It¹s the sublime that emerges through
the combination of both man¹s and machine¹s languages. It¹s the sublime in the
intertwining of forms and contents (the rational with the irrational). Machine
and humans will feed off each other and produce art forms that reflects each
other¹s needs and questioning (can a machine have a will? Well, not in the
human sense of the word, but a Owill¹ to survive, spread and disseminate? Yes,
I believe so. Machine are survival vehicles for memes, they belong and are
intertwined in the planetary fabric; they thus obey the structure of
evolution).
By the way, digital art, and especially database art, are already a sign of
these new, emerging art forms, one closer to the inhuman condition than to the
human one. Digital art show us a different side of metaphysics, where to be
human is not to be enmeshed in story telling, is not to belong to a linear
evolution, but to be intertwined in an imploded notion of time, space and
narratives, where to be human is to be a receptacle of data, is to be an
ephemeral form, produced by the convergence of different languages (machine¹s
and well as man¹s) and levels of reality, where to be human is also to be
everything but a unique individual, where to be human is to be both Oread¹
and Owritten¹ by machines, where to be human is to be inhuman.
Quoting Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>:
odyens@alcor.concordia.ca wrote: What is to be done with a process that helped create ourperception 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 humanity¹s need for the transcendent, when
what most of what art produces today responds to machine¹s perceptions oftheworld?
This is a great text, with interesting references and a clear relation to present reality. But I think the onus is on you to give some initial ideas of what is to be done. There is, effectively, nothing in the Western philosophical tradition that will help respond.
I am currently reading a philosopher from that retrograde country, France, one who writes in the minor imperial language most of them still use over there, his name is Bernard Stiegler. He thinks that the entire European production of technological writing machines in the enlarged sense - the kind of machines with which we cultivate ourselves, along the lines sketched out by Foucault in his text "writing of the self" - should be reoriented so as to basically save the inhabitants of Europe and perhaps elsewhere from a threatening reduction of human singularity, and with it, of any possible ethics. He thinks that capitalism, in the advanced economies, is now primarily cultural, focused around the different devices whereby memory and creativity of all kinds is exteriorized into objects and traces. He thinks such machines are essential, a basic part of the human experience in time, but that care needs to be taken with their production, so that persons can go on becoming individuals ("individuating") in a relation of creative tension with societies which are also constantly individuating. If this care for the social and psychic self cannot be translated into a change in the kinds of machines which are produced, he believes that a generalized disenchantment with democracy will grow more widespread, leading to a collapse of desire into gregarious, instinctual outbursts of destructive violence. His latest book, Reenchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel, begins precisely with a chapter entitled "What is to be done?" However, if I have understood the post you sent, this whole approach and anything like it is already obsolete. So I am quite curious what you think is to be done.
all the best, Brian Holmes
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Dr Melinda Rackham Executive Director
Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) PO Box 8029 Station Arcade South Australia 5000 ph: 61 8 8231 9037; fax 61 8 8231 9766 http://www.anat.org.au anat@anat.org.au
Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) is supported by the Visual
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Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the South Australian
Government through Arts SA.
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