[-empyre-] Process as Paradigm

Fri May 7 04:06:49 EST 2010

Thank you Renate and Tim,

For inviting us to moderate this months discussion on the theme of Process as Paradigm - art in development, flux and change

Please find some words about the context below as well as our distinct statements for discussion.

We also want to thank our invited discussants, Beatriz da Costa (US) who also participates in the (ongoing) Tactical Media discussion, Ursula Damm (D) who is participating in the exhibition Process as Paradigm, Baruch Gottlieb (CA/D) who wrote the essay 'The vital signs of processual art' for the exhibition catalogue and Robert Zwijnenberg (NL) who is leading the Arts and Genomics Centre of Leiden University. Their bio's as well as ours can be found below. More discussants will be introduced next week, who are mainly participating artists in the exhibition this discussion is based upon. 

We hope for an interesting and engaging discussion.

All our best,

Susanne, Lucas

Process as Paradigm: Concept and Context

On April 23rd at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial in Gijon, Spain the exhibition Process as Paradigm – art in development, flux and change opened, curated by Susanne Jaschko and Lucas Evers. With this empyre discussion, the we as curators wish to deepen the critical discourse on the concept of Processual Art as formulated with the show.                          

The full catalogue of the exhibition can be found at http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/en/714-catalogue

From the curators’ notes in the catalogue: With this exhibition and accompanying programme we curators formulate a bold thesis. We claim that process – and here we mean non-linear and non-deterministic process – has become one of the major paradigms in contemporary art and culture.

More than this, we see a strong connection of this cultural development to the current situation of the globalised world which is shaken by on-going military and religious conflicts, the sudden meltdown of world economy and the threat of climate change, only to name the big headlines. In the light of the current and reoccurring crises it has become obvious that these processes of greater scale and impact are not necessarily following simple rules of predictability or linearity. What might have been a wrong construct in general and the consequence of a deceptive linear narrative of history – a world which is at least partially manageable by us humans – has turned into a scattered, “atemporal” picture.

Susanne Jaschko: Processual Art + real life = ?

I am particularly interested in Processual Art’s potential to mirror, respond to, or comment on the changing, processual nature of life on a long-term basis. I hope that in this discussion we can find some results to the equation “Processual Art + real life = ?” and that we also critically discuss process as a paradigm bridging various practices and genres in contemporary art and culture. Parallel to this empyre debate I am teaching on the subject at Bauhaus University in Weimar in May and hope that the seminar will deliver also interesting perspectives and results, which I can share with the list.

The contemporary perception of us humans as particles of larger networks and systems – an effect of real-time connectedness – is one of the major conditions for the prevalence of the present and of process as a concept in culture and in the arts.

We are involved in new and different typologies of scattered communities, groups, manifold production networks and communication grids, and act within them with different intensities, but with an awareness of our own dispersed presence in all these systems.

No doubt, the degree of performance and presence that is demanded in all these systems is tremendously challenging. We live in a culture of the present in which the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ – in its new interpretation – has become a universal condition. In this celebration of presence and the present lies one of the major factors for the turn in the arts (but also in other related fields like design and architecture) to processuality and performativity, a shift that is gaining momentum.

In 1967, Roy Ascott wrote: “When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure”. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht turned against the exclusive construction of meaning in the humanities, and against their limited focus on signs and meaning structures. He argued that there is another valid access to the world beyond representation – the aesthetic experience of presence.

The flow and continuous changes, the agency of the artist and the public, being characteristic of works of processual art have a strong impact on the specific, subjective perception and understanding of presence. While today we increasingly experience this “tyranny of the here and now,” with its unrelenting demand for our attention, the delicate and ambient nature of processual art allows for shared attention, the choice between active and passive agency on the part of the recipient, and a multiplicity of access points. In this regard, processual art opposes the oppressive canon of the spectacle and instead introduces the idea of art that merges with life – or at least the idea of art that accompanies life.

Lucas Evers: Is Art the way to deal with serious shit?

A remark related to Gumbrecht’s aesthetic experience of presence above was also made in the still ongoing debate on tactical media on empyre. Christopher Sullivan, in his post of April 29, reflecting on the limits of current conventions in art education, notes “that though we come from different places, we should all have read the same materials, and agree on all major topics, primary to this, is the notion that everything is about representation, and everything is an illusion created by prejudices, the government, the media… Ignoring the more interesting conversation that some serious shit is actually happening. I.E. people sneaking across any border in droves, is a problem.” 

From this perspective that some serious shit is actually happening, I am are also interested to discuss processual forms of art that blend into other domains of life. Art-Science, not in the sense of art reflecting on science, but maybe art and science as merging creativity with knowledge finding. Reflections of that sort can be made about art and economy and what this means for art as a distinct practice.

Bios:

Susanne Jaschko is curator of contemporary art and based in Berlin, Germany. Her curatorial practice focuses on experimental art which goes beyond art as commodity and renews the concept of art and its social and cultural functions. She was Head of Presentation and of the artist-in-residence program at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam from 2008/09. From 1997 to 2004 she was curator and later deputy director of transmediale. She holds a doctorate degree in Art History/Philosophy.

Among the exhibition projects she curated independently are Process as Paradigm, Laboral, Gijón, 2010; Visual Voltage Amplified , Felleshus, Berlin, 2010; Travelling Without Moving, Oboro, Montréal; urban interface berlin/oslo, 2007; Urban Screens Manchester 07;  Open House, Vitra Design Museum/Art Center Pasadena a.o. 2006 – 2008; SCAPE – Biennial of Art in Public Space, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2006.

Next to her curatorial work she has taught at institutions in Germany and abroad. She regularly lectures and writes about contemporary art that relates to her curatorial practice. 
www.sujaschko.de

Lucas Evers is head of the e-Culture programme of Waag Society in Amsterdam, a position from which he is interested and involved in projects where art, science, design and the societal meet, extending the e of e-Culture to a wider range of technology informed arts and their representations of, meaning for and effects on society. His work includes curating, but also organising encounters between those who give meaning to and create our society, organising critical debate, teaching, designing, in order to find and form thoughts, structures and other parameters that shape our everyday/technological life, without necessary always being utilitarian.

Having worked from 1998 until 2003 at De Balie, center for culture and politics on the editorial team for new media, politics and cinema, and parallel from 2001 until 2007 at Melkweg and curator new media he was involved in a large number of international projects that took place in Amsterdam amongst which Re:Mark:Marker - retrospective of the works of Chris Marker (1999); net.congestion - International Festival of Streaming Media (2000); Next Five Minutes; An Archaeology of Imaginary Media (2003); The Upgrade Amsterdam (2004 - 2005); Creative Commons Netherlands (2006 ongoing); Utopian Practices (2008 – ongoing – collaboration with The Arts & Genomics Centre, The Virtual Knowledge Studio). He teaches at Dasarts – master for advanced studies in performing arts.
www.waag.org

Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering and politics. Her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building and critical writing. da Costa has also made frequent use of wetware in her projects and has recently become interested in the potential of interspecies co-production in promoting the responsible use of natural resources and environmental sustainability. Issues addressed in previous work include the politics of transgenic organisms, and the social repercussions of ubiquitous surveillance technologies. Through her work da Costa examines the role of the artist as a political actor engaged in technoscientific discourses. This topic is also addressed in a recently published anthology she co-edited with her colleague Kavita Philip entitled Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, (ed. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, MIT Press, 2008).

Da Costa is a co-founder of Preemptive Media, an arts, activism and technology group, and a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble (2000-2005).Beatriz is Associate Professor of Studio Art, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine. She is a core faculty member of the ACE program and affiliate faculty of the Culture and Theory Ph.D. at UCI.
www.beatrizdacosta.net

Ursula Damm has become known for her installations dealing with geometry and its social impact on public pace. Since 1995 these installations became interactive, responding to architectural aspects with video tracking technology (www.inoutsite.de). She has developed numerous installations on the relationship between nature, science and civilization (Venus I-IV  or Double Helix Swing ─honorary mention Ars Electronica 2006─). She has had solo exhibitions, among others, at the Goethe House, New York; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at, among others, CAAC-Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen; Centro CulturalConde Duque, Madrid; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Cologne; Ars Electronica 1999; ISEA 2002, Nagoya. She currently works on an interactive installation for a public place at the Metro-Station Schadow strasse in Düsseldorf. Since 2008 she holds the chair of Media Environments (Media Arts & Design) at the Bauhaus-University Weimar.
http://ursuladamm.de

Robert Zwijnenberg is professor of history and theory of contemporary art in relation to the sciences and technology at Universiteit Leiden. He has published on Renaissance culture and art theory (a.o. The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Order and Chaos in Early Modern Though, Cambridge University Press 1999), philosophy of art (a.o. co-edited with C.J. Farago, Compelling Visuality. Works of art in and out history,  University of Minnesota Press 2003) and on the relation between contemporary arts and the sciences (a.o. The Body Within. Renée van de Vall and Robert Zwijnenberg (ed. and introd.), Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, Leiden: Brill Press 2009). Recently he wrote the preface to Ingeborg Reichle, Art in the Age of Technoscience. Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art. Springer Verlag, New York 2009. Zwijnenberg is one of the founding directors of The Arts and Genomics Centre that has the objective of stimulating, initiating and supervising meetings, discussions, collaborations and exchanges between international artists, life science researchers, and professionals from business and government organizations (www.artsgenomics.org). He is founding co-editor of the series Studies in Transformations in Art and Culture at Amsterdam University Press, and also the general editor of Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Zwijnenberg is member of the international Brainhood Project (www.brainhood.net). He is a trustee for Waag Society, Amsterdam (www.waag.org), and trustee for the MediaGilde, Amsterdam. Zwijnenberg is a board member of the council for the humanities of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
www.artsgenomics.nl

Baruch Gottlieb is a Montreal, Canada-born media artist exploring navigable fiction and documentary. His work has always explored the notion of the industrialization of the subject of industrially produced media.
From 2005-2008, Gottlieb was assistant professor in Media Art at Yonsei University Graduate School of Communication and Arts, he is currently artist-researcher-in-residence at the Institute of Time-Based Media at the University of Arts, Berlin. His new book “Gratitude for Technology” Atropos Press, explores the persistent materiality of the digital image.

Gottlieb's practise is mainly derived from film-making. In recent years, he has been developing random-access forms of narrative or discursive objects which can be presented in the art space. The central figure of this work is a human body. During two decades of personal and collaborative exploration of dance and movement in media, his work explores a 'syntax of human form', in a cosmology of 'human nature'. This work thus always includes a performative aspect, and has also been implemented in works of stage performance and public art and net-based art.
Gottlieb has written on urbanism, media art, sound and sound art for a variety of publications. He is currently working on a modular documentary film project, navigation strategies for artistic database, and on 4-d media sculpting techniques.
http://g4t.info

On May 6, 2010, at 3:14 AM, Renate Ferro wrote:

> Thanks so much to Tim for moderating our discussion on Tactical Media
> - university research.  Tim pulled this discussion together at the
> last minute because of a glitch in the moderator schedule.  Thanks to
> all who participated!
> 
> This month on empyre we welcome two guest moderators, Susanne Jaschko
> (D) and Lucas Evers (NL),  whose discussion theme is Process as
> Paradigm – art in development, flux and change. This discussion is
> inspired by a curated exhibit that they organized on April 23rd, 2010
> at  Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial in Gijon, Spain. Both
> Suzanne and Lucas are hoping to open their discussion to our over 1400
> international subscribers to add to the critical complexity that they
> set up within the concept of the show.
> 
> Tomorrow Lucas and Suzanne will be explaining to you a little more
> about the discussion this month and they will also introduce their
> guests.
> 
> Best Wishes to all of you.
> 
> Renate  and Tim
> "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

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