[-empyre-] Process as paradigm

[Aymeric Mansoux]

Dear Empyre,

Thanks to Susanne and Lucas for the invitation to both the exhibition
and now this discussion.


Antoine Schmitt said :
> I think that programming is a radically new artistic material in art
> history, because it allows the artist and the spectators to focus on
> _action_ as such. This gives us a brand new way to reflect on acting
> entities like humans and societies. This is also why life and nature
> are often subjects of programmed art, and why the bridges with
> political activism are so tempting. About this latter subject which
> has been brought up, I think that whether something is art or
> activism relates mainly to the context in which it is shown : the
> same work can be art in an art exhibition and a political action in
> a political rally or a public display.

I would not say "radically new" but it is true that programming skills
have been increasingly present in the production of some works of media
art, yet few have been trying to explore it as an artistic medium
(another can of worm, see netbehaviour July 09 archives for a relatively
recent discussion on the matter, triggered by Pall Thayer's Vito
Acconci's 'Seedbed' Perl version in "Microcodes").

But there is a problem with programming as soon as the code and its
interpretation|execution steps out of its convenient function of tool,
which is often the case in process or agent based works of art.

To tackle this problem, it is probably good to understand that in all
these (process-based|processual|generative|conditional|etc) works, the
position of the artist is moved from a high-level top-down creator to
the role of a more low-level bottom-up designer of processes. Once this
is done, the work usually "emerge" from the different relations created
within the designed system. As Susanne said "the action is transfered to
a system that performs with a great deal of autonomy".  The problem is
that usually what is emerging is too often perceived as a by-product of
the process, which only gives to the audience only two opposite
positions in between which they can navigate: On the one hand a passive
state of contemplation - and here we could probably, indeed, develop the
argument of an artist-god delivering honesis to the masses, or on the
other hand, an active position of treasure hunting investigator trying
to decipher the processed used by the artist.

Within this limited choice, like Simon mentioned in a previous mail,
there is a risk that the work will appear "naïve and simplistic,
concerned with formal and abstract detail" because it only refers to
itself and does not take into account anything else but its own
existence. In this case this would be working against Lucas' interest
seeing such processes engaging with "serious shit", not to mention
missing the opportunity to understand the cultural impact of these
processes if we focus too much on their underlying mechanical structure. 

Unfortunately it is true that in many process driven works, we are very
often just left to contemplate a screensaver, or left to try reverse
engineering a Rube Goldberg machine, because the artist limited herself
or himself to design a seed and forgot about the garden where it will
eventually be sowed.

 
> Extending this train of thought, I think that programs and processes
> are a new creation material, but not only in the art field. I'm
> looking forward to experimenting programmed political pamphlets,
> programmed philosophical thesis. And I'm actually surprised not to
> have encountered many of them yet, like a real political virus for
> example, something that _really_ acts on reality.
 
This links back to the role and place of an activist-arty art. In that
regard I would like to make a reference to Douglas Rushkoff who recently
commented on the important role of the current networks and social
software, and not the art galleries, to enable the spreading of virulent
memetic content to help deconstruct the illusions they carry (closing
speech Viral Communication conf at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam).
Once again, in this case we can see that a process becomes interesting
when it has been designed taking into account some cultural context and
not just for the sake of abstraction and computation.

a.

--
http://su.kuri.mu