[-empyre-] networked self and the netopticon

[Heidi May]

Simon B,

In response to your response to Simon T.... just a comment:
Your views align very much with my arguments for networking  
understandings of art. I hope you don't mind if I continue to pick  
your brain over the next year as I pursue this area of research of  
artists working in this area whom also maintain teaching practices.  
You have also responded in a way, very eloquently I might add, to the  
questions I posed in the other thread about networking art practices  
and postmedia.

> In this flux those elements we might consider more
> fixed (author, reader, artefact) are also rendered uncertain,  
> unfixed and
> fluid. Bourriaud also identifies this, although he remains focused  
> on the
> outcome of things, the art work, and thus misses the point.

Would you say than that the experience - the process of engagement,  
the learning and becoming - is what is most significant with works  
that contain networks of agency? And, if you are able to, can you  
expand even more on "networks of agency"? Can we understand networks  
of agency both on a local level (the immediate relations/comments  
between the form, the idea, the artist, the participant) as well as on  
a global level (sociocultural issues)? I like the phrase but wonder if  
you have thought more about the choice of the word agency... People  
are using this word in relation to social research, which is why I  
wonder about when "art" becomes social research.

For me, I've been drawing connections to processes of learning rather  
than agency....likely because I am doing a degree in an education  
program but perhaps also because of my interests with personal  
identity. I wonder if there is a way to make stronger connections  
between philosophical notions of learning (the idea that one learns  
when it is initiated through self-learning through a sense of active  
engagement) and agency (perhaps understood as putting that self- 
learning to action with others?). This is where my mind now moves to  
pedagogy and the act of teaching as a form of agency....yet today, the  
understanding of "teaching" is being challenged since it is being  
argued that "teaching" doesn't necessarily lead to "learning," as I've  
indicated in my definition of learning above...thus, this brings me  
back to the role of networking art practices.

I'm just rambling now and would be surprised if anyone out there is  
following my train of thought...

~ Heidi


On 29-Jan-11, at 5:00 PM, empyre-request at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote:

> However, once this is accepted our concern can shift a little from a  
> focus
> on art work, author and/or reader to the relations between them, the
> networks of agency. These "connections" are not fixed but dynamic in  
> nature,
> constantly becoming. In this flux those elements we might consider  
> more
> fixed (author, reader, artefact) are also rendered uncertain,  
> unfixed and
> fluid. Bourriaud also identifies this, although he remains focused  
> on the
> outcome of things, the art work, and thus misses the point.
>
> An interactive work of art (that is more than just physically  
> responsive to
> external sources of agency) is one that has been produced primarily  
> as a
> means to reveal and reflect upon these processes of flux, the manner  
> in how
> all the participants in a situation are dynamically being formed, re- 
> formed
> and de-formed as relations shift. The interactive art work seeks to  
> contain
> the totality of that, even though materially it might be quite  
> constrained
> in its existence.
....
>
> What has this to do with the netopticon? I'd argue quite a lot. An  
> artist
> like Paul Sermon was one of the first to focus on network relations  
> as a
> subject for art practice, considering how network media can affect  
> human
> relations and the subsequent impact on how we become through those
> relations. Sermon was doing this work a decade before Bourriaud read  
> Latour
> and came up with his catch-phrase of relational aesthetics. Sermon's
> interest was not in aesthetics or art about art but human and other
> ontologies implicit in the experiences and mediations that can  
> comprise
> life. His earliest work, involving little more than phone calls  
> between
> participants, also evidenced this focus and his current work  
> sustains this
> interest. It's rich territory.