[-empyre-] co-creation, the unknown, and techno-scientific postivism

[Gradecki, Jennifer]

Thanks to Renate and Tim for inviting me back to join in on another fascinating conversation on -empyre-. There have been many interesting threads of conversation so far: I’ll just touch on a couple of them here.

I appreciated hearing xtine articulate her work as participatory and collaborative social practice, distinguishing between interactivity and participation. I would be curious to hear what people think about the concept of co-creativity. I recently became aware of this concept through the Open Documentary Lab at MIT through their Collective Wisdom project [1]. They describe co-creation as a way to move beyond the single-author model while also focusing on the critically reflexive process of making. My practice often involves co-creation with algorithms as well as other practitioners. Some practitioners co-create with communities, as well, so there may be overlaps with social practice. I’ve found co-creative processes to be well-suited to the investigation of complex computational technologies because it can foster sustained critical reflection, as feedback is incorporated from different actors (both human and algorithmic) into the artwork.

I also wanted to connect with something really interesting that Renate and Kat discussed, starting with Renate’s prompt that “perhaps Aquarius gives us cause to embrace lore, legend, myth, the unknowable inspired by logic, science and invention,” and Kat’s response that “it sounds like a tightrope walk for artists to have a foot in both spaces (technology, science, new media), as well as this other space of the unknowable, but then again liminal spaces, between binaries, are often productive spaces for artists.” This relates to some of the research I have done into the dataveillance technologies and practices of intelligence analysts. In order to study this secretive group, I conducted document analyses of intelligence agency documents and interviewed contemporary dataveillance artists, and I read the two in contrast to one another. I found that despite the deeply philosophical nature of intelligence analysis, agents tend to reject deduction, intuition and metaphysics and embrace induction, rationality, and empiricism. In contrast, the artists I interviewed valued intuition, speculation, and metaphysics and they pulled from disciplines that intelligence analysts tend to devalue, like art and philosophy.

I found it especially revealing to juxtapose the relationships that intelligence analysts and dataveillance artists have with the unknown. It seems to me that artists investigating things like the surveillance state have to embrace the unknown out of necessity, because they are studying a powerful entity that resists being known. Their practices necessarily involve developing tactics for deducing what is unknown from that which is known. The rigid techno-scientific solutions of the intelligence community—mass surveillance, fusion centers, predictive policing—strive for omniscience, and necessarily fall short of capturing the complexities and flux of the world. Dataveillance artists remind us that data can be manipulated, decontextualized, and woven into many different stories. Their critical reflexivity and epistemological openness renders them capable of comprehending the messiness, multiplicities, and indeterminacies of the world, much more so than the intelligence analysts who cling to positivist techno-science.

Looking forward to seeing what the rest of this week’s discussions will bring up.

All my best,
Jen

[1] Collective Wisdom: https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/collective-wisdom-part-1/release/3?readingCollection=f7c1b7e5


--
Jennifer Gradecki, PhD
Assistant Professor, Art + Design
Lake Hall 213A

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