The new Leonardo Electronic Almanac, with Editor in Chief Lanfranco Aceti, is a collaborative effort between The MIT Press; Leonardo/ISAST; Goldsmiths, University of London; and New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Established in 1993, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, a peer reviewed journal (ISSN No: 1071-4391), is the electronic arm of the pioneer art journal, Leonardo – Journal of Art, Science & Technology. LEA Editorial Board is composed of internationally recognized academics who are experts in their respective fields. Lanfranco Aceti, Editor in Chief, and Ozden Sahin the Co-Editor envisage the Leonardo Electronic Almanac as an incubator that develops research projects, conferences and exhibition that are later on published in a variety of formats: e.g. catalogs, books and magazine issues in collaboration with OCR. Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), jointly produced by Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST), and published by MIT Press, is a peer reviewed electronic journal dedicated to providing a forum for those who are interested in the realm where art, science and technology converge. In 2010 the journal was re-launched by Lanfranco Aceti, Editor in Chief in order to face up to the challenges of the publishing industry in the 21st century. “Leonardo Electronic Almanac will focus on publishing rigorously peer reviewed articles,” said Lanfranco Aceti “that reflect contemporary fine art engagements that reflect the complex social, technological and cultural shifts in contemporary globalized societies.” For over a decade, LEA thrived as an international peer reviewed electronic journal and web archive covering the interaction of the arts, sciences, and technology. The new LEA will emphasize publication of recent work and critical discussion on topics of current relevance. LEA encourages contributions from scholars, artists, scientists, educators and developers of new technological resources in the fine arts and media arts. Content will include profiles of media arts facilities and projects, insights of artists using new media and feature articles comprising theoretical and technical perspectives. A curated gallery of contemporary fine art practice in collaboration with OCR will also feature selected exhibitions and LEA will publish special issues on a variety of topics related to contemporary art and its complex entanglements with the complexity of social, technological and scientific thought. Leonardo is a registered trademark of the ISAST.
Copyright (c) 2017 Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Interference Strategies: Is Art in the Middle?
If we look at the etymological structure of the word interference, we would have to go back to a construct that defines it as a sum of the two Latin words inter (in between) and ferio (to strike), but with a particular attention to the meaning of the word ferio being interpreted principally as to wound. Albeit perhaps etymologically incorrect, it may be preferable to think of the word interference as a composite of inter (in between) and the Latin verb fero (to carry), which would bring forward the idea of interference as a contribution brought in the middle of two arguments, two ideas, two constructs. It is important to acknowledge the etymological root of a word not in order to develop a sterile academic exercise, but in order to clarify the ideological under - pinnings of arguments that are then summed up and characterized by a word.
Copyright (c) 2015 Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Images (R)-Evolution: Media Arts Complex Imagery Challenging Humanities and Our Institutions of Cultural Memory
Considering its technological and thematical contexts, digital art conveys different – even more complex – potentials of expression than traditional art forms (such as sculptures, paintings, etc.), what makes digital art a paradigmatic expression of its time? This article emphasizes the variety of (complex) topics that are expressed within digital art, ranging from globalization, ecological and economic crises (virtual economy), media and image revolution to questions of the body and its societal norms. Due to the imminent problems of archiving, the digital arts are threatened by its loss – a problem that is reinforced by the insufficient practices of cultural institutions to display, collect and research digital art. Post-industrial societies require digital arts based on contemporary media dispositive to reflect upon current and future challenges, just like art history was always informed by its contemporary media technologies. By establishing concerted international strategies and new scientific tools it is the aim of this essay to provide a framework to enable media art histories and image science as well as the digital humanities to engage more fully with current digital developments in order to enable the humanities to meet with its (current) responsibilities. By discussing examples from a variety of projects from the natural sciences and the humanities, this article tries to demonstrate the strategic importance of these collective projects, especially in their growing importance for the humanities.
Gesture in Search of a Purpose: A Prehistory of Mobility
This paper explores the uncanny anticipation of mobile telephony in the history of the visual image. Drawing on our remix project, The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, it critically engages with contem - porary media culture’s obsession with the occupation of the hands as an unwitting gesture in search of a purpose. This gesture is a bodily panto - mime imagining an indispensable, intimate apparel that has modified the body’s relation to itself and remote others through mobile media. These images are suggestive of bodily rhythms that synchronize the hand, the ear, the eye and the mouth that have not always made sense. In this they foreshadow the potential media that will, in time, resolve this postural er - gonomics into a meaningful function: the immediate and continuous com - munion with unseen and absent others. The visual archive can become the unconscious of contemporary media when its images are re-coded through the writing of implicit and anachronistic narratives. The combina - tion of image and text, in the form of captions, denotates and detonates at one and the same time, creating a double vision that, once seen, can never be unseen.
Contaminated Immersion and Thomas Demand: The Dailies
If, as Oliver Grau has stated, immersion “is characterized by diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening, ” any artwork might be thought of as potentially im - mersive. Arguably, immersion is a condition contingent upon the viewer responding to the artwork, rather than an inherent quality within the artwork alone. Considered in relation to some art historical contexts, the relationship between immersive experience and interference will be discussed in order to contextualize Thomas Demand’s Kaldor Public Art Project, The Dailies. Demand’s project both relates to and departs from some of the key aspects of what is conventionally thought of as immersive art. It is useful to consider this in order to engage with the implications of immersion in art, and reflect on the possibility of strategic interferences operating within what might be described as contaminated immersion.
The theme of ”˜interference strategies for art’ reflects a literal merging of sources, an interplay be - tween factors, and acts as a metaphor for the interaction of art and science, the essence of transdisciplinary study. The revealing of metaphors for interference “that equates different and even ”˜incommensurable’ concepts can, therefore, be a very fruitful source of insight. ” [1] The role of the publication, as a vehicle to promote and encourage transdisciplinary research, is to question what fine art image-making is contributing to the current discourse on images. The publication brings together researchers, artists and cultural thinkers to speculate, contest and share their thoughts on the strategies for interference, at the intersection between art, science and culture, that form new dialogues. [1] David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order and Creativity (London: Routledge, 2000), 45.
Towards an Ontology of Colour in the Age of Machinic Shine
This paper argues that the enduring mystery of colour, in particular its el - emental effusiveness, has been tamed and managed by notions of good taste and chic that equate cultural maturity with a limited palette. Yet co - lour in all its post industrial forms continues to break free of constraints in an audacious display of autopoiesis. The science of colour based on image, mimesis, and the physiology of the eye has missed the phenomenon of co - lour altogether because it takes place at the incalculable level of shine and radiance. Ontologically colour makes things manifest by revealing them in their unique presence rather than merely facilitating communication, rep - resentation or spectacle. Before colour is seen, before light can facilitate a look, colour looks back in such a way that looking and seeing are provoked. Using Thierry de Duve, David Batchelor and Martin Heidegger it will be shown that these ways of being with colour are extended by a formal evolution in painting whereby expanded painting addresses everything in the everyday world that carries colour from data screens to plastic utensils and even paint itself. Ultimately, the medium of painting however decon - structed or expanded, has become the entity to ”˜whom’ the work of colour is addressed.
A Robot Walks into a Room: Google Art Project, The New Aesthetic, and the Accident of Art
On the 1st February 2011 Google unleashed the Google Art Project, a new way to engage with the major collections of the world’s art galleries. With the Google Art Project came a new way of viewing, not just art but the other objects that inhabit art galleries. Google Art Project depends on a robot looking machine. This aesthetic machine is a different form of digital material that has entered into what have for a long time been quiet still spaces for human, and not machine contemplation. With an equal focus on the spaces between things as much as on the things themselves, Google Art Project suggests a new way of understanding art, in the interval. Except it is not new at all. This essay draws a connection between the Google Art Project, James Bridle’s new aesthetic tumblr log and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in order to suggest that accidental encounters and ghost images formed in the spaces between things remain key to contemporary understandings of aesthetics.
Headless and Unborn, or the Baphomet Restored Interfering with Bataille and Masson’s Image of the Acephale
This paper investigates Bataille and Masson’s drawing of the Acephale, the escutcheon of Bataille’s esoteric cabal and the journal ( Acéphale) that espoused his vision of a violently sacralised society. Masson’s drawing of the acephalic monster is the emblem of Bataille’s negative Absolute, and is therefore the final image, a talisman to wipe out all other images. I unearth a hitherto unsuspected connexion between the Acephale and a magical text, one of the Papyri Graecae Magicae. Noting that the Acephale is an ”˜emblem’, I point towards the tradition of the emblematic books, a tradition that began with Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica. I then propose that Caillois’s ”˜objective ideograms’ and the idea of mantic decaptitation was in part responsible for the production of Masson’s image. Capitalising on these imaginal connexions, I conclude by re-imagining the image of the Baphomet, and in particular Eliphas Levi’s famous drawing of the ”˜Goat of Mendes. ’ I suggest that the Baphomet is the secret twin of the Acephale, and that it is Levi’s aim to make his Baphomet the ultimate hieroglyphic emblem, the supreme condensation of the mysteries of the occult tradition. Thus the Baphomet is the necessary occult complement to the headless monster of Bataille and Masson.
The Case of Biophilia: A Collective Composition of Goals and Distributed Action
Rather than follow the machinations of a singular artist in the production and exhibition of an interactive artwork, this paper uses an actor-network approach to collectively hold to account a whole host of actors that literally make a difference in the production of an interactive artwork, Biophilia (2004-2007). My main argument is that in order for any action to take place both humans and non-humans must on some level collectively work together, or, in actor-network terms translate one another. However, such new relations are predicated and indeed just as dependent on and what these new actors are willing to give up as it is to do with what they can offer. Needless to say that when the negotiations are momentarily over, actors give up individual goals and compel others to collectively form new definitions, new intentions and new goals with each interaction. In other words, the ”˜work’ represents neither the beginning nor the end of a particular event, but is described more as a continually shifting and cumulative series of distributed actions.
The Art of Decoding: n-Folded, n-Visioned, n-Cultured
Scientific modelling requires us to suspend disbelief, nowhere is this more palpable than in artificial life, an area of computational research investi - gating the principles that constitute a living system “without making refer - ence to the materials that constitute it. ” [1] This paper investigates artificial life visualisation as both a scientific concern and in relation to media arts. Of interest in this examination is the normative protocol of looking at an artificial life simulation or ”˜world. ’ Analogous to looking through a telescope or microscope, the view into the artificial life world is monocular and often fixed; in this regime we look at ”˜organisms. ’ This strategy of looking through the scientific lens to observe a ”˜natural world’ enfolds other forms of cultural tactics that require decoding including but not exclusive to Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, Disney nature films and other “apparatus-based universes which robotize the human being and society. ” [2] Subsequent to identifying these protocols in artificial life visualisation I describe a number of works which exploit normative computational procedures to align artificial life image making into optical consistency with other forms of contemporary culture and to celebrate the ”˜ocular madness’ found in art forms such as neo-baroque image making and Islamic art. [1] C. Adami, Introduction to Artificial Life (New York: Springer, 1998), 4. [2] V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 70.
An ancient library of what has become known, if contentiously, as the “gnostic gospels” was accidentally exhumed in 1945 from a monastic grave - yard in Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Among these esoteric texts, most of which were lost to history since their hasty burial in the fourth century, the Gospel of Thomas has an especially piquant pedigree. Cited throughout early Christian literature as an exceptionally heretical and prohibited text that had been purportedly composed in the first century CE, its cryptic (when not incomprehensible) apothegms are claimed to have been secret knowledge written by the twin brother of Jesus Christ. This claim, even taken as figurative, poses a modest predicament for the archaeology of Christian theology. However, taken as an artifact of media archaeology, this text – one of its verses, in particular, which proposes an equation of knowledge and death – extends a dark perspective on our own contemporary cultural imperatives with embodiment and performativity.
Increasingly, the images we regard as authoritative – those with a seem - ingly direct relation to the ”˜truth’ of our brains, profiling our identities, or mapping our universe – are not generated optically. They are composed out of other media, notably sonic and electromagnetic materialities, and other processes, primarily algebraic and statistical transforms. In actuality they are transmaterial assemblages. Yet such heterogeneous image enti - ties continue to command the epistemological privilege of indexicality that light-based images previously claimed. If the scientific, authoritative image is already constituted ”˜transgenically, ’ what implication does this have for interference as a viable aesthetic strategy? To what extent can artists and cultural producers visually interfere with the politics and ethics of such im - aging practices? This article suggests that we should abandon the strategy of interference as intervention in favour of a better understanding of in - terference as pattern, indeed fabric, subtending many contemporary non - visual imaging practices. I argue for a transversal diagrammatic approach to the nonvisual image; to diagramming as both a holding together and a dynamic deformation of images into new assemblages. In turn, such dia - grammatic practices reflexively remind us that what we see as fixed and authoritative images are instead processual, virtual and speculative modes of ”˜viewing’ and engaging life.
This article investigates the nature of digital data as a medium for art. Specifically, what are the qualities and specificities unique to the medium of digital data, and how can artists working with this medium create work that cannot be created in any other medium? References are made to Friedrich Kittler, Mark B. N. Hansen, Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Munster and Claire Colebrook to establish a bivalent ontological model of digital data. This bivalence is described in terms of ”˜data’ and ”˜display, ’ where ”˜data’ exists in an indeterminate state inaccessible to hu - man perception until a determining operation is performed to modulate the data into a ”˜display’ state, where ”˜display’ does not necessarily imply visual display. Such a model suggests, in McLuhanist and Deleuzean terms, a medium that retroactively virtualises all previous media. This model is compared in detail to Gilbert Simondon’s ontological model of transductive individuation. Finally, modulation - in the form of parameter selection - is presented as the defining work of the artist in the digital medium.
The tradition of modern and contemporary art seems to be characterised by an endless pushing back of the boundaries separating art and everyday life, art and the sphere of the social. This is typically interpreted in terms of a work of merging and blurring – an effort of interference that affects dimensions of both art and life. This paper suggests an alternative concep - tion. Drawing upon the metaphor of electronic multiplexing, it argues that, while never simply absolutely distant from one another, art and the sphere of lived relations and social interaction are closely interleaved and yet re - tain a sense of distinct, differentiated identity. The energy of their relation, their potential to suggest new relations, depends upon an interplay of het - erogeneous and always contingently determinable component signals.
Traveling at the Speed of Paik: An artist-researcher visits the Nam June Paik Art Center
Nam June Paik visited Japan in 1985, in preparation for Bye Bye Kipling, his second work for satellite, fusing live broadcasts from Seoul, Tokyo and New York. In this same year, German film director Wim Wenders went to Tokyo. Wenders’s trip resulted in his nebulous homage to 1950s film director Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo-Ga.
Copyright (c) 2014 Leonardo Electronic Almanac
The Economies of Language in Digital Space/s
As language (both writing/speech) rapidly changes due to on-going developments in speech recognition systems, text-to-speech and chat bots, this paper focuses on the various attempts to synthesize, and mechanize language over time: to submit it to the logical, rational, and mechanical: to atomize and/or render it as pure code. This involves looking afresh at the kinds of philosophical questions these developments raise with respect to language – as a ”˜human’ phenomenon – which is increasingly being mediated by technology. The question – what is language when it is made by a machine? – touches upon ethical concerns; the notion of linguistic agency, and the shifting relationship between language and thought. While attempts at synthesising speech can be traced back as far as Roger Bacon (1200s) and Christian Kratzenstein, (1770s) more recent attempts to mechanize speech include early 20th c. mechanisms for encoding speech, such as the 1939 World’s Fair ”˜Parallel Bandpass Vocoder’ and ”˜Voder,’ (1940). [1] Alan Turing’s work with ”˜Universal’ computing languages, and their implications for AI, as well as the recent Siri application for the iPhone are more recent examples of the move towards forms of language which are removed from the body and rendered through code. The claim is that such mechanical interventions into language, both foregrounds and problematizes our relationship with language as a primary human technology. This paper proposes that we might want to pay particular attention to the changing forms of language as they are experienced/mediated through such technologies, and to the implications for identity, human agency and the larger ”˜moral economies’ they imply. “At the 1939 World’s Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognisable speech. No human vocal cords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electronically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker.” Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” in The Atlantic Monthly, 1945, 94. For photographic documentation also see: http://www.davidszondy.com/future/robot/voder.htm (assessed October 20th 2013).
The origins, functions and reasoning behind morality are part of an ongoing debate, stretching through time, societies and disciplines. This paper, however, proposes a more radical stance; suggesting that with the emergence of the Internet and the connectivity that mobile and wireless technologies provide, one is not only forced to redefine, but perhaps abolish the notion of morality altogether. By subverting such basic social and personal categories as identity, community, society, religion, crime and punishment alongside the traditional materiality of human existence, the multiverse that is the Internet takes away not only tools for the enforcement of morality, but also the very need for it given the near absence of measurable ”˜good and evil’ behaviors. Both primal in its unrestrained emotional expressivity and highly sophisticated in its technological and social structure the Internet functions by its own flexible set of behavioral prescriptions. I propose a comparative analysis of preexisting moral codes of behavior, illustrating the discrepancies between them and their virtual partners. For instance: access to intimate and or pornographic imagery was once condemned and limited to obscure adult entertainment venues whereas today such content can be accessed via web/mobile cameras and websites in an unlimited and unrestricted manner. Or just as commonly available is today’s- access to videos and manuals on drugs, weaponry and self-harm; areas which were once seen as immoral, illegal, and limited to the domains of criminal and military services and that are now within the reach of every child who has access to the Internet. Such traditionally decried practices as raw pornography, piracy, acts of perversion and images of death are created, shared and practiced without restraint and with public acceptance, leaving popularity with the peers to be the new moderating factor. This helps to establish the ”˜morality’ of an emerging generation that is composed of “digital natives and migrants.” [1] The question of whether one should or is even able to influence this process remains open. Marc Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” On the Horizon 9, no.5 (2001): 1.
In this paper I propose that when we look at an image, it looks back at us from a position of radical alterity. Thus the experience of looking at an image, any image, is always an experience of being confronted by the utterly other, one name for which might be ”˜God.’This is exemplified in God’s refusal to show his face to Moses in Exodus, and is clearly the underlying impetus behind the anxiety about images in the context of religion in many cultures. This is perhaps the reason the image, any image, is always also somehow obscene, in the very act of showing what is other. It shows us what should not be shown, what should be ”˜obscaena,’ offstage. In the modern era however the female nude becomes a privileged site of this forbidden representation. Taking my cue from the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, as well as GustaveCourbet’s painting ”˜L’Origine du Monde,’ Georges Bataille’s Madame Edwarda, in the book of the same name, who shows her genitals to the narrator while shouting ”˜I am GOD,’and Marcel Duchamp’s final work ”˜à‰tantdonnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gazd’éclairage,’ I argue that pornographic representations of the female body are the explicit demonstration of the implicit condition of the image, in which the obscene and the divine are closely related as things that should not and indeed cannot be looked at. All this must be understood in the context of the increasing ubiquity, availability and normalisation of pornography as a result, partly, of the World Wide Web. The ubiquity of pornography, and the more general acceptance of sexualized imagery in mainstream media has led to the lessening of pornography’s stigma, its transgressiveness, which is also, perhaps, a loss of a certain relation to the divine.
The Premediation of Identity Management in Art and Design: New Model Cyborgs – Organic & Digital
Post 9/11, governments and large corporations are placing a stronger emphasis on security. This, together with the fact that the majority of our interactions are now conducted remotely online via a computer or smart device, means that various forms of identity management have developed; passwords, wearable tokens and more recent innovations in biometrics such as face recognition. These forms of identity management are also shaping our concept of self. Through Richard Grusin’s lens of “premediation,” [1] in which multiple futures are alive in the present, we are able to identify the taboos of identity management and discuss how art and design practices are part of this wider media phenomenon. Within scenarios of identity management the line dividing taboos from desires is often blurred, and a taboo can quickly flip into a desire, if the conditions under which that interaction take place change. We discuss the tensions between technology and the body and how many art projects are raising awareness of the loss of anonymity and privacy through the use of masks and other organic materials. We conclude that we are all becoming “new model cyborgs” [2] – a mixture of the organic and the digital in a continual process of engagement, separation and re- engagement between our bodies and technology. Finally, supporting this paper we created an interactive presentation where people can give their opinion, answering and posting questions, about current technologies and how they work with identity management. [3] Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 240. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). IMprints, official Website, 2012, http://www.imprintsfutures.org/dissemination/ (accessed October 11, 2013).
Re-Program My Mind: The Emotions (after Charles Darwin)
Rapid changes in science, technology and new media art will lead to more sophisticated ideas about what it means to be human. This may reposition/refine our relationships with machines and animals with the human functioning symbiotically as a modifiable database-like structure that can be accessed perhaps unknowingly by others, globally over the internet. Genetically emotionally or otherwise enhanced individuals could become the fashionable norm; synthetic biology could replace plastic surgery, with the further complication of not knowing where those genetic modifications will take them as individuals or us as a species. This paper documents the development of the new media art project The Emotions (after Charles Darwin) whose collaborators include the Brain Mind Institute (autism research), Joseph LeDoux (a neuroscientist researching survival circuits associated with emotions) [1] and Roddy Cowie (a psychologist researching audiovisual representation and emotions, to be explored separately). The Emotions first tries to establish the existence of the universality of emotion perception and classification as empirically documented by the Brain Mind Institute. Secondly, it tries to establish the universal biological basis of emotion as evidenced by Joseph LeDoux’s work. Thirdly, it suggests the potential for subsequent futuristic manipulation and possible misuse through synthetic biology alone or combined with other technologies. Joseph LeDoux, “Rethinking the Emotional Brain,” Neuron 73 (2012): 653-675.
Content Osmosis and the Political Economy of Social Media
This article explains the function of content osmosis within social media and it also provides historical examples of its use in the marketing of cigarettes, commercial films, and computers. The term ”˜content osmosis’ has been coined to designate the transfer of certain characteristics of media’s content into an audience, empowering them to feel as if these qualities are within themselves. Content osmosis has existed for decades within the belief that the consumption of specific products and services are determinants of one’s personal identity, and this belief has evolved more recently into the notion that our social needs can be enhanced through participation in social media. A detailed example of content osmosis is provided through a character analysis of the 1953 film Roman Holiday, a title that coincides with Baron George Gordon Byron’s phrase for an event that uses human suffering for enjoyment or profit. This article proposes that the dominant purveyors of social media are using content osmosis as an effective mechanism for attracting audiences to embedded advertising, and that depictions of human tragedy are used to attract audiences who are interested in ”˜Schadenfreude’.
The revolution of social media has been heralded in by utopian appeals to reinvigorate social networks and democratic politics. While many social media sites are designed for users to post images, messages, comments or preferences, these same sites are used to profile their users. With massive corporate datamining and government information gathering anonymity and privacy are quickly disappearing. This paper explores how the web gathering that calls itself Anonymous has made anonymity a political issue. I aim to show that Anonymous upsets dichotomies that are fundamental to traditional political thought and practice, like identification and anonymity, liberation and control, dissent and accountability, privacy and piracy. As a result the discourse of ethics and accountability becomes more and more entangled with politics.
Seductive Technologies and Inadvertent Voyeurs Effect
This paper is based on practice based research undertaken to examine the use of Quick Response (QR) Codes in print-based artworks. Knowing that scanning a code can unlock hidden aspects of the artwork can make the urge to scan quite seductive and often irresistible. What happens, though, when the code reveals content which may be disturbing, or evokes strong emotional responses? Contextualized within the areas of interactive art, mobile devices, affective technologies, presence and intimacy, the discussion examines audience perception of a series of artworks that were created for this research. Evaluation methods draw on precedents set by other researchers in Human Computer Interaction and Grounded Theory. The findings indicate that participants showed strong emotional reactions to the works and revealed unexpected confidences, as well as highlighting that there are opportunities for the artist to surreptitiously entice audiences to engage with content that is taboo or issues that may take people out of their comfort zones. These are discussed within a wider awareness of the ethical considerations when manipulating the emotions of audiences through the mediation of presence and intimacy.
In the post-digital Web 3.0 the world moves onwards in an accelerated and complex manner and many structures and identities are left anachronistic and economically vulnerable (publishing, journalism, music to name a few). The ”˜virtues’ of access, connectivity and sharing have been successfully sold to society whilst the older principles of individual freedom and depth of lived experience are being recontextualized and / or eroded depending on one’s perspective. Mixing theory with applied examples, this paper describes how contemporary social technologies have significantly changed our practical reality, a reality where human experience and technical artifacts have become closely intertwined. The paper explores the ontological consequences of this change and the potential in establishing ”˜Precarious Design’ practices and methods as a response to the precarious nature of our existence.
Curating, Piracy and the Internet Effect
This paper examines a selected number of recent and ongoing instances of the practice of unauthorized exhibition-making and other curated formats, which specifically relate to, reference or operate by means of the internet. It will demonstrate that the internet and the advent of post-internet culture has proved to be a particularly fruitful tool for the advancement of such practices. This examination will be contextualized by a survey of historical examples in which the legal and moral rights held by artists have impinged on curators’ freedom of expression and inversely, where curators’ freedom of expression have impinged on the legal and moral rights held by artists. It will also be prefaced by a review of the notion of appropriation, in order to then develop the argument that where the curator reproduces or uses an artwork for display in an exhibition or other curated project without the prior consent of the artist, and that reproduction or use can be classified as a form of piracy, then that action is justifiable if it features a dimension of criticality.
Copyright and Digital Art Practice: The ”˜Schizophrenic’ Position of the Digital Artist
What is the role of copyright in the everyday social context of new, emerging and ”˜born digital’ artistic activities? Is copyright able to govern the practical behaviour of artists and creative practitioners? If not, then what or who impacts on their behaviour? This paper focuses on the interaction of copyright with the everyday life of creators working in the digital environment and discusses their ”˜schizophrenic’ position. It draws upon a qualitative empirical study with digital artists aimed at exploring their perceptions of copyright law: how they understand and manage copyright and how copyright interacts with the local circumstances of their day to day creative practice. A finding of this study was that some of the artists faced moral dilemmas and were pulled in different directions with respect to their perspectives and decisions regarding copyright. The consequence of this was a seemingly ”˜schizophrenic’ position, one that manifested in various ways – such as emphasize that ”˜copying’ cannot and should not be controlled in the digital medium but equally feeling compelled to have some control. Other artists rejected the prevention of copying in the digital domain while relying on exclusivity of copies in the analogue domain and / or denied the applicability of traditional notions of authorship to their practice while asserting the importance of attribution.
“There must be something wrong with this, Sally”¦” Faults, Lapses and Imperfections in the Sex Lives of Machines
Starting with a remarkable private recording made by two drunken women, identified only as “Sal Boo” this essay looks at how imperfections, slips and lapses have characterized our relationship with technology. As the women jeer, curse and make lewd suggestions to their home phonograph, which they rightly suspect to be malfunctioning, the provenance of these mistakes is revealed to be both intimate and highly charged. Linked via Norbert Weiner’s concept of feedback, as outlined in his theory of Cybernetics, and Turing’s adaptation of the Imitation Game as a test for machine intelligence, the responses of conversational programmes such as ELIZA and PARRY, as well later iterations such as Clever-Bot, reveal a similar set of errors at work in the networked relationship between humans and machines of today.
Dancing on the Head of a Sin: Touch, Dance and Taboo
This paper will outline the practice and performance of haptic_dance (2011) and discuss the ethical issues raised and the challenges presented to dance’s ontology by this work. haptic_dance is a dance work received by touch, choreographed and performed by Sue Hawksley for an audience of one. It aims to make tangible some impression of a dance, and through focusing attention on this aspect of the sensorium, to enhance the audience’s experience of kinaesthetic empathy. The use of touch to deliver and/or communicate dance is a novel and little explored choreographic approach. Within Western traditions, while social dances are often shared kinaesthetic/ kinetic experiences, theatre dance performances are generally engaged visually and from a distance. The concept of touching the audience in order to deliver the dance raises interesting issues concerning professional and ethical codes of practice. Touch is generally the least shared, or acknowledged, and the most taboo of the senses. Haptic and touch-screen technologies are becoming ubiquitous, but although this makes touch more commonly experienced or shared, it is often reframed through the virtual, while inter-personal touch still tends to remain sexualized, militarized or medicalized (in most Western cultures at least). haptic_dance employs what could be seen as the simplest of mediating tools – the hands. However, the somatic senses are complex, involving the proprioceptive, vestibular and visceral systems, not limited to any specific organ but involving the whole organism. In haptic_dance I encountered the complexities of delivery and interpretation of inter-personal touch, and the limitations encountered by touching on a taboo. Does the haptic engagement with dance – a medium in which touch is nowadays often accepted (in social dances, tango, or contact improvisation for example) – make it easier for the work to transcend taboos, or does it add to the complexity? Dance has been prohibited in some European societies since medieval times, and still is in certain cultures. Another key issue this work raises is where the dance is located. Some audience members felt that it was in or around them, others felt that it was in me as the dancer, or in the danced material from which the touch version derives. This question of where the dance is significant in considering whether, how and why the use of haptic mediation technologies within this or another choreographic context can make touch more broachable.
Ana-Materialism & the Pineal Eye: Becoming Mouth-Breast Visual Arts in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction
Ana-materialism & the Pineal Eye provides a landmark interpretation of materialism, representation and the image using the Cartesian conceit of a pineal gland and its voracious sexually embedded appetites. Developing the argument via Georges Bataille’s re-invention of the pineal gland as an all-seeing, all devouring, (pineal) eye, Johnny Golding borrows this move to envision a different analytic approach to digital forms of ”˜matter’ and artificial forms of ”˜life.’ From her critical engagement with Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler, Golding shows why the tools provided by these modern, contemporary and postmodern approaches to philosophy, image, the body, indeed representation cannot fully explore, let alone develop these new forms of reality/ies except by retreating into traditional binary divides between male and female, good and evil, mother/child and so forth. Ana-materialism and the Pineal Eye introduces a much needed understanding to oddly cathected sensualities, multiversal realities, digital imaginaries with no weight, no volume, no spatiality, but ”˜somehow’ making sense, and with it, creating matter, ethics, art.