Why
tech/Why not? : a report on the 2003 Subtle
Technologies Conference by Barbara Sternberg
I
just attended my third Subtle Technologies conference, (the 6th annual held in
At the conclusion of the three-day conference,
I was left warmed by the generosity, dedication and humility of the
participants—scientists and artists from
Artists
working with technology are moving into new realms, blurring the boundaries and
complicating the definition of artist and of art (some hybrids spawned:
artist/researcher or researcher/artist, artist/computer scientist,
artist/biologist, artist/activist). I propose to review this conference,
highlighting several of the presenters and through this consider the effect,
the place and the ethics of inter-active, technology-driven, new media art—art
that is seen as socially relevant, community-based yet global in reach.
The answer to the question "why
technology?" could be simply answered: "Why not?" If the
mountain's there some people, artists among them, will want to climb. There is
more to it though: it continues to be the role of art to humanize science and
technology, to democratize, to question and subvert, and finally, not to be
left behind. Artists have often been asked by the manufacturers of the latest
technology to work with it and see what it can do beyond its intended
commercial use. Have artists been co-opted by this? What is the nature of the
connection between science, art, technology, government and business? Is
business (and government) a silent partner or the controlling interest? Is
globalization inevitable, and is it a result of electronic and digital
technology?
Sergio Basbaum (his
background is music, cinema and visual arts) presented, Synesthesia
and Digital Perception, which contextualized digital art historically (this
material is on CDROM which one can move through in a non-linear way—see
Appendix). Following upon the tendency to fragmentation and specialization in
science and art in the 19th century, and the subsequent specialization and
separation of the senses in modernist art, Basbaum
argues that digital technology, like the tribal, 'acoustic' world Marshall McLuhan described, is synesthetic
and immersive. Many simultaneous sensations are interwoven—the here and now of
sensation prevails over the rational symbolic order, a unity is
experienced.
It
is possible, then, to talk about a digital perception, a synesthetical
model of understanding reality which employs notions of perception of reality
abandoned in the eighteenth century, but now under a technological support
...[aims to] reunite the once separated senses...[There are] strong trends in
digital art to develop synesthetic and immersive
works that both envelop us in virtual environments and search for
correspondences and complimentarities between the
senses, as much as for 'magical' and 'spiritual' experiences of the real
world.
With
Basbaum's reference to Marshall McLuhan
the question, "why technology?",
was put into a larger perspective: we are living in a new age, the
electronic age, even if we can't yet clearly describe the changes in individual
psyches or societal structure that the change from typography to electronic
communication has wrought. In "The Guttenberg Galaxy"1, McLuhan recalled Karl Popper's descriptions of changes in
society from the unity of
'tribal' to 'open' society that the change from oral to written
culture brought about, changes like the shaking up of class structure. Now in
the shift to electronic culture, to a digital synesthetic
perception, back to 'tribal' is 'back' with a difference. Not back to small
tribal communities or cities but a global tribal unity will be realized. We cannot not participate. We're IN it, though we may not
recognize the changes. Artworks dealing
with surveillance and other 'political' art may be part of the new revolution
or a continuation of the dissolution of class and privilege, this time of the
ruling military/police/corporate elite. Demolishing isolated locations, global
cyberspace is where this new age lives and works.
With
SWIPE, artist/activists Beatriz da Costa and Brooke
Singer address the gathering of data from drivers' licenses, a form of data
collection that businesses are starting to practice nation-wide... Swipe aims
to bring attention to this practice [by art performances and street actions]
and enable people to see exactly what
is stored on their mysterious strip [the magnetic strip on the back of the
license]... With public knowledge there is a chance for public voices and
ultimately resistance.
At a gallery opening they manned the bar and
asked everyone they served for I.D.; these I.D.'s
were then swiped. Hooked up by computer to a data collection company (which
they paid for), they printed out on a screen behind the bar personal
information on that gallery visitor: name, address, age, social security
number, income. Different amounts of
information were found for different people. In the post 9/11
Marc Tuters noted
the similarities between Australian aboriginal song lines and GIS (Global
Information System) maps, between the ancient mnemonic devices for navigation
and new wireless communication and computing technologies for location
awareness. According to Tuters, these devices are
"creating impromptu social networks that are mutating users' very
relations to space, time and to each other." Friend-Finder services in
Japan, group behaviour studies among Finnish teens,
political protests organized by forwarding text messaging via cell phones,
transponder chips implanted in children by security-fearful parents are
examples of this "psychogeography."
Tuters' own design practice and other collaborative mapping projects
'are creating locative wireless interfaces that allow users to annotate space
and, in so doing, become the architects of their own social spaces." Tuters sees the
transformative potential of locative media but also worries over the issue of
social control. For more on Tuters' projects see his blog (blog, for the uninitiated like me, is a contraction from
web log or diary - I'm finding the experience of this new technology is very
much tied up in language which for the most part is "Greek to me"!)
Lee Smolin, a
researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, gave a different
type of historical overview. He described the ethical basis of science and
democracy—both are ethical communities—and explored points of contact between
the scientific understanding of space and time and our conceptions of human
society.
Smolin sees the Aristotelian hierarchical universe echoed in the
societal order god, king, people. The liberal
scientific universe of Copernicus and
The
question of ethics had been raised early in the conference by Aniko Meszaros whose work crosses
many disciplines, even creating a new one, "genetic architecture". Meszaros decided to enter the controversial arena of
biotechnological engineering rather than abdicate because of its ethical
issues. Her background is in architecture and environmental studies. She has
designed plant organisms that will grow habitable landscapes. Her project Plant
Anima transforms tools of biotechnology into devices of culture. It proposes a
new inhabitable architecture, generated through the invention of unique plant organisms, that is wired yet vegetable, responsive yet
independent, artificial yet alive... A new 'genetic'
architect then watching the organism grow itself.
Meszaros defends her work from the protests of those against GMO's on the basis that her genetically designed plants
will increase diversity rather than move towards the establishment of
monocultures which has been the direction taken so far by corporate interests.
The
project's research began at the Microbiology Department of the University
College of London and won the Gold Prize at Osaka International Design
Festival. Further crossing disciplines, it will be exhibited in galleries and
museums. Meszaros asserts that while the design of
Plant Anima has positive ideals, it is ultimately at the service of
beauty.
A
sample case will be presented: a floating, inhabitable living landscape
inserted into an obsolete industrial harbour.
Utilizing plant typologies that digest pollutants, the project can repair
damaged ecosystems and provide an entirely new wilderness...
Adam
Zaretsky's work points to another art/science
relationship, that of ethical watchdog—art as a reminder of societal
implications of scientific research especially when it is funded by
corporations with vested interests like pharmaceuticals. At the 2001
conference, Zaretsky had warned about transgenetics. He had found that although in his computer
collages he was producing mutated bodies with multiple breasts and legs at both
ends, he was living in fear of what geneticists could do, are doing to the real
thing. To conquer his fear, he got a job in a biotech lab. What he learned fed
his politically oriented art.
This
year Zaretsky has been teaching VivoArts:
Art and Biology Studio, an experimental 'living art' production class at
Zaretsky's idea of art is that it should scramble up existing
attitudes about humanity. He asks questions as challenges:
Can
we use our green imaginations to create realities of urban closed systems
integrate sustainable complexity? Why do we seem to showcase our most isolationist
fantasies of the future? How can we use these reflections to design new urban
wild lands?
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During
the lunch break I heard from Camille Turner about her trip to
Although
the project was well-intentioned and successful in terms of participation and
enthusiasm, as I munched my burrito I questioned the colonial, patronizing
attitude the project could be accused of:
we in the 'first world' have computers, you are missing out if you don't
have them too and we will help you to have what we have/be more like us (and
we'll have a new market to capitalize on). This objection was countered by a
third voice with, " It's easy for you to say that
you don't need to have a computer or web access because you can have it if you
want." Camille has also been involved in a similar project in
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Artists-working-with-technology
(they seem to be a breed apart not to be confused with digital artists) are being called upon to help solve social and economic
problems - (technology as saviour?). Johannes Birringer,
independent choreograher and former Head of the Dance
and Technology Program at
as
conversion performances—devising projects for subjective inscription and
alternative economies of communication and connection, while also devising
partnerships and transfer services between science, culture and teaching that
can put former sites of labour to different
uses.
For
a full description of the process and final performance see the lengthy essay Birringer has posted on the InteraktionsLabor
Gottelborn website. Birringer
also has specific questions as a practioner in the
area for the future of technology-activated interventions:
The
Interaktionslabor of course pointed its finger at the
future and asked what kind of influence virtual environments might have on our
imagination, and what intuitive associations people
make with such technically mediated interactions. How can architectures of
virtual image-sound-spaces emerge to form meaningful sensual experiences for
social interaction, allowing us to recognize our bodily activity? How is the
virtual felt? What relationships are forged between portable/mobile media and
the persons who use them? How do relations between body media develop into
symbolic actions or interactive games which we understand as meaningful
collective cultural behaviour? What balances can we
achieve between nature, industry, digital culture? Digital nature? With these questions in mind, the laboratory
plans to continue its work and regroup next year...
A
lot of the works were referred to as projects or research projects rather than
art and take place in public spaces. Dance choreographer Yacov
Sharir and collaborator Sophie Lycouris
use wireless wearable computers in IntelligentCity .
This
is a long-term international research project which uses choreographic
practices in dialogue with interactive technologies to transform and accentuate
the perception of everyday built environments
by live audiences who are also regular users of such environments [shopping centres, train stations, restaurants]...The technologies
employed translate the sonic and movement reactions of the audience into direct
digital imput which trigger
visual, sonic and dynamic transformations of the space manifested through the
use of multiple video screenings and surround sound.
Each
year the dance artists have been the most critical of the results of these
technical interventions. In the wrap-up panel discussion this year, Sharir wondered whether they are leading to new movement,
to moving differently, to anything substantively interesting or are they just
finding something to do with the equipment? Johannes Birringer
who has created interactive, collaborative, in-cyberspace 'dance works'
questioned the nature of this space and its impact on dance. How useful is this
new technology and how much is it a distraction from questions of significant
content? He takes the brave attitude that as he works more with these spaces and
movement in them, something will eventually present itself that satisfies one's
longing for emotive experience in dance.
Did
any of the art 'move' me, 'touch' me? SWIPE is activist and informative, yes.
Is it art? Meszaros'
drawings fascinate as scientific possibilities, but can they be judged solely
as drawings? Steve Heimbecker's Wind Array Cascade
Machine: Pod involved 64 movement sensors on a rooftop in
The
most exciting moment, the one with a spark of life that got me stirred up, was
Johannes Birringer's presentation at the conference.
Here there was ambiguity: elliptical language referring to going down into a
dark 'unknown' spoken in broken phrases by a vulnerable person live in front of
me (that the dark space actually referred to the mine in Gottelborn
was left unsaid and so could have rich diverse meanings and associations for
me). Birringer's utterances were accompanied by an
arm gesture open to many interpretations—a touching of hand to chest (heart)
and a pointing or flinging away or opening out. There was a live video camera
which, via computer, tripled the arm gesture on a screen behind Birringer and beside it another video image of a factory or
industrial architecture (later revealed to be at the Gottelborn
mine site). It wasn't an artwork per se, but it was the closest I got to an
art-induced experience during the conference.
Other
artistic disciplines are grappling with the whole computer question. I read
recently in a craft journal that on-line selling of jewellery
was ineffective because of the lack of tactility given the buyer, One needs to feel the weight of the piece, how it feels
against one's skin, to appreciate the work. A film journal on screen violence
commented that computer-generated special effects have made violence more
convincing, pushed screen violence into another realm in the light of which its
possible effects (catharsis, fantasy, escapism, imitation, brutality) have to
be re-examined. Walter Benjamin (in a discussion on the effects of early Disney
film cartoons) spoke of the mass technological reorganization of daily life-and
consequently of consciousness. Is another reorganization and attendant change
in consciousness happening with the aid of artists - and is this a good thing?
And
this thought from J.M.Coetzee's Youth (After the youth of the title uses a computer to generate
phrases to make his poetry, he questions the ethics):
Is
it fair to be using mechanical aids to writing?...Or do [these] huge resources
turn quantity into quality...might it not be argued that the invention of computers has changed the nature of art, by
making the author and the condition of the author's heart irrelevant? 2
All
the roles for art in relation to technology listed earlier (democratize,
subvert, expand, humanize) are being addressed. Nancy Nesbitt from
Why
technology? Well, technology is always involved—film, paint, a pen is
technology, and each determines the type of art produced. According to McLuhan and Blake and Ruskin before him, the technology of
the age determines not just how we think but what we think—our 'imaginations'
are bound by the technology we use. The new electronic technology seems to lead
to: international collaborations, laboratory research-identified projects,
co-operation between various groups and disciplines—interdisciplinarity,
community activism; and to aim for some sort of translation, transferability or
transformation through technological means, and immersive, often virtual or in
cyberspace, often youth-oriented, audience-active, networked environments. It
dreams of creating new realities.
All
quotations unless otherwise specified are from the presenters' submissions
printed in the conference program.
1
Marshall McLuhan, Guttenberg Galaxy,
2
J.M. Coetzee, Youth (
APPENDIX
of web-sites
Subtle
Technologies - www.subtletechnologies.com
Adam
Zaretsky, zareta@rpi.edu
The
Worhorse Zoo project -
http://emutagen.com/wrkhzoo.html
Beatriz
da Costa - www.beatrizdacosta.net
Marc
Tuter's web diary- http://gpster.net/blog/index.php
Sergio
Basbaum, e-mail address:
musicossonia2001@yahoo.com.br
CDROM
- "Psicanalise e Historia
de Cultura"
Johannes
Birringer - http://www.aliennationcompany.com
His
books include Media and Performance (1998) and Performance on the Edge
(2000). InteraktionsLabor
Gottelborn - www.iks-saar.net
Originally
published in Topia : Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, volume 11, Spring
2004