CHArt Conference Proceedings, volume nine
2006

Abstracts

User Requirements for a 'Virtual Arts Centre of the Future'.
Katrien Berte and Peter Mechant, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium.

Today, most museums, arts centres and festivals in Flanders are represented online. A recent study shows however,  that in general their presence is far from interactive and that they use only a fraction of the wide range of possibilities offered by current information technology in terms of community building, interactivity, hypertextuality and multimedia.

In the IBBT research project ‘Virtual Arts Centre of the Future’ (VACF) we use a number of web2.0 applications to create an online cultural environment that is elaborate, interactive and targets the specific interests of its visitors. Are the Flemish art lovers interested in this new concept or do the current sites realise their needs?

In February 2006, an online survey about ‘culture, the arts and the Internet’ was conducted among visitors to some of Flanders most-visited websites targeting the Flemish Internet user with an interest in culture. This survey resulted in a dataset of 2,635 respondents. They were asked about their cultural behaviour and experiences in contributing to online communities and consuming culture and arts on the Internet. They were probed for their needs and expectations about arts and culture online. A model to determine the adoption rate for the ‘Virtual Arts Centre of the Future’ was implemented. Preliminary results show that most respondents would like to see trailer-like video fragments and listen to audio fragments before going to a cultural event. They are interested in receiving personalised information based on their interest and their past behaviour. The majority of respondents are less interested in sharing their experiences with others and in expressing themselves by making or sharing their own digital art.


Aesthetics and Interactive Art
Karen Cham, The Open University, UK.   

Any discussion of aesthetics and interactivity must first transgress the divide in modern western art history between art and technology. Despite the fact that technical principles have always underpinned fine art production (rules of perspective, proportion and the golden section for example) photography, film, television and video are still marginalised in art historical dialogues.  The mechanically reproduced artefact is easily dismissed in a discourse where value is still equated with dubious concepts of authenticity and originality anchored in production techniques.

For example, whilst video art has been part of the art world since the1960s when artists such as Nam June Paik brought the TV set into the gallery, the aesthetics of video is still neglected in art theory. Not only can video artefacts be mechanically reproduced, but the potential for mass access or worse still, mass appeal, is assumed to negate the exclusivity essential to establishing an aesthetic value.

Digital artefacts manifest these two problems of reproduction and access to an even greater extent. A digital artefact, by conventional standards, is even less authentic and original than a mechanically reproduced one; a true simulation, a mathematical model of the real. Furthermore, not only is the digital artefact accessible by the masses, it is very often interactive, i.e. shaped by audience input; a product of ‘the mass’ themselves.

These material factors should not inhibit an academic discussion of the aesthetics of interactivity. An aesthetic value is always established by the consensus of an elite. In media studies for example, textual analysis of televisual artefacts clearly demonstrates that whilst television might appear generally accessible and understood by everyone there is quite clearly a relative, yet elaborate, aesthetic code operating within a wider, still elite, cultural context. In such a way it is easily possible to demonstrate various aesthetics of photography, film, television and video.

In the same vein, interactive media artefacts abound in our day-to-day lives. This paper will argue that for academic dialogues to embrace the aesthetics of interactive art in a constructive and meaningful way the intellectual prejudice against reproduction and access must be abandoned. For example, how can one seriously analyze the aesthetic of Edward Ihnatowicz’s ‘Senster’ (1970) without the context of contemporary science fiction when it is a fifteen-foot high hydraulic robot with a triple proboscis of sensors for a ‘head’ ?

Only in this way can the use of wholly appropriate theories from media and cultural studies ensure that the technical skill of commercial producers, the narrative dexterity of on-line gamers and the visual eloquence of the television audience are accounted for in both interactive art production and theoretical discourses on new aesthetics.


When Presence and Absence Turn into Pattern and Randomness: Can You See Me Now?
Maria Chatzichristodoulou (maria x), Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.   

What is the meaning of embodiment and presence within a postmodern, posthuman, and 'post-media' context? What is at stake when embodiment becomes virtual, distributed and/or hybrid? What happens when presence and absence turn into pattern and randomness?

This paper explores the issues of posthuman presence and virtual embodiment in relation to current emergent, performance and/or performative, artistic practice. Blast Theory's piece ‘Can You See Me Now?’ is used as a case-study. The focus is on networked performance practices that employ the Internet and other networking technologies as distribution media but also as spaces - that is, as cybernetic stages that span across physical and virtual spacetimes challenging established notions of presence and absence. Whereas performance is closely associated with the notion of physical, bodily presence, when it comes to (semi-) mediated, networked, and other forms of technologised performance practices ‘questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage ...’1, as the corpo-real body ceases to function as a tangible proof of presence. Presence becomes doubt. It becomes impregnated with absence (Derrida), an in-between state, a presence-absence. What happens while we exist in-between presence and absence in performance?

Furthermore, strategies we develop in order to both shape, embody and relate through hybrid spacetimes as present-absent, posthuman creatures are investigated, questioning the meaning of embodiment within a posthuman context. I argue that, within this context, the conceptual dichotomy of presence - absence is not sufficient for the analysis of networked performances and encounters. I further argue in favour of Hayles’ proposal of a complementary dialectic based on notions of pattern and randomness. To approach and illustrate these issues I use Blast Theory's installation/performance/gaming piece ‘Can You See Me Now?’ (2001) (<http://www.canyouseemenow.co.uk>)


'You Are Here': Locative Media and the Body As Networked Site.
Alicia Cornwell, Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA.     

The increased use of locative media-enabled devices such as mobile phones has recently been of interest to artists working in the emerging field of locative arts.  Artists and collectives such as Loca (Location Oriented Critical Arts) are highlighting the ways in which locative media technology allows bodies to be tracked and monitored through largely invisible wireless networks.  By sending unsolicited text messages which indicate that the mobile phone user is being observed and also by providing methods that aid users in physically identifying such networks in their surrounding environment, Loca’s project draws the user’s attention to the tendency of technologically-augmented bodies to become sites of surveillance in the digital terrain.

Mobile phones and other devices do not only allow users to be tracked, they also contain and reveal surprising amounts of information about users’ lives.  The wealth of information afforded by these devices makes up an individual’s digital past, both distant and immediate, that is specifically connected to the user’s situated body within the wireless networks they inhabit.  Loca, whose project can be linked to both site specific art practices from the 1970s to the 1990s and to the activities of the mid-twentieth century Situationist International movement, makes use of homemade wireless networks and nodes to demonstrate the ease with which outside parties (often large corporations) can monitor and glean personal information from mobile phone users. 

Loca are emphasising through their project that the result of the digital and physical overlapping of space is an increasingly complex and often compromising system of information generation and retrieval, reliant upon the physical location and context of bodies in space.  As sites that are monitored within a wireless, networked terrain that is increasingly vast, Loca stresses that our bodies have been caught between the layers of the physical and digital divide. 



Steps of New Media Art at the Venice Biennale, 1960s to 1990s.
Francesca Franco, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.   

This paper investigates the way new media art was introduced to the Venice Biennale and in particular seeks to tackle questions that arise around the shift in attitude towards new media art.

The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, is one of the oldest international festivals of contemporary art in the world.  The influence of technology in art at the Venice Biennale can be traced through works presented from the late 50s – early 60s, when computers were in the early stages of their development. The four moments analyzed by this paper are the following:

1966, 33rd Venice Biennale, Argentinean artist Julio Le Parc won the Grand Prize for the painting category. This work did not fit exactly into any category and from that time the Biennale jury abolished all categories; In 1970 Herbert Franke curated the exhibition ‘Art and Technology’ for the 35th Venice Biennale; In 1986 Roy Ascott participated in the Venice Biennale with ‘Planetary Network’, a new media installation and world-wide telecommunications project in the context of LABORATORIO UBIQUA, the Technology and Informatics section of the 42nd Venice Biennale; In 1990 Jenny Holzer, the first woman artist to represent America with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, received the Leone D’Oro Grand Prize for best pavilion at the 44th Venice Biennale.

Through the analysis of four pivotal moments in the history of the Venice Biennale, this paper reflects upon the successes and crises of new media art in order to address some key questions: when did technology enable this shift? What kind of consequences did these changes introduce? How did the curatorial practice change and what is the legacy of new media work in terms of judging, viewing and curating artworks?



Preservation of Net Art in Museums.
 Anne Laforet, University of Avignon, France.   

Artists appropriated the Internet as soon as it became public in order to experiment with new artistic, social and technical practices that have been gathered under the term Net art. The museums and cultural institutions that are interested by those works have to reconsider the way they commission, exhibit, collect and preserve artworks, just as they have already done with other forms of ephemeral or process-based art.

Within the museum, the balance between documentation and preservation is shifting in favour of documentation, owing to artworks that do not have a fixed or stable form but exist in different states. A rich, diverse and precise documentation is crucial to support preservation strategies that accept artworks as being variable, mutable and not static.

New or updated preservation models need to be explored. After an overview of current models being developed (especially those within museums or national libraries), this paper will focus on the concept of the archaeological museum as a potential model for Net art preservation.

By combining museum and archival approaches, it is possible to keep track of the context of Net-based artworks by taking into account their interrelations within a dynamic environment. Net archiving tools allow close observation of how an art work evolves, although this does not necessarily mean that the captured works function in the same way as the originals.  By emphasising the dialogue between Net art works and their environment, the institution would become a living archive, a research space, with fragments of artworks which could be updated and re-activated in multiple ways. Moreover, it could take the form of a partnership of organisations with different scopes, methods and goals, a meta-institution composed of the many actors involved in preserving Internet art.

Embodying Judgment: New Media and Art Criticism.
Daniel Palmer, Monash University, Melbourne Australia.   

Art criticism is widely held to be in crisis, yet few who make this claim have paid attention to the issues raised by technological changes in art media. Indeed conventional methods of art criticism are poorly equipped to assess new media art – offering confused criteria for judgement – and an accessible critical discourse around this art is largely absent as a result. This paper explores aesthetic theories of new media with a view to rethinking the place of the medium in contemporary art criticism.

The challenges that new media poses for art history have been much discussed. However, aesthetic debate around new media art has largely concentrated on locating the defining qualities of new media art. As many have observed, this focus risks restating an anachronistic modernist paradigm of medium specificity. On the other hand, to merely note that new media entails a shift from object-centred to reception-centred aesthetics fails to discriminate between new media and other contemporary art of the post-Minimalism period.

This paper takes off from two recent and ambitious efforts to theorise the aesthetics of new media by Mark Hansen and Anna Munster. Both locate ‘digitality’ in terms of embodiment and duration, even as they attempt to shift the focus away from the medium or technology. Both, in distinct ways, link bodily effect with an ethical dimension.

How do these theories relate to existing models for contemporary art criticism? How do they recast Michael Fried’s famous dismissal of Minimalism as ‘theatrical’ because temporal and embodied? How can we put these ideas into practice? Is it possible to judge works of new media art by the type of embodied experience they invite?

A Blueprint of Bacterial Life - Can a Science-Art Fusion Move the Boundaries of Visual and Audio Interpretation?
Elaine Shemilt, University of Dundee, Scotland.   

Scientists from the Scottish Crop Research Institute have pioneered a method called Genome Diagram, which enables visualisation of billions of gene comparisons simultaneously between over 300 currently sequenced bacterial genomes, including those of human and animal pathogens. Our project takes this scientifically-challenging work outside the fields of biology and medicine and places it into the context of interdisciplinary art. Drawing from our previous work we reflect the dynamic nature of biological systems that arise from these static genome sequences. We explore such processes using both visual and sound methods.

Our research aims to have a consequential effect upon the future work of both the scientists and artists involved. The role of the artist should not be that of a mere illustrator: our interpretation of the data may have an effect upon the scientific research by enabling the recognition of new information and routes to new analysis. Similarly for the scientists the project aims to influence the direction of the art itself. As the process of abstraction influences the mode of visualisation, the form of visualisation affects the future process of abstraction, and we expect that greater insight of our own processes of deduction, and analysis of the data itself, will flow from this collaboration.

This project investigates how complex data and images used by the Genome Diagram, through interpretation and expression in a range of art forms, can help to develop and evolve the scientific tools themselves. This is achieved by utilising both modern printmaking and 2D/3D computer-generated imagery now combined with installation and sound. We are developing a multimedia installation based on the genetic plasticity and evolution of the bacterial pathogens. The aim is that the artistic interpretation will specifically not be an illustration or analogy of the data, rather an exploration of the influence of the surrounding spaces using both visual and sound feedback.

The unifying thread of our artist/scientist collaboration is that we begin from data of a biological nature, which also imply certain processes. By de-contextualising them, we obtain a complementary viewpoint to the biological interpretation that would ordinarily be enforced on those data and processes. Fine art practice emphasises subjectivity and ambiguity whereas science practice attempts to identify objective truths. Despite the contrast between the two approaches they are unified because both disciplines thrive on lateral thinking and observation.


Electronic Civil Disobedience: The SWARM case.
Fidele Vlavo, London South Bank University, London, UK.   

‘As far as power is concerned, the streets are dead capital!’  2

In the early 1990s, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an American group of artists and political activists developed the concept of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD), a radical form of active resistance designed to transfigure social-political activism. In a series of contentious writings, CAE exposed its account of nomadic power and governance relocation, arguing for the development of a new political opposition in cyberspace.
 
As a result, US militant artist groups embarked on the coordination of virtual blockades and online sit-ins in an attempt to confront governing bodies in their so-called virtual locations. Since then, recent changes in Internet and digital communications such as national governments’ policies and corporation control are affecting the evolution of web-based disruptive movements exposing the latent tensions between ECD theory and practice.
 
This paper will examine the case of Electronic Disturbance Theatre and its SWARM project, the first known case of electronic civil disobedience and online protest, presented during the 1998 Ars Electronica Festival. For the project, members of EDT created a piece of software designed to disrupt targeted websites (in this case the Mexican and American governments’ websites) in support of the Chiapas Zapatista movement. Placing the SWARM case in the context of online activism and current cyberspace politics, the paper will consider the potential discordance between Electronic Civil Disobedience praxis and contemporary art practice.




1 Hayles, N. Katherine How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999,  27. Hayles specifically refers to the technologies of virtual reality. Nevertheless, I consider that the problems these technologies raise around issues of presence and absence apply to most emergent, hybrid forms of performance that employ networking and/or other digital technologies.
2 Electronic Civil Disobedience, 1994:11,<http://www.critical-art.net/books/ecd/ecd2.pdf>

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