Object and Identity in a Digital Age
CHArt 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Object and Identity in a Digital Age
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Frederik Lesage, London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE)
The Artist as Designer, the Artist as User: Developing a collaborative framework for artistic engagement in ICT design
Recent initiatives in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have provided support for artists to participate in ‘collaborative experiments’ with engineers and scientists in computing departments in the hopes of developing online platforms that are better suited to artists’ interests. For artists, such experimental work represents an opportunity to research the artistic potential for emerging information and communication technologies. For engineers, it represents a chance to understand a different set of ‘user requirements’ relating to software and hardware design. When viewed in such a light, these temporary exchanges can benefit both disciplines through a mutual knowledge exchange.Although experimental work with information and communication technologies (ICTs) has been extensively researched by social scientists from the point of view of engineers, it remains unclear how (or to what extent) this kind of collaboration is valuable to the artist over time. Studies of innovation in new media have developed a nuanced understanding of the role of users in the design and implementation of ICTs. Such studies provide us with frameworks for analysing how user groups can collaboratively work with designers to shape the ICT’s meaningful development at a social and technological level. But the user/designer opposition, when applied to such collaborative work, arguably overlooks the complex historical dimension of social groups with well-established discourses for engaging with the design and use of technologies. In the case of the arts, there exist longstanding discourses that define the relationship between artists and their tools of production. Some artists attribute considerable value to maintaining creative freedom and to the ability to innovate through the contention of established conventions or standards. Such values may represent a problematic set of ‘user requirements’ for ICT design. It is therefore arguably only through methods that enable a historical analysis of the design and use of technologies that one could begin to better understand how artists and engineers can successfully collaborate in a research environment. The paper will address this problem in detail through an examination of a recent case study of an artists’ group and its work with the multicast platform known as Access Grid.
Frederik Lesage is a PhD student at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) whose research interests include new media art and organizational structures in the creative industries. After completing an MA in Cultural and Creative Industries at the King’s College London in 2005, he was awarded the EDS MARCEL Studentship to study at the LSE in the department of Media and Communications. In the past two years, he has presented in conferences at Westminster University and Cambridge’s CRASSH as well as presented papers to international conferences in Bruges, Vancouver and Cologne with a recent invitation to present at the annual International Association for Media and Communications Research Conference in Mexico City. He has also published work online as part of the EDS Innovation Research Programme and as an independent researcher with Proboscis.