Pre-socratic media theory

Drawing inspiration from Siegfried Zielinski’s ground-breaking study of media archaeology, Deep Time of the Media, this paper explores the potential for pre-Socratic philosophy to provide a model for alternative conceptions of mediation within contemporary media art. It argues that pre-Socratic philosophy develops notions of mediation that extend beyond the contemporary focus on technical media. In their exploration of fundamental dynamic principles within nature and in their sensitivity to the uncertain relation between truth, appearance and finite human understanding, they suggest diverse conceptions of mediation that have continuing critical and creative relevance

A Line Made by Walking and Assembling Bits and Pieces of the Bodywork of Illegally Dumped Cars Found at the Edge of Roads and Tracks in the Illawarra Escarpment

Make seven walks up from my home to places where there are illegally dumped cars in the escarpment bush. On each occasion, cut out a square section of a car with an angle grinder and carry the piece home. This scheme provides the basis for a work that responds to the impure complexity of the local illawarra environment. The aim is not only to intervene, in a small way, within sites of vandalism, but also to descend down into the space where car and forest meet. The work takes shape partly as a set of sculptural samples and absences, and partly as field of action - walking, cutting, image-making and writing

Bourriaud and the aesthetics of electronic interaction

Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002) provides a sophisticated critique of interactive aesthetics. His focus, however, is not literally interactive electronic art, but rather Conceptual Art of the 90s that deliberately reduces technical means and prompts human dialogic interaction. Bourriaud celebrates work that shifts the status of the art object from self-contained aesthetic thing to socially relational model (or field). In his view, technological art, in its very obvious claims to interaction reveals its association and complicity with broader regimes of simulated conviviality and interaction that characterize modern democratic society. It seems that interaction becomes all important in the instant that it effectively disappears. Here Bourriaud is clearly the heir to critics such as Adorno, Mumford and Baudrillard who question the social emancipatory claims of technological media. Despite its apparent Luddite tendencies, this critique retains value in terms of qualifying the rhetorical claims of electronic interaction. But for my purposes what is more interesting is the way in which Bourriaud draws upon key features of technological media in order to describe the sphere of genuinely critical interactive art. The digital image, for instance, in its programmatic, algorithmic potential provides a model for the contemporary art object. Rather than a static, fixed thing, the digital images represents a “generative power” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.70). I would argue as well that the notion of model itself reveals a debt to modern technological media, which constitutes not works but systems that obtain life and currency only through (problematic) interaction. Bourriaud’s critique represents an effort then to tease out a notion of genuine interaction from the formal structure of its avowed enemy. It is hardly surprising then that every positive aspect of dialogic interaction is defined in terms of its difference from electronic forms of interaction. Very curiously, the latter is positioned both as model and evil double for the properly relational character of contemporary art. This paper traces the contours of this ambivalent relation and considers the value of the concept of relational aesthetics towards an assessment of the interactive claims of interactive electronic art

Instrumental relations: software as art, art as software

Software art is characterised by a close concern with the culture of software and the medium of programming. This inevitably demands an engagement with the terrain of the instrumental; software is a sphere of tool-making and programming is governed by conceptions of functional (and generic) utility. Yet where does this leave art? If, in Kantian terms, art is defined by its uselessness (by its lack of any externally grounded necessity) and if, in classical critical theoretical terms, this alienation from function opens up a space of critique, then how can art explore and participate within the instrumental without abandoning its fragile critical autonomy? This paper addresses this question, drawing upon Heideggers conception of technology and Platos conception of poesis to argue that critical software art can not simply oppose the instrumental character of software; instead it must acknowledge its own complicity in the operations of hiding and unreflective functioning that characterize the instrumental once the latter is re-conceived apart from the simplicity of human agency and humanly determinable ends. I examine one of my own software projects as a means of clarifying the dilemmas of critical aesthetic purchase that emerge as a result of this engagement with the instrumental dimension of software

Walking, Drawing and Procedure

What is the relationship between coding practice and contemporary forms of socially engaged art practice? Both can trace links to the conceptual art tradition. Both explore issues of system, instruction, communication and constraint. Both disturb the limits of autonomous art - either by choosing to speak and to think in an alien, technologically inflected language, or by refusing to function in the gallery context and in the service of producing neatly solid and distinct aesthetic phenomena. Although at times the two can correspond closely – within currents, for example, of open source culture and political software art – they tend to preserve an uneasy relation. Despite their affinities, they cannot quite find adequate points of contact. This paper aims to examine this awkward relation, considering key dimensions of commonality and difference, as well as envisaging possibilities for greater collaborative intersection. Fostering exchange involves, at the outset, acknowledging diverse modes of addressing the social – from the literal to the indirect, from the immediate and ephemeral to the diagrammatic and abstract. Then, in a related manner, it involves conceiving new ways of setting these modes at play, of bringing into dialogue code and lived experience. More specifically, this paper examines how forms of code-drawing, which can easily be interpreted in terms of a naïve and conservative return to the terrain of conventional art, can intersect with the diagrams and ephemeral ‘walked’ paths of socially engaged art

Media art: mediality and art generallly

The wide ranging, trans-disciplinary interest in technological media suggests the possibility of a new discipline concerned with the history, implications and practice of mediation. Within this context, the field of media art gains a new sense of coherence and identity. Given the lingering tension between media art and mainstream contemporary art, this may lead the latter to assert its disciplinary autonomy. This paper argues against such a move. Media art is better positioned as an integral strand within contemporary art and, more particularly, as a key space of creative enquiry and practice within a generally conceived contemporary art education.Keywords: media art, medialit

Merge/Multiplex

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 conception. 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 retain a sense of distinct, differentiated identity. The energy of their relation, their potential to suggest new relations, depends upon an interplay of heterogeneous and always contingently determinable component signals

Media Art: Mediality and Art Generally

The wide ranging, trans-disciplinary interest in technological media suggests the possibility of a new discipline concerned with the history, implications and practice of mediation. Within this context, the field of media art gains a new sense of coherence and identity. Given the lingering tension between media art and mainstream contemporary art, this may lead the latter to assert its disciplinary autonomy. This paper argues against such a move. Media art is better positioned as an integral strand within contemporary art and, more particularly, as a key space of creative enquiry and practice within a generally conceived contemporary art education

Instrumental relations: Software as art, art as software

Software art is characterised by a close concern with the culture of software and the medium of programming. This inevitably demands an engagement with the terrain of the instrumental; software is a sphere of tool-making and programming is governed by conceptions of functional (and generic) utility. Yet where does this leave art? If, in Kantian terms, art is defined by its uselessness (by its lack of any externally grounded necessity) and if, in classical critical theoretical terms, this alienation from function opens up a space of critique, then how can art explore and participate within the instrumental without abandoning its fragile critical autonomy? This paper addresses this question, drawing upon Heideggers conception of technology and Platos conception of poesis to argue that critical software art can not simply oppose the instrumental character of software; instead it must acknowledge its own complicity in the operations of hiding and unreflective functioning that characterize the instrumental once the latter is re-conceived apart from the simplicity of human agency and humanly determinable ends. I examine one of my own software projects as a means of clarifying the dilemmas of critical aesthetic purchase that emerge as a result of this engagement with the instrumental dimension of software

Computational drawing: code and invisible operation

Drawing upon my own experience in developing the algorithmic drawing project, Loom, this paper considers the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual dimensions of drawing in computational art. It is concerned particularly to reflect upon the nature of this aesthetic labour, which involves not only programming but also the blind space of procedure