Week One

An Aesthetics of Modularity and Reuse.

In Ernst Gombrich's Art as Ornament, he argues that devices such as the potter's wheel are technological aids to aesthetics, and that the movement in the 19th century towards "true expression" and perception without visual aids (such as with Ruskin), overlook the fact that the implements of creating art--are technologically based. For the paintbrush allows a facility that the finger of the artist does not. For with the potter's wheel even, the ability to shape through speed and motion and physics, centrifugal force is converted to symmetrical clayware.

Now, with the acceptance of photography as an art form, and the surgence in digital practices, many artists are predisposed to an embrace of the technological. Technological art has a historical basis, and in acknowledging human collaboration with technology, we reconcile our past with our future and our present. In the present, whenever we design, we explore issues of technological creation. Want to increase the value of your designs? Acknowledging the similarities between meaning making and technology construction, while still maintaining a critical distance from the ills of technology (except when we are launched, headlong into cultural, technological problems), allows us to appropriate the encroaching digital lifestyle and the machine production of use and meaning.

So, definitively there is an aesthetics of computing. To acknowledge it, is to acknowledge our history as tool-makers and users. But our cultural history is embedded in the economic and technological base, the technological conditions of meaning making. Technology is a constraint upon our artistic production, and it provides a framework for an aesthetics. A technological aesthetics also asks questions of origins and being. In putting computing aesthetics into our artwork and interactive work, we ask questions about the difference between the thought procedures of computers and the thought processes of humans.

In an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation, the android Data is on trial for his utility as a machine and is seeking to be granted the possibility for his transcendence of his mechanics, of his status as a machine. Aesthetics enters into the character of Data, in that in a testimony against his sovereignty, Commander Riker has Data simply take his mechanical limb off of his body, with little effect on the rest of the physiology of Data. Androids do not feel pain. They differ from humans in that they are constructed from mechanical parts, and while they may develop (in fiction) as sentient beings, they do not, grow from a cell (except in the case of nano technology). The complete interchangeability of machines which do not feel pain can also be transposed on to the model of human beings and on to modern medicine, for which hands have been transplanted onto victims of dismemberment.

So Interchangeability--ever since Whitney and his rifles that used parts totally created from similar milling devices, standardized parts--has captured the imagination of humans, concerning their own construction (albeit more complex) and has even directed modern medicine. The question it presents as we increasingly use technology, is "Will we ever know if technology arrived at the same time as humans?" Does nature provide the pattern for technology and why can we reduce an aspect of our humanity to this concept of interchangeability? Is the specific implementation of technology a technological construct, or does nature function like a machine?

The Case of Deconstruction and George Landow's analysis of the Movement.

"Deconstruction" is a literary critical movement starting with the French University revolution of 1968. The practices of structuralism, such as of Levi-Strauss, which involved the attachment of unconscious structures to universal ones, were being superceded by Post-Structural practices. Authors such as Derrida commented on the bias of Western culture towards speech and speech acts, when actually, Derrida argued, speech was really a form of writing or coding.

George Landow's scholarship argues that Derrida and other Post-Structuralists were influenced to prioritize writing because of the computer revolution, even though their texts were not explicit about computing concepts, in the way that other writer's such as William Burroughs and his cut- up technique were explicit. In Burroughs it is obvious, the place of the computer in his metaphors of the human. But what Landow does is argue that Deconstruction was playing with the properties of texts for their misreading, machine reading, and polyvalence, through the tradition of literary analysis done by computer.

Landow's argument remarks on the ubiquity of technology and how it frames what we do, on how we represent ourselves and how a culture's body of knowledge looks in relation to nature and culture, nature and technology. So in some senses, it is impossible to NOT have a technological aesthetics, if one has an aesthetics at all. If a theorist wants to interpret, like Mumford, art in terms of technology, he or she may do so, and may do so as far back as possible.

The Example of Spielberg's AI

If androids and the prospect of artificial intelligence allow us to suggest how modularity and reuse create an aesthetics, then what happens when the social aspects of the institution of AI are established in reality--or in film. Enter the case of Spielberg's film, Artificial Intelligence.

AI has a scene where copies and copies of androids--instances from various molds--are depicted replacing their worn parts. Here technology is anthropomorphized but in an extremely interesting way. Spielberg incorporates questions of gender, class, and vision into technology in this single scene. For an analysis of modularity and reuse in this scene.

Through questions of machine thought, the relationship of machines to medicine and the parts of the body, and through questions of the voice of writing (i.e. is it computer or human or both?), the fundamental principles of copying, modularity and reuse, can be extrapolated to function in modern or contemporary art in the same manner of the paintbrush affecting the quality of written characters and the facility of picture making in previous periods. When we create interactive art, we are, in a long tradition of communications, inscribing technology into the personal and collective voices of our culture.

 

 

Week One