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.
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