Aesthetics in present future: the arts and the technological horizon 9780739173732, 9780739173749, 073917374X

Table of contents :
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Aesthetics as Future
The Virtual Body
Robots That Have Art
Unimodernism, or the Aesthetics of Permanent Present
The Kantian Philosophy of Twitter
Identifying and Interacting
Interlude
Future of Aesthetics
Aesthetics and Kinesthetics in Performance
Artifice, or a New Nature
Aesthetics and Transcoding
Ruins
About the "Anything Goes in Art"
The Changing Canvas of the City
Bibliography
Index
About the Editors
About the Contributors.

Citation preview

Aesthetics in Present Future

Aesthetics in Present Future The Arts and the Technological Horizon Edited by Brunella Antomarini and Adam Berg

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aesthetics in present future : the arts and the technological horizon / Edited by Brunella Antomarini and Adam Berg. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-7373-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-7374-9 (electronic) 1. Aesthetics, Modern—20th century. 2. Aesthetics, Modern—21st century. I. Antomarini, B. (Brunella) II. Berg, Adam, 1962– BH201.A37 2013 701'.17—dc23 2013010021 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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I: Aesthetics as Future 1

The Virtual Body Roberto Diodato

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Robots That Have Art Domenico Parisi

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Unimodernism, or the Aesthetics of Permanent Present Peter Lunenfeld

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The Kantian Philosophy of Twitter Alessandro Lanni Identifying and Interacting: Notes on the Architecture of the Visual Brain Rob Spruijt

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Interlude: Mneem Miltos Manetas

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II: Future of Aesthetics 6

Aesthetics and Kinesthetics in Performance Erith Jaffe-Berg

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Artifice, or a New Nature: Toward a Philosophy of the Automaton Brunella Antomarini

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Aesthetics and Transcoding: De-Accelerating the Photographic Image Adam Berg

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Ruins: Reflections on Aggression and Destruction in Aesthetics Alain J.-J. Cohen

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10 About the “Anything Goes in Art” Teresa Iaria

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163

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Contents

11 The Changing Canvas of the City Ysamur M. Flores-Peña Bibliography Index About the Editors About the Contributors

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189 195 201 203

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Valentino Zeichen and the friends of the Association of Aesthetics Sensibilia for their suggestions. A special thanks to Erith Jaffe-Berg for her help in editing the text, and to Pietro Traversa for his help with the index.

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Introduction

In this anthology, we examine the place and role of aesthetics in light of the current relationship between the arts and new media technologies. Within the creative, academic, and pedagogical spheres, due to the growing role of technology, there is an urgency in re-assigning aesthetics to issues that vary from cognition and design to globalization and skills. Our attempt is to contextualize these issues and offer an alternative platform to aesthetics—one that would address the changing dynamics of art and aesthetics as interrelated. Aesthetics is increasingly implicated in contemporary and future worlds as informing us about the relation of new technologies to memory, knowledge, and image production. Examples range from computer design to Web sites, cinema, theater, photography, architecture, painting, and information media. We focus on how such issues spell out the ways in which an aesthetic program can transcend the contingencies of contexts without overriding our ability to respond to imminent events. The speed at which our and future generations’ technological tools change makes it urgent to comprehend the consequent modifications of our perspectives, and at the same time, every attempt at comprehension must inevitably be hypothetical and flexible, in such a way that it can detect and include at any moment an unpredictable change in orientation, caused by the ongoing technological revolution. Moreover, insofar as technological interfaces alone may obliterate moral responsibility by removing our responses from both transmission and communication, it is necessary to detect a possible emergence of a new sense of responsibility—an aesthetic responsibility. How do we re-assign the role of aesthetic education to the future? How do we approach the cultural production of events and objects or images with a growing sense of multiplicity and yet with an equal universalizing-globalizing force? We have followed the reflective paths of various scholars and artists in this book to find out about these issues and questions. Each has offered both a critique and a proposal to engage with future aesthetics as intertwined both as a future direction and as a source of learning through art and aesthetics. The twelve contributions offered in this book are prefaced by short interviews with the authors, facilitating the reader’s paths into the chapters through a dialogue. The social-cognitive sphere and the aesthetic sphere overlap but are never entirely in congruence. The conception of such an experiential 1

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Introduction

sphere is anchored in a phenomenological perspective that feeds off Edmund Husserl but remains methodologically open-ended. Each of the contributions in this volume offers a version of such a perspective with the intent of situating the socio-cognitive permutations of our times in reference to aesthetic issues. Insofar as postmodernist attempts—of deconstructing concepts such as the sublime, autonomy and appropriation or of engaging aesthetics within the political—to ground aesthetics within the social sphere have failed to address the responsibility inherent to the aesthetic, we suggest a different outlook. One through which the social sphere itself is undergoing aesthetic changes and a transformation into emergent systems, thus allowing our probing to be relieved of many of the assumptions that were perpetuated by postmodern approaches which critiqued modernity and its constructs from a polarized relation with technologies of new media. The fact that information systems and networks no longer enable us to distinguish reality as a sphere removed and isolated from those systems calls into question the role of aesthetics in shaping our experience and knowledge of the realm of art. And on this ground we base our arguments, revolving around two main topics: the aesthetics of future and the future of aesthetics. In the first part the inquiry tackles the issue of understanding the future “aesthetically”: given that a radical aesthetics is constituted, as a way to imagine and produce reality, how are we to orientate ourselves in this production, and distinguish and control the value of its manifestations? As it would be too easy and obsolete to claim to supersede the limits of this systemic feedback between the real and its production (we produce on the basis of what we have produced), we direct our attention to the fact that systems are often finite and mutually inconsistent. Hence, we must turn to the possibility of instability as affordable and plausible, explicated in terms of convergence of multiple open-ended systems; and since we can no longer base aesthetics on the fixity of visual cultural approaches that rely on their opposition to the past, we must turn to the possibility of instability explicated in terms of integration of multiple non-linear systems. In the first part of the book we encounter the topics of the virtual body, robotics, Twitter, neuro-aesthetics and web art in ways that posit a relation to aesthetics from a future rather than past traditions in culture and art. In particular, Roberto Diodato argues in his chapter that in a virtual environment perception immediately fades into reflection, as an image is neither external nor inside consciousness, thus indicating the emergence of a new cognitive condition. The idea of “robots that have art” is for Domenico Parisi not a mere speculation but rather an inevitable consequence of our probing of the meaning of a time when human behavior can no longer be dissociated from computational systems and robotical machines. For Parisi, a theory of behavior as expressed by a robot cannot be described in words or

Introduction

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mathematical symbols but rather exclusively through the rules used to construct the robot. In his words, “If the robot behaves like a human being, the theory incorporated in the robot is a good account of human behavior.” Peter Lunenfeld examines the notion of unimodernism as connected to a Unicode in which modernism and the networked cultures come together, and shape up a new balance between the banal and the sublime, a balance collectively construed by “users, artists and audiences, readers and writers, downloaders and uploaders.” Alessandro Lanni’s reflections on Twitter bring to the fore Kant’s critical constructs as pivotal to our evaluation of how we construe a decentered aesthetics in relation to Twitter, and the role of the “filter” might very well become a seemingly mechanical and not cognitive critique of reason with long reaching effects on subjects and cultural production. In reversal, Lanni shows how a ‘cooperative’ subjectivity may be introduced and enhanced by a “transcendental” virtual space. Rob Spruijt probes neuro-aesthestics and finds hope in future art precisely since aesthetic qualities tend to be located in the very relation between the material work and the response of the mind, or its emotional and motivational processes, in such a way that the work of art becomes an occasion for self-revelation. For Spruijt the phenomenological fulcrum of artworks is to be found in the fact that “aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to embodied cognition” and “is emotional-motivational.” Miltos Manetas’ contribution, which represents a sort of exemplary way of conceiving the new aesthetic challenges due to technological opportunities, relates to his work as an artist who willed to give up the categories of art production in favor of an open-ended network that he announces through his encounter with “mneem.” Manetas explains that the term is produced by a mix of Mneme (“memory” in Greek) and meme, a term coined by Richard Dawkins, to mean a unit of cultural information easily transmitted and continuously re-interpreted. A mneem is a new cognitive subject which, appropriating the human cognition, guides its choices and decisions, and catches it in the technological “Web.” In the second part we focus on the ways in which art produces and transforms reality; specifically, how traditional practices of art, high and low, performative and cinematic, institutionalized and urban, are reciprocating with emergent technologies especially in terms of re-inventing the image of art and its reach outside its traditional perimeters. By entailing new aesthetic possibilities that emerge out of its rapport with new media technologies, art is no longer simply the passive subject of scrutiny and analysis of aesthetics. In other words, art’s ability to reconfigure its relation to the very topos of aesthetics has been transformed by its new alliance with new digital and media means. Thus, future art seems to lose its traditional aesthetic autonomy only to find itself mobilizing a radicalized aesthetics, which no longer deals with an outside reality. There seems

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Introduction

to be no traces left of an ontological substratum ratifying the productions themselves. The arts analyzed in these essays appear to have a common feature: They claim to construe sense in the only possible way in which the new technologies allow—a sense that, through the different techniques, legitimizes itself. This may very well be the Janus face of future aesthetics, being equally amnesic and mnemonic, easily forgotten and thrown into oblivion and recycled, sampled, and revisited. Whether we call these radicalizing techniques transcoding, or automatic cognition, or the filmic reliving of ruins, or the interacting with the artwork through locomotion perception, or urban identification through the networks, or an aesthetic use of the results of the experimental cognitive sciences, we are confronted with a new way to cope with the world in which art is no longer its symptomatic expression or manifestation but rather its instigator. Erith Jaffe-Berg looks into the enactment of kinesthetics in contemporary theater performance as both reflecting and extending our sense of digital presentification. Jaffe-Berg observes the more and more frequent use of simultaneous time frames, allowed by different lighting or spatial location on stage, which emphasizes the exploration into a nonlinear fashion of narrative. On the part of both the authors and the audience, there will be more liberty to choose from which stage location to derive meaning, and how meaning changes even its own definition, being multiple and independent from a singular narrative. Both of these consequences conform to a less hegemonic way of conveying a story, which also accords with a more multicultural ethos in general. Brunella Antomarini extends the reading into the creative matrix of art and suggests a holistic view of art in relation to the figure of the artist, which tends to become a “constructor,” that is, actually only an aspect or part of the real agent of art, which is the complex machinic apparatus. Every singular human constructor is a kind of tool serving the purpose of editing and animating “the real agent of construction, a kind of superorganism, made of natural and technical elements.” Seen from such a vantage point then we may look at future art as the emergence of autopoietic “artifacts,” or “humans” as apparent automata, which won’t need to affirm any particular aesthetic perspective, nor rely on the traditional culture/nature opposition. Adam Berg looks at “transcoding” as the emergence of a new “universal algorithm” (following Stephen Wolfram) and shows how it affects the photographic image in particular and art in general. Key epistemological notions such as correspondence, evidence and representation are subverted into non-hierarchical nexi of transcoded images. And as Berg observes, “in more than one respect, contemporary technological extensions/mediations are presenting us with ‘evidence’ that poses less the question of its corresponding objects but instead its correspondence in perception.”

Introduction

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Alain J. J. Cohen’s essay is to draw our attention to the aesthetics of ruins in relation to aggression and destruction in art, and specifically in cinema, that goes beyond the allegorical significance of those experiences and rather posits the phenomenon of cultural and historical revisitation as a kind of present/future lived-memory theater. The prevalence of ruins becomes conduits or unifying platforms that weave historical facts and narrative fragments into an ongoing cinematic unfolding, in which the new technologies of film restoration allow us to enjoy the past as a presence. Teresa Iaria’s argument against art’s systematization is ironically denouncing not just of art’s reduction to a single stabilized system, but also of the endless manipulation and inclusion of multiple systems of art for its own unfolding. Gazing beyond the scope of the present anxiety regarding interdisciplinarity in art, Iaria suggests that the role of the artist is no longer to amend fragments or to connect objects and images of experience, but rather to identify their respective systemic or disciplinary signs, drawing our attention to such multiplicity. Ysamur M. Flores-Peña explores urban aesthetics and its relation to education through the unpacking of the decaying history of a place, an urban community, retrievable in what he calls Locus Serenus. In the age of social networks it is Locus Serenus that re-encompasses both actual and virtual cultural signs and memories and identities. As Flores-Peña observes, “many urban gangs repurpose the history by creating a metahistory within the confines of an apparent historical desert.” It is time more than space then that provides, through the social networks, an urban identity, its meaning, its historicity, the force to resist metropolitan fragmentation and dispersion. It is within the framework of aesthetics and its future concomitants that we have imagined a discussion on the arts within the technological horizon as equally prevailing on a global scale and yet also marked by the specificity of places. And as such, the international sites for the writers, within the realm of their practices and analyses, reflect on specific community and regional concerns, but the echoing issues reflect the fact that, while regionally specific, these concerns are not closed off to one and other. It is our hope that this book will broaden not only the critical discourse but also the dialogue between the arts and its imaginary interactions and projections on future aesthetics and its role in shaping the future. Brunella Antomarini and Adam Berg Los Angeles and Rome, January 2013

I

Aesthetics as Future

ONE The Virtual Body Roberto Diodato

DIALOGUE Q. Can you explain the notion of the “body-image” and how it differs from the traditionally perceived image? Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis, we can say that any consciousness of image is consciousness in its nonrealizing function, which has its noematic correlative in the imaginary. Therefore the “image” is clearly ontologically distinguished from “perception.” In reversal, in the virtual environment, the sense of “having an image,” as distinguished from “having a perception” is not self-evident, as it not clear what can be called an image: the virtual body-image, so far as it is intentionally constituted, is structurally ambiguous. In a virtual environment, it is not true that what is conventionally called the image is immediately given as such to reflection, but what happens is that perception and imagination rather mysteriously fade into one another, because the percept, faced as perceptual intention, is not properly external, it is neither in consciousness nor in the world; it is external-internal, it is itself an image, which is not a thing-image of the world (a painting, a photograph, a cinematic image, a digital image like TV images), but a body-image, constituting itself in the very interaction.

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Q. Given that human perception of space, as you state, is unhomogeneous, how does the new “virtual body” alter our relation to art, say Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, and the possibility of its inception? Differently from the traditional spectator of the pictorial or filmic device, what is given to the subject-spectator-actor as induced by any virtual device, is an incentive of motion rather than its suspension; it is a supercommitment of kinesthetic functions, a feeling of inclusion within the scene and in relationship with the characters involved, a feeling intertwined with a feeling of distinction, because the scene would not exist without his/her action. The voyeuristic drive is replaced by a drive of insertion, of limitless intervention, of omnipotence inhibited only by the limits of the program run. Thus the metapsychological regime of immersion, the processes of identification, of imaginary constitution and distinction of the self, change radically. We should think of aesthetic fruition as deprived of that distance, which has been a condition of possibility of an artistically relevant form; we should try to think of the function rather in the form of a backwash; that is, of the interpenetration of the body of the user into the body of the work and vice versa the work into the body, or the imaginary. This implies an emphasis on the pathic and panic dimension of the relationship: being one with the work, which undergoes the effect of my presence and modifies, through the change caused by that undergoing, my feeling. Q. What are the possible consequences of what you term “interactive metaphysics” for art? Saturation seems to be typical of the virtual environment: a filling effect, a presence effect, as if there were no absence and no distance: the spectator-actor doesn’t present himself/herself as being in a state of lack (virtual only in the sense of potential): there is no effect of suspension of reality, but rather a presence of another reality, its very enhancement, rather than a protection from the real. What is cut off is the regression and suspension of reality, and after all the possibility—always plural—of any identification with the represented object. This is especially true in the narrative arts, through the represented characters: the immersion in them is made too strong to allow any projection or identification: the virtual spectator cannot identify with the subject of his/her vision-action. Now, this cut of a primary identification implies a cut of processes of secondary identification, which especially deal with the different temporality of the virtual.

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Q. From an aesthetic vantage point does the virtual body seem to shift perception from mere illusion to interactivity? On one hand, virtual simulation, although it may deal with ludic or commercial aspects, gives the virtual artwork the possibility to disconnect from reproduction as simulation of “real” experience, or experience of “reality.” Artistic production implies accomplishment of the imaginary, which is always “unreality” and implies the openness of that split in existence that digital technologies allow. On the other hand, we are confronted with a deep novelty, as the virtual artwork is not reproductive nor reproducible: being interactive, it embodies in a new way the user’s action, because the user’s action is the very being of the artwork, its ontological structure. This notion of interactivity does not imply a subtraction but an enhancement of unrepeatability and uniqueness of the artwork (which is no more an “object” or an “event,” but rather an “object-event”) and makes the notion of authenticity more complex. Actually, the specific virtuality of the virtual body stresses the fact, implied in its very definition, that the digital interactive body-image never turns itself into an actuality in its algorithmic matrix; the virtual, contrary to the potential, configures itself as a problematic complex, a net of tendencies which requires a process of actualization. Q. Can we entirely reduce aesthetics to noesis through virtual environment and eliminate the metacognitive modality of aesthetic experience? Absolutely not; the question here is rather the overcoming or at least the questioning of the distinction between aesthetic and noetic, because the virtual body-image is both aesthetic and noetic: an emotional noesis, a thinking aisthesis. Q. Traditionally, the concept of event or occurrence in art was linked to singularity. How does that change in relation to virtual environment? Certainly the ontology of this strange object-event, and of its relationship to space-time, is to be tackled. (What are the conditions of identity for a virtual body? What are its limits? In which sense does it have borders?) Also, its specific temporality and its connection to human and computer memories are arguable dimensions that would deserve an analysis, as they directly affect an ontology of the virtual body, the difference between the virtual and the possible, and the human body–virtual body relationship. But if the specific character of the virtual is, as we have said, to be an intermediate entity between object and event, between thing and image, then virtual bodies represent a hybrid, interactive world, which can be visualized as a synthetic image, an immersive hybrid engaging the corporeality of the user and merging with the virtual

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body’s image; this hybridation, between body of the spectator-actor and the virtual space in which it is immersed, is difficult to define in its singularity. It is a world in which the relationship is prior to substance, a world in which the ontology of states of things is not tenable: interactivity does not properly mean (only) interaction, or action between two given substances, but intervention or modification of the matrix allowing the virtual work to exist, it has also an impact in the aesthetic-noetic dynamics of the technologically hybridated body of the user. This “fundamental” aspect of the interaction has introduced both in the work and in its fruition an element of imponderability, unpredictability, and potential risk (both for the aesthetic success of the work and its possible effects on the user), in such a way that the digital, or numeric, that is “programmatic” essence of the work introduce indeterminacy. Q. There seems to be a new kind of ontological implication to aesthetics as result of “virtual body.” Specifically it is connected to internal and external, input and output, that defines a new dimension: “the strange place where the border becomes territory.” Has such a novel ontological dimension become a constant or does it remain contingent on its technological enaction? This is a big issue. My answer is tentative: I think that the ontology of the virtual body reveals how the fundamental category is the relationship (not the relation between given polarities but rather what constitutes any polarity), even more than substance, but I could not say whether this holds good for all entities in the world. In my opinion we can show how this can be seen in the analysis of other entities: the ones studied by quantum field theory, or what we call “person,” or what we call “artwork,” or divine Trinity (which I think offers an ultimate model of comprehension of reality). *** In our age of new-digital technologies, novel relations between humans and technology emerge and consequently marginalize the role of humans. The new-digital technologies are in fact “no longer extensions or implants . . . but extroflections of the basic human functions that gradually tend to become autonomous and self-operating.” 1 Therefore the newdigital technologies, that are based on numerical outputs, lead us out of the dual paradigm that has dominated the reflections on technique: the technique as a means for compensating the adaptive deficiencies typically human. Such theses, as classically expounded by Arnold Gehlen 2 and many others purport technology as a “natural prosthesis,” as originally connected to “human nature,” in itself hybridized with the artificial as the well-known thesis by André Leroi-Gourhan. 3 New-digital technologies go beyond the human, and rather place the human in a need to

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reconfigure herself or himself through them and substantially into them, as if around a center of gravity equally shifting and multiple. With reference to such shift, Jean Baudrillard 4 has introduced the concept of “videosphere” as the overall meaning of the new-digital technologies, hypermedia, and computer systems. Such a concept is all together rather simplistic and potentially misleading, since the new-digital technologies do not only evolve around television culture and technology but rather and most importantly transform processes of analysis and synthesis of and on the notion of appearance. In other words, the message is clear: new-digital technologies, rather than being instruments or explanations of the “human nature,” seem to constitute on their own a new tendency of autonomous flows; perhaps the first expression of a previously hidden aspect of the physis, involving in their processes—through structuring and unstructuring—human cognition with its ways of perception, emotions and desires, social exchanges, and the whole body-mind complex. These technological tendencies result in their own increasing autonomy and thus make the human constituents eccentric to them. And in new both crucial and critical ways such tendencies do not submit themselves, as traditionally thought of technology, to the power of will and plan, as laid by human constitution. We are forced then to rethink the synthesis physis-techne in a new way, as the place of ethos, of the human living and not as a lineal extension of human volitions as tools. In order to understand the new-digital technologies and what they brought forth as a novel ontological perspective of “telematics,” we need to focus not only on new-media technologies within their own technical capacity, but most importantly examine the concepts of virtual and virtual body as involving human elements. On the one hand, virtual and virtual body are in general the conceptual basis for new information and digital technologies; and on the other hand, they function also as the basis of artistic productions. The artistic productions are thus equally infused with technological and virtual elements which are neither immediately medial nor have a specific communicative purpose. Instead, they produce the sense that the appearance-communication can compete with any artistic production as traditionally or classically construed in respect to human cognition and intentionality. By “virtual body” I mean first of all a digital interactive image, the phenomenalizing in the interaction with a user of an algorithm in binary format, a writing operation that in its sensible appearance hides and exposes at the same time the project rendered in the computational operations that constitute it. 5 Apparition of a grammar, such an image-language implies a characteristic spectrality affecting the visible-invisible relationship and structures the modalities of the use. From this point of view the digital image which can be multisensory, is not simply an image-of, not only mimesis of an identifiable or not, thing or image, and so it does not have a simulated essence. On the other hand, it is not even an

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icon or an original image; it is rather a genetic relational form belonging to a multiple rendering system. The digital image is not, we could say, exactly an “image,” but rather a body-image, because it is made up of ordered sequences of binary units, or otherwise character strings developing on different levels of a syntax which builds the coincidence of these strings and the sensible appearances, at present mainly sound or visual, but generally perceptible. Now we know that in the discrete sequences continuous undulatory phenomena are also rendered so, a thin body of a noncontinuous world, a discrete world of data points that show themselves as fluidity and density and saturate the perception, informationally or in formal terms programming language, the virtual body is for sure an electronic body, and so (to use another metaphor), an atomic aggregate, but the digitalization process makes it peculiarly light: a complex of sometimes remarkable quantities of extraordinarily fast transmittable data (the highest speed permitted by the physical limits) it can assume various incarnations, both structurally identical and phenomenally different as hybrid entity, body-image, and its appearance, its existing as image is essentially interactive. This is a delicate point to which we will have to return, but at least it allows us to exclude from the notion of virtual body those simply photographic or television digital images, which permit a passive action that does not affect the properties of their appearing and, most of all, on a different degree of the meaning of virtual body, do not permit a retroactive interaction on the structure of the computer memory, in other words an incision on the matrix. The number of the different degrees of interactive operativity is obviously very large, and relatively the meaning of the notion of “virtual body.” In detail we will approach the strong notion of virtual body that concerns us here for the novelty of its ontological statute. We will now approach the specific notion of “virtual body” clarifying preliminarily the qualities of the experience of virtual; we will then define the concept of “virtual” and eventually the concept of “virtual reality.” First of all, the experience of virtual reality is multimedial and interactive. Multimediality indicates a peculiar representational richness of a mediated environment, that can be conceived as made up of two factors: wideness (quantity: number of senses which are simultaneously involved) and deepness (quality of perceptions, or sensory information); interactivity designates “how much the users interact in the modification of the form and the contents of a mediated environment.” 6 There are then different levels of multimediality and interactivity, and as these levels get higher, the virtual-reality experience becomes more and more immersive. We can then claim, with Oliver Grau, “virtual realities . . . are in essence immersive,” 7 but at the same time we have to consider the paradoxicality of this statement, since physical and mental immersivity implying the suspension of disbelief, together with the identification of the body with the medium does not coincide with the simula-

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tion, and, in some ways, it is in opposition to it. In other words, I think that “virtual reality,” because it is immersive, should not and must not be confused with a tendentially perfect simulation of reality, with a simulation that cancels similarity transforming it in identity (and so that cancels itself as such) or with a teleologically definitive transparency of the medium: immersivity can happen, and happens, but as the quality of an experience that cannot be confused with the one that we call “real.” To justify this position, the same question can be examined from a geneticconstitutive point of view: Generation of “virtual reality” means generation of the possibility of experiencing an environment (characterized as “environment” by a set of “virtual bodies” which are not bodies belonging to the environment or in the environment but bodies coinciding with it) which is able to produce perceptive experiences in the user. By “virtual-reality generator” we can then mean a machine that is able to make the user experience such an environment, to render the environment in a situation. So a virtual-reality generator could be conceived as a generator of possible sensory perceptions, and precisely as a generator of sensory perceptions (visual, auditive, tactile, olfactory, and so on) which are able to simulate an environment-situation that we could prephilosophically and with sufficient accuracy define as “real”: In other words, a virtualreality generator should simulate that “perceptive faith” that seems to be presupposed in our daily dealing with the world. But I believe I have just given a restrictive and after all not very interesting definition of environment and, relatively, of virtual body, because it tends to equalize virtual reality and simulated reality, considering virtual as a part of simulation or of a mimetic project for the following reasons: an environment that we define as virtual because of its capability to simulate a real situation, turns out to be accurate inasmuch as it is able to answer the desired way to each possible action of the user, its accuracy then does not only depend on the experiences that users actually perform, but also on the ones they could perform. The evaluation of the “sufficiency” of this accuracy is a problem: can a reality with no differences be simulated? Can a “perfect illusion” be built? Supposing the user is able to make free choices, in the sense of liberty of indifference, simulation is impossible, because such choices are not computable. If we stick to other metaphysical hypotheses, supposing, for simplicity, that choices are the result of an endless causal series (where the idea of series itself is reductive and inadequate), the simulation of reality will be efficient the more the elaborator is able to calculate the possible actions and reactions of the user, and consequently to pre-build potential interactions among the virtual environment-bodies. So the more such computation tends to infinity and relatively such algorithm is phenomenalizable, the more virtuality simulates reality. From this point of view, the virtual environment is an imperfect Spinozian machine, a set of relationships that constitutes a tendential coincidence of liberty and necessity. Such coincidence could be possible only in an es-

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sentially uncomputable, endless, causal network. So, the virtual environment tends to produce the experience of a pervasive and persuasive immersion, but at the same time such an experience is relatively aware of its own particular ontological statute: it appears as a tendential simulation, and not as a perfect reproduction, and in my opinion it is actually this limit, void, lack, that opens the artistically relevant possibilities of the virtualization of imagination. Its particular interactivity is an evident characteristic of the virtual body, which defines it among the other types of digital images: the virtual body is an entity that phenomenalizes itself in the interaction. In some ways, interactivity is something the virtual body has in common with any other body, but in some other ways it is a peculiar condition. To understand such peculiarity, and so to approach an ontology of virtual, we must think over the concept of virtual and over the difference between virtual and possible. As a matter of fact, in a general sense virtual is one of the states of reality, and not its opposite. Nevertheless, the concept of virtual can be better defined moving from the concept of “possible”: while possible is conceivable as a constituted entity waiting to be carried into effect, virtual configures itself as a problematic complex, a junction of tendencies imposing an actualization process. From this point of view, obviously the virtual-actual process does not correspond to the realization process of possible, if this is conceived as simple giving matter to a pre-existing form, and in this sense as the constitution of a substance, even though dynamic. Anyway, the opposition with the idea (though a little trivialized) of possible, helps to clear up the interactive quality of virtual: since the virtual environment develops itself in the interaction with the user, virtual means a dynamic configuration of forces with an intrinsic tendency to actualize themselves in forms which are not totally preconstituted. 8 The virtual environment we are speaking of, together with all its perceivable qualities (the set of the colors, of the sounds, of tactile densities, and so on), to say, the environment in which I have the physical sensation of being immersed, is nothing but the actualizing of the content of a digital memory, the mise-en-scene of a binary-system elaborated algorithm. This leads us to consider the relationship between aesthesis and noesis. We are actually facing the possibility of a reduction of aesthesis (as sensory perception) in computational terms, though this does not imply a reduction of the secondary qualities to the primary ones, and not even a possible reduction of the world to a number. We are speaking of an original and reversible solidarity between aesthesis and noesis, which expresses itself in an operative space of this sort: at one end there is a digital description in a computer memory, and at the other end a body outfitted with technological prosthesis, with nonorganic extensions of the senses: The body of the user of a virtual environment is a complex structure, a subject-object coming out of a technological project; it is a nearly-

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cyborg body, similar to the ones that were pondered and experimented by several artists, a body rendering itself in a phantomatic and eminently active entity. There is a lively discussion concerning these themes among the theoricians of virtual reality: in a certain sense, you can get to know a virtual environment only sensorially by an eminently bodily gaze, but at the same time a virtual environment is, as we said, a mathematization of space, and its images are actualizations of algorithms. It is a paradoxical situation: the identity, the “self” of the user is at the same time de-corporized and ipersensibilized: to meet a “thin” body, you have to be outfitted with a “heavy” body; the abilities of the organic body must then be technologically increased. But, in my opinion, it is actually this heaviness of the disembodiment that does not let us reduce the perspective of the virtual vision to a subjective shot directed by ourselves, and together, once again, immersivity to simulation: the human body–virtual body relationship does not restrain corporeity giving rise to a disembodied mind-gaze which is able to experience mental products that appear sensible only through technological prosthesis. On the contrary, the virtual environments with their “heavy” bodies interrelating with “thin” bodies tend to exalt the difference and the awareness of the difference from the usual body-environment relationships. The user is then conscious of perceiving an imaginary space; he does not have the sensation of experiencing a dematerialized reality. The user experiences a reality felt as “other,” different, and some way similar to a product of the imagination. The possibility of manipulating one’s own perspective making it become a place of experience, matches the possibility of learning by immersion until consenting, also here on different levels, to the appropriation of points of view belonging to other users. It implies radically and generally the crisis of the stability of the abilities of one’s own body, and their redefinition through the relationships among technological prosthesis and virtual bodies. This way, at least an outlook on the conceptualization of an all-changing incarnation of self is provoked, which can be affected by the evolution of technology and of the programming languages: the rethinking of the figure of self as a hallmark of its movements, of its residual integrity as medium of its transformations, of its possible borders in the passages of actions that constitute the virtual space. This leads us to study even more in detail the ontological nature of virtual, with Philippe Quéau reminding us that “the techniques of virtual representation are essentially numerical. Differently from the techniques that are mainly analogical, they do not participate directly in reality,” 9 they take part in it indirectly through the digitalization process, which is circularly made possible by those techniques. So the virtual bodies must not be understood as representations of reality, but as realities that are built in a way that is essentially different from the way the others are, since they are constituted by the circular participation of the living body

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with the world. Thanks to the perception-vision, the world goes through the body and becomes an act, a movement of the body, which might be mediated by instruments of analogical reproduction, and so an image. Virtual bodies are rather “artificial windows giving access to an intermediary world.” Now, in what sense is a “body” a window, meaning by this an internal-external passageway? It may be that the metaphor of the window can work if understood in a nontrivial way: it is not about passing through Alberti’s window, for the virtual environment is not (is not only, and is not essentially) a simulated reproduction of reality. The virtual body is rather an environment-window, a sui generis place where the internal-external relationship changes according to the different standards, acquiring a relevant power. I will soon come back to the question from an ontological point of view, for the moment let us take a famous quotation by Kandinsky: “Each phenomenon can be lived in two different ways. We cannot choose these ways, for they depend on the phenomena—they are derived from the nature of phenomena, from two of their properties: Internal-External.” 10 As we know, this is true for our own body, but also for everything that appears to us about the way our body shows itself: a phenomenon can be lived, some way, from a certain distance, it can be perceived as other, it can be world, but the same phenomenon can differently be part of our life, it can engrave itself in it, accomplish itself as its pathos and show in this way, in visibility, its invisibility. All this corresponds to common experiences, which are just as selective as ordinary: something we perceive might engrave itself in memory and affectivity, it might become part of that primary and indemonstrable inside and might go back to the light of the common world through different means. Something else, the mass of the perceived phenomena, at least consciously, might not. But Kandinsky did not only claim that the phenomenon could be lived in two different ways, internal and external, but that this can happen because external or internal are properties of the phenomenon, of the same phenomenon: since being together internal and external is part of its nature, the phenomenon can be lived as world or as pathos. Now, I do not know if this position can be held with what we generally call “reality,” but it works well for virtual bodies: in a virtual body-environment, in which space itself is the result of an interaction, the world does not happen as if it was standing back or taking some distance. It happens in the way of a sense-feeling of the immersion, and the body, since it is perceived as other, realizes the sense of its reality, of its effectuality as a pathic and imaginary incision, as a production of emotion and desire, to the point where the sensation of reality transmitted by the virtual environment depends mainly on how efficiently the emotions are provoked in the user. From this point of view “virtual reality can provide its own, self-authenticating experience,” but exactly as reality, as something different from the user, as an environment in which it can interact, as bodies it can manipulate. So the virtual body-environment acts as an

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intermediary not only as mediacy between the computer model and the sensory image, but primarily between internal and external, the strange place where the border becomes territory, of which the ontological structure must quickly be articulated. As we know, one of the most discussed questions in contemporary ontology is the distinction between thing and event, and relatively the distinction between concrete and abstract. Now, in a virtual environment, what the user perceives as a thing is actually an event, the temporary actualization of something virtual existing only, in its actuality, as an interactive relation function. This leads us to think over the necessity of considering in an articulated way the concept of relation, and over the notions of thing and event as relational bonds, without this implying a drift, because the virtual has an actuality of its own, even beyond interaction (it is real exactly because it is virtual). What we have to do is to articulate, at least briefly, the question of the object-event relationship, in order to point out a typical ontological mark of the virtual body as it is here defined. Such a relationship has been mainly conceived (if we decide, in order to ease our work, to overlook dialectic or neo-idealistic positions) as a form of relationship with two values: the event is an object (or more than one object) that changes. An ontology that admits events, often conceives them as changes of an object, thing or substance provided with some permanence; so it conceptualizes the event as relative to such becoming, even when the becoming object is not clearly identifiable. All in all, it is a conveyance of Aristotle’s ontology, which conceives substance, with its intrinsic dynamism, as a main category. If we start from this assumption, we will have to face the question of the symmetry of event and object, and of the possible conceptual dependence of the category of event on the one of object, even if we conclude that the categories are not conceivable separately. Now, the virtual body, even though not reconductable to a representation, does not exist as body if not in interactivity, it is an interaction, an object-event: an action (relation of interactivity) which is a body (virtual body) because it owns the characteristics we usually ascribe to bodies. As time goes by, the virtual body, if certain conditions concerning its interactive nature are given, persists to mutations of position, size, shape, color, but also to certain conditions that concern its interactive nature. Virtual bodies are then (like, perhaps, bodies simpliciter) (relatively) monotonous events, but only if certain conditions are given. Pondering such conditions in the field we are interested in brings to transform questions like “do things like changes exist?” into questions such as “what are the conditions of possibility of changes which are things?” and so we are brought to consider the typicality of the virtual body. (Leaving out for the moment the question about the ontological difference between the virtual bodies and the so-called real bodies). In the case of a virtual body, the event is something unrepeatable, a concrete but thin individual (meaning by this an integrated system), con-

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stituted by the interaction of a human body (so of a body-mind complex) outfitted with technological prosthesis, with an electronic elaborator, implemented by an algorithm (in turn rendered in a programming language). Does this concrete but thin individual occupy exclusively one place? If so, what place? Several parts of my technological prosthesis, several sensitive surfaces of my body, a certain part of my brain, a computer memory? In any case, it is a body which allows other bodies in its place, it allows, for instance, my body to pass through it, and if a virtual environment is a virtual body which is qualifiable as a structured surfable set of virtual bodies, then a virtual body can contain virtual bodies in its own body, like shadows, rays, angels, phantoms. . . . Now, a virtual body occupies, supposing these words have an intuitive sense, a certain portion of the space-time, but not in an exclusive way, because the virtual body happens in the space-time of a non-virtual body; moreover it multiplies its temporal form: what is its time? Of course it happens at the moment of the interaction, but among its conditions of possibility, or better, in its being a real body, there is the fact of being previously written or engraved on a material base, in a memory. So a virtual body is and is not itself in place and time, since its eventualization depends on the interaction with the user: can we now claim that reality is interactive in the same way? About this question, David Deutsch writes: What may not be so obvious is that our “direct” experience of the world through our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we even experience the signals in our nerves directly—we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them. 11

What Deutsch affirms is nothing but another form of trascendentalization of the empiric: what psychophysically affects our “direct” experience of reality, by this meaning the constitution of a fully sensed environment. Facing this situation would obviously imply to state a theory of knowledge and an ontology. Here we only want to point out that the virtual body seems to have at least one quality which is different from the ones of the bodies we usually call (on a common sense level and with the languages of theories) real. I would say that reality is not interactive the same way as virtual reality, and that “real” bodies are not events the same way as virtual bodies, since the virtual body avoids the dichotomy external-internal in a much clearer way compared to the so-called real bodies. Because of its discrete and interactive nature, the body coincides with its story, it is a process, but not only a sum of numerically different phases, for the weft of the body depends on the interaction. It takes place

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as an action making sense for a subject and from such interaction it acquires identity. But it is a revelative identity, and consequently fluctuating since it is dependent. Certainly any body, if perceived by my body, is in a situation of interaction; but it seems that being an object, and being an external object, it has the proper characteristic of not being able to be amended. This means that I cannot, through a simple act of volition, make an object not be so and so, make it not be what it is: the external world would then be the world of the unamendables, to which all perceivable objects can belong (those in which we are now interested), but also the nonperceivable ones. From a theoretical point of view, the situation is different for a virtual body: even supposing that that it is possible to separate a “simple volition” from a movement or a perception, considering that it will be possible, through sophisticated prosthesis, to connect virtual bodies directly to the seats of nerve impulses, nothing will forbid to amend a virtual body through a simple act of volition. Once this is said, we have to ask ourselves if such an act is possible in its specificity only within the noninfinite conditions previewed by the matrix, or if it is possible to implement algorithms permitting a retroaction on the matrix, that is to say a type of very strong interactivity, and if so, in what sense: a program that learns, modifies, and develops in its relationship with the user. Given the interactive nature of the virtual, I do not see the theoretical impossibility of it happening, and so I do not see the impossibility of producing a kind of intersubjective communication mediated by the computer memory which would become, starting from a programmed base, a memory of experiences. If we ignore this possible development of the problem, still we have to consider that if the unamendability is a characteristic that is necessary to objects belonging to the external world, then the virtual body does not belong to it. On the other hand, the virtual body does not belong to the internal world: the object-event which it is, is not something I have imagined or dreamed of, it is an environment which is surfable, by me or by other users, produced by a technology, and of such an environment I preserve the awareness of the difference from what I usually call “reality” (of which, as we have seen, a perfect simulation is not possible). Finally, I would say that the virtual body is neither internal nor external; it is, if you wish, external-internal, considering that synthesis is not a sum, but another thing, a proof of the ontological novelty of the virtual body. This leads to consider it as an object-event, which can be interpreted, ontologically and with the related consequences, as a strange, relatively monotonous event allowing other bodies in its spacetime, or as an object-event protracting itself in time according to a fourdimensionalistic conception, or as (in a partially Spinozian way, though this supposes that time is an entity of reason and that the relationships among objects-events—not between objects and events—are one form of immanent causality) a succession of entities-instants. This last position is interesting, for in accordance with it, the permanence of the object in

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dynamism is a cognitive illusion. This induces to suppose that virtual bodies can be conceived as discrete not only in space, but also discrete in time, as temporal segments which are numerically different, and that their diachronic identity is potentially discontinuous. The virtual body, in its appearance, namely, as virtual, sums up its story, the history of its phenomenalizing through a series of relationships. These relationships constitute a virtual environment, that includes a human body endowed with certain prosthesis. The virtual body-image is an ontological hybrid, a thing of the world that is jointly natural and artificial, a strange object-event which fits rightly in space opened by the famous, powerful, and paradigmatic distinction made by Aristotle’s Physics, when he says that of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes. “By nature” the animals and their parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water)—for we say that these and the like exist “by nature.” All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are not constituted by nature. Each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration). On the other hand, a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations i.e. in so far as they are products of art-have no innate impulse to change. But in so far as they happen to be composed of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse. 12

The virtual body entails a digital appearance that prevails only in the interaction, is certainly artificial, produced by technique, and also has, or rather it is, an “innate” tendency, that is independent in its “natural” components but contingent on its own “nature,” to change, and for structurally being an event. In other words, we encounter a hybrid artificialnatural, a quasi-organic system of “living”—what we can conceive in the language of physics as a “dissipative system.” NOTES 1. Mario Costa, Dimenticare l’arte (Milano: F. Angeli, 2005), 44–45. 2. Arnold Gehlen, L’uomo nell’era della tecnica (Milano: Sugar, 1967), 10–11. 3. André Leroi-Gourhan, Il gesto e la parola (Torino: Einaudi, 1977), 283–84. 4. Jean Baudrillard, Videosfera e soggetto frattale, in Videoculture di fine secolo, L. Anceschi, ed. (Napoli: Liguori, 1989), 30. 5. For further reading please see Roberto Diodato, Aesthetics of the Virtual (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). 6. Jonathan Steuer, “Definire la realtà virtuale: le dimensioni che determinano la telepresenza,” in La comunicazione virtuale. Dal computer alle reti telematiche: nuova forme di interazione sociale, C. Galimberti and G. Riva, eds. (Milano: Guerini and Associates, 1997), 75. 7. Jonathan Steuer, “Definire la realtà virtuale,” 75. 8. See Pierre Levy, Il virtuale (Milano: Cortina, 1997), 130.

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9. Philippe Quéau, “Les vois virtuelles du savoir,” in Costruzione e appropriazione del sapere nei nuovi scenari tecnologici, A. Piromalla Gambardella, ed. (Napoli: CUEN, 1998), 19. 10. Wassilij Kandinskij, Punto-Linea-Superficie (Milano: Adelphi, 1968), 7. 11. David Deutsch, La trama della realtà (Torino: Einaudi, 1997), 110. 12. Aristotle, Fisica Libro 11 (192b8) (acura di R. Radice, testo greco a fronte, Bompiani, Milano, 2011), 181–82.

TWO Robots That Have Art Domenico Parisi

DIALOGUE Q. Given the evasive nature of art, why should a robot—a mechanical device— help to analyze it better? Robots as scientific tools are useful because they make it possible to understand “evasive” phenomena in precise terms. A robot is a theory of behavior that is not expressed in words or mathematical symbols but is expressed by using a theory as a blueprint to construct the robot. If the robot behaves like a human being, the theory incorporated in the robot is a good account of human behavior. And it is not an “evasive” account because we can always open the robot and examine what happens inside the robot. However, robots can be “toys” which do not tell us much about human behavior and the human mind and, to avoid constructing “toy robots,” one and the same robot should be able to reproduce as many different empirical phenomena as possible concerning human behavior and the human mind. Art is one of the most important manifestations of the human mind. Therefore, in order to really tell us what the human mind is, robots should have art. Q. Who’s the robot: an audience? An experiencing subject? Or a statistical, hypothetical viewer? Are you thinking of an actual robot or a hypothetical one? To understand what is art by constructing robots, we must construct both robots that create works of art (robotic artists) and robots that expose themselves to works of art (robotic publics, robotic audiences). Ro25

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bots are physical entities, which can be either physically realized or simulated in a computer. We can learn about the human mind from both physically realized and simulated robots. Q. The very notion of simulation implies that we know something from which we infer something else (that we do not know). What do you consider “known” in art and what do you consider “unknown”? What is “known” about art is that some people use their (precious) time to produce acoustic, visual, and linguistic artifacts with no practical value and other people use their time to go to concerts and art exhibitions and to read poems and novels. Can we construct robots which, spontaneously and not because they have been programmed by us to do so, produce artifacts without practical value and expose them to these artifacts? All human behavior ultimately has adaptive value—that is, it leads to an increase in the individual’s survival and reproductive chances. What is the adaptive value of art? Our robots should help us to answer this question. Q. When referring to robots that “have motivation” do you mean that they possess or manifest intentional stance, a cognitive volition? Or rather, that they simulate the complexity of multiple parameters of choice, which cohere in the robot’s motivation as analogous to a neural network that is dynamic and emergent? Robots are useful scientific tools because they allow us to “operationalize” the meaning of the words we use, that is, to translate these words into things which we observe, count, and measure. A robot can be said to have motivations if the robot does different things that lead to an increase in its survival and reproductive chances and, since the robot generally cannot do more than one thing at a time, the robot’s brain must “decide” which motivation to try to satisfy at any given time. All animals—even the small worm C. elegans which has a “brain” of only 300 neurons—have motivations, and they must “decide” which motivation to try to satisfy with their behavior at any given time. But, in addition, human beings have a mental life in the sense that, unlike the brain of nonhuman animals, their brain is able to generate its own sensory stimuli, both linguistic (talking to oneself) and nonlinguistic (remembering, imagining). And human beings may self-generate sensory stimuli and respond to these self-generated sensory stimuli when choosing which motivation to try to satisfy with their behavior at any given time.

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Q. Since art as a concept and as an experience is categorically dynamic and openended, can it be regulated by the robot’s system as such? Everything is categorically dynamic and open-ended, except mathematical entities. Q. To what extent is the robot’s simulation of emotion different from its expression? Does an “emotional circuit” actually stand for human emotion, or is it just metaphorically intended? An emotional circuit is not metaphorically intended because nothing in robotics can be metaphorically intended. An emotional circuit is a piece of the robot’s brain (an artificial neural network made up of neurons connected by synapses) which has specific characteristics with respect to other, more cognitive, neural circuits (for example, it is based on neuromodulation rather than on neurotransmission) and whose function is to make the motivational decisions of the organism more correct, rapid, and adaptive. For example, it can be shown that a robot with an emotional circuit in its brain is better able to shift from looking for food to escaping from a predator or to approaching a robot of the opposite sex when the predator or the robot of the opposite sex appears, compared to a robot whose brain does not have the emotional circuit. The adaptive nature of art, the reason why art exists, is that it makes it possible for human beings to have experiences that cause them to have more effective emotional circuits. But human beings are highly social animals and for their social interactions it is useful for an individual to know the emotional state of another individual. What we call “expression of emotions” is changes in the external appearance of an individual’s body that are caused by the activation of the individual’s emotional circuits and which can be perceived by another individual. It is not clear if the expression of emotions is a simple by-product of having emotional states or if it is so perceivable, articulated, and differentiated to let other individuals know one’s emotional state. This may have implications for art. Art induces a sense of “feeling together” which is adaptive for highly social animals such as human beings. Q. Would you say that robot-simulated artworks are identical to human generated ones on the basis of objecthood or their intentional constitution? How could a robot produce a Duchampian ready-made, which is not “made” but found? From a robotic point of view (and also from the point of view of real human beings) it is not clear what is “intention” and what is “intentional constitution.” But our robotic artists should be able to “create” Duchampian ready-mades, because human beings “create” them. As I have said,

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the adaptive function of art might also be linked to sociability, empathy, and feeling together. A robot might react to something “found” and not “made” because the context tells the robot that someone else, the robotic artist, is communicating its emotional state through the ready-made. Duchampian ready-mades pose other interesting problems beyond their conceptual framework. Human beings have “artistic” reactions (reactions which lead to improvements in their emotional circuits) not only with respect to artistic artifacts but also with respect to natural objects (such as a flower or the sea), which also are “found” and not “made.” Robots should help us understand how our reactions to artistic artifacts are similar or different from our reactions to “beautiful” natural objects and why some people (or perhaps, all of us) think that “someone” is communicating with them through nature or that nature is “animated.” Q. It appears that the value of such art-robots would be to expand and explore new aesthetic modalities within art rather than reducing art into a simulated procedure, is that so? If we construct robots that have art, this does not mean that art is “reduced” into a “simulated” procedure. As I have said, robots are not really constructed by us but they construct themselves because, like us, they evolve and learn. The ultimate aim of human robotics is to “construct” robots that are indistinguishable from us so that it is not clear which is the original and which is the copy (the simulation). But, of course, in so far as robots are not exactly like us, they may create artistic artifacts which we like and which may be different from the artistic artifacts created by us. And we may like to “construct” robots which are not exactly like us but create artistic artifacts which we like. (What these artifacts will tell us about ourselves?) Q. How is it possible to have a scientific interpretation of art (that explains, defines and predicts its productions) if art is precisely that which escapes such qualities? Art is the product of an animal (Homo sapiens) with a given body and a given sensory and motor organs, a given brain, and a number of different histories (biological evolution, development, learning, cultural and social history) through which it has created itself and continues to create itself. Robots will let us understand why and how such an animal creates art in a way that (correctly) appears to us to be so distant from “explaining,” “defining,” and “predicting” in the sense in which science explains, defines, and predicts everything. ***

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A ROBOTIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING ART What is the phenomenon of art? Although philosophers, art historians, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists all have attempted to answer the question, we still do not seem to really grasp all of art’s nature and vicissitudes. So the question “What is art?” remains evasive, at least if we are interested in a scientific account based on theories and models that are formulated by using objective, well-defined, and operational terms that generate unambiguous empirical predictions to be compared with intersubjectively observable and possibly quantitative facts. In this chapter, I propose to develop a scientific model of art by constructing robots that have art. What are robots? Robots are physically realized or simulated artifacts that resemble living organisms and behave like living organisms. Why construct robots? Robots can be constructed with two different goals in mind. They can have a variety of useful applications with commercial value, and this justifies the money and effort needed to construct them. Or robots can be constructed as a new way of expressing scientific theories of behavior. Theories of behavior and mind tend to be expressed in words, but words have ill-defined and often ambiguous meanings. Furthermore, theories expressed in words tend to be unable to generate specific and noncontroversial empirical predictions—which, given our definition of scientific theories, is exactly what scientific theories should not be. Robots are a new way to formulate scientific theories about behavior and mind. The theory is used as a blueprint to construct a robot, and the robot’s behavioral patterns are the prediction derived from the theory. And yet in order to avoid circular logic, the theory must be well defined and operational for the robot’s behaviors to be objectively compared with known empirical facts about behavior and mind. Imagine that we want to construct robots to understand the behavior of human beings. If our robots behave like human beings, then we can suppose that the theory we have used to construct the robots is a good theory of human behavior. Based on these assumptions, we must know human behavior in advance and our theory confirms what we already know. Being human and having art are intertwined. And since art has such a constitutive role in being human we will never be right to claim that we have built human (not just humanoid) robots unless our robots have also art. The robots that we have in mind are not robots whose behavior is programmed by us but rather are robots that, like real organisms, autonomously evolve at the population level and develop or learn at the individual level whatever behavior they possess. Therefore, it would be critical for us to identify what sort of functions are to be introduced in relation to artistic artifacts in our robots’ lives so that if they wanted to create artistic artifacts and expose themselves to them they would do so. If we install into robots a sense of fascination and they start

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making beautiful objects, we can than assert that art deals with fascination. So, when will we be entitled to say that our robots have art? There are many possible answers to this question but I think that an important one is that robots that have art must be robots that spend a significant part of their time (and, possibly, money) listening to sounds, looking at visual displays, and reading written texts produced by other robots, with no easily identifiable practical purpose on the part of both the robots that listen to the sounds, look at the visual displays, and read the written texts (the public), and the robots that produce these sounds, visual displays, and written texts (the artists). Let us start with a presupposition, that art deals with emotions: to construct robots that have art in the sense just defined we have first to construct robots that have motivations and emotions. So we start by describing robots that have motivations and emotions. MOTIVATIONAL CHOICES Many robots have been constructed that use their time to acquire various types of resources which are important for their survival and reproduction. Imagine a population of male and female robots living together in an environment containing food tokens. The robots have a certain amount of energy in their body that is consumed by some quantity at each time step and, if the energy goes to zero, the robot dies. Thus, in order to survive the robots must be able to approach and eat the energycontaining food tokens. However, survival is not enough. To reproduce they must also be able to approach and mate with a robot of the opposite sex. The robots’ behavior is controlled by a “brain”—a neural network artificially made up of units (neurons) and connections between units (synapses). Such a neural network has visual input units that encode what is in front of the robot at any given time (food tokens and other robots), other input units which encode the current level of energy in the robot’s body (hunger), and motor output units that control the movements of the robot in response to the input. The input is further elaborated by internal units within the neural network and a motor response is generated in response to the input. How a robot responds to the input is determined by the quantitative value of the connections that link the units (synaptic weights). The robots of the initial population have neural networks with random connection weights and therefore these robots are generally unable to eat and to find mates. However, since each robot will behave somewhat differently from all the other robots, for purely chance reasons some robots will be somewhat better than the other robots at eating and finding mates. These lucky robots live longer and mate more than the other robots. Their offspring inherit the connection weights of

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their parents with the addition of random changes (genetic mutations) that may result in offspring that are better adapted than their parents. This goes on for a certain number of generations and, as a result of the selective reproduction of the best robots and the constant addition of new variability, the robots will progressively evolve an ability to both approach and eat food and to approach and mate with the robots of the opposite sex. If we observe the robots in their (simulated) environment on the computer’s screen we see that the robots divide appropriately their time between looking for food and eating and looking for a robot of the opposite sex and mating. We say “appropriately” and, in fact, an appropriate use of time is a critical requirement for our robots—and for real animals. Behavior has two levels, a motivational level and a cognitive level, and both robots and real animals must be able to function well at both levels if they want to survive, reproduce, and live well. Our robots have two distinct motivations, eating and mating, and at any given time they need to decide whether to look for food and ignore the robots of the opposite sex or to look for the robots of the opposite sex and ignore food. This is the motivational level of behavior. Once an appropriate decision has been made concerning which motivation to pursue, the robots must be able to generate the appropriate behavior that allows them to satisfy the motivation decided at the motivational level. This is the cognitive level of behavior. It is clear that a robot must function appropriately at both levels. If a robot is good at approaching and reaching food but it ignores the robots of the opposite sex and never mates with them, the robot will live a long life but it will leave no offspring (copies of its own genes) to the next generation. On the other hand, a robot may spend most of its time approaching and mating with the robots of the opposite sex but it may die because its bodily energy reaches the zero level. This robot too will not leave many offspring because it will have a short life. The best robots will be those that both make the appropriate motivational decisions and know how to satisfy their current motivation. The first ability may be more important than the second one because wrong motivational decisions may more directly compromise a robot’s (or an animal’s) survival and reproductive chances—the currency of biological evolution—while a robot which is not particularly good at approaching and reaching food or mates may still survive and reproduce. Evolution and genetic inheritance are not the only determinants of behavior since behavior changes during the life of an individual because of learning and the individual’s experiences. But we believe that biological evolution is crucial if we want to explain behavior and, in particular, art.

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EMOTIONAL STATES As we have stated, a prime requirement for our robots, and for real animals, is that they must be good at choosing which motivation to pursue at any given time. Their motivational decisions must be correct (look for a mate if you are not very hungry, otherwise look for food), must be fast (immediately stop looking for food as soon as you see a mate), must be persistent (do not stop looking for food if you are very hungry even if you don’t see food), and must not be compulsive (stop looking for a mate if there is no one in view). If a robot does not function well at the motivational level, the robot will die or will not have offspring even if it functions well at the cognitive level—that is, if it is able to generate the appropriate behavior that satisfies the chosen motivation. In fact, functioning well at the motivational level is so important for survival and reproduction that evolution has created a special circuit in the brain of animals that helps them to make more appropriate motivational decisions. The states of this neural circuit are called emotional states or, more directly, emotions. Emotional states change the current strength of the robot’s current motivations so that the robot is able to make better motivational decisions. We can construct robots endowed with neural networks, which include an artificial emotional circuit made up of special units. The circuit is activated by various inputs from either the external environment (for example, seeing a mate or seeing a danger) or the robot’s own body (for example, feeling hungry) and it sends its outputs to the main circuit of the neural network and in this way influences the robot’s behavior. Consider a robot with an excessive tendency to look for food rather than for a mate, and which, therefore, risks having a long life but no offspring. Would the emotional circuit of this robot be activated by the sight of a mate? Would this increase the chances that the robot will stop looking for food and start looking for a mate? Or, consider another robot which is very hungry but, this notwithstanding, tends to pursue the motivation to mate, in this way risking its life. The emotional circuit of this other robot would be activated by (strong) hunger and it would change the robot’s motivational choice causing the robot to look, more correctly (adaptively), for food rather than for mates. An emotional circuit in these circumstances would be “anxiety.” We can also construct other robots that have other emotional states. An excessive emotional state of “fear” would be activated by the sight of danger, (say, a predator), and it would cause the robot to choose to pursue the motivation to avoid the danger over any other motivations. The robot’s offspring may be unable to survive unless they are fed and protected by dangers, so that the sight of one’s offspring, or of one’s permanent mate which may also feed and protect one’s offspring, may evoke in the robot the emotional state of “love” which increases the probability that the robot will choose the motivation to feed

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and protect its offspring or mate over other motivations. These are simple instances of emotional states for our simple robots. Humans have a much larger number of different emotional states corresponding to their much more complex and articulated repertoire of motivations and, furthermore, in humans learning during life plays a more important role in shaping an individual’s behavior and also the individual’s motivations, compared to other animals. EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS As we have proposed so far, the emotional circuit may be activated by input from both the external environment and from within the organism’s body. But the emotional circuit involves the organism’s body in other ways. The emotional circuit does not directly help the brain to react appropriately to the input but it also activates the body’s internal organs and systems (the heart, the stomach, the respiratory and circulatory systems, the hormonal system) and the muscles controlling the movements and postures of the face, the sound-producing organs, and other parts of the body and, in turn, it receives inputs from these internal and external parts of the body. Emotional states are “felt” states because of these inputs from the body due to the interactions of the emotional neural circuit with the rest of the organism’s body. But what interests us here is that the changes which occur in the external shape, color, sound-producing organs, and movements of an individual’s body as a consequence of the activation of the individual’s emotional circuit can be perceived by another individual. In this way emotional states are not only subjectively felt but they are also expressed and made accessible to others. The external expression of emotions can be just a by-product of the states of the individual’s emotional circuit and its interactions with the rest of the individual’s body but, for complexly social animals such as humans which live in a social ecology made up of other humans rather than simply in a natural ecology, the expression of emotional states becomes an important mechanism for social interaction. Through the expression of emotions an individual can know the emotional states of another individual, and this is important because, by knowing the emotional states of the other individual, the first individual can better predict and influence the behavior of the other individual and can adapt its own behavior to the other individual. In turn, expressing one’s emotional states can be useful to let other individuals know one’s emotional states and in this way be helped by them to satisfy one’s motivations. Neuro-physiological research has shown that human beings socially resonate emotionally in the sense that an individual can share the same emotional state of another individual if the first individual perceives the external expression of the emotional state of the second individual. This sharing of emotional states

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may become a collective phenomena which involves many individuals and which lets these individuals coordinate their behaviors for some socially shared goal and expect mutual help. EMOTIONAL OR ARTISTIC ARTIFACTS Humans create artifacts: that is, they modify and shape the environment and construct objects that are added to naturally existing objects. Most human artifacts are practical artifacts, that is, artifacts that allow humans to better satisfy their practical needs. Let us go back to our robots that need to eat and to mate. Eating in these robots is very simple: they approach a food token and when they touch the food token, the food token disappears. It is considered eaten, and the robot’s bodily energy is increased by some fixed amount. But consider another robot that has a somewhat more complex adaptive pattern and needs to construct tools in order to eat. The next step is to connect constructing artifacts and having emotional states. As we have seen, external stimuli can evoke emotional states that help our robots to make better motivational decisions. The sight of a mate may evoke an emotional state that makes it more probable for a robot to choose to pursue the motivation to mate rather than other motivations. The sight of a predator can evoke an emotional state that increases the probability that the robot will try to escape from the predator instead of continuing to look for food. The sight of its offspring or permanent mate can evoke an emotional state in the robot that causes the robot to feed and remain in proximity of its offspring or permanent mate instead of doing some other thing. Now imagine that our robots construct artifacts meant only for stimulating its senses, causing an emotional reaction state in both the creating robot and other robots that come into contact with the artifacts. These “emotional artifacts” are the artifacts of art: they can be bi-dimensional (pictures) or tri-dimensional (sculptures or buildings) visual objects, sounds (music), spoken and written texts (poems, novels). Why should our robots construct artistic artifacts? Why do they need to stimulate the senses? It is important to answer this question because if we want to actually construct robots that have art, our robots should have an overall adaptive pattern in which making artistic artifacts is adaptive for them. Thereby, we must start with a population of robots who do not construct such artifacts but evolve and learn to create them. The robots we have described at the beginning of this chapter are purely practical robots. Why should they construct artistic artifacts? What is the “added value” of artistic artifacts that may explain why humans began making artistic artifacts so early in the history of the species? Our research strategy is to generate a series of hypotheses on the possible function(s) of artistic artifacts for humans, to build robots based

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on these hypotheses, and to see if the behaviors exhibited by humans with respect to artistic artifacts can be reproduced in the robots. Here are some hypotheses: 1. Artistic artifacts allow the robots to objectify and make explicit for themselves their own emotional states, and this can be useful for the robots to know themselves better, which in turn can allow the robots to generate more adaptive behaviors. 2. Artistic artifacts allow the robots to experience strong emotions, and to familiarize with them, without the dangers associated to strong emotions. 3. Artistic artifacts remind the robots of pleasurable experiences and therefore induce pleasurable experiences. 4. Artistic artifacts create shared emotional states in groups of robots that allow the robots to better coordinate among themselves and to make the behavior of the other robots more predictable. 5. Exposing oneself to artistic artifacts makes a robot emotionally more sophisticated—that is, more responsive to its own emotional states and to the emotional states of others. These are all hypotheses about the origin of art in humans and, of course, they are not mutually exclusive hypotheses. To test these hypotheses we should construct robots that incorporate these hypotheses and see if our robots develop the behavior of constructing artistic artifacts and of exposing themselves to these artifacts. The general idea behind all hypotheses is that artistic artifacts cause the emotional states of an individual to better regulate the motivational decisions of the individual, and we have seen that making appropriate motivational decisions is a critical requirement for survival and reproduction. So our robots should spontaneously begin to construct artistic artifacts. If they do not, our idea should be revised or abandoned. DIRECTIONS OF RESEARCH We have sketched an approach to constructing robots that have art. Our robots are very simple and we have described only some basic ideas for constructing them. But our method is clear. Unless our robots develop a tendency to spend some of their time producing artifacts with no practical use and exposing themselves to these artifacts, we will not be entitled to claim that we have constructed robots that have art. But even after we have constructed robots that have art, many important questions remain open, and the validity of our approach should be measured in terms of its capacity to provide answers to these questions. We conclude the chapter by briefly describing these questions:

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a. Our robots that have art should also tend to expose themselves to natural objects such as flowers, natural landscapes, and individuals of the other sex as they expose themselves to artistic artifacts, and with an attitude that shares similarities to the attitudes with which they expose themselves to artistic artifacts. Furthermore, their practical artifacts should have properties, such as their particular shape or color and do not have a practical purpose but trigger in the robots the same responses generally caused by artistic artifacts. And, finally, the robots should exhibit other types of human activities, such as playing and entertaining oneself, that show some similarities to reactions to artistic artifacts. b. Artistic artifacts appear to evoke one particular type of response on the part of the individuals who expose themselves to them, a response which focuses on the perceptual properties of the artifact and does not consider its possible use or other practical implications. These properties are sometimes referred to as “form,” and they explain why the notion of art is historically linked to the notion of form. It is interesting that something similar also occurs in the case of science. A scientist responds to some particular phenomenon or fact by focusing on the observed or otherwise known phenomenon or fact without considering the practical implications of the phenomenon or fact. In this sense, both art and science are “speculative.” However, it is also important to find how art and science differ. The differences may be many. One might say that an artistic artifact is processed by both the cognitive half and the motivational/emotional half of the mind while a fact or phenomenon is processed only by the cognitive half of the scientist’s mind. Science needs emotional detachment while art needs emotional participation. Or one might say that a fact or phenomenon is processed by the scientist’s mind for at least one practical purpose, that is, the purpose to be able to predict other facts or phenomena, while artistic artifacts do not even have this practical implication. However, one has to consider that predictability can also play some role in artistic artifacts and, in fact, “beauty” is sometimes explained in terms of symmetry, where symmetry implies predictability. c. We have talked about art in general but art varies as a function of society, epoch, and its relation to other human activities such as religion and power. Therefore our robots should be able to reproduce not only art in general but also the different ways in which art manifests itself in different societies, epochs, and in its relation to other human activities. If we want to understand humans by constructing robots that behave like humans we should be concerned with, and reproduce with our robots, not only the phenomena studied by psychologists and neuroscientists but also the phenomena studied by social scientists. In this case we should be able to

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reproduce not only art but also the place of art in human societies. And we should be able to address two interesting questions about today’s art: (1) If art is based on the introduction by the artist of variations in inherited schemes, can art exist today if inherited schemes tend to be rejected? (2) Why does art today tend to become marketing, that is, the production of artistic artifacts to “sell” them rather than to express something with them? d. Another important research question is whether different types of artistic artifacts, for example, music versus visual displays versus literary works, play different functions for our robots. Although all robotic and human cognition appears to be action-based, music may more strongly imply physical movement on the part of the listener to follow and anticipate rhythm and melody when compared with visual displays and literary texts. Architectural works are experienced differently than other artifacts (for example, by entering into buildings) and may evoke specific feelings of enclosure, protection, respect, and community. e. A final research question in the study of art is: How are human artistic artifacts related to the specific characteristics of humans: their body (size, shape), their sensory and motor organs, their adaptive pattern (sociality, mental life, etc.). Will robots that have different bodies—different sensory and motor organs and different adaptive patterns—develop artistic artifacts different from human artistic artifacts? For example, what types of artistic artifacts would be constructed by robots that do not have human-like hands; robots with less sophisticated visual capacities and, say, more sophisticated smelling capacities than humans; robots that displace themselves in such media as air and water rather than on surfaces; robots that are much smaller and less heavy than humans? If we are able to construct robots that produce artistic artifacts that are unlike human artistic artifacts, the artistic artifacts produced by the robots may suggest new types of artistic artifacts to humans.

THREE Unimodernism, or the Aesthetics of Permanent Present Peter Lunenfeld

DIALOGUE Q. Can you give a general definition of “unimodernism”? Unimodernism describes the ways in which modernism in all its variants and historical strains comes together with the networked cultures of electronic unimedia. Q. The concept of unimodernism seems to deny the mainstream orientations of the twentieth century about rhizomatic multiculturalism or post modernity. Is that the direct result of what we are facing through the unifying power of the Web? Unimodernism assumes that which we archived as early modern fervor, high modern sophistication, and postmodern pastiche will now coexist co-temporaneously in global networks, accessed at the whim of the downloader and deployed as the user sees fit to be uploaded yet again in an ever-increasing blur of style churn. Q. Do you think that new generations will continuously adjust to new digitalized systems, or do you envisage a critical breaking point caused by the effort to keep the pace with the machine? “Tool fatigue” is a term I first heard in the late 1980s to describe the difficulty people had then in dealing with the rapid advance of digital 39

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technologies. Obviously, that was before the absolute explosion of the digital worldwide in the past quarter century, so my objective answer would have to be no. Q. Given that product manufacturing becomes more and more virtual and cybernetically generated and not only controlled, what will be the role of human creativity as such? What happens is that each new generation adopts some strain of the digital as its own, often letting earlier and still vibrant technologies languish. Thus you’ll have “pro-am” users defining themselves not by any capacity to create social media tools—as hacktivists have long maintained is vital—but instead as “content providers” first and foremost. Perhaps the next generation will look at these contemporary “users” with disdain and spark a DIY, programming-centric movement. Q. Did the convergence between Duchamp’s ready-made and virtualization leave space for creativity without mechanical or digital interactions? The issue here is less “creativity” than it is distribution and audience. The fact that food is the new rock and roll, that young people aspire to be chefs in the way that they used to want to be lead singers, demonstrates that there is a huge demand for the “real.” It just so happens that the food truck, the pop-up store-front, and the home-based restaurant are the “new” venues for the nonvirtualized and the artisanally produced. That digital technologies are used to support and promote these kinds of ventures simply demonstrates that they are indeed in and of their own, networked moment. Q. Will the kind of exchange that the Web offers ultimately replace actual commercial fetish value as experienced in a social space? Will it entail the decay of consumerism or a birth of a new one? I see no evidence of the Web reducing consumerism. It may eliminate whole categories of shops (witness the decline of book stores and the devastation of video stores in the United States, for example), but global networks introduce new ways to meld leisure time with shopping— everything from commercial pop-ups in on-line television (click to purchase what the starlet is wearing) to the emerging marketplace for virtual goods (buy a magic axe from a professional Chinese gamer to outfit your World of Warcraft avatar).

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Q. In your chapter, you address the effects of unimodernism on a wide array of cultural phenomena, from writing and imaging to gaming. To what extent do such changes mark a departure from a symbolic understanding of cultural production? I do not think a purely symbolic interpretation of culture is even possible, and I know that it would be inadequate. Markets and networks are both means of distribution, and, as in your earlier question about “creativity,” I think that cultural production cannot be separated from modes of dissemination and use. Unimodernism became for me, and I hope will become for my readers, a way of thinking in, through, and with networks about the cultures that they were simultaneously downloading and then uploading. Q. Do you see in the unimodern a tendency to flatten experience and thus pose a danger to the possibility of generating aesthetic visions that are not systemdriven? No cultural innovation comes without cost, and complaints about art and media flattening experience are older than Plato. Every era has a different ratio of the sublime to the banal. What that balance will look like, and how the future will assess the unimodern contribution, will be up to contemporary makers and users, artists and audiences, readers and writers, downloaders and uploaders. *** The visionaries of the early twentieth century transformed the look and feel of culture, not supplanting the past’s bracings of oak and edifices of marble so much as adding the sheen of industrial materials like concrete, glass, and steel. By the 1920s and 1930s, the audience for modernism was equally an audience for the machine aesthetic: the hard, unembellished lines of El Lissitzky’s graphic design; the clanks and atonality of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck; the sensuous curves of Marcel Breuer’s chromed steel tubing in his “Model B32” chair; the assemblages of tubes, pistons, and levers that compose the Fernand Léger painting “Nude on a Red Background”; the severity of Rudolph Schindler’s untreated wooden beams intersecting with unadorned canvas-covered sliding door frames; and the comic yet sinister factory where Charlie Chaplin works in the film Modern Times. Regardless of media, artists sensed the change, and filled their work with the sights, sounds, and even smells of industry, figuring the machine as central to the cultural ground of the twentieth century. While industrial machines popped a hundred years ago, information has emerged as the key figure for this new century. There are historical

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parallels between the emergence of the machine aesthetic in the first decades of the twentieth century and the nascent aesthetics of a digitized, unimodern culture in the twenty-first. The second half of the nineteenth century developed a market economy that produced and consumed machines. The early decades of the twentieth century saw artists, architects, and designers responding to this fever of material production by figuring the machine in their art, architecture, and design. The second half of the twentieth century, in turn, became an ever-accelerating feedback loop of information. Thus, we should not be surprised that the past few years have seen our culture machines producing information-based art, architecture, design, and media; a digitized, interconnected society produces objects and systems that deal with software, databases, and the invisible flows of communications technology and computing algorithms. The greatgrandchildren of those obsessed with Victoriana in the 1920s may look back with bemusement on their forebears’ archaic tastes, but they are the ones flocking to modernist emporiums like the Conran Shop and Design Within Reach to purchase the highest expressions of the machine age at the very moment that the info-aesthetic is on us. If we accept that the digital computer is our culture machine, we can understand the ways in which information has popped to the forefront of our consciousness by using figure/ground relationships to analyze how electronic databases have transformed our expectation of stylistic “progress” and warped our cultural memory. When image, text, photo, graphic, and all manner of audiovisual records are available at the touch of a button anywhere in the wired world we experience not multimedia, but in fact unimedia. In a unimediated environment, the ordered progression through time is replaced by a blended presentness—what literary theorists would refer to as the triumph of the synchronic over the diachronic. One reason our faith in progress has waned even as the future continues to manifest itself on our desktops and in pockets stuffed with smart devices is that this blending produces what I call a state of permanent present, which impairs the facility to appreciate the present, much less produce a new, better future. This sense of permanent present affects not only the present and the future, it also has an impact on the ways we remember the past. Contrast our moment with Classical Rome, where a senator like Cicero could become famed for his mnemnotechnics, or the practice of memory. Twenty years after the fact, he could recite, word for word, speeches that he had heard on the senate floor. In a period before the wide availability of paper for taking notes, a trained memory was of inestimable value in governance and commerce. Print transformed this situation, and by the Enlightenment, the arts of memory were already obsolete. If anything, the culture machine allows for even the outsourcing of our memories, with audio files, image banks, and video storage added to the archive. The

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effects of all of this storage go well beyond the memory of personal experience to encompass our memories of mediated experience as well. The universal database transforms the direct linkage between the object in time and the actual memory of that time. It creates a co-presentness of eras, with a predominance of the modern. It is for this reason that I say we are in a unimodern, rather than post- or late-modern period. Unimodern production follows an arc first traced by Duchamp and his ready-mades. After Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), it is the presentation of the object that defines that object’s function within culture, with the shaping and molding of context come to the fore. This is not news, and in fact, those defining the differences between the high modern moment and what followed it hinged their definition precisely on this elevation of context to parity with the text itself. It has only been within the past decade that the combination of computers and communication networks has been robust enough to contribute to the creation of context. This context takes many forms, especially in relation to popular media, from the preplanned marketing of tie-ins from music CDs, television spin-offs, and lunch boxes, to the efflorescence of discursive communities generated by fans. In certain cases, these all combine to create something far more interesting than the backstory and more complicated than synergistic marketing. This is the “hypercontext,” a dynamic, interlinked communicative community using networks to curate a series of shifting frames and content. The addition of greater levels of information to an object or system is not simply an additive process, it is a transformative one. It transforms objects by augmenting them and situating them in vastly larger hypercontexts, and when done in the proper spirit it makes them exemplify what we can now see as an emerging, global uniculture. Being able to tell figure from ground in this environment of hypertrophied, transtemporal bricolage becomes a vital part of negotiating the use of the culture machine. When the whole of popular culture from the last hundred years is finally brought under the disciplinarity of the universal database, it all becomes ground, and the refiguration of its parts becomes a veritable economic necessity. Those who are capable of refiguring in a way to attract an audience become fantastically powerful wealth generators—from hyperstylized director Quentin Tarantino to hyperintellectualized architect Rem Koolhaas, from Japanese Superflat artist Takashi Murakami to U.S. lifestyle guru Martha Stewart. I have mentioned artists, designers, and directors here, but being able to flip between ground and figure is central to everyone’s use of the culture machine. What we all, from world-famous designer to weekly blogger to occasional taker of digital snapshots, need is a catalog of strategies to help us understand what we download and contribute to what we upload. The ways that we figure words, sounds, images, and objects from the ground of information will define how and what we are able to produce with the culture

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machine. The key is to understand that we are constructing a uniculture from unimedia with unimodernism as the aspiration. What follows here catalogs some of the unimodern strategies that these unimedia follow in this unicultural era. WRITING We are now so deeply entrenched in the era of word processing that we have forgotten how revolutionary the development of dynamic text was for the production of literature. That the culture machine can reformat your work while you are typing it, that you can grab chunks of it and rearrange them, that you can search for terms and replace them, and that the process of adding and editing is essentially one of unfinish—these are all the modes under which we work, so instantly ingrained that we have forgotten just how new they are. When you add in hypertextuality, the ability to link and jump from one section of a text to another, or from one text to an entirely different one, you have one of the defining qualities of the unimodern culture machine. Hypertext showed the way by making the link integral to the construction of the meaning. The creation of meaning via juxtaposition is ancient, of course, but the modern era’s refinement of collage in still images and then montage in the cinema elevated the status of the meanings produced through these processes. The televisual era introduced a randomness to the juxtapositions. If Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical montage was about the deliberate production of effect through cinematic editing, channel zapping on television was closer to the experimental “cut-up” fiction of Brion Gyson and William Burroughs in the late 1950s. Gyson, a painter, and Burroughs, a novelist, created texts and then literally cut them up into pieces, reassembling the fragments at random, giving up a large measure, though not by any means all, authorial control. The earliest attempts at hypertext tried to marry the randomness of the cut-up technique to a restricted universe of potential connections, thereby establishing the technoliterary equivalent of a forced card in magic. You had choice as a user/reader, but your choices and paths were often predetermined by the author. The advent of the World Wide Web broke open these closed text worlds, creating the freedom to jump around with “real” randomness. One of the earliest net.art text pieces understood the new environment perfectly, linking every word on a Web page to a domain that contained that word—a far more inventive concept in 1996, when there were thousands rather than billions of pages in ether space. What is new in the world is that text more and more becomes something that is linked to anything, words become the building blocks of augmentations, the whole world develops labels like those at museum

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exhibitions, and each label links to another one describing, advertising, or commenting on another text, another image, another object. The hyperlinking that starts with text as far back as the 1940s’ experiments of Bush and Turing becomes the default mode of figuring “meaning” in the world. What happens with text moves on to sounds, then to images, and finally to physical objects. SOUNDING For the culture machine, it is as though everything that happens in the realm of the visual happens years before, first with text and then with sound. Sound is cheaper and easier to store, manipulate, and upload than images, and so it has been that digital technologies have transformed not only the media that the music arrives on but also the very aesthetics and content of that music. The shift from analog to digital is about much more than the shift from vinyl albums to CDs, and then to free-floating file sharing. The proliferation of cheap synthesizers and editing suites enabled by digital technologies spread this meme to musicians and producers worldwide, and the music itself began to change. By the time the culture machine eventually simulated and subsumed these sound-generating and sound-organizing modalities, an entire generation of listeners were creating sampled, remixed, digitally processed, digitally accessed music. From the now-quaint “You’ve Got Mail!” AOL voice-coder greeting, to the advent of audible interfaces and game soundscapes, to the popularity of pop snippets as personal audio identifications in cell phone ringtones, there has been a proliferation of audio cues within work, play, and mobile environments. The unimodern soundscape owes a huge debt to hip-hop culture. The origins of hip-hop are to be found in the analog arena. In the 1970s, disc jockeys in the Bronx cut back and forth between turntables with vinyl records on them, mastering their ability to “drop samples” and use the turntables themselves to generate new sounds—the ubiquitous “scratching” of that era. But within a decade, the culture machine started to absorb and simulate these analog techniques, and the digital sample became the music’s building block, and remixing became the aesthetic strategy of choice. Hip-hop and high tech are inextricably bound together, offering a sterling example of the street finding its own uses for technology. One place to see the hip-hop collage aesthetic collide with post-Napster file sharing is the phenomenon of the mash-up. Mash-ups meld two or more recordings into a new entity, famously done by Danger Mouse’s mash-up of the Beatles’ White Album, a defining work of the 1960s’ rock era, with Jay Z’s rap epic The Black Album (2003) to create The Grey Album (2005). The result was widely distributed because of the Web, file sharing,

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and the proliferation of sound and image editing tools. The ability to download vast archives of music, whether accessed legally or (more likely) illegally, allowed for an explosion of mash-ups. The fad, for it was a fad, eventually died down, as Web-driven phenomena frequently do, but mash-ups were proof that huge audiences were playing with their culture machines, mixing, matching, pasting, and then getting that unimodern material out into the unimodern world. IMAGING What happened in text and sound inevitably spread to the realm of the image. The explosion of cultural production that mash-ups reflect has in turn transformed our understanding of the meanings of words like “print” and “publish.” We print much more than text these days. The first major shift came in the era of desktop publishing. In the digital realm, text and image are just strings of ones and zeros, indistinguishable as information, and made manifest only by the medium in which they are eventually released. So an image could be fluid in an animation, printed on paper as a screen, encompassed in a resizable window with surrounding text, or blended in a graphic with those same typographic elements, which could themselves be animated as a motion graphic. In his book Lifestyle (2000), the designer Bruce Mau refers to “Postscript World” when he discusses the radical transformation that the culture machine brings to our visual environment. With the development of “page description languages” like Postscript from Adobe Systems, there is “no longer any distinction between text and non-text, image and nonimage.” Surfaces are “now described in one language. Everything is now image.” Postscript World announced itself with the desktop publishing phenomenon, in which the image on the monitor looks like the page that the printer will produce, and vice versa. This was the software/ hardware combination that brought us the acronym WYSIWYG, for What You See Is What You Get. The previously independent realms of word and image were now brought together under the sovereignty of Postscript World. What had once been the realm of obscure pasteup artists, burly press operators, and black-clad design gurus became a commonplace at every office worldwide. In 1970, only the most design savvy knew what people meant by the term “font”; three decades later, second graders talk about their favorite letterforms with a passion formerly reserved for toy trains and paper dolls. When images and words are both expressed in the same code, the distinction between them erodes, and people speak with images and paint with type. As the Postscript World came to embrace the mutability of Photoshop as well as the development of animation and motion softwares like embedded digital video, centuries-old distinctions be-

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tween media forms dissolved in turn and created unimodern unimedia, the digital soup that the networked culture machine pumps worldwide. FABBING From words to sounds to pictures to moving images, the networked computer has transformed the production of culture. The next new thing that is in fact already here is the “printing” of objects. The Postscript World of image/text printing has become part of an even larger system of computer fabrication, or “fabbing,” in which what was once restricted to two dimensions is extruded in three. WYSIWYG, “What You See Is What You Get,” is being followed by an era of what I call WYMIWYM, for “What You Model Is What You Manufacture.” Just as WYSIWYG allowed new freedoms to graphic designers and two-dimensional image makers, the WYMIWYM era of computing allows architecture and industrial design to play with form and iteration, and make complex extant forms easier to manufacture profitably. In other words, what the computer did to the flat, two-dimensional fields of painting, photography, and graphics is now happening in the three-dimensional realms of sculpture, industrial design, and architecture, as artists, designers, and architects develop forms on the computer, and then fabricate them with three-dimensional printers. An architect like Greg Lynn can use three-dimensional printing to do everything from creating maquettes, or small-scale models, of buildings to making prototypes for designs for a line of flatware commissioned by the Italian design manufacturer Alessi. When the fabbing specialists at the design collaborative Machine Histories worked with artist Pae White to create a complex bedframe for an exhibition, they worked with solid Corian, usually a surfacing material in kitchens and bathrooms. The object, “untitled” (2006), was so intricately worked by Machine Histories’s unique tool paths that it felt airier than one would ever expect a headboard to be. The deft carving and intricate detailing went beyond what handwork could have accomplished, and serves as a reminder that expertise in three-dimensional fabrication will indeed bring on a new material culture for the twenty-first century. This is all the more true because art, design, and architecture students are getting exposure to 3-D modeling tools along with large-scale 3-D printers, extruders, and other computer-aided manufacturing in school now, and you can bet that they will fill their own studios and ateliers in the future with the smaller, cheaper 3-D printers that are already in development by the manufacturers. These WYMIWYM objects obviously figure informationalism in their production process, but as they themselves become linked into larger networks, through the incorporation of sensors, transmitters, and augmentation, they begin to attain autonomy. From mute objects and closed

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spaces, they become nodes in the network, aware of their place and time, and capable of communication from the minimal to the maximal. The incorporation of radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs) and microcontrollers into formerly quotidian objects enlivens them in an almost magical way. Like the animated brooms in Walt Disney’s Fantasia that come alive when Mickey Mouse accidentally enchants them as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, there is a glamour, in its magical rather than fashionable sense, inherent in these new, augmented objects and spaces. The explosion of WYMIWYM objects and spaces will bring about an efflorescence of style, just as WYSIWYG publishing did. Much of it will be excruciatingly bad, worse even than bad desktop publishing because it will have more dimensions to fill with its awfulness, but this is to be expected and embraced. Much that is wonderful will also be discovered, and perhaps some of what makes us wince will eventually earn at least grudging respect for its exuberance. But the ability to follow a program, in the architectural sense of an overarching vision, that the WYMIWYM era allows can engender the opposite problem from that of too much unstudied pluralism: it can also allow for the figuration of information in too perfect a form. Karl Kraus, a Viennese modernist in the early 1900s, once complained that art nouveau living spaces were so fully integrated that they allowed their inhabitants no “running room” for the imagination. In the emerging clusters of entertainment design and experience design we see the resurgence of the totalizing impulse. The Disney World model of complete design integration from food to signage to people mover to thrill ride to collectible souvenir moves centrifugally outward from its Orlando home, becoming the de facto model for new experiences within entertainment capitalism. One factor contributing to the rise of entertainment and experience design is the computer itself, which allows for an unprecedented merging of design disciplinarities along with a sharing of communication and information across design groups, participating companies, and geographic space. The impact of these intersecting design and technology schema are to be found everywhere from the branding overkill of themed resorts like Paris, Las Vegas, to Jean Nouvel’s seamlessly integrated galleries of indigenous art at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, France. Here, as in so many other hyperdesigned spaces around the world, interface and object, building and Web presence, as well as commodity and brand identity all swirl together in unimodern, digitally enabled Postscript documents and WYMIWYM environments. The figuring of informationalism into form has been our preoccupation in this section, and these forms—as words, sounds, images, objects, and even spaces—serve as semantic building blocks for the syntactic ways with which we will “speak” with these media. The secret war be-

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tween downloading and uploading is predicated on the idea that the message and its meaningfulness need our full attention as well. PLAYING People’s willingness to embrace unfinish differs by age and class—that is to say, by who can afford it in the first place. Sometimes the adults who design systems can forget how much younger users are invested in finding ways to fill their downtime. Television, music, and video games can all be seen as preemployment time fillers for adolescents, and even those self-styled “rejuveniles” who are choosing not to abandon the games and pastimes of their youth. But those with the desire and access to the culture machine can kick-start their own do-it-yourself (DIY) movements. There are deep desires to categorize and annotate one’s own life as well as the lives of one’s friends and community. This moment is not about professional narratives so much as the development of new tools to create letters, diaries, photo collages, and home movies. At its best, these DIY archives transform lived experiences not into commodities sold back to us but instead as realized memory traces that we construct ourselves and communicate to communities of interest. These actions indicate that the desire for the personal rather than the professional archive is ever expanding. From the mimeograph machine, to the advent of videotape, to fax technologies, to public access cable television, each new communication technology brings with it a new potential for participation. Think of the copier machine, which was a huge boon to the punk era, when fans produced zines (the small magazines and fan letters that were created out of a sense that Rolling Stone and the other major magazines would never “get” punk). The computer has encouraged the growth of new forms of DIY, hacktivist, and even craftivist culture. Take, for example, the crafting Web site etsy.com. It is composed in almost equal measure of three apparently unconnected concepts: an enthusiasm for alternatives to mass-produced objects, e-commerce capacities inspired by the success of eBay and Amazon, and the gestalt of a summer craft fair in Vermont. Etsy has grown by attracting a young, primarily female user base that is interested in making, selling, and buying handmade objects. The site’s rhetoric and design schema are carefully considered to attract just such a demographic, of course, but there is also a sense that Etsy would and could not exist without the authentic excitement of its users for a space that could not have ranged as widely before the Net provided the affordances for such a community. One of the interesting evolutions of the site has been the growth of the “buy local” option that allows members to develop place-based networks as well as national and international ones. Etsy’s users want to create a different relationship

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to their material positions, carve out a space in which makers can communicate and trade, and build what essentially become microeconomic relationships that are personal rather than corporate. MAKE, a magazine, Web site, PBS television series, book line, and succession of public “Faires” takes DIY concepts and makes them available in an ever-expanding set of interrelated media. Mark Frauenfelder, MAKE magazine’s founding editor-in-chief, brought a great deal of credibility to his publishers when he proposed a concept for engaging with the remarkable explosion of objects made by and with the culture machine. Frauenfelder had been involved the cyberpunk print fanzine Boing Boing. After migrating to the Web as boingboing.net, it grew into a huge “directory of wonderful things,” as Boing Boing says in its masthead. The site’s studied eccentricity, the indefatigable energy of the four principle bloggers, and the bloggers’ worldwide network of interesting collaborators exposed both Frauenfelder and his boingboing.net readers to everything from long and serious discussions about culture jamming to a prototype for a polite umbrella that contracts to avoid poking other people in the eye. Frauenfelder’s next move was to create a separate entity to concentrate on the making of this kind of culture—a twenty-first-century hybrid of Popular Mechanics and Martha Stewart Living. MAKE magazine’s first issue came out in 2004, and since then it has covered everything from crafting interactive fashion to creating personal lighter-than-air dirigible flying robots. The emphasis is on producing new and networked objects, and the response was strong enough that Frauenfelder and his coworkers decided that they could expand into producing live events to bring together their community, offering demonstrations and workshops, and growing the number of people interested in these new DIY phenomena. The resulting events, called MAKER Faires, drew from other communities, like the DIYers who have been such a huge part of the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, and became social spaces that blended consumption and production, fan and maker, and online interaction with real-life excitement. The point here is less the commercial success and long-term viability of the Etsy and MAKE DIY communities than the ways in which their very existence points toward a future of blended real and virtual communities devoted to the material production of culture along with its integration into more open spaces of commerce, trade, and exchange. The ease with which people can build a like-minded community combines with the ability to share component software as well as report on process and results. There are knitters using networks to expand their discussions about their craft, the open-source software and hacker communities, and then interesting hybrids like “modders,” as those doing electronic modifications call themselves. These people take mass-produced objects and change or modify them in a way to “make personal”

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the products of an advanced technological society. The sheer amount of craft and obsession that went into the process of remaking an iPod out of hardwood, including a working jog wheel, boggles the mind, but it is a quintessential mod. This is a physicalized metaphor for remix culture— taking something, adding one’s own spin, and putting it back out into the world (with mods, it is often just pictures of the object and its production process). But the more bit-driven realms of remix culture differ in that the remixes are then sent back out into the world to be remixed again themselves in a recursive and ever-unfinished loop. GAMING Certain media are either emboldened or diminished by the expectation that “in the future” they will become somehow that much more than they already are. Games, for example—like comic books, or “graphic novels” as the recent rebrand would have it—have long been in just such a situation. Although there is no area in which the computer as culture machine has come to so dominate, games are still seen in many quadrants as forever on the verge of crossing over into a realm of deeper meaning and greater cultural impact. Part of this tentative embrace of the gaming medium is that the worlds that games create have steep entry costs—not so much in terms of money or even access, but rather temporally. To master the skills required to play proficiently enough to enjoy gaming itself is merely the first investment of time. The next, and perhaps most serious in terms of this discussion, is the time needed to simply explore the game space sufficiently to see it as more than a fragment. This can be ten, twenty, forty, or even eighty hours of commitment. That strikes committed gamers as a fine value for the money invested in the purchase of the game, but the sheer time demanded tends to deter the uncommitted or “casual” gamer, much less the bystander who might be interested in the experience, yet cannot justify such an expenditure of time. In this, gaming is quite different from the cinema, where a 90-to-150-minute commitment is all it takes to be part of the “experience.” One way to understand this divergence is to realize that for all their narrative conventions, games are not best understood as interactive stories. To get a feel for what matters in gaming it is worth revisiting their earliest history, before gaming’s visuals came to rival the realism of cinema and television. Although there was a tic-tac-toe game and a tennis simulator in the 1950s, it was really Spacewar!—developed by students at MIT in 1962 for their own amusement—that stands as the urtext of gaming. With two armed ships shooting at each other while spiraling down a gravity well, Spacewar! established a few conventions of gaming that remain powerful today. These include conflict, time limits, and graphic interaction.

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The game itself was a useful way to gauge the speed and accuracy of the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP minicomputers, and the company began to ship later units with the game in the core memory. This ensured an ever-growing group of users, who would go on to create later pioneering games for arcades and the growing home market, including Pong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. Arcades, consoles, computers, and handhelds—these and more were the material substrate of gaming. Over the years, designers have configured their games for single players, for a few players arranged around a television, or for millions spread out worldwide on the Net in massive-multiplayer configurations. What has not changed, no matter what the era or configuration, is the importance and specifics of game play. There is no question that games have become a fantastically successful part of the culture machine’s impact. For their players, there is no denying that gaming brings a level of enjoyment equaling sport and a level of immersion that comes to rival architecture itself. The power of gaming to involve the committed, then, is hardly worth discussing. The longer-term issue is whether those gamers will in turn affect the culture as a whole or whether the ludic experience will be restricted to its own, hermetically sealed world. As haptic and other interfaces become more widespread in the wake of Nintendo’s success with the Wii system, whether or not those casual players become more involved with other forms of game play remains to be seen. Two other arguments tangential to play itself have dominated discussions about gaming. The first is the effect of violence in the game space on violence in the real world, and the second is about the influence of gaming’s twitch culture on cognition. The first is an argument about content for the most part, and while it has a great appeal for parents concerned about exterior influences as well as the politicians who cater to these voters’ concerns, this is a contention that holds less and less interest as “shooters” become more and more a specific genre of game rather than an overarching category. The neuroscience and cognitive science studies on gaming are still coming in, and critics, depending on their preconceptions, divide into two camps, either bemoaning the splintering of attention that video games bring in their wake, or lauding the response time and multitasking skills that games engender in their most avid players. These are all serious issues, spanning the range from the sociological impact of repetitive actions to the neural conditioning that distinguishes gaming from other media. In the context of the assertions offered in the rest of this chapter, however, I would say that the pressing issue is whether individual games or games as systems can accrete in such a way as to create what one could call ludic stickiness. One game that was indeed sticky involved players running around a huge and unconventional map of the world, working together to deploy resources and innovative technology to make not just their team but rath-

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er the whole globe a better place. More than a generation ago, the polymath futurist and designer R. Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) proposed this multiplayer “design science process for arriving at economic, technological and social insights pertinent to humanity’s future envolvement [sic, a signature Fuller neologism] aboard our planet Earth.” Originally called the “great logistics game” and then the “world peace game,” it was best known simply as the “World Game.” Inspired in part by the war gaming that planners engaged in to prepare for the hot battlefields of World War II and the colder, yet protracted, conflicts with the Soviet Union that followed, the World Game was a revamping of these strategies to think about how best to use resources to ensure planetary happiness. Often laid out on the unfolded polyhedron of Fuller’s own Dymaxion map, the game used a synergistic rather than competitive play strategy to determine ways to best harness the natural resources of the planet. Fuller’s map gives a better sense of the relative sizes of the continents than the usual Mercator projections, and even more subversively does not have a natural “up” or “down” that de-privileges people’s usual expectations of maps and the sense of space that they project. Fuller maintained that the goal was to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” The World Game was a product of postscarcity thinking and 1960s utopianism, played without benefit of networks and computer simulations, but its essential message—that humans working together have the potential to craft a better world—resonates, and more than ever looks like a prototype for the networked effects of simulation and participation. RUNNING ROOM OR PLAY SPACE? Simulation and participation drive everything from figuring information to the fabbing of WYMIWYM objects; they make possible the mixing and mashing of open-source sound and imagescapes; and they shape the ways that we work as well as the ways that we play. It is my hope that the detailed listing of all these manifestations of the computer as culture machine in aggregate proves the existence of the unimodern unimedia posited at the start of this chapter. In keeping with the spirit of this project, I hope to not simply identify unimodernism but to point toward ways in which its unimodern unimedia might deepen meaning and engagement with the world, art, and each other. What we need to confront is the explosion of information that computer networks engender. Understanding the changes wrought by computer-inflected technologies points to the huge difference between processing data and designing its output. This conceptual clarity will also help us to categorize what

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kind of culture we are actually constructing in the twenty-first century. If we divide the last century into early modern, high modern, and postmodern strands (roughly 1900–1919, 1919–1973, and 1973–2001, respectively), the culture machine’s ubiquity has braided all three (and more) into what we have already identified as unimodernism. The twenty-firstcentury culture machine’s modernisms exist simultaneously in an everpresent database, ready to be deployed or redeployed in the cultural equivalent of just-in-time production. The single most important issue is to ensure that the uniformity of substrate that the computer brings to culture does not produce a stultifying sameness of content. To do so, it is worth revisiting Karl Kraus’s concept of running room. In the original German, the word is Spielraum, the roots being Spiel, or “play,” and Raum, or “space.” So whether running room or play space, the concept brings with it a sense of exploration, imagination, and engagement with the unexpected. The sheer productive capacity of unimodern unimedia can and should be able to carve out this Spielraum. Running room is different from the touted benefits of diversity, however, because diversity is often another way to describe the offerings in a bazaar. If the diversity that is being offered is simply in the realm of consumption, it remains just that: consumption. The play space I am discussing will be located within twenty-firstcentury capitalism, but it has to offer the choice not to buy and especially the option to make. That is one reason that the open-source community is so crucial to the future of running room. Free culture as a gift exchange offers a real challenge to the inherited affordances of market economies. The generosity of online communities serves as a way to access the powers of the always already available archive of the unimodern culture machine without falling prey to the notion that the market defines everything and that the imagination must be tied to its precepts. We have already seen how unimodern unimedia has exploded access and content in our cultural archives. This expansion has in turn led to more opportunities for collaborative multi-authorship. This kind of unsigned multiple creatorship is reminiscent of the Greek myths and the Great Wall of China. Both the myths and the wall took centuries to build, and thousands of people contributed to their effort. We build multiple author works as well, but now we call them Linux, Wikipedia, Flickr, Tumblr, and communal bogs. These are the cultural forms that show us a future in which we could all potentially contribute to the creation of things and systems vastly larger than ourselves. This has frequently been the effect of religious devotion, of course, and those who have been to a barn raising have experienced similar kinds of emotions. We know how the memes of simulation and participation competed as well as built on each other: simulation enabled functionality, and participation brought that functionality to ever-more people. This was the promise of computing, and the cultures it has engendered differ radically

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from those we inherited from a half-century of television viewing. The previous regime offered and continues to beguile us with an ever-increasing plentitude of narrative entertainment (again, it does not matter whether that entertainment was called a situation comedy, the nightly news, a shopping channel, or a reality show—it was and is all entertainment); it creates habits of mind and modes of consumption. The development of ever more complicated and intertwined systems of delivery, the downloading syndrome, can lead to a proliferation of meaning-lite, if not outright meaningless, content. That is why, even when setting out to celebrate the best of the culture machine and its products, there is an underlying fear of unexplored avenues that will shut down in the face of an inexorable yet barely perceptible pressure to do less rather than more. The arguments here shuttle between the past, present, and future, and one of the fears it deals with is the concern that no matter what they want, people may end up getting a machine that emulates their televisions, but with a cell phone and credit card shopping grafted onto it. Combine stickiness and unfinish, however, and what you create are ever-enfolding and expanding interconnections of hypercontexts. Those who want to do new work with the culture machine must ensure running room for the imagination as well as playful space for mindful downloading and meaningful uploading. This is the unimodern dream—less grand than its predecessors perhaps, but no less worthy.

FOUR The Kantian Philosophy of Twitter Alessandro Lanni

DIALOGUE Q. In few words, what do you think are the differences between old and new media manipulation? The new platforms on which we consume information—in such a wide sense that goes far beyond the daily news—and on which we produce content ourselves, are still quite recent resources and prone to constant changes; it is these changes that make them still obscure. Furthermore, if I think of two social networks as Facebook and Twitter, they apparently undergo the plastic push by the users’ masses on one side, and on the other side by the business companies that run them. Sometimes these two pressures can converge in a common direction; other times, the one will affect the other one, in such a way that either user will condition the companies or vice versa, the companies will impose their own orientations to the users. In short, the in-progress nature of the new sources of information does not allow us to propose any profitable strategies for an adequate solution. As with any solution, it depends on us to choose the most convenient tools. That said, surely both familiarity with the tools and competence with the topics we are concerned with, are a necessary basis for improving the use of platform 2.0. When Clay Shirky speaks about information overload as a flaw in the filter, he is pointing to a theoretical comprehension and a practical way out. But in order to learn how to select, we need at least to have clear ideas: entering the actual Harvard Library and not knowing how it 57

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works, causes the same effects of displacement that we experience on the Web. Q. Do you envisage a new conformism or a paradigm shift in knowledge as result of new media and in particular in relation to aesthetics? Independence of thought is essential both in the analogic and in the digital mediatic scenarios. I do not think that things are different now and the Kantian phrase “Sapere aude” continues to be a useful compass, even after more than two centuries later. Surely, if we use the instrument more and more often to get and produce information and knowledge, our responsibilities will be increased. Huge agencies of knowledge, school for first, will have to cope with this disintermediation. Q. Do you think that after all the Web’s self-regulation, dynamics is like any selfregulation including that of organic systems? I do not know whether the dynamics of the network is self-regulating. There are cases in which central governments can manage to control social networking platforms. Certainly, the top-down mechanism of mass media communication must confront competitive instruments today, which follow different rules. From a general point of view, when we enter the dimension of Twitter, for example, all of us start from scratch, but once inside, the paths diverge, and the forms of power which count are different from the ones which counted in the traditional mass media, while both still being a matter of power. Q. Do the techno-media scenarios you describe become a new kind of orality, losing all institutional fixed reference for a community? The reference to the re-tribalization determined by what McLuhan called the electric media is by now an obsolete image, within the reflection on the media. The disintermediation determined by the Web, the social media and the increasing portability of the connection tools, is in any case an epochal novelty, which contributes to redefine the roles and relationships between producers, owners, certifiers of knowledge, and simple users. Q. Kant’s aesthetics introduced critical constructs as pivotal to our evaluation of what we regard as beauty, goodness, and art. How do you construe decentered aesthetics in relation to twitter? Kant criticizes the eighteenth-century idea of an objectivity of beauty, as traceable in almost explicit rules. Rather, the Kantian beautiful is grounded upon the Urteilkraft, which attributes to aesthetic judgments

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both subjectivity and universality, or at least the very aspiration towards them. All the same, in Twitter, generally speaking, it is difficult to find a shared background that is also objective. Everyone determines his/her own timeline flow, depending on interests, tastes, preferences, and all that is totally subjective. Q. Does the role of the “filter” subject cultural production to a new set of constraints which blurs the Kantian divide between the aesthetic and the sublime? The filter is a decisive notion for many of the arguments we share about the Web today. Who filters? How does one filter? On what grounds? How does the construction of knowledge, whatever it is, change, if the filter is not certified anymore from the outside objectively? All these are issues that should enter philosophical discussions by virtue of the change in the constitution of knowledge, that is, the way it is fed and ratified. Q. Does Twitter as a metaphor—and not only as a tangential phenomenon in our technologically driven society—suggest that we are receding from Kant’s subjective aesthetics of art into an objectified field of mechanical extensions? I would say exactly the other way round. Twitter is a space in which sense can be construed (though not necessarily) in a free way. Although for sure there are structural ties—like the 140 characters—nonetheless, the possibility to test new paths in which a transcendental—that is collective and no longer individual—subjectivity may be recognized—a cooperative subjectivity, I would say—is always there. Q. Do the structural features of Twitter imply the Kantian schematism? The way in which sense is determined on a platform such as Twitter makes me think of Pragmatism: more than by virtue of an external reference, sense is determined by virtue of a communitarian trigger. For sure there is an oscillation between empirical and transcendental that is bypassed when using Twitter. *** One of the major topics (and problems) within the transformation of our information diets—a reaction to the digitalization of knowledge at first, and to the circulation of this knowledge through the Web later on—is the filter. How to select information in front of the constant and ongoing assault we are subjected to from several devices, through which we shape much of what we currently know? How to distinguish between quality

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and cheap information? How to sort out the so-called information overload? What’s important for us and what’s not? The discussion around these questions is growing at a speed that, beyond the quality of single contributions, is surely a sign of the centrality of the topic within the common doubts and frenzy awakened by the transformation in progress, which we are all going to face whether willing or not. Nevertheless, the purpose of this chapter is not to add a puzzle piece to the scenario as much as to focus on the philosophical content of many of the questions above. I want to stress that the issue of the filter like we experience it, for example, on Facebook and Twitter, is a philosophic issue at heart. On top of that, I’d like to emphasize the way this issue has been at the center of philosophy since the origins in the West about 2,500 years ago. TWITTER IS EMPTY (AT THE BEGINNING) First let us consider how we decide what keeps plurality together. How do we categorize and sort out the chaos in which there is no organizing principle a priori. If we go over the texts that try to rethink the nature of the Web and knowledge in the Web age, the great interrogations in philosophy are apparently always behind the corner. We are not interested in deciding whether Clay Shirky 1 is right or wrong when he says, “It’s not information Overload. It’s filter failure,” but we realize that the terms of the discussion haven’t gone, for example, much further than Kant’s “transcendental schematism” when the philosopher was searching a principle to keep intellect and experience together. The principle that, in the third Critique, would be developed into the capacity to judge, Urteilskraft, signaled a great aesthetic and epistemological escape to which the story of schematism eventually came to an end. 2 Now, to prove how much of philosophical depth lies within mechanisms that seem utterly removed from it, let’s take an ever growing social network like Twitter, the microblogging Web site used by millions of people around the world, which defines itself as follows: “Welcome to Twitter. Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.” To sign in it’s as easy as it gets: a username (for instance, @alessandrolanni), a password, and you’re in. But “in” what, exactly? Nothing. When you sign in, you’re into nothing. Or better, you’re inside something that can potentially become something else but hasn’t a shape yet. Our TimeLine is literally empty because we haven’t started to follow what will be our source feeds that will compose the plurality of knowledge filtered by Twitter. Sure, there are some suggestions (follow that actor or singer, follow this important magazine) but we are basically alone and it’s up to us to build a vision on the world sub specie Twitter.

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It’s from this kind of tabula rasa that our vision of the world starts, according to the blue bird’s social network. While information inputs run one after another in front of our eyes, depending on our selection, a personalized stream of knowledge takes shape. There are no a priori categories to prescribe the way to bring multiplicity back to a concept. On Twitter, our ever contingent and changing interests are the ones to dictate the rule of our knowledge. So, a kind of “historical a priori” that keeps knowledge and individual interests closely together comes into play. When you sign in you have an empty box that you fill with your own prejudices, your own choices and so on. An absolute TimeLine is therefore impossible; no user faces the same stream of tweets. The multiplicity that we find on our computer screen or on our smartphone is always preinterpreted; it’s a multiplicity for sure, but according to a grid that we imposed on our own, one that avoids what we are not interested in and admits only what we believe may be relevant. There’s no view from nowhere, there’s no absolute knowledge in Twitter. The information descending from the social network is necessarily partial: what I know is what I choose to know. THE FILTER The filter then. The greatest problem of the horizontal, open, and participated Web. Who’s to filter? On what basis? Why do we agree that my filter is better than yours a priori? Can we even say that? Maybe not, since the filter has its own unavoidable historicity and contingence. There’s no best selection principle, it’s simply not possible. At the same time, if everyone acts on one’s own and is perfectly at ease in this solitude of choice, what permits one to compare a twitter-based knowledge to another? If everyone chooses his or her own way to tweet, if anyone has a finite dimension without external rules imposed by an arbiter at disposal, if everything changes, how can you critique, although failing, the use of Twitter? Where to start? Ultimately, if Twitter doesn’t exist as shared knowledge, does this mean that “anything goes”? If there’s no shared space, if the sense is unstable and precarious, it’s hard for the critique to get through and decide about the right or wrong, about the “best” or “worst” use—if we don’t care about “correct”—of the social network. If Twitter does not exist, who’s to criticize? The risk is to move from knowledge to power; the one who’s more persuasive—and not always just for the sake of reasonable or at least reasonable arguments—will impose a stronger vision. Apropos the preoccupation around information overload, David Weinberger cleverly wrote, “We shouldn’t freak out about information overload because we’ve always been overloaded, in one way or another.” 3

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What does it mean to recognize that we were always overloaded by information, by data assaulting us everyday? In our view, it means to bring up an issue about which the most advanced minds on the revolution of the Web are at each other’s throat: the question that crossed the whole of Western philosophy, from Plato’s Sophist to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and to find answers also in the twenty-first century. Weinberger focuses on the question in this way: “If our social networks are our new filters, then authority is shifting from experts in faraway offices to the network of people we know, like, and respect.” 4 In sum (and abruptly), in the 2.0 era the great problem of the Metaphysical Deduction elucidated in the first Critique is blown away. When Kant made an effort to ground the constitutive categories of objective knowledge on the sturdy pillars of logic (Aristotelian logic at that time), he was dealing with the very guarantee of authorship that is being currently divided among single individuals. Reputation on the Web is earned and maintained (or lost) every day: there is no absolute criterion to certify the quality of the filter. THE CENTER IS THE SELF The Filter Bubble is a book published in 2011. Author Eli Pariser is an activist in his early thirties, one of those guys we are able to imagine even though we don’t know them, thanks to all the profiles in the magazines over the last years. He didn’t write a philosophy book, it is rather a complaint about the change occurring due to the revolution of personalized information diets and behaviors online. Because of the freedom to select contents and knowledge arranged by the Web, one may think that our freedom horizon is wider but, as Pariser states clearly, it’s not like that. It is true, to some extent, that we are media to ourselves, we are filters free from principles set elsewhere, the only choosers responding to our immediate interests is us. Yet the founder of Move On explains why it’s not like that. Web moguls like Google have been working so far to “direct” this freedom. As of today, many companies struggle to guess what we like in each area (from food to politics) to profile an information filter targeted for marketing, that is to say to sell us information and products we are supposedly interested in. If in the 2.0 era, the a priori of knowledge categories is nullified and each a priori, each selection principle of the multiplicity is contextual historical and dependent on our interests, which are obviously contingent, there is a “pole” that works to prepackage this multiplicity. If Google results are preshaped, prechewed, knowledge itself is under some form of external control. If the search engine of Mountain View does not play only as “experience form” (like space and time in Kant) but also as a facilitator that understands our partial and immediate interests (previous

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surfing, enquiries, online shopping) like absolutes, something in the new mechanisms fails. New generation filters—Pariser is considering Google and all the tools that select information on the basis of our preferences—“they are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you’ll do and want next” 5 (emphasis added). In a few words, here’s the renewed proposition of the philosophical core of the filter issue, just like philosophy addressed it 2,500 years ago. The filter tells us who we are, what world we know and how we know it. There is a militant streak in Pariser’s book and a wish to warn the reader and Web surfers about the transformation that occurred over the last years. We are not interested here in considering the valuing aspect of the essay; we’ll leave it to others. The Filter Bubble helps us to focus on the filtered nature of the reality descending from the Web (the social Web but also from search engines like Google). A filter that is ours, always and forever, even though the multiplicity we are in front of is not so neutral as we might think. If the catch line “we are the media” by Dan Gillmor 6 expressed the consciousness that we are all able to create a potentially worldwide message through the new media, the new catch—besides the call “hey there, we’re here”—should be “we are the filter.” The value of our individual and/or collective presence in the Web resides more than ever in the capacity to size quality through the filter, to select, distinguish, and establish a hierarchy of contents. I am the filter I select. In this era, with the affirmation of what Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells called “mass-self communication,” everybody, at least potentially, is able to shape contents by himself. 7 The key word is “self.” One tends to forget, however, that also the fruition of contents, the shaping of a knowledge scenario, resides in the self. SOLIPSISM IN THE SOCIAL NETWORKS All of this could be read in light of some famous propositions by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (5.6). The Viennese philosopher wrote about one hundred years ago, affirming the total mirroring of language and world and identifying a nameless edge in that “my,” in that hidden subjectivity. Slightly further on, Wittgenstein writes, “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (5.632). Let us ask: isn’t the worry that the world will turn into my world to inspire all the people who criticize the personalization of knowledge through the web? 8 The solipsism, the risk to become closed monads would always be behind the corner according the “apocalyptical” who are warning the naive users.

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However, the additional question is: does some kind of multiplicity selectable/filterable through our categories even exist? In light of what was said before, the answer is no. Without an ordering principle there is no multiplicity to look at. This is rather a byproduct of our reconstruction of the knowledge mechanism in the 2.0 Web in retrospect. Let’s say it again: our TimeLine on Twitter but also elsewhere is empty if we don’t apply a filter; some selecting principle to start a journey headed somewhere. Without a decision, there is no multiplicity descending from that decision. The passage from chaos to sense is the great mystery of humankind. How is it that words (or concepts, this depends on latitudes and eras) make things speak? There, the experience of sense rising from the disarray of social networks confirms the same philosophical question. How is it that empirical multiplicity turns into science? How is it that noise turns into a signal when a central system (Kant’s “I think”) that donates sense to confusion, which is nonsense by its own terms, is blown away like in the Web? The problem of synthesis is brought up to date. Many people are concerned by the absence of a higher-level principle to regulate sense on Twitter. This strain of thought posits that the possibility of making sense is lost forever, and in so doing, it denies the daily experience of millions of people who are indeed able to organize some knowledge for better or worse, no matter its quality, on the Web. Knowledge does not disappear; the problem for those who worry is that the objective principles that underpin knowledge are at risk. “The filter exists no matter how and it is understood in retrospect, it intervenes in a second moment,” writes Sergio Maistrello, one of the leading interpreters of what’s happening in the Web in the past years. It’s collective, distributed, based on the activity of assimilation and relaunch of any single knot in the Web. It follows that the unassuming presence of a content on the Web never says something on its quality; there’s room for every kind of idea, even the most aberrant, and it is up to a community of interconnected people to distinguish between what holds popular interest from digital trash, what is useful from what is inappropriate. 9 The problem, the way it is often addressed, seems comparable to the one Kant would call of “subsumption.” If a principle that somehow allows the organization of millions of tweets disappears, could one make use of all the excess knowledge the Web projects us into? A lot of critics of the Internet see this as one of the major cognitive problems we would be exposed to by the current information revolution. But does a philosophical question have to stop at the level of this reasonable worry? I do not think so. In his constant pursuit of a mechanism that could keep knowledge together, Kant has probed first the subjective logics and later the aesthetic one to seek for the unifying principle.

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So now we are in a condition similar to the one the philosopher was facing: we have to decide what holds together our knowledge in the Twitter era, where the summa of knowledge that is now based on Twitter’s TimeLine comes from. Should we appeal to personal taste, to contingent interest? Should we appeal to the “I like it this way” or the “this is what interests me?” It is possible, sure, but philosophy would be put aside. If we’d rather question what is changing (and also what stays the same) within the present revolution, we may try to discuss what appears as given data in front of us. For example: does a multiplicity even exist without any principle of selection? Does information exist—no matter how overabundant, failed or scarce—without a “we,” or better said without an effective “I” that poses itself at the center of gravity, among one of the infinite centers of the universe 10 described by the change due to the Web 2.0? Maybe not, and it’s Twitter’s own void at the beginning to demonstrate it. Without millions of Twitter users not only will there not be any content posted every second in the short form of 140 characters, but there won’t be contents either because no one would activate the mechanism of the selection, the filter. “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind,” wrote Kant in the first Critique. In the era of mass self-communication, to underline this mutual dependence, we could translate this Kantian quote in: “filters without twits are empty, twits without filters are blind.” “Information overload is just a malfunctioning filter” means not only that we must acknowledge some limits of content that run on Twitter but also that we must be conscious that the selves as filters count because without filters there is no information, much less information overload. Commonly, we build millions of daily paths in the Internet and no matter their imperfection, we cross a territory that is also our territory, our map. It is hard in this dimension to appeal to something from the outside (that was Aristotle’s logics for Kant) to rule our navigation, properly, because it is our world and its limits are established by all our friends and those we follow on Twitter. NOTES 1. Clay Shirky is one of the most distinguished authors on the effects of the Web on individuals and society. His books include: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008) and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin, 2010). 2. One must recall Emilio Garroni (1925–2005) with his pivotal work on the third Critique. We have to mention his Estetica ed epistemologia (Roma: Bulzoni, 1976) and Senso e paradosso (Bari: Laterza, 1986) where he focuses on a new interpretation of the Kantian Aesthetics beyond the study of beauty.

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3. David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 10. Even though this is not the proper context, it would be interesting to delve into Weinberger’s distinction between filter out and filter forward. 4. David Weinberger, Too Big to Know, 10. 5. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 6. See his celebrated We the Media (Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly Media, 2004). 7. Manuel Castells, Communication and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 8. My mind goes back to Cass Sunstein’s celebrated Republic.com (2001) but also to several studies issued over the decade. 9. Sergio Maistrello, Giornalismo e nuovi media (Milano: Apogeo, 2010), 51. 10. Some talk about this transformation in terms of a “Copernican” revolution, of cosmic proportion. I think it is more appropriate to refer to Giordano Bruno’s idea of a universe with a multitude of centers rather than a universe where the Sun replaced the Earth as a cornerstone.

FIVE Identifying and Interacting Notes on the Architecture of the Visual Brain Rob Spruijt

DIALOGUE Q. Let’s begin with the outcomes of having two eyes input into one organ (brain) for visual art: what are the principle phenomenological implications? We receive half of the amount of light when we close one eye, yet it does not suddenly seem to be half as light in the world around us. The two eyes create a single visual experience. This has been described as us having two eyes biologically, while having cyclopic vision phenomenally. McGinn (see reference in the chapter) takes to mean that the “mind’s eye” is indeed effectively singular. These considerations lead me to think that imagination, what we “see” with the mind’s eye, is effectively experienced monocularly, without stereoptic depth. Q. You mention in your chapter Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipsis” as an example of how we derive an aesthetic pleasure not simply by means of brain processing. Does it imply the effect in terms of aesthetics is not simply defined by our visual system alone? On a trivial level all pleasure is brain processing, but it need not be limited to the visual modality. My point about Serra’s torqued ellipses is indeed that the aesthetic pleasure of the work is not derived from just looking at it, but from moving through it and from participating in the work. Aesthetic pleasure is not modality specific. We also derive aesthet67

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ic pleasure from sound and through movement. Interestingly, we do not generally refer to “aesthetic pleasure” in the realm of taste and smell. Within the context of the chapter, I would surmise that taste and smell more often involve direct pleasure, rather than the motivational dimension. However, if indeed, as I suggest, the aesthetic response is part of the motivational system, it stands to reason that it permeates every sensory system, and I see no formal reason why we cannot speak of aesthetics in the context of food and perfume. From the chapter, it follows that the particular aesthetic experiences associated with the visual system are not independent of their modality: the structure of the visual system also structures visual aesthetic pleasure. This is the way embodiment structures cognition and emotion. Likewise, I expect aesthetic experiences associated with other modalities to be structured differently and in concordance with their particular modalities. And the work which triggers such aesthetic experiences may do this in one or more modalities, although I suspect that there is a tendency in art to limit the modality in many cases. In the example of the Serra piece, I would postulate that the aesthetic experience triggered by the visual apprehension of the work is rather secondary to the act of participating in the work. Q. Can you expound on how “curiosity” and “exploration” of “real world scenes” may inform a discussion on environmental art forms? Sensory systems are continuously attending to specific locations or sources in the world. This attending is not some mechanical scanning of the world, but is driven by emotion and motivation. In short: we are looking because we are curious, and so on. What this means for painting, photography, and all those art-forms which are nonlocalizing, is that curiosity leads us to explore the image and the world of the imagination it instantiates, but that world is by definition nowhere in particular. Curiosity in the context of the environmental arts, on the other hand, invites exploration of an existing physical space, if only because such works cannot be fully apprehended without changing one’s point of view. A somewhat new area of vision research studies how we are choosing where to look next, where to go exploring, how we assess overall emotional salience, and how we map salient locations within that environment. I expect such research and the environmental arts can greatly benefit from each other. Q. How does “indirect perception” affect our conception of aesthetics in art? Indirect perception refers to the notion that our visual experiences are of mental images, triggered by the cues provided by the eyes, and which are then projected onto the external object or scene. This implies that a

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discussion of aesthetics should consider both the external cues triggering the aesthetic experience (the work of art), as well as the internal processes which generate the phenomenal experience. More interestingly, it also implies that aesthetic qualities are neither located exclusively in the work of art, nor in the mind. Rather, aesthetics are the result of a reciprocal relation between the two: properties of the object triggering cognitive, emotional, and motivational process, and these idiosyncrasies are in turn projected onto the external object. Q. It seems that your differentiation and insight into “when gestalt becomes a drawing” falls into Wittgenstein’s critical stance on phenomenalism (such as Mach’s) in which any diagrammatic representation of perception cannot be reduced to direct sensation but is rather mediated through language. What is the point you are making on canonical images? I see absolutely no reason to privilege language in this matter. Several species of animals have been shown to make images (albeit in highly artificial contexts) without possessing symbolic language. All mammals have visual brains like ours, and can see without symbolic language. We can recognize and even draw objects for which we do not have names. What we draw, however, is not based on “direct sensation,” but on perception: the mental image triggered by the sensation. There can be no doubt that the mental image is visual in nature, and is not some language-based code. At the same time this mental image is unlike external representations such as diagrams, sketches, paintings, or photographs in that the mental image is not representing but instantiating knowledge. Some of this has been touched upon in the chapter. When we externalize the mental image in the form of a drawing, the fingerprints of the visual brain will be all over that image, and canonical perspective is one such feature. At the same time, the act drawing also changes the mental images, makes it more definite, and specific, and, tangentially, it may invite language-based reflection. Canonical perspective is typical in drawings across cultures and across objects being drawn, so this gives us a glimpse of the way the visual brain constructs the mental image. There is no need to include mediation by language in this mechanism. Q. As you mention in respect to the image of a tulip: it is its historical context and not only its embodied cognition that defines its aesthetic experience. In what ways does aesthetics in that sense retain a meta-cognitive dimension? The aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to embodied cognition: I hope to have shown that the aesthetic experience is emotional-motivational. As externalization of a gestalt the drawing embodies cognition, and is not a mere copy of external data. But the aesthetic experience can be separated from that: a logo can be successful without being aestheti-

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cally pleasing. You also seem to assume that various connotations of the tulip image are part of the aesthetic experience. I am not convinced of that, as it suggests that without (complete) context the aesthetic experience would be lessened, diminished. I can appreciate the image, despite my not knowing for what particular context it was made. My aesthetic appreciation of cave art, likewise, is completely outside any historical or cultural connotations. My aesthetic experience of imagery from various religions is not diminished, and perhaps even enhanced by the removal from their original context. All this does not preclude the possibility of our appreciating a work of art where contextualizing is central to the work—think Felix Gonzáles-Torres bringing a mount of candy into the museum. Such aesthetic pleasure, it seems to me, is not essentially visual, but closer to that of poetry. Q. You conclude your chapter by noting that it is music rather than language that is more analogous to aesthetic experience in visual arts and yet so much in modern art has been vested in languaging a concept-related configuration. What does it tell us about contemporary and future aesthetics? I have no clearer insight into the future than the rest of us, but I would be happy to speculate. I would like to separate art theory and critical theory from a data-driven approach to aesthetics. I found that within a data-driven approach the analogy of art and text is not particularly useful, which is why I wanted to bring attention to another, and potentially more useful, analogy. Each of these analogies, however, is just that: an analogy, and not a deeper ontological insight. Unfortunately, such analogies quickly morph from being descriptive to prescriptive, and artists start to make work that fits a given discourse. Personally, I find the current discourse, relentlessly focussing on language, rather narrow and stifling: the notion that postmodernism would move beyond the credo or the manifesto has not yet been fulfilled. I would like the artistic discourse to be more open, more inclusive, more imaginative, and less institutionalized. All artistic movements and conceptualizations eventually morph into something else, and this will be no different for the language-based approach: eventually it has run its course. Contemporary aesthetics should not just try and collaborate with any current discourse, but should aspire to a data-driven understanding and description of the aesthetic experience. Such a model might inspire artists to make particular work, but I can only hope that such work would be original and imaginative, not merely attempting to illustrate any intellectual position. Personally, in my work as a scientist and as an artist, I specifically like to explore the visual dimensions of imagery, while often appreciating other possibilities in the art world around me.

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***

NEURO-AESTHETICS AND THE VISUAL SYSTEM In this chapter, I will present an approach to aesthetics which is grounded in the neurological architecture of the visual system and its corresponding phenomenology. Being both a psychologist and a painter, I have a particular point of view. I care about anchoring the core concepts and mechanisms of the visual system in empirical reality. But I also notice that the point of view of the maker is quite different than that of the observer. Contrasting such phenomenal positions yields some interesting observations about the relations between images and the mind, which I intend to explore here. The past decades have seen major developments in the understanding of the visual brain as it works on real-world tasks. 1 Our understanding of the core functions of the brain has greatly enhanced our understanding of what it is like to be human. Understanding how the brain deals with core concepts like space and self has influenced an array of disciplines. Some areas of psychology have now been able to ground their terminology in neurobiology. Contributions from neurology to the field of imagination and aesthetics have led to an emerging field of neuro-aesthetics. 2 Its main insight is that the brain parts that are used to understand incoming visual data are also utilized in visualizing what an artist is about to make. By linking artistic output to the architecture of the visual brain, we might be able to understand why, for example, just about every child in every culture will draw when given the opportunity to do so. Zeki also provides neurological arguments for the existence of portraiture and imagery of the landscape in just about every culture that has visual art. We will examine the biological basis and implications of the two basic tasks of the visual system: vision for identification and vision for navigation/interaction. 3 This brain research can be related to our subjective experiences. 4 The experiential aspects of vision are referred to as visual phenomenology, which is not a reference to a particular philosophical school of thought, but simply a descriptive term for “what it is like” to have a subjective visual experience. I believe that the two main visual functions each place unique constraints on aesthetic appreciation. These constraints will demonstrate how the structure of the visual brain leaves its “fingerprints” on the work artists make; artistic production is the tangible external evidence of these internal processes and structures.

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VISION HAS TWO FUNCTIONS The standard approach to the visual system studies the optics of the eye and subsequently follows the optic nerve into the brain. 5 We learn from this how the visual brain, in the back of the head, analyzes the visual information in more than thirty individual visual modules, 6 each one dealing with separate visual aspects such as faces, colors, brightness, motion, or stereoptic depth. All these modules can be grouped into two larger visual pathways. 7 One pathway, from the back of the brain to the sides, connects the visual system with memory. This pathway allows us to recognize and identify what we see. Modules that make up this pathway include those for color, invariant aspects of objects, and facial recognition. The other pathway runs from the back of the brain to the top, and connects the visual system with an array of topological maps, which enables us to keep track of where things are in space, where we are in relation to these objects, and how we might interact with our environment. Modules dealing with motion and stereoptic depth are part of this pathway. These two pathways are the biological foundation for the claim that vision serves two main functions: vision for identification and vision for interaction. Effectively, each eye serves two rather different sensory purposes, bundled into a single organ. The center of each eye, our central vision, allows for the detection of color and detail, allowing for the identification of objects. Our peripheral vision is little or no help in this task. Peripheral vision serves a very different function: it keeps track of where things are and it detects motion, so that when we want to identify or focus on something to take a closer look, we know where to look. These two visual pathways have their own distinct experiential aspects and their own phenomenology, with distinct implications for visual art. THE VISUAL PATHWAY FOR INTERACTION IN THE IMAGINATION The two visual pathways are only loosely connected in the brain. Milner and Goodale, and Humphreys and Riddoch 8 have written extensively about patients with selective brain damage in these pathways in order to distinguish the specific functions of the two pathways. Interestingly, the pathway that allows for interaction runs mostly on autopilot: we can walk around without bumping into objects while focusing on a conversation. We can drive a car, or go for a run, without having to pay close attention to how we do that. The most dramatic study in this area was of a patient who had lost most of her capacity to identify objects as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. 9 She was still able to confidently grab objects, and would avoid obstacles when walking. Bizarrely, though, she had no visual awareness at all of what she was grabbing or what she was

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not bumping into. Milner and Goodale, and Jacob and Jeannerod 10 concluded that the phenomenology of sight is limited to our pathway for identification. A quick experiment might demonstrate the basic point. While closing one eye, try and have the tips of your index fingers touch each other. Most people find it difficult to do this without missing at least some of the time. Now do the same with both eyes open. This is much easier. With both eyes open we have stereoptic depth perception, and this greatly enhances our capacity to locate things in the world and to interact with them. Stereoptic depth perception is one of the visual modules that make up the pathway for interaction and navigation. The crucial part of this little demonstration, however, is not that having two eyes open makes it easier to interact with the world. The crucial part is that in terms of visual phenomenology there is no difference: the world does not look different without stereoptic vision. There is, in other words, little or no phenomenology associated with vision for interaction. In general, when we are imagining or visualizing objects, we do not interact with them, and we will thus not engage the pathway for interaction. I speculate therefore that our mental images probably have no stereoptic depth, 11 nor some of the other features associated with the modules that make up the pathway for navigation/interaction. As this pathway has no visual phenomenology, I speculate that this pathway also plays little or no role in the conscious imagination, which has interesting consequences. Humphrey 12 describes earlier research on chimpanzees where brain areas were destroyed which we have since come to recognize as the visual pathway for identification (not something one would likely get permission for anymore these days). As one would expect, these animals are incapable of distinguishing between food and non-food, and they would put anything in their mouths. At the same time, they would not trip over things, and they would have no problem reaching and grabbing an object, demonstrating that the pathway for navigation is still intact. Buried in the data is an additional observation with great relevance. Without the pathway for identification, these chimpanzees would show no signs of spontaneous exploration of their environment. That is, not only had they lost their knowledge of what was in front of them, but when they lost their conscious experience they also lost their curiosity, their affective response to their environment. Our affective responses are thus mostly connected to the visual pathways which identify objects. That would include the particular affective response we call the aesthetic experience. It should be trivial that one has to be aware to have an aesthetic experience. It follows, however, that the aesthetic response is not part of the largely unconscious interaction pathway of the visual system. The joy we may find when we interact with the world, during physical play, on a roller coaster ride, and so on, is thus not derived from visual observation, but from us physically engaging in this activity: a roller coaster is not that

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exciting from the merely observational point of view. In this very specific way we have to walk through the Richard Serra torqued ellipsis to appreciate the work. INCLUDING THE PATHWAY FOR INTERACTION IN VISUAL ARTS The pathway for interaction seems to play no direct role in the visual imagination. Which is not to say that this pathway is not interesting in the context of visual art: it is the absence of this pathway in the visual imagination which gives visual art some of its formal characteristics. The conscious imagination bypasses the pathway for navigation, including modules dealing with stereoptic depth. As a result, visual imagination tends to be effectively two-dimensional and it is probably no coincidence that visual art, as the externalization of the imagination, is mostly twodimensional as well. I speculate that this has made it possible for twodimensional visual art to emerge and to survive for so many centuries. In every culture I am aware of, people who make visual art make drawings and other two-dimensional art. Two-dimensional art comes naturally to us: even though the world around us in 3D, our imagination is not. When humans first started making imagery, they made a huge leap in attempting to externalize their internal mental images. But they did not have to invent how to understand two-dimensional images, as that experience is provided by the architecture of the brain. The images we make as artists, even when they are nominally “realistic” or “from observation,” are depictions which are heavily influenced by the neurological architecture of the imagination, not just by the world around us. If the visual imagination is indeed two-dimensional, this would have implications for explicitly spatial art forms such as architecture. One might expect a certain tension between the visual characteristics of a building as consciously envisioned by an architect, and the largely unconscious way its inhabitants will eventually interact with the space. To imagine how people might interact actually with a space requires scale models and much experience, and this is not always successful. It also leads me to speculate that sculpture in the round is difficult to visualize without the actual work in progress available to envision the possibilities. Contrary to Michelangelo’s suggestion that the sculptor envisions the desired shape and simply cuts away what is not needed, I speculate that sculpting is much more process-based, where the sculptor needs the actual object providing the multiple points of view. I also suspect that 3D is not a natural fit for the movies. The movie generally resembles the way the mind envisions a possible world, not the way our world happens to be. Although the basic technique for 3D movies has been around for a long time, it has cycled in and out of fashion. That movies look more “realistic” with 3D may not matter if the movie in the end is not experi-

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enced as real, but as an instantiation of the world of the imagination. Stereoptic depth is used in the brain in the context of interaction, as opposed to visualizing and imagining, so one might expect to see 3D to become part of video games, or other applications where location and interaction is a relevant part of the medium. I do not expect to see romantic movies turning into 3D in the near future. The architecture of the visual system suggests a grouping of artistic practices such as architecture, environmental art and design, sculpture, and virtual reality which all require using the pathway for navigation and interaction. These interactive art forms all instantiate imaginary worlds being “right here, right now.” Typical two-dimensional art, however, is not located in a specific place and time; the imagery world is nowhere in particular: “once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away.” The aesthetic response is usually encountered in the context of either not being able interact with the content of the imagination (such as the painted image) or in the context of abstaining from interaction (we are only to look at most sculpture). Consider that a child climbing on a sculpture in a public park may be having fun but is probably not having an aesthetic experience. The recommendation to “look with your eyes, not with your hands” is not only inevitable in the context of preservation of art works, it is also a “user’s guide” for the way to experience the art: the aesthetic experience becomes possible when we abstain from interaction, even in environmental art forms. When we have an aesthetic response in an environment or in an installation there are plenty of things to look at, to focus on. Our response could perhaps be described as a compound experience of the individual features of the environment, experienced under the “rule” of abstained interaction. Another, less reductive description of this process might be possible when we study how people scan an environment, as opposed to recognizing an individual object. 13 Such research emphasizes how we can pick up the the gist of the context, say when we walk into a room full of people and we quickly get the feeling whether the crowd is friendly or not, or that panicking feeling when something seems missing in the living room. I would argue, however, that this “understanding” of a scene, is better described as affect. We scan a scene based on our affect: searching a room full of strangers for a friend, looking anxiously for lost car keys, and so on. Our attitude towards a scene is not one of seeing, but is a “looking-for”: an affect-driven exploration of space. 14 While much more work needs to be done in this area, research into curiosity and exploration of real-world scenes may very well inform a discussion of environmental art forms.

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VISUAL ARTS WITHOUT INTERACTION As a general rule, two-dimensional visual art does not require us to interact with the art work. It appears that without interaction our phenomenal experience changes and becomes more intense and gains affective depth. We do not yet have a good understanding of why abstaining from interaction seems to have these effects, but we can at least describe this phenomenon: the aesthetic response is enhanced when we are not physically interacting with a work of art. Some examples from outside the artistic realm may provide a model here. We are prevented from interacting with the world around us when we exclude peripheral vision, which is the retinal equivalent of our vision for interaction, but also when objects are out of reach. Peripheral vision is obscured in cases such as looking through a camera or telescope or microscope, through a keyhole or a kaleidoscope. Many children seem naturally curious when encountering such opportunities. They might not be budding scientists, they just show a spontaneous curiosity to “look-into.” 15 Just about any device that obscures peripheral vision seems to have this effect of directing focus, heightening curiosity, and intensifying the visual experience. An empty box or a porthole somehow makes us want to look and find out what can be seen. Freudians might invoke voyeuristic tendencies here, but I only want to point out that these formal aspects seem to encourage this affective response. The camera or telescope obscures peripheral vision, but it also places objects out of reach: there is nothing to interact with. The same can be said for a mirror or a window. The mirror frames the visual experience and people are naturally curious when encountering a mirror, even though they may have checked their appearance just a moment ago. Likewise with windows: the curiosity triggered by windows can make window-shopping satisfying. In some people this curiosity is a pathological desire: a peeping Tom. There is quite a phenomenal difference between looking at an easel painting in a gallery context, and the experience of being invited into a environment such as an installation. The immersive experience of an installation includes peripheral perception and leads to the scanning of the entire scene. The installation invites interaction or at least evokes the possibility to do so, and the installation is very much located in time and place. In contrast, the world which is instantiated by a typical painting is nowhere in particular; I cannot interact with it. The painting, photo, and so on could hang somewhere else without affecting the world it instantiates. The image, framed by its physical boundaries, focuses the view on a relative small central area of the visual field, blocking out the periphery. A particular case of excluding the visual pathway for interaction occurs when there is just nothing to interact with. This not unlike the experience of walking in a dense forest and coming to a clearing. The forest gives way to the vista of a wide landscape. People are stopped in their

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tracks, might sigh, and experience what is sometimes described as the sublime. In the formal context of the visual system, the vista and a very large shop window can be compared to a large-scale photo or a painting from Barnett Newman or Rothko. In these cases we have excluded the possibility of interacting with the world, while preserving peripheral vision as such. These cases share the phenomenal aspect of stopping us in our tracks and they invite us to contemplate what we see. Much ink has been spilled in comparing and contrasting the sublime and the beautiful. Without rehashing the arguments here, we should recognize that the artwork is part of an artistic discourse, whereas the landscape is not. It interests me, however, that both share certain formal features: it fills most of the visual field and there is nothing one could possible interact with. Neither survives reproduction on a smaller scale very well. A photo of a Rothko in a book doesn’t capture the tremendous power of his work, and a photo or painting of that amazing landscape quickly reduces it to kitsch or nostalgia. The crucial change effected by these reproductions is that the change in scale also changes the role of peripheral vision. As an aside, note that when we are interacting with a book or a postcard, the pathway for navigation and interaction is activated again, though our interactions are related to the physicality of the reproductions, not to the depicted works of art. The visual pathway for navigation and interaction is only loosely (if at all) associated with consciousness and with the imagination. Research in this area is less well developed than research into the capacity for identification, but I expect future research to have relevance for a group of related art forms which include the environmental arts and large scale works of art. Much more research is available for the processes and components which are involved in recognition and identification, and we will now turn to those. THE VISUAL PATHWAY FOR IDENTIFICATION: INDIRECT PERCEPTION In describing the visual system for interaction, we approached the visual system from the outside inwards: starting with the eyes, following the visual signal into the brain. When describing the system for identification such a traditional description is less helpful. 16 While input from the eyes is often the basis for visual experiences, the brain is also quite capable of generating visual experiences without input from the eyes. This is the case in imagining and in dreaming. It is also the case in visual memories, visualizing, day dreaming, and so on. Even in those cases where we use our eyes to see the visual experience is only loosely related to the data provided by the retina. We experience a world full of detail and color, although only the center of the eye detects details and color. Optical

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illusions such as the familiar duck-rabbit illusion show that we can have wildly different experiences based one and the same set of external data. Traditionally, such illusions were considered pathological examples: cases which somehow fall outside the normal functioning of the visual system which could not be explained. But it is becoming increasingly clear that such experiences are indicative of a flaw in that traditional model. The last decade has dramatically changed the way researchers think about the visual system. The pathological examples have become the new normal. We now know that neuronal pathways are not exclusively running from the eye into the visual brain and onward toward memory. There are at least as many connections running in the opposite direction. A preliminary description of this two-way system might be that we are as capable of seeing what is out there as we are of making it up internally. The visual system allows us see what is out there, but it also allows us to compare perceived reality with previous visual experiences and it allows us to anticipate possible realities. Seeing derives much of its practical use from our capacity to interweave our current visual experiences with other visual experiences such as visual memory and visual imagination. When we open our eyes, we are simultaneously seeing and imagining, remembering, and anticipating. Yet even such a description of the visual system is still too generous to the role of eyesight. An increasing number of scientists and theorists consider the internal capacity for generating images the starting point for all visual experiences, reducing the experience of seeing what is out there as just one example of this process. 17 The emerging idea is that the brain is constantly generating images, whether the eyes are open or not. When we are opening our eyes, this model posits, we are still experiencing internally generated images. The general term for this model is indirect perception: even our experience of seeing the world around us is indirect, mediated by images in the brain. The central assumption in indirect perception is that our phenomenal experience is not of the world out there, but of a mental image, which I will call a gestalt. These mental images can be experienced under the assumption of past or future, they can be experienced as consciously generated or originating outside of us, but all these images are part of the way the brain operates and are phenomenally related. The brain is not passively waiting for input, but is continuously and actively generating imagery. In some cases we know that we are creating the gestalt and expect to have control over it. In other cases, when we are not aware of initiating the imagery, we take it that the imagery is originating outside of us, such as in hallucinations or in dreams. Of particular interest in the study of indirect perception is a condition called Bonnet syndrome. 18 Unlike schizophrenic patients, people with Bonnet syndrome are not cognitively impaired, and they can usually infer that they are hallucinating. Yet they describe the imagery as com-

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pletely realistic. Ramachandran and Blakeslee 19 describe a case of a young man who, as a result of a car crash, has persistent hallucinations in the entire lower half of his field of vision, while in the top half he can perceive the world normally. This patient is in the unique position of being able to compare and contrast normal sight and hallucinations. He is described as cognitively normal, yet after seven years of seeing these hallucinations he still cannot tell the difference between his normal vision and the hallucinations. He can often infer the the images must be hallucinatory, but they look perfectly normal. Dreams are fascinating because they present us with the unconstrained brain generating imagery. 20 This makes the phenomenology of dreams a model for the study of indirect perception. In dreams we find that we are having visual experiences like those in the real world. All the senses may be experienced, though vision and hearing tend to dominate. The dream world, while strange, looks like an actual world out there, offering a non-pathological example of the mind making images which are experienced as the real thing out there. After we wake up we realize that the images were part of dreams. Dreams are often characterized by impossible events. However, dreams do not look like dreams: the visual phenomenology of seeing so-and-so in the real world or in my dreams is the same experience of seeing so-and-so. This is a crucial point in describing indirect perception, because it posits that the healthy brain is indeed capable of generating complete visual experiences without concurrent input from the eyes. In dreams the imagery is chaotic and associative. When we open our eyes the imagery becomes constrained, structured by the data from the eyes. We do not see what is out there, however; the phenomenology is triggered by the internally generated gestalt. When we are seeing, we are in effect still dreaming. From a phenomenal perspective, there is no difference between dreaming and seeing. From an epistemological point of view the difference between dreaming and seeing is of course dramatic: dreams are not informative about the world around us, while seeing offers us a way to figure out what is really going on. The model of indirect perception describes visual phenomena and does not in the least force us to contemplate solipsism which is a position about epistemology, not about phenomenology. WHEN THE GESTALT BECOMES A DRAWING While the mental image has a visual phenomenology, it is not an image in the regular sense, 21 which is why I prefer the word gestalt. The gestalt is the visual record of the brain constructing invariant features of objects from accumulated visual experiences. This is generic in as far as that it is independent of point of view, distance, lighting, and so on. The gestalt is

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also specific, in that it is the gestalt of this object, not another. By way of illustration, image for a moment a zebra. Take your time to convince yourself that the image is clear and that you are indeed seeing the zebra in your mind’s eye. Now consider the following question: where is the imagined zebra? What can you say about its imagined environment? We are perfectly capable of imagining the zebra in an environment, but most people will not spontaneously imagine a (specific) background for the image. We imagine the gestalt of a zebra, not of that zebra in the zoo or in the Serengeti. This makes sense when the gestalt is indeed the visual record of the invariant features of a zebra, and not the varying conditions in which we might see a specific one. In the real world a zebra is inevitably somewhere, but the imaginary zebra is nowhere in particular. The possibility of isolating an object in the imagination, to be uncommitted about context, is probably a consequence of the separation between the visual systems for recognition and for interaction as described above. The result, however, is the visual experience of a gestalt: of a zebra surrounded by nothingness. Most people do not realize this bizarre feature until it is pointed out to them. When people are asked to draw something simple, say a banana, they will do so in the very same way: they will draw a banana without context, without light-logic or shadows; just the contours and perhaps the basic color of a banana. Drawing (sketching) relies on a gestalt and I consider drawing as the externalization of this internal gestalt. Another person, looking at this drawing of a banana, can easily understand the drawing even though we have never encountered an actual banana without any context or location. When we are looking at such a drawing, we are not wondering where the banana is, why it seems to be floating in mid-air. I propose that this is because we intuit that the drawing is not the drawing of a part of the world, but the drawing of a part of the mind. The drawing, even while representing a real-world object, is understood as the drawing of a mental image, as the product of the mind. In this way drawings can provide a way of studying the architecture of the mind. Drawings are frequently used to diagnose and study visuospatial disorders, 22 though there are only few methodological studies into the validity of this nonverbal method. 23 The drawing is understood as an externalization of the gestalt, but we should be careful not to confuse the two. Return for a moment to your mental image of a zebra. Perhaps this time you imagine it in a context. Regardless, convince yourself again you have a clear image. Now try and tell how many stripes the zebra has. We cannot count these. It turns out the image does not have a particular number of stripes. Again, most people don’t realize the mental image is so generic until it is pointed out. The image seemed perfectly clear, perhaps even photographic, but the mental image is not an image. The gestalt visually represents our knowledge that the zebra is striped, but the mental image does not represent that feature by a specific number of

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stripes. A drawing, on the other hand, can be generic in many ways but cannot have an indeterminate amount of stripes. We easily make and understand drawings of objects without context, and we also habitually do so without wondering about light-logic or shadows. I speculate that this is caused by the gestalt lacking light-logic, and so on. The gestalt is the visual format of certain invariant features of an object, and light-logic is quite varying. Rather then choosing a particular light source, the gestalt can be uncommitted about it, even though this cannot correspond to a real-world object. A sketch is often cartoonish: contours, outlines, perhaps filled in with colors, but without specifics because the gestalt has little detail. The gestalt is generic, perhaps in a platonic way; it is not the image of a particular object. My gestalt does not appear cartoonish to me because the moment I consider color, or highlights, the gestalt has them, but not until then. People with Bonnet syndrome sometimes report hallucinations actually looking like cartoons. 24 That we can understand cartoons so easily, despite their being very different than the real world, is not the result of us learning how to “read” cartoons in the context of a culture. Rather, the cartoons are mimicking the way the brain deals with visual information. In this way the art we make has the fingerprints of the architecture of the mind all over it. Another observation about the relation between the mental image and a drawing concerns the point of view. Actual objects are experienced from a particular point of view, but the gestalt is generic. A drawing needs to draw the object from a point of view, even if a gestalt perhaps has none. We cannot be uncommitted about a point of view the way we can be uncommitted about light source or color. When people draw a banana or a horse, a dog or a fish, they mostly tend to do so from the same particular point of view. A fish, while mostly seen from the top in reality, is typically drawn from the side. A dog, while typically approaching us or running after a squirrel, is drawn standing still, seen from the side, with the eye-level about half way in the drawing. Such conventions are already observed in cave art 25 and in typical children drawings and as such they seem to predate the notion of style. Such an unusual but highly typical and informative point of view is known as a canonical point of view. 26 When we are encountering such a canonical point of view we might intuit that we are dealing with a generic representation, a type of object or a logo, not a specific object. I observe that drawings with a less conventional point of view are more quickly assumed to represent a particular situation and this then also calls for a context of sorts, a light logic, a background, and so on.

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DRAWING KNOWLEDGE Works of art generally do more than convey knowledge, but in at least some cases knowledge is central to an image. We can externalize human knowledge in the form of language, as well as in visual form. Consider medical illustrations. The medical illustration of a brain is not just a copy of the world out there. If that were the objective a photo might be more suited to ensure adequate representation of the data. Beginning medical students studying an actual brain are generally confused by the fairly undifferentiated parts. They will study the medical illustrations, perhaps a 3D model, and compare those with the specific brain in front of them, and go back and forth until the brain in front of them starts to make sense. A medical illustration does not represent the world out there, but is the visual record of our knowledge. That is why medical illustrations are drawings, not photos of body parts. This example can be generalized to botanical illustrations, ornithology, and so on; the record of our understanding of form is a drawing. There is an epistemic continuity between writing down your understanding of the world in language and drawing your understanding of the world. A scientific report on the discovery of a fossil is typically accompanied by a photo of the find as well as a drawing. The photo serves the purpose of an eyewitness account: this is what we found and this is what it looked like. The drawing is made much later, after the fossil has been studied, and it reflects how the researchers understood the patterns of light and dark as bone and matrix, as essential information and extraneous data. The photo serves as record of the external data, the drawing as our best current understanding of those data. This use of different types of images for different purposes is generally implicit, though common. We intuitively choose certain kinds of representation to externalize certain specific cognitive formats. I speculate that the internal format of embodied visual knowledge makes drawings an easy fit for recording and embodying that knowledge externally. The format includes a generic viewpoint, is uncommitted about inessential details, color, and lighting. In embodying visual knowledge relevant features are emphasized, and there is a short distance between emphasizing and exaggerating; from depicting and characterizing to caricaturing. Artistic discourse invites artists to explore these possibilities, boundaries, and the rigidity of these connections. Artistic explorations will strengthen some of these links, while it might invalidate others. Understanding an image not only depends on the way the image embodies aspects of cognition, but also on the discourse in which the image is analyzed. A seventeenth-century image of a tulip might be purely descriptive, as an illustration of what flower a particular bulb may produce. The same image in a different context can also be interpreted as a symbol for the transience of life. The image might be exaggerating

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aspects of the flower if the image was used as part of a sales pitch (caricature). At the height of the Dutch tulip craze the tulip was a visual metaphor for wealth, and ten years after the crash the same image became a visual symbol for vanity and folly. A single image might allow for all these understandings and then some. Such is the complexity of the externalized mental image: intent, cognition, context, culture, execution and discourse all adhere to the image and become part of our wonder and appreciation. A MODEL FOR EMOTION AS MOTIVATION After discussing the gestalt and the knowledge it embodies, we will now focus on the affective component of the visual experience. The aesthetic response should properly be described as affective or emotional, but what psychological theory or framework might describe such an experience? The aesthetic experience is to some extent a learned response, subjective and culture specific. But the experience is in some way also connected with external objects, and some objects seem better at eliciting these responses than others. However unique the aesthetic response might be—and there is little indication as of yet that animals are having such experiences—the general rule in biology is that nothing comes out of nowhere. The aesthetic response is grafted on pre-existing patterns, and I will describe these basic patterns. The most basic emotions, which we share with other animals, include the fight/flight responses. These responses raise blood pressure and heartbeat, and increase adrenaline and muscle tone, all needed for quick and forceful physical action. Humans have interwoven fight and flight behavior with the subjective experiences of anger and fear, which are not shared by all animals. And as social animals we also tend to communicate these subjective experiences to others through facial expressions. So even the most basic emotions have at least a behavioral, an experiential, and an expressive component. It follows from the discussion of the two visual pathways, however, that the aesthetic emotion involves little or no behavior, so it is not obvious how to group the aesthetic response with these basic emotions. Another approach differentiates responses to environmental cues (such as fight and flight) from emotional drives or motivation. 27 We are not just passively waiting for external cues to respond emotionally; we are often actively searching out environments, objects, or people. We are driven to explore. On the most basic biological level, searching for food or for a mate are standard examples which are very different than the fight / flight responses. These motivating emotions can be described as impulses, characterized by restlessness and by an active exploring of the environment. Some objects and situations may pique our curiosity, and

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when an appropriate object is encountered/consumed, the person may experience pleasure, which biologically corresponds to a dopamine rush. The satisfaction after a meal or after sex share the mechanics of the dopamine rush with the satisfaction of finally finding your car keys. This group of emotions-as-motivation all share this aspect of satisfaction and might be a better point of departure for the aesthetic experience. Dopamine has several functions aside from the experience of pleasure, which are presumably evolutionarily interrelated. For our discussion, the role of dopamine in physical movement is irrelevant. But related to its role in the physical get up and go is the role of dopamine in the mental get up and go. The absence of pleasure is generally experienced as sadness, while a lack of motivation is experienced as boredom. In patients with mania we see restlessness, sometimes extremely so, combined with euphoria (sometimes alternating with depression as in manic-depression). Outside of a clinical context, we might call this emotional state “exuberance.” 28 While exuberant, people are often quick to make mental connections, to see and to find metaphors, and to be creative. They are generally very alert to their environments, and seem driven, motivated. This motivation, while internally generated by surging dopamine levels, is projected onto features of the external world: we are motivated by something. While art might give us pleasure, we intuit that the aesthetics experience goes beyond pleasure. Motivation, with the related terms of curiosity, attentiveness, inquisitiveness, enthusiasm, and exuberance, is the opposite of boredom, and is probably more closely related to the aesthetic experience. A simple example: I can enjoy a Hollywood summer movie. I go along for the ride, so to say, like in a roller coaster. Pleasurable while it lasts, I might find myself afterwards critical of the plot, the character development, and the lack of . . . well, something. And then there are movies which do provide this something, while not always being pleasurable. Some Ingmar Bergman movies can do this for me personally: I find them meaningful, though not pleasurable per se. I suggest that this something motivates us and is at the center of the aesthetic experience. In rather abstract ways, this is what keeps us going, what makes life worth the effort. Humans can make the transition from being motivated to search for food or a mate, to feeling motivated. With this transition the biological term “motivation,” with its associations of functionality and evolutionary mechanisms, changes into the psychological domain where we might call it curiosity or attentiveness, or meaningfulness. My dog seems capable of the basics just as much as we seem so, but only we can take it this one step further, having biologically irrelevant objects (cultural production) symbolically evoke the experience of meaningfulness. This step requires the capacity for symbolic thought, but we should be careful not to confuse the experiential aspect with thought.

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BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN? In a simple world without symbols, objects mean what they are: the sight of food motivates us to eat. The knowledge of food, the motivation to eat, the action of eating, and the ensuing satiation all fall together. In this context, the food is meaningful in a unambiguous way. In a culture, however, “meaning” is rarely unambiguous. Objects accrue meanings like barnacles. We can, however, distinguish between two kinds of “meaning.” Asking what a foreign word “means” or what this Paleolithic image in a cave “means,” is asking about some kind of knowledge, which is very different from asking what that same image “means” to you personally. Meaning-as-knowledge tends to be declarative: we can talk about it. Meaning-as-knowledge relies on intersubjectivity: if we can agree on meanings, we can talk about them, try to disentangle them from other meanings and ideally achieve relatively unambiguous and specific knowledge. In this realm of knowledge we intuit that we can aspire to simplicity and clarity, which we can communicate sometimes in language, sometimes in visuals. The drawing of what a horse looks like can indeed be simple while also being clear and specific so we don’t confuse the horse with a donkey or a mule. The current discourse for meaning-as-knowledge is semiotics: image as text. Language introduces the symbolic use of data, allowing for the metaphor of “reading” visual art to find what it is “trying to say.” The metaphor of image-as-text has proven so useful that it structures much of the discourse on visual art. Yet this metaphor often excludes the aspect of meaning-as-motivation, the experiential aspect of meaningfulness. In the context of aesthetics, the question “what does it mean,” risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Indeed, in most semiotic discussions of art, the aesthetic experience is conspicuously absent. When we are shifting our perspective from “what is the work telling us?” to “how does the work move us?” we need another discourse. Meaning-as-motivation is notoriously difficult to formalize. Above, I got as far as calling it something. I propose using the experiential term “meaningfulness,” rather than trying to find an analytic term. The moment we abstain from interaction and utility, meaningfulness is this unmoored experience, beyond language, or at least beyond specific language. We can certainly indicate when or where we experienced something as meaningful, but this experience is fundamentally not paraphrasable: we cannot put it into (other) words without losing the essence of meaningfulness. Experiencing meaning is at the core of what it is like to be human, it is something we urgently like to express or to share, while being dumbfounded by it at the same time. We might ask someone: “what was it like” to see this or that. Without being able to paraphrase the aesthetic experience people are inclined to say what it was “like”; they find a metaphor. We find ourselves driven to

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find metaphors when encountering meaningfulness. And this applies to the artist as well as the viewer: in the same way that the viewer has to find metaphors to describe what it was like to have an aesthetic encounter, it seems to me that the artwork itself is often also a metaphor for what it is like to be human, to encounter meaning. A still-life painting may have its semiotic connotations, but people might not be only fascinated by them or collect them because they are clever semiotic puzzles. Rather, such images can also be experienced as the only way we can communicate about what it is like to experience meaning. I find music a better analogy for the aesthetic aspects of visual art than language. Music takes the experiential aspect of an artwork as central. Music communicates, but what is being communicated is generally more ambiguous than specific. I can find (instrumental) music deeply meaningful, while I am generally unable to be specific about this meaning. Indeed, it would seem that if the composer wanted to say something specific, the work should be considered a failure. Music communicates not the same way a language communicates, by attempting specific, paraphrasable content. Rather, music may express or embody emotion and meaningfulness to some degree and is inherently not paraphrasable. Investigating this metaphor might enable us to consider program music and film music, or it might encourage us to understand a studio practice where most artists I know listen to music while making art. And most importantly, it would allow us to confront that art can be expressive and meaningful, without getting caught in trying to paraphrase what it means. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have developed a description of the visual system, grounded in neuropsychology, and applied this to phenomenal aspects of visual art. The visual system is quite complex, consisting of some thirty-odd modules, dealing with various properties of the visual experience, which are grouped in a visual pathway for navigation/interaction and a pathway for identification. The pathway for navigation is (mostly) unconscious, which has some interesting implications for environmental artworks. The modules in the pathway for identification seem isomorphic with at least several cross-culturally recognizable genres in visual art, allowing for a nontrivial link between neurology and art. Despite the fragmentation which is apparent in the modularization of the visual system, we are familiar with a unified, holistic, visual experience. Throughout the chapter, I referred to this visual experience as the gestalt; an internally generated mental image. Although visual in nature, the gestalt is fundamentally different from an image, and as such it does not depict or reference any content, but rather embodies it or instantiates

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it. Distinguishing the gestalt from artistic images is important, and this will actually help to clarify some features of the images which artists make as the evidence of mental processes, rather than as copies of the outside world. The content which is instantiated by the gestalt has aspects of memory/knowledge, and of emotion/affect. The distinction between these two aspects can be artificial at times, and language can refer to both with the term “meaning.” Yet the differences are profound. Knowledge embodied in visual memory is mostly generic and intersubjective. Meaningfulness is fundamentally nondeclarative, calling for metaphoric expressions, rather than in unambiguous verbal descriptions. The experience of meaningfulness is one of the most profound human experiences, and I argued that it is at the core of the aesthetic experience. Much work needs to be done to further explore the relations between the neurological description of the visual brain, visual phenomenology, and visual art. I believe, however, that this chapter provides a basic framework for such investigations. NOTES 1. John Findlay and Iain Gilchrist, Active Vision: the Psychology of Looking and Seeing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Milner and Mel Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing: the Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Samir Zeki, Vision of the Brain (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993); Samir Zeki, Inner Vision, an Exploration of Art and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2. Samir Zeki, Inner Vision, an Exploration of Art and the Brain; John Onians, Neuroarthistory: from Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 3. David Milner and Mel Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action. 4. Antti Revonsuo, Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Alva Noë, Ean Thompson, eds., Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy 0f Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 5. Martin Toveé, An Introduction to the Visual System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 6. Steven Kosslyn, et al., The Case for Mental Imagery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jeremy Wolfe, et al., Sensation and Perception (Sunderland MA: Sinauer Associates, 2011). 7. David Milner and Mel Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action. 8. David Milner and Mel Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action; Glyn Humphreys and Jane Riddoch, To See but not to See: A Case Study of Visual Agnosia (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, Associates, 1987). 9. David Milner and Mel Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action. 10. David Milner and Mel Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action; Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing: the Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition. 11. See also Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 12. Nicholas Humphrey, Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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13. Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing: the Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition; Stephen Luck and Andrew Hollingworth, eds., Visual Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14. Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing: the Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition. 15. Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). 16. Antti Revonsuo, Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 17. Rodolfo Llinas, I of the Vortex: from Neurons to Self (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Thomas Metzinger, The Ego-Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Antti Revonsuo, Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. 18. Antti Revonsuo, Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon; Vilayanur Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Harper Collins, 1998). 19. Vilayanur Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain. 20. Antti Revonsuo, Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. 21. Zenon Pylyshyn, Seeing and Visualizing: It’s Not What You Think (Cambridge, MA: Bradford, 2006). 22. Ian Robertson and Peter Halligan, Spatial Neglect: A Clinical Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment (Hove: Psychology Press, 1999); Marlene Behrman, ed., Handbook of Neuropsychology, Vol. 4: Disorders of Visual Behavior (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001). 23. Dario Grossi and L.Trojano, Construction and Visuospatial Disorders (Chapter 5 in Behrman, ed., Handbook of Neuropsychology. Vol. 4: Disorders of Visual Behavior), 99–121. 24. A. M. Santhouse, R. J. Howard, and D. H. Ffychte, “Visual hallucinatory Syndromes and the Anatomy of the Visual Brain,” Brain 123 (10), 2000: 2055–2064. 25. John Halverson, “The first pictures: Perceptual Foundations of Paleolithic Art,” Perception 21 (3), 1992: 389–404. 26. S. E. Palmer, et al., “Canonical Perspective and the Perception of Objects,” in Long and Baddely, Attention and performance, IX (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1981), 135–51. 27. Kennon Sheldon, Current Directions in Motivation and Emotion for Motivation: Biological, Psychological, and Environmental (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009). 28. Kay Jamison, Exuberance: The Passion for Life (New York: Vintage, 2005).

Interlude Mneem Miltos Manetas

DIALOGUE Q. What is a mneem? It is a creature made of both human elements and information. The term is produced by a mix of Mneme (“memory” in Greek) and meme, which is, according to Richard Dawkins, a unit of cultural information— such as a practice or idea transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one human mind to another. Thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, even habits and moods are memes. Q. Are they computer-generated or did they exist even before? Probably they have always existed, but now all this electronic warmth, together with that enormous external memory that humans have created for themselves, all computers and networks have given voice to a new category of entities, to mneems. Some call them simply “angels,” as does Bob Dobbs, a friend of Marshal McLuhan’s. It would be an error to consider them computerized life. The very term “computer” is so obsolete by now. We must add that the majority of them come from the analog and not the digital world; from art history, music, literature. Q. Do humans like to recognize their existence? Not very often, because humans prefer to believe that they do everything by themselves. But sometimes they can’t do otherwise; indeed, these two short stories below are told from both points of view, the mneem’s and its carrier’s.

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Q. You weave in and implicate Las Meninas in ways that almost suggest a historical plot that unfolds as a mirror maze; and yet we are left with a sense of deprivation that we will never, “outside” your account, meet mneem. Is that meant as an allegory of or for future art? It’s not an allegory at all. I am an artist and anything that an artist says is some kind of new beginning of future art. In any event, if I speak about the mneem, it is only because I really felt I saw it and I really have to write its memoir. ***

MEMOIR OF A MNEEM Madrid, August 2008

My name is Orange. I am a mneem. I am in Madrid today, staying at a lurid hotel whilst taking care of business. Through the eyes of my carrier, I look at my reflection in the mirror and I find myself young. But I am young only on my human side; my other side, the automa, is really old. Still, for those few that can actually see mneems—and recognize them—I may look young, too. That’s because I am a painter’s mneem and paintings always stay fresh somehow. I’m leaving the hotel now, as I need to meet an Indian art dealer and make agreements for my carrier’s exhibit in Bombai. My carrier follows certain patterns that he believes can protect him from the others and even from himself. He tends to easily forget his objectives and he often gets lost in his own experiences and becomes disenchanted. Sometimes he behaves the way he thinks a “real artist” should behave and that’s dangerous, because no rational human can afford to be a full-time artist (or for that matter a full-time lawyer or a fulltime soldier). One must simply act as an artist, a lawyer, or a soldier at the right moment; one has to be an actor before anything else. There is no place for human authenticity in a world made of constructs. No human can be really authentic because any really authentic impulse would eventually drive him into madness. Full creativity, greed, passion—even violence—are just for us mneems. But he’s a good “pony.” He carries me around wonderfully and makes me grow up. He understands my infinite thirst for information and tries to satisfy it as much as he can, unhurriedly. Together have we come to the conclusion that, in order to control information, we must eat it cold. Fresh information multiplies our cache of cookies and becomes a disease. This is why my painter never watches the news on TV and avoids the CNN Web site. He doesn’t even read art magazines, because

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he cares about staying independent, even from books, I suppose. Together, we do visit as many museums as possible. Looking at the old masters is essential to me, because it is there that I find my tribe of mneems and get stronger. I become a grown-up, though, by grasping more and more details of the nature of things. I also grow frightened. Time doesn’t mean much to mneems. However, age is rather an important factor: it creates a recording of our evolution. We mneems calculate our age by summing the number of years since our automatic self has existed. Most humans can go through life and never think of the genetic automa inside of them but we never forget having one. Knowing our age works not only as a record of our progress and evolution, but also reminds us of our robotic part. Joseph Engelberger, the pioneer in industrial robotics, said that he “can’t define a robot, but he knows when he sees one.” We mneems can recognize robots when we see them and we know with certainty that they are very different from us. “Robot” stems from “robota,” a word that originates from the Old Church Slavonic “rabota,” which means “servitude” and in turn comes from the Indo-European root “orbh,” curiously the same as “Arbeit” and “orphanos.” Our species. . . . Only recently, we started thinking of our group as a “species.” At some point, a name was necessary, a term that we could share with humans. That’s how we started calling ourselves mneems: “memes with a memory,” that’s the closest we come when we try to define ourselves. Still, we are quite different from memes: even if they also evolve by natural selection through the processes of inheritance, variation, competition, and mutation, and are self-propagating and can spread through a culture in a manner similar to that of a virus, they are not self-conscious. In fact, at this very moment, a mneem is describing itself. We are always in need of human carriers, but humans choose freely to carry us around or not; we depend on their passions and their determination for our survival, whereas memes do not need free choice. In some way, humans are our genes, the genes of mneems! Just as humans can’t exist without their genes, neither would I exist without my occasional human side, my carrier. But while humans easily vanish, mneems never completely disappear. Without a carrier, we simply “cease being” for some time, but we are still there, like things of this earth in a state of dormant quasi-life. I understand of course how difficult it is to understand all this from a human perspective. It is only lately—because of computers and networks—that we have started to entertain the idea of a connection with humans, a link beyond the usual mneem/human riding. My carrier, my “pony,” the person who is typing this text—a male—is not a writer, of course; he is a painter. I am a painter’s mneem. I wouldn’t ride a writer. We usually paint pictures together, but these are weird days for mneems and humans alike, so I asked my pony to start putting down

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words for me, to help me write my memoir. Writing isn’t very difficult for him, badly messed up as he is with information. My carrier has grown addicted to computers in the past few years. I saw that coming. I watched him looking at these things for too long, listening to their voices for too long. But again, it was because of the computers that I kept riding him twelve years ago. It was in 1995 that many people started having their first laptops, and they would go everywhere with them, would start doing everything together. Laptop computers became surrogate babies to them; people started loving them more than their human lovers; soon they couldn’t live without them. In 1995, when my carrier bought his first laptop, instead of using it, he asked his laptop to pose as a model for him and started painting its portrait. It was at that moment that I emerged. For us mneems, that was a turning point, too. One, two, a hundred, or even a million industrial computing machines didn’t mean much to us; but when every human that we could find to ride started having one of those, a quantum leap occurred. A bit later, even their phones became computers. The little screens that the eyes of our ponies would crisscross day and night became for us another kind of mirror and we found ourselves observing in them the features of our real faces. This is how we finally came of age! Now we could define ourselves. Before that, we were infants, acting more like memes than mneems. As infants, we were looking at the world, grabbing notes from it, snapshots and memories, but until we came of age we couldn’t access anything except from all these personal collections. We didn’t have a fully developed body, you see. There have always been the bodies of our ponies, of course, but they were borrowed bodies, and in a sense those were no bodies at all. It was great—there are certain things you can do bodilessly—but there are other things that you definitely can’t. Portable computers, and their deep connection to humans, finally gave us our body. The networks of the Internet became our extensions. They were crude and inefficient, of course, but we have soon learned to use them in a flexible way. Email gave us a way to start interacting with mneems of different kinds, some so different from one another that we could hardly imagine they could actually exist. I met science mneems, theory mneems, philosophers’ mneems. As our human ponies have started exchanging streams of written words, we have figured out how to express ourselves by diverting at least some of all this energy into a kind of communication among us. Parts of us, and parts of mneems that were in a state of quasi-life for a long time now, started showing up here and there on the Internet and there was something in them that humans would recognize as fascinating and even beautiful. As a result, mneems started becoming more visible to humans.

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Especially people who were disenchanted with the world, like my pony, would look at the computer with a different eye; they’d look at it the way a pilot whose plane is about to crash looks at the ground below him. Is there something he needs to know before the impact? Can he find out just by staring, just by listening? Maybe there are hidden pathways out there, something, anything that could result in a reversal of fortune. There was nothing else left to do, anyway; digital computers didn’t allow for many options; there was no “maybe,” no grey tones; everything was black or white, either “yes” or “no” to them. Because of our early attempts at open contact with them, a few of these people have now become fully conscious of our existence. Noticing our connection with their computers, they think of us as some kind of esoteric “computer life,” more analog than digital—a kind of quantum computer, not at all generated by digital simulation machines. The history of art, music, medicine, and literature is our story. Speaking about my own kind, it is amazing how many painters’ mneems, like myself, have survived for centuries, simply covering themselves with layers of paint. Every time that a copyist would repeat a motif taken from a notorious picture, we would fly from one surface to the next until we finally arrived at the walls of Museums and Collections. Now we are hosted next to labels such as “Caravaggio,” “Morandi,” or “Goya.” There has never been a single Caravaggio, Morandi, or Goya, of course; all those works are collaborations by generations of humans and mneems. When someone like my pony finds himself under the spell of forms and grabs a brush, there is always a mneem inside of him, riding him, driving the situation. But enough writing for today. I need—we need—to leave the hotel now, and meet the Indian art dealer. I must rush to my painter and animate him with ambition. I am waking him up, slowly, making him believe it is he, the one in control, who moves and takes a cab. Then, while approaching this Spanish winter, I will disappear for a while and come back later, when he is sleeping in his bed. I will check his emails and charge the computer battery, preparing his next move.

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THREE YEARS LATER, A MNEEM’S CARRIER REMEMBERS . . . Madrid, August 2011

I was in Madrid again, the city where I’d had my first encounter with that strange creature—the mneem—three years earlier. This time I was invited to one of those Ted events: “Technology meets Entertainment meets Design.” I was there to speak about computer existentialism, nothing to do with painting. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the mneem. According to my GPS, the Prado Museum was exactly a seventeenminute walk away. Sitting on an Eams armchair (a Taiwanese “authorized” copy), I turned to my iPad and asked Google’s “Street View” to visualize that short trip for me. Fueled by an excellent network speed, my nervous index finger now started travelling each and every inch that separated me from El Prado. I felt my brain fill with anticipation. Prado was where I had met the mneem back then, and I was impatient to return to the museum to see him again. Three years is a long time. Still, one of the results of my meeting with the mneem was that afterward, time felt really short. My brain, left permanently under some kind of shining, had started compressing time. I recalled the details of that first encounter. It was February, during ARCO, the Madrid Artfair. I went there for the fair and had stolen time from my job to go visit the Velázquez. At some point, walking among the paintings in Prado, I heard my own voice speaking. I didn’t pay much attention at first—somehow, we are used to hearing our own voice constantly talking, saying all kind of things. But soon I realized that while the voice and most of the thoughts expressed were definitely mine, it wasn’t me who was doing the talking. Not only me, at least. Someone else, something else, was also there. Then I heard this someone/something, introducing himself/itself: “I am a mneem, a painter’s mneem.” This must be some kind of chimera, an illusion produced by my fantasy, nothing more, I remember thinking. But then I heard my voice again: “Not at all . . . ” I happened to be in front of a seventeenth-century mirror at that moment, and I noticed my mouth clearly moving. A guy looking at the paintings next to me had heard it, too, and now was looking at me puzzled, trying to understand whether I were talking to him. I smiled to him and hurried to an empty little garden close by. I sat on a large ceramic pot and I waited. “I am not you, and I am not your imagination. I am a mneem,” the voice started saying again. “A painter’s mneem, a painter like yourself. But you aren’t painting much these days, are you?” At that point, I was already somehow accustomed to this presence.

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It is amazing how fast we accept things that are new but actually real. I remember showing an iPhone to some young members of an isolated Amazonian tribe and after touching and playing a bit with it, they lost all interest. They already knew that even if the iPhone could perform all kinds of strange things, it was after all just a piece of nature, or a ghost, a spirit, a religious figure appearing suddenly in front of them, upsetting them because in the backs of their heads, they know that they don’t really exist, or if they ever do, they exist as nature. As for myself, I already knew that a safe way to find out whether something that is happening is real is to monitor my need to ask for help and to see if at some point that need vanishes. In front of reality, indeed, we can’t afford to keep asking for help, because it is imperative to solve the situation on the spot. Sitting on that ceramic pot, listening to the mneem talking, I knew that I didn’t need anyone’s help. So I accepted the presence of the creature as somewhat unexpected, yet certain. My brain now knew that the existence of the so-called mneem was a matter of fact. So there I was, in front of Goya’s “The Family of Charles IV” at the Museum of Prado, listening to someone/something talk about itself from inside my own body: “You start getting nostalgic; nostalgia is something we both share. You enjoy nostalgia and I am made of it. But this is not the reason why I’m back. I am back only because of this Goya and because of your staying in front of it and watching it. I have hung around this painting for many years now, but I never came back into focus again. So many people have been looking at the painting but couldn’t see me; they just saw a picture on a canvas. But you can see me; and you will see me in the painting that you will paint yourself after looking at this Goya. So right now I have just left this Goya and come to ride YOU.”

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Future of Aesthetics

SIX Aesthetics and Kinesthetics in Performance Erith Jaffe-Berg

DIALOGUE Q. Is the merging of different time lapses a spacialization of time? And is the theatrical hyperpresence a way to anull the linearity of time and its culturalideological origin? What occurs in many contemporary plays is that there is the use of simultaneous time frames designated by different lighting or spatial location on stage. This allows the writers to explore narrative in a nonlinear fashion. It also means that the audience can be more at liberty to focus on different stage locations to derive meaning independent from a singular narrative. Both of these consequences conform to a less hegemonic way of conveying a story, which also accords with a more multicultural ethos in general. Q. How will the difference between this all-presence and that “instant” digitized presentification be detected and felt by the new generations? I suppose the tendency is to see digital reality, which suggests the Internet, as itself un-hierarchical in the same way that the plurilistic temporal-spatial designation in performance is. I think the diversity of points of attention on stage, the lack of a strongly inforced singular plot and singular narrative would be very appealing for new generations. I think of my daughter, who is ten, and is so attuned to diverse technologies and able to split her attention. For her, a split screen is a natural mode of 99

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communicating with the world. The simultaneous action on stage in effect realizes what a split screen does. Uses of technology within performance also would appeal to new generations because they would fuse different technologies in the very language of performance. That is, for young audiences, the use of liquid screens in scenography, the incorporations of dense lighting fields, and the ability to incorporate the Internet, computers, and the language of the cyberworld is appealing in performance. Q. Concerning the emphasis on the gesture (making sense by repetition), does its reenactment jeopardize the theatrical actions (making sense through accomplishment of an aim)? This question really underscores the fact that the contemporary modes I discuss disrupt an Aristotilean sense of unity of plot. Aristotle urged that effective conveying of an idea is best handled by a unitary plot or storyline. In effect, performances which are less focused on a singular story, based on one character, disrupt this Aristotilean dictum. One can see in iWitness the struggle Sobol has between keeping to a singular story and interrupting it with Brechtian trajectories into other plots. But in BlackWatch, the Scottish National Theater is much more interested in a complexity of human situations rather than the story of a single soldier’s journey. I think the latter will be much more the tenor of where theater and performance are going. Q. How distant is your perspective from Brecht’s political mission? Interestingly, your question refers me to Brecht, whom I thought of often, especially in relation to Sobol’s play. I think that technology is much more complementary to Brecht’s mission of estrangement, critical disengagement, and social change than we might think. In fact, you can argue that with a play like Mother Courage and Her Children we have an enactment of kinesthetics’ complementarity to social change. In that play, the main character’s action throughout is staged as a circular walking around the stage area; a counterpart to Sobol’s having his main character clean a metal pot with circular motion as a nod to Teresa d’Avila’s statement about God’s presence in all things. When Mother Courage walks but learns nothing, the futility of her loss to war is punctuated by the fact that she is walking in a circle, getting nowhere, learning nothing. That statement is underscored visually and kinetically for the audience when she is staged as walking her wagon in a circle, as the famous production of the Berliner Ensemble with Helen Wegel accomplished. The urge to awaken the audience to active engagement with the social reality of the play is coaxed by this central performative image in a

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similar way to the kinesthetic proddings I have discussed in the contemporary performances. It is only that the technologies have changed. *** Deriving from the Greek Kine, or movement, and aesthesis, or sensation, the term “kinesthesia” initially refer specifically to the muscular sense of the body’s movement. —Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance

Kinesthesia: a sense mediated by receptors located in muscles, tendons, and joints and stimulated by bodily movements and tensions; also: sensory experience derived from this sense. —Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

In a world increasingly defined by technology, kinesthesia, with its connotations of embodied, sensory experience, holds special relevance today as we look at developments within the arts now and in the future. Whereas some may argue movement is increasingly lacking in our sedentary, computer-driven world, others would counter that the development of portable technology, and the incorporation of this technology within entertainment signals our future. 1 This chapter draws on performance and dance studies to explore how kinesthesia has become an area of exploration in recent performances. The formation last year of a research center for Cognition, Kinesthesia and Performance at the University of Kent in the UK; the research work of Bruce McConachie integrating cognitive studies within performance studies; and the publications online and elsewhere of groups such as The Watching Dance Project and The Machine Project, the work of dance critic John Martin, and the work of cognitive scientist Vittorio Gallese all reflect a growing attention to the integration of cognitive sciences within performance studies. 2 Furthermore, the dance scholar Susan Foster dedicated a recent book to the study of kinesthesia and its connection to empathy. 3 While Foster’s work emerges from the field of dance, her methodology is applicable to other performing arts, such as theater, because of her focus on the connection between empathy and kinesthesia. When approaching play content that has to do with conflict, especially in so-called war plays, the question of empathy looms central to the dramaturgy. In theater, a number of “war plays” have made central use of kinesthesia in their combined dramaturgy and staging. Performances of plays such as the work of the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol as well as the Scottish National Theater’s BlackWatch have made use of a heightened kinesthesia in their experimentations with empathic dramaturgy in

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works about war. This chapter offers a fuller exploration of how kinesthesia gains importance in contemporary performances in order to suggest a direction that may be more pronounced in the arts created in light of continuing quagmires. How the arts are responding to these situations in the message of their plays and also in the communicative mechanism they employ has become a central concern for theater production globally. Plays directed at international audiences have come to rely on metalinguistic mechanisms of expression which are one way of bridging incommensurabilities of culture, language, and content. While focused on very specific historic incidents, these works nevertheless managed to broaden to a more international audience by offering material whose interpretation can be taken in different directions by the audiences. Part of this broad appeal, I argue, lies in the deliberate integration of a kinesthetic aesthetic within the performances. The integration of specifically kinesthetic gestures and staging of scenes appeals to an audience that is versed in technology, and conversant in vicariously experiencing empathy through kinesthesia. Kinesthesia becomes an important “language” of the performance text, to borrow the terminology of the theorist Patrice Pavis in Theater at the Crossroads of Culture. In using the term kinesthesia, I refer to the dictionary definition quoted above. In performance, this can mean an emphasis on kinetic motion that has a kinesthetic effect on either the performer or, by association and empathy, on the audience. I first look at kinesthesia and its use as a counter-reaction to velocity and tempo by providing examples of theatrical responses to digitized pace. I then look at affirmations of the body and bodily through performance with examples in which theater reenacts the sense of bodily imminence through kinesthesia, affirming a sense of presence. In connection with this point, I study the importance of empathy within the mechanism of kinesthesia on stage. Finally, I look at uses of physical language and repetition as extreme forms of verbal kinesthesia rehearsed in performances. KINESTHESIA AND PERFORMATIVE RESPONSES TO DIGITIZED TIME Theater emphasizes to the audience the presence of the body, and the importance of the audience as a collaborator in the creation of meaning. As opposed to other media, which are not dependent on this co-presence (film, television, YouTube, the Net), theater relies on the inhabiting of a given space by actor and audience in a time-bounded event. This aspect has always been a creative constraint in theater making and has induced alternative structural devices such as the relaying of exposition, the integration of flashbacks, and—more recently in postmodern theater—simultaneous stage action. While theater is itself bound by a temporal structure

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that other media can overcome, this very limitation has always enabled theater to become an ideal vehicle for exploring questions of time. Almost any play that includes exposition, foreshadowing (often referred to as “forwards” in play analysis), 4 split screens, scrims, and nonlinear framing would serve as an example of this. In two recent examples, both of which happen to be war plays, the repudiation of temporal limitation in the dramatic material is felt particularly in reference to kinesthetically foreground moments. These two recent performances, one from Scotland and the other from Israel, grapple with the dilemmas of a soldier and the ethical parameters of participation or refusal to participate in war. As such, the plays are implicitly invested in questions of empathy; for this reason, they are ideal examples of how theater uses kinesthetic means in performance strategy. While both plays are directed at audiences of different national backgrounds, they were presented to international audiences as well, and, in so doing, greatly increased the scope of their message. While focused on very specific historic incidents—a Scottish regiment stationed in Iraq during the recent war in Iraq and the refusal of an Austrian citizen to serve in the army of the Third Reich during the Second World War—the two projects toured and were presented to audiences of different countries and language backgrounds. Clearly, both had international appeal. Part of this broad appeal lies in the deliberate integration of a kinesthetic aesthetic within the performances. The integration of specific kinesthetic gestures and scenes appeals to an audience that is versed in technology, and conversant in vicariously experiencing empathy through kinesthesia. iWitness and BlackWatch suggest a deliberate smelting of time through visceral kinesthetic means. The play Ed Reiya (translated into English as iWitness) was written by Joshua Sobol, first staged in Israel in the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv in 2003, and was subsequently translated and adapted by Barry Edelstein for an English language production, premiered at the Mark Taper Theater in Los Angeles in 2006, and directed by Edelstein himself. 5, 6 The play is based on real events following the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who resisted serving in the Nazi army both as a soldier as well as nonmilitary personnel and was killed in 1943 for his refusal to serve. His absolute resistance was marked by his refusal to wear any uniform or take on any job, in one instance even a janitorial job, remotely associated with the Nazi army. 7 The play traces this singular act of civil disobedience in the context of Nazi Germany in order to raise broader questions about the efficacy and ethics of the act of conscientious objection. In its original performance context in Israel, in the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, where it premiered in 2002, the play was unquestioningly interpreted as a reference to refusenics, soldiers refusing to serve in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) in the occupied Palestinian lands in Gaza and in the West Bank. 8 This comparison is the reason the play was received with some objections in Israel where several

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people even argued Sobol was feeding into the provocative paralleling of Nazi atrocities and genocide against the Jews with the Israeli occupation and violence against Palestinians. 9 It is important to emphasize that Sobol himself has denied this claim about his play by emphasizing the play is not about this paralleling nor is it about Israel per se. In this way, Sobol has suggested the play to be more universal than its interpreters have claimed. In the dramatic text, actions emphasize the gestural potential on stage for kinetic action. In other words, Sobol deliberately creates physical moments on stage that require a director to integrate kinetic action within the performance. One example of this suggests that movement on stage can become meditative. The main character, Franz, is seen cleaning and scrubbing throughout the play—whether it be his boots, the latrines, or even a simple pot. Franz explains his level of activity by suggesting that repetitive movements, even merely the scrubbing of a pot, reveal the lie force implicit in all things and people. This recalls the famous statement by St. Teresa that “God can be found in a scrubbed pot.” Franz’s articulation shifts the godliness of work to a sense of individualized spirituality Franz finds in deeds, in improvement of one’s surrounding: FRANZ: This skillet came to the world sixty years before I did. Forty years before my father was born, whom I didn’t know, and who got killed in World War One. Millions of people were born and died in the meantime, and this pan was always here. Thousands of people who died or were executed have eaten meat that was cooked in this pan in the fat of thousands of pigs that were born and slaughtered, and the grease was scrubbed, and the pan was cleaned and and and and. Can’t you see it doctor? RAPS: See what? FRANZ: Cleaning is repetitive work. I clean pans and pots that will get soiled tomorrow with the food cooked for the prisoners, who will eat it and shit it into the latrines which I cleaned yesterday, and when all those prisoners are executed, and the cells will be cleaned up, and new prisoners will come who will go on eating and shitting and cleaning until they are executed. But this pan will stay here after them and after me and after you. 10 In fact, the actor is constantly scrubbing throughout the play. The audience thereby is enmeshed in his hypnotic movements, repetitive and simple. The circularity of these motions communicates a meditation on the circularity of life: as on the tactile presence of one person’s spirit in the objects he or she relays to others; in the simple acts connoted by a boot or a skillet—eating, feeding, serving others; and in the metallic material of

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the skillet itself, forged in heat from different metals, shaped by human hands, withstanding of fire when it is exposed to it once again. The cleaning of the skillet or pot, the shining of a boot, may enact the Brechtian gestus: using a gesture on stage that refers to the broader social significance of the gesture or object. 11 But the use of the gesture is also something different in its mesmerizing kineticism. It seems to enfold the audience into a shared moment of co-created spirituality. So, while the play uses the episodic style common to Brecht and makes use of scene titles that suggest a pointilistic rather than smooth scenic progression, in other ways it develops Brechtian elements in a direction that emphasizes kinesthetic elements and a muted, meditative spiritualism. In this meditative use of time, the connection between things and people is not “instant” as it may be in a digitized reality—for example, as one writes an email, instant messages, sends a tweet, or checks the Web. In this kineticism, the audience becomes more aware of time as circular and cyclical—or, as may be explained, more mythical. In Nietzsche, Kant, and Deleuze, modeling of time as related to repetition can fall into polarities between a circular and linear model. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze considers the connection between different models of time and finds in repetition not sameness but difference: “Difference lies between two repetitions.” 12 This is not the inevitability of seasonal or cyclical time, which suggests a determinism in which the subject takes a passive role. Instead, Deleuze connects the idea of repetition as a linking of events each of which is constituted by moments of presence. In performance, the repetitive motions created by Franz are never the actions of a bored man; rather, they are his way of affirming his existence and his connection to the past and future. These are moments in which the character is “hyperpresent,” in the sense of Deleuze’s notion of repetition. Interestingly, they are also actions that link the audience kinesthetically to time in an actively present way. THE BODY AND BODILY THROUGH KINESTHETIC MEANS Another way in which theater offers an alternative to technological communication is by its emphasis on perception and sensation as united in the body. Performance foregrounds the body and emphasizes the humaneness of the body even in the midst of seemingly mechanical actions. 13 Presence and the body are always emphasized in BlackWatch and iWitness. One of the most stunning moments in the Scottish National Theater’s performance of BlackWatch involves a single actor chronicling the historical development of the regiment from the eighteenth century to the present. This piece of exposition overcomes its verbal exegesis when the actor physically embodies each of the phases of the historical periods by transforming into wearing the costumes common in each of the peri-

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ods. He does this while walking across the stage, and while speaking to the audience in an uninterrupted flow of movement and verbosity. The transformations are accomplished by his fellow actors dressing and undressing him, removing shirts, boots, hats, and other garments by turning the speaking actor on his head, upside down, enabling him to make the necessary costume changes. The feat is accomplished in an almost circuslike fashion, and the audience delights in the accomplishment of the costume changes and the historical time travel through a highly physical means. The action on stage is highly kinetic, and for the audience the experience is vicariously kinesthetic, as the sensations of motion are indirectly felt. The presence of the body is also underscored in iWitness. Franz’s omnipresence on stage results in his appearing in scenes in which other characters speak to each other in a different temporal and spatial frame than he is in. For example, in the sixth scene, his wife and daughter speak to each other in their home while he is still imprisoned. Since realistically, Franz could not be present in this moment, he serves as a commentary on the mother’s explanation to her daughter that her father is refusing to serve in the Nazi regime. 14 This lends an empathic element to his presence; furthermore, Sobol’s enactment of a temporal anachronism in this scene introduces another purpose to Franz’s presence, a more bodily or kinesthetic purpose. In this scene, Franz is buried under the bed on which Franca and his daughter sit. He remains and is overlaid by the furniture, contorted in his position. But this is not a passive presence: it is a relentless presence. It is Sobol’s refusal to render the actor invisible and his insistence that the actor’s body be present to such a degree that the audience becomes hyperaware of it. This moment creates a visceral poignancy: the staging is literally striking at the body, enacting a kind of violence towards the body, while at the same time the dramaturgy calls for the inclusion of the body in the scene. In this way, the audience becomes aware of both the character as well as the actor’s body as a conduit for the performance. The audience’s awareness of the body’s presence is a marked contrast to the stand-in for the player in a video game, the player character or avatar. In the video game, the avatar makes our body as player and audience transparent and it is substituted for that of the avatar. Our body becomes a conduit for the movements performed by our avatar, and those movements influence the “narrative” or plot and outcome of the game. In contrast, in the example of Franz, our awareness of the body of the actor and our own, and our mutual presence as witnesses of the character’s progress through the plot suggest a cognitive acknowledgement of the fictional and the real timeframes simultaneously. As the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the centrality of the body in perception:

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In other words, the subject of sensation is not my conscious ego but my body. In every act of sense perception, moreover, the perception of the thing and the perception of one’s own body vary in mutual conjunction, because in the final analysis they are the two aspects of one and the same “act.” Such a view of the human body as subject of perception can obviously not be justified by deductive or dialectic arguments; it can be made acceptable only by careful analysis and description of the concrete modes in which man originally perceives. 15

The body of the actor is hence both a conduit for the character but also an independent force that demands our acknowledgement as well. While this generally occurs at the end of plays, in the curtain call, in which the audience acknowledges the labor of the actor, Sobol’s example, greatly influenced by Bertolt Brecht, reveals that within the play itself this awareness can be emphasized. KINESTHESIA AND EMPATHY In my example of Franz being under the bed during a scene in which his wife and daughter speak of him, his presence amplifies the sorrow and empathy the audience feels for his being lost to his daughter and wife. In addition, kinesthesia itself relates to empathy on another level. In fact, implicit in studies of kinesthesia is the question of empathy, as Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance has shown. Movement and the perception of movement by an audience would induce, the argument goes, a sense of movement, motion, and emotion in the perceiving audience member. In this way, the audience member could be guided on an emotional journey by kinesthetic means. Foster has offered a noteworthy caution to this oversimplified association of the perceiving audience member and the performance. Nonetheless, even her work is geared to exploring the levels of empathy, which undergird a kinesthetic exchange in performance between audience and performer. With regard to empathy, a notable moment (in the inserted scene labeled Four-A) occurs earlier in iWitness and also involves Franca. The scene of Franca reading a letter to Franz is inserted within a raucous scene between Franz and his friends Martin and Hans who visit him in prison. While Martin and Hans’ visit is volatile—the men break out in a fight and grotesquely imitate Hitler—Franca’s reading of her letter to Franz is full of wistful longing and tenderness. The text is simple, almost banal: Franz, my love, it’s night. We’re not allowed to turn on any lights because of the air raids. The village is dark as a cellar.

and yet emotional:

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While the reading of the letter is even-keeled, at the end Sobol adds the following stage direction: “She repeats the text a few times, each in a different manner. She exits.” Interestingly, Sobol asks that the actress playing Franca read from her letter, which is highly emotional: Franz my love, it’s night. Because of the air raids . . .

But at the end of the letter Sobol asks that she repeat it a few times, each time with a different emotion. The linear frame is broken by this tactic and the suggestion is both logical—the evocation of the many times she may have mulled over this letter, the many times she felt this sadness and longing, but also the many mixed emotions of grief, anger, love, desire that were part of her mourning his absence. One may also remark that, similarly to Franz’s bodily presence under the bed, in which the actor’s bodily presence is foreground, here Sobol once again is very aware of the actor’s own body performing the character. When Sobol asks the actress to repeat the reading, he is setting her up for a sense of climactic frustration. The actress would be hard-pressed to resist the kinesthetic reaction to repeated motion and verbal articulation: frustration. The actor’s frustration feeds into the character’s frustration and the effect that Sobol is after, as signaled by the stage direction. The scene derives its power from creating a literal reading of the letter only in order to deconstruct that emotion and offer a different line reading. The reconstitution of meaning derives not from the semantic sense, which remains the same, nor from the emotional dimension but from the enactment over and over by the actress. 17 I am reminded of a scene in the Scottish National Theater’s touring performance of the play BlackWatch in which a group of soldiers each receives a letter from home. Rather than text this intimate scene, the director chose to have each actor/character gesture in signs his response to the letter in a silent and evocative self-expression that was personal and at the same time repeated by many on stage to suggest that, while personal, the gestures and emotions were relatable and shared and for that reason there was an underscoring not of individualism, and one person’s pain and loss, but rather on a moment of echoed emotiveness whose strength came from its repetition by other figures on stage. As the line are repeated, as in iWitness, a different pacing allows for a variety of emotions to be expressed, culminating in a similar sense of frustration and loss. In conclusion, in this chapter, I suggest the possibilities offered by kinesthetic analysis in the arts in application to examples drawn from recent theater production. Because of the inherent connection between

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kinesthesia and empathy, I looked at plays—iWitness and BlackWatch— whose content has to do with conflict and, specifically, war, where the question of empathy looms central to the dramaturgy. These plays exist among a larger list in which we may include the work of Suzan-Lori Parks, especially the 365 Project; the Medea Project, which involved global, synchronized performances; the work of the Son of Semele Ensemble in LA; and others. I demonstrated how central use of kinesthesia in staging signal a preoccupation in performance today and may indicate a direction for further exploration in future productions. NOTES 1. In either case, kinesthesia has become increasingly evident in learning styles and pedagogical approaches, in technological applications, and in the arts. 2. See John Martin’s work as a dance critic on “kinesthetic sympathy” and its further development in Susan Foster’s work, already referred to above. See also Bruce McConachie’s publications, and recent work on Erving Goffman. In Britain, the University of Kent’s Center which combines the disciplines of architecture, anthropology, drama, engineering, digital arts, and psychology. The work of Peter Dickinson at Simon Fraser at University of British Colombia, Canada. Dickinson has a blog on these topics of cognition and kinesthetics within performance. The Machine Project is an experimental art center in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their exhibition “How Not to Be Seen,” GhillicSuit Workshop and Camouflage performance (July 2008) resonates with the issues of kinesthetics that I will be discussing. 3. For example, see Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London: Routledge, 2011). 4. See David Ball, Backwards and Forewards. A Technical Manual for Reading Plays. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983). 5. Published in its Hebrew edition by Or-Am in 2004. For this chapter, I have consulted both the performance text of the Hebrew version, archived at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv, as well as the subsequently published version in Hebrew. I have also referred to the English version, iWitness, adapted by Barry Edelstein from an English language version by Joshua Sobol which Barry Edelstein has kindly shared with me. This draft version is dated October 12, 2006. All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this version which I refer to as the “Rehearsal copy. Draft 10.12.06,” and in shorthand simply as iWitness, as opposed to Ed Reyia, the title of the play as originally published in Hebrew. 6. The program notes for the English premier at the Mark Taper Forum indicate this background: “In 1938 when Hitler’s troops moved into Austria, Jägerstätter was the only man in the village to vote against the unifying of Austria with Nazi Germany. He remained openly anti-Nazi and publicly declared he would not fight in Hitler’s war” (“Franz Jägerstätter,” in iWitness program notes, Center Theatre Group, Performances: Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center [May 2006] P7). 7. Some have contended his act of refusal was based on his Catholicism and was an act of conscientious objection. However, as Sobol points out, Jägerstätter had served in the Austrian army for three years and his refusal was a pointed refusal to serve in the Nazi regime (Sobol, radio interview, 1). In fact, he had been drafted in 1939 and called into active duty in 1943, occasioning the crisis that would lead to his beheading by the Reich Military Tribunal (Program notes, P7). For more on Jägerstätter, see In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (New York: Zahn, 1964.) 8. For example, it is possible to see how there would be a resonance of the IsraeliPalestinian context for many in the Israeli audience when Franz states that: “This State

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has occupied and robbed peoples who have done us no harm and who owe us nothing. It perpetrates horrors in the occupied lands” (Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness “Rehearsal copy. Draft 10.12.2006”). At the same time, in the original text in Hebrew used in the performance (and available in the Cameri theater archive) as well as in the published text in Hebrew the translation is not “occupied lands” but “occupied countries” (“Aratzot kvushot”) (Joshua Sobol, Ed Reyia, Or-Am 2004, 63). While the first part of Franz’s statement may be read as resonant with a liberal perspective on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the final statement about “occupied countries” contextualizes this firmly in the German setting. Thus, Sobol presents an interesting interplay between historic specificity and its capacity to resonate for a present-day audience. 9. Glenda Abramson offers a good review of the controversial reception of Sobol’s plays (pre-dating iWitness) in Israel and abroad, in: “Zionism on the Stage: Sobol’s Case” in Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101–2. 10. Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness, 10; Sobol, Ed Reyias, 24–25. 11. The concept of “gestus” was to become a cardinal feature of Brecht’s theater practice; in John Willett’s definition, “It is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point: one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed. It excludes the psychological, the sub-conscious, the metaphysical unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms” (Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage; From Naturalism to Grotowski [London: Methuen Drama, 1982], 173–74). 12. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 76. 13. While in early-twentieth-century theater (The Adding Machine and Machinal) the body was used as a template on which mechanical movements were imposed to critique the ways in which machination and industrialization are dehumanizing us, the opposite is true of repetitive movements in theater in the two pieces I have referred to. The repetition actually emphasizes the bodies’ presence. 14. Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness, 67. 15. Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Merleau-Ponty on Space Perception and Space,” 274–311. In Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences: Essays and Translations, eds. Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 279. Kockelmans writes of Merleau-Ponty: “The chief concern of his work lies in the query about the very Being of man and about the fundamental significance of our body-subject” (280). 16. Sobol, Ed Reiya, 40–41; Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness, 17. 17. BlackWatch was staged in LA as part of the UCLA Live series in the fall of 2007/ 2008, Sept 18 to October 14, Freud Playhouse. It was written by Gregory Burke and directed by John Tiffany.

SEVEN Artifice, or a New Nature Toward a Philosophy of the Automaton Brunella Antomarini

DIALOGUE Q. You appear to posit a new creative agent in the age of post-artifice and you relate to it as the “constructor”; can you expound on it? The “constructor” is actually only aspect or part of the agent, which is the complex machinic apparatus. Every singular human constructor animates the real agent of construction, a kind of super-organism, made of natural and technical elements. Q. In what ways does the art object as a collective manifestation of one’s aesthetic constitution suggest that it may be regarded as an automaton? This super-organism builds “artifacts,” which are apparently automata, as they do not depend on any particular aesthetic perspective. It is becoming clearer and clearer that artworks as artifacts result from a collective work, which corresponds to no one’s singular intention, they make themselves while, in Luhmann’s words, they describe themselves.

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Q. You seem to suggest a different articulation of the notion of montage, and not quite as Bergson’s cinematic metaphor to cognition or later Deleuze’s articulation of time and space in relation to image and perception. Can you explain what your motives are in approaching montage in reference to cognition and aesthetics? This perspective has no opposition to Bergson or Deleuze, but the natural development of their views: kinetic image, or image-temps, already resolves and overcomes the linearity of narrative. The still image as such is an illusion which montage reveals. What the radical use of montage through the digital network develops further is the disillusionment about a “hidden” meaning, or an ideological aim, as in the case of Eisenstein. Q. What are the differential aspects that lie today between sensory inputs and the symbolic in light of your arguments on the interplay between the analogue and digital? The sensory inputs are secondary to the symbolic ones (symbolic itself is a term that recalls montage, meaning unifying what is separate), as if we had here an extreme version of the gestalt theory: anything may become symbolic. Or: nothing has meaning, therefore anything may get one. As a consequence, the totally artificial meaning brings about secondorder sensory data (through the network I see a place before seeing it). After all, the term digital stems from digitus, that is, finger, or touch, as it is needed in both organic and technological inputs. Q. How does Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis help us in explaining the emergence of an aesthetics infused with analogue as well as digital agents? The notion of autopoiesis has been used to replace the mechanic model of the real with an organic one. But today, being able to speak about “living machines” (which is Varela’s expression), we can expand the notion of the organic to the mechanical, and vice versa we discover mechanical dynamics in the organic (chemical reactions, chaotic impulses giving place to life, and so on). Nature makes and reproduces itself adding the machinic as an emergent factor of its autopoiesis. Q. Can you explain what is the significance of the new kind of machine situated as nature? Is it a naturalized machine (of aesthetic experience) or rather a naturalistic version of the aesthetics of machines (for example, Futurists or cyber art)? Certainly this model of both cognition and ontological commitment deals with a naturalized machine. To what extent machine aesthetics can be associated to it, is to be found out over time. It is too early to say.

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*** This is an art which does mend nature, change it rather, but the art itself is nature. —Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale The machine is by no means a tool for the single worker. . . . Differently from the tool, which it is the worker to animate, the machine replaces its own ability and strength to the worker’s, it is itself the skilled one, which has a soul of its own in the very mechanical laws that work in it. —Karl Marx, Fragment on machines

ARTIFICE, OR A NEW NATURE Artificio, in Italian, denotes that which is not natural, namely, what is made by us, ours, of art, or has been built by hands or machines. In both cases, the result is given by assembling together separate parts, which in turn are smaller wholes made of parts. The origin of the term “montage” is to be traced back to the assembly lines in factories: a material and mechanical activity of the hands or of robots, aimed at saving time in producing goods and tools. Its metaphoric extension to the cinema has come to refer to the technique of editing, breaking down filmic scenes or sequences and re-composing their pieces into new sequences, integrating juxtaposed elements into a whole. Assembling parts is the fundamental act through which complex products are constructed; and all artificial and artistic productions can be brought back to such an act whose outcome is a composite, which can be virtually broken down again to its simple parts. Until recently the construction of an artifice was considered the opposite of what we used to call “nature.” The organic does not share the existence of distinguished parts to be stuck together. Organisms have parts that make sense only thanks to the whole. Nature has this claim that it cannot be broken down into parts; it does not need hands to build its creatures. Its form is gestalt (the whole makes sense of the parts) whereas the form of any artifact is associationist (the whole is always the result of parts). Can we keep that distinction today, or shouldn’t we rather recognize that each definition fades into the other? This chapter concerns the epistemological consequences of the merging of artificial montage-making (from mechanical to digitized, or machinic artifices) and nature. Today, both our technological and cognitive tools allow for an overcoming of “nature” as distinct from technique. Art—as the paramount artificial—in its current forms anticipates or inti-

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mates at this new nature, both living and technical, while losing a specific status, or theoretical assessment. A phenomenological description of this aesthetic-epistemological orientation regards: 1. A new cognitive agent, that is, the constructor (versus the scientist or the artist): the creator (out of nothing) is actually a technician (who works out existing objects, using a proportion of skillful intention and unintentional trial-and-error procedure. 2. A new object of knowledge, coinciding with the product of the construction, a product of which every agent knows only some parts and never all of them; that is, no individual in particular knows the whole object, which is to be valued by successive recipients and whose value is never actually established. 3. A specific cognitive modality: there is no rational relation between the parts of the whole; the parts, by being superimposed or juxtaposed, create themselves, using the human agent as a tool of its own assemblage. The product is made in such a way that it can always undergo successive re-assemblages and re-definitions. 4. A focus on the use of integration of the heterogeneous, of interruptions in the continuum of sense and meaning, of the autopoietic organization of contingent forms. 5. A new description of “reality”: all entities result from a blending of random and willful activity. “Reality” is a technique, to be extended to the organic (which is becoming more and more a minor form of montage: organic bodies regulated by technologies). THE CONSTRUCTOR There is an increasing difficulty for art critics and art historians to define “art” and consequently to find a criterion of evaluation for artworks. Probably we are headed to the conclusion that an aesthetic theory is impossible or unnecessary, due to the complexity of current art expressions and to the redundancy of the artist’s quality of the poietic “skill,” that is the ability to make something out of nothing, also defined as “creativity.” A definition of “art” or of “artist” fades into a definition of “constructor” or “construction,” in that it is a ground-concept: “beauty” seems to be dismissed and replaced with “fit” and “unfit,” as suggested by Niklas Luhmann, who defines the strictly systemic relationship between art and social dynamics: This includes the problem—which did not present itself until the XX century—of how the distinction between art and non-art is to be controlled; how, in other words, the paradoxical unity of art and non-art can be dissolved within the art system itself. 1

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Artists seem to construct a product out of some technical skill, in which poiesis is replaced by techne, or the practical ability to build an object or a scenario, or a visual happening, and so on, which is a matter of re-elaborating, re-interpreting, re-composing pre-existing objects, being at constant disposal of the interpreter, in a renewed hermeneutic circle. 2 According to the ancient Greeks, who distinguished two kinds of intelligence, one theoretical and the other one technical, this second intelligence is the one used by artisans and inventors, called metis, the ability to find stratagems and devices aimed at making something work; metis is a specific kind of techne, that defines the ability to overcome obstacles, and of mechane, the practical application of techne. Instead of ideas and meanings and conceptual or spiritual values implied in artworks, we have simple work here, defined basically as the transformation of thermic energy into mechanic energy, and on more complex levels, as the transformation of mechanic energy into informational energy. By way of example we recall the use sculptors make of a 3D printer, which accomplishes what the artist could not make manually; the printer is the real poietes, or the real craftsman, of which the sculptor or the expert who invented and the ones who built the printer are the assistants, or supports, or instruments. The source of information and the source of energy are concentrated on the machine. The artist knows just something, makes just something. Most of the work and information comes from the machine. And of course this becomes apparent in the case of the various forms of Net art. Artists are endowed with the ability to use technologies and previous objectual structures in order to re-compose them in a new, or different level of a whole, making them significant, through editing, in a totally different context (which causes as a consequence copyright issues). It is a method of work that shares with the artisans the difficulty of speaking about it (as they said: ut videbitur operandi, it will be seen as it must be done) and the need to show it, independently of any “theory” or conceptual frame (it was Wittgenstein who said that concerning art, it is very difficult to say something that is more worth than saying nothing). Should we imagine silent artists-constructors, who do not care anymore about their recognition, disregarding any critical support, busy, as they will be, to work inside the machine? Ancient artisans in fact were not held in high consideration, exactly because of their reluctance to talk about their works, both due to the necessity to keep a technical secret (Leonardo’s secret writing code is an example) and to the inability to represent the practical products of techne in words. The technique speaks for itself, it shows the rule according to which it works, it informs about itself, by simply presenting it functioning. The artist-constructor knows the rule but does not know the causes. It is not a matter of ignorance, but it is the very structure of the work that implies and requires an explorato-

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ry attitude. The result must be left to its own automatic nature: it may make itself, if duly worked upon, and if duly left to its own self-making chance. Within this epistemological frame the purposeful is inextricably intertwined with the unintended; the assemblage adjusts itself; at each step it shows its own succeeding or failing; hands or fingers on a keyboard are its helps and its instruments. A kind of chemistry occurs between all the actors involved (hands, minds, tools, machines), from which a new entity emerges, aimed to modify the environment and its “reality,” whether by practical use or by aesthetic reception. Between the initial intention and the final result occurs what Marcel Duchamp called the “art coefficient,” 3 suggesting that it is the work that makes a decision at each step of its making. Its author/instrument can only detect how the work asks to be corrected or modified in order for it to succeed (and succeeding here does not mean to correspond to the author’s intentions, but to its resulting in the “right” re-composition of parts). Duchamp’s ready-mades can be read as self-making works, respect to which the artist is the first spectator, receiving and following external suggestions. The parts to be assembled in fact pre-exist the choice and the perspective from which to use them. The parts can match one another in different and alternative ways; they do not follow a necessary route, but suggest themselves their contingent possible montages. Any cause-effect relationship in this way of making is discarded in favor of trial and error, repetition, probability, unpredictable issues, parallel possibilities; the contingent way the parts may be assembled inform about their interchangeability or lack of necessity of the whole. THE OBJECT AS AUTOMATON At the end of retinal art, ready-mades, combines, Dadaism, superimposition in photography, Eisenstein’s montage of attractions, surrealism, introduced exploration as a step-by-step construction of a work, which is not so much the application of any previous law or theory, as it is itself the cause of a or rule for its construction. The constructor explores parallel possibilities, allowed by the multiple potential integrations of discrepant parts. The auto-poietic system resulting from that work, independent from any intentions on the part of the artist (or the recipient) modifies the theory and the rule while working: conceptual clarity is the result of the machine that works well, but the guide is more the hand than the mind. Knowledge takes on an automatic character, as if the constructor followed suggestions given by the tool or machine itself. He tries, whether the next move matches the previous one, and then he knows, so far as his knowledge—local and flexible—is not challenged again by the next move. His intention is continuously challenged by the gesture, whose decision is faster than any language or concept can grasp. The constructor does not

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think before making; what he communicates arrives later than the visual presentation. This is why the traditions of craftsmanship hardly survive time: it is difficult to be transmitted in words; the technical skill intertwined with seconding what contingent factors require, makes it “showable” rather than communicable. The constructor knows his object without mastering all of it. And even though this is most true today, when complex technological objects require so much specialized and piecemeal knowledge of each part, that it is a (virtual) collective cooperation, of which no one in particular is the author, or the center or the coordinator, we can nonetheless re-read in hindsight and trace back its historical prototype in baroque bel composto (beautiful composition) as Gian Lorenzo Bernini would call his sculptures, integrated as they were with architecture, painting, bas-relief, theater, composing a scenario of juxtaposed heterogeneous elements, aimed at displacing the spectators’ frontal point of view, making them need to move around the scene in order to make sense of it, as is the case of Santa Teresa in Rome, or of the various “macchine sceniche” the sculptor built for the Church festivities, composed of mechanical fountains, automata, or light games, aimed at showing off the power of Catholicism. And this cost him the early-twentiethcentury Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce’s comment: “Il barocco è il brutto nell’arte” (Baroque is ugliness in art). Ugliness, that is to say, the lack of a planned order that makes the artwork a clearly symbolic value, or a manifesto of its author’s intentions. We have to wait until later in the century to find a re-evaluation of that unintentional juxtaposition in Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “allegorical,” that is the fragmented and incomplete as meaningful, or Giovanni Careri’s reading of Bernini as the first filmmaker who introduced motion picture and “montage” in the arts. 4 With this paradigm in mind, we can read the historical changes in style as an auto-poiesis of painting and its metamorphosis into cinema: by way of example, we can re-read the cinematic propensity of Michelangelo or Beato Angelico in Giulio Antamoro’s film Christus (1916), Ghirlandaio in Bill Viola’s The Greeting, or in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone, Rembrandt in Greenaway’s Nightwatching; and expanding to music, we could re-read Bach in Glenn Gould, Scarlatti in Enrico Pierannunzi, Beethoven through the Moog synthesizer compositions by Wendy Carlos for Kubrick, and so on. What is to be emphasized now is that that propensity has been more and more reinforced by the new technologies, to the point that any handmaking, or creative power of the artist-poietes, tends to be neglected and replaced by the use of bits and pieces of what can be found at hand on the Web—virtual ready-mades, Net art productions, uploading of videos edited from other videos, soundtracks stolen from found music—or whatever the interaction with the machine allows. The same can be said of certain street spectacles like flash mobs, or freeze, in which the impact of

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the dancers with the random quality of the surroundings makes the real show. Or even more cogently, we may recall smart objects: everyday life digital tools and machines that, by being interconnected to the Web, are in constant mutual dialogue and provide the users with services, realtime information about parking, traffic, weather, better food, and so on. They are tools, though reducing their users to used puppets, devoid of any chance to make decisions. They are both extra-organs added to our bodies, and our “masters,” in the Hegelian sense of the slave ending up to master its master. These are only a few examples of the increasing freedom of montage that the Web allows and fosters, unleashing a new disregard for the authorship, almost a step back into times when the craftsman, the sculptor or painter didn’t need to sign what they did. These objects are automata, in that they share these qualities: the artifice is built upon another artifice; it loses what Aristotle called its material cause, or at least the material of its stuff is so complex and indefinite that we might call it a second-order matter, or a new nature; a kind of hidden soul—or fake soul of the mechanic-machinic object (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s information machines 5) which moves itself. As ancient automata, birds or dragons sang and moved in fountains by the very water pressure, like the ones built by Hero from Alexandria, or the early modern mechanical robots, like the flute player by Jacques de Vaucanson, activated by clockwork mechanisms, among many other mirabilia, these objects are ironic: they all seem to have an inner energy or an aim that they have not: what this new nature in fieri brings about is human indifference, both subjective (psychological) and objective (indiscernible objects) and its consequent laugh, an irony quite pervasive in the presentday arts, which are not so much the product of aisthesis (perceptual involvement), as rather the product of an absolute artifice, perceived only in its radical self-reference and self-description, in which it simulates itself, brings itself to life, discouraging all attempt find out its author as genius. This perspective gives the traditions of art history a renewed afterlife (in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term.) 6 Every artwork can be seen as a part to be assembled in the montage of potential other wholes-artworks, which seamlessly alternate in the flowing environment of this new nature. In the oscillations between dissolutions and re-associations, every artwork will be more and more often conceived, since its very birth, as a fragment of a bigger picture, which is always possible and always allegorically missing. 7 The very meaning of the Italian Renaissance can be re-read as “anachronic,” 8 in the sense of juxtaposing and integrating past and present motives, displaying time in an atemporal plural space. Renaissance artists would single out formal elements from classical art and place them in their works without any formal need or justification. 9

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COGNITIVE MODALITIES As it is commonly and widely shown, the ongoing paradigm shift provides artists, intellectuals, and users of the Net in general with new inhibitions and new abilities. Among the first we witness a decrease of memory storage, projected onto the computer storage; shorter and shorter attention span and concentration; a lack of center of reference and hierarchy of choices; the consequent risk to become easily manipulated by media and commercial (or worse, political) aims. Among the second (which are the interface of the first) we can list the increasing speed of real-time information, flexibility of perspectives, readiness in skipping redundancy, suspension of judgment, due to the fast modifications in the net of events, that is, the ability not to judge too quickly, with the advantage of keeping the distinction between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, in constant motion. It is as if cognitive agents became cognitive instruments of recognition of the very flows of facts. If twentieth-century epistemology was based upon the idea of the theory-laden facts, the twenty-first century might introduce an epistemology of self-making facts, or provisional theorizations of facts, with a strong natural-selective criterion of their own definitions. Facts seem to emerge and disappear in the virtual artifice, without being supported by a perceptual or conceptual reference, which used to work as an original, to be endlessly reproduced. Even now that I am writing on the computer, the whole of my text is partly hidden and invisible to me. The sequential verticality of the paper page, which I used to hold in my hands, is reduced to a continuum’s fragment, which I can place elsewhere. I discover that that sequence did not rigorously follow a logical frame; rather its coherence results from a plurality of possibilities. The necessity of the argument is blurred in favor of its intuitive grasp. Readers roll these pages on their computers, they will catch the gist of it, without feeling the need to retain the whole, certain that the memory of the whole chapter is kept at hand any time that they want to go deeper into it. Their attention decreases and increases discontinuously, it may be weak or intense, but surely short. Lacking the material object of a book, they do not have any idea of the volume of what they are reading. The velocity of information allows them to collect many of the texts on their desktops to be read after or in between the reading of this one. And I, being the first reader of my text, know that my rhetoric strategies to connect what I said to what I am going to say are useless, if I can move one period or one argument or one sentence wherever I want at any moment. My text reveals its logical contingency, which does not prevent it from being understandable and consistent. My montage does not leave any trace; my text is not so much mine as it is self-making, as it happens in film.

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In addition I am working simultaneously on two or more screens, files, or applications. I can go back to correct what I have written, also depending on the suggestions of the other work I am writing, or reading or watching or listening to. I can retrieve a word from all of my documents and re-apply it elsewhere. As a spectator of myself, I become aware of the multiple associations that exist by chance between one text and the other. Growingly a multitasker, I make many things seemingly at the same time, which means quickly interrupting the one to pass to the other one and back again. Skipping passages and then integrating attention gaps, making it faster to get information and elaborate it without waste of time or dead moments. I rely upon my attention being attracted here or there, or being deactivated if nothing is attracting it. I am partly guided by randomly activated triggers. Where attention is not drawn, it doesn’t go. I resort to the translator online if I need a word, which I can’t find in my memory, or to information online without first even trying to remember it. Production and reception of texts are so strictly intertwined that producers function as the ancient artisans, focused more on the visual result than on their argumentative authorship, and communication becomes a secondary need with respect to the visualization of the text itself. The text describes itself as the container of other texts, exactly as a poem does, without referring to any external or perceptual data. As being functional to the machine, I make my moves, as the machine requires me to. I feel my thoughts are partly generated elsewhere than myself; they have an extension that range from a wide temporal and cultural distance. But that distance is annulled by its virtual presence, and its virtual presence is exempt from being a substantial whole. And the idea of our personal identities will evolve from being like discrete particles to being interactive fields, which do not need to master the construction, but only to partially contribute to its accomplishment. It is an epistemological structure that cognitive anthropologist Merlin Donald called, in his seminal book Origins of the Modern Mind, “ESS” (External Symbolic Storage), a network of collections of symbols, stored in a material but disseminated and digital super-organism to which each individual (each of its parts) is plugged. 10 Whereas the ESS is a fluid center of modifiable symbols and values and truths, our minds are in constant active systemic feedback relationship with it, being modified by and modifying it at the same time. All advancement, progress, and learning emerge from this network structure, and are not due to any genius, any solitary mind, any evident origin. We can say that it has always been like that, but it is only now we cannot invent stories about origins, causes, and beginnings: the groundlessness of this cognitive model is clear enough to exclude the idea of authorship from a creative act, which is actually an act of construction, built upon other constructions, in total heterogenesis of intentions and lack of “initial conditions.”

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INTEGRATION, EMERGENCE, AUTO-POIESIS For our purposes, what this scenario, more and more discussed in different fields of scholarly research, suggests for future art is the juxtaposition of elements, as they virtually propose themselves; the consequent emergence of artworks which are the products of “nobody”; the auto-poiesis, or self-construction of the product itself, whose identity rests upon the contingent manipulation that successive users, including spectators and audiences, will make of it. All of these elements at play bring up a new use of contingency: the necessity that governs an “artwork” is produced by the guidelines of contingent suggestions, independent of theories (are we at a turning point, in putting an end to the search for an art theory that claims to include all possible forms of art?), having as sole criterion its being fit for functioning: a clear feedback loop and circularity, the same that we find in the ESS model of cognition and which shows that there is an epistemological value in the thing itself, which is not reducible to any theoretical value. 11 Knowledge shifts its agent from the human subject to the emergent self-descriptive phenomenon. 12 (But hasn’t it always been like this?) What is learned and used in one context, becomes a source of cognition and use in another one; what is efficacious in one field, may be found out to be efficacious in another; it is the very experimental performativity of the product that makes it artistic. So far as it works within the Net (or the ESS), it is considered a form of art, which decides itself (being itself an interconnected object) for its own value and destiny, as if there were, on Henri Focillon’s terms, a “life of forms,” 13 generating one another, and working even in absence of any intention to make them work, and the more rhyzomatic the forms, the weaker their actual presences. We perceive first their montage character, their being integrated parts, their being essential modifications; something close to Jullien’s description of the Chinese painter’s gesture, who “paints modifications.” 14 Instead of looking for an art theory, we will have to cope with the increasing complexity in the systemic reference technology/artifice/nature, in which the phenomenon “art” rejects the need for any human authorship and acquires a self-referential memory: The work of art, then, establishes a reality of its own that differs from ordinary reality. And yet, despite the work’s perceptibility, despite its undeniable reality, it simultaneously constitutes another reality. 15

This distributed, beehive-like being is able to guarantee a horizontal order of organized structures, on condition that the enormous quantity of its human actors is out of control. 16 We witness the emergence of entities which regulate the behavior and development of other entities, which regulate the behavior of other entities, and so on, though not to infinity, but in an endless circularity and shifts of balance, which gives the advan-

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tage to change one’s mind easily, to use previous errors as sources of novelty, to take advantage of unbalance to construct other balances. So if today artworks are arbitrary, are absurd, have no beauty, or have no arguable “meaning,” if it is almost impossible to assess their aesthetic value, maybe it is because they, being the product of collective constructive mind-machines, do not need those requirements anymore. In a beehive, bees do not need to evaluate their actions; they simply act, out of an aim that can be either pragmatic, or for its own sake. Again, we can trace in hindsight a constant of this cognitive structure even in the aesthetic tradition: painting can be seen as the paramount example of the “intelligence of the hand,” of the step-by-step work of which artworks are stages of a bigger collective construction, which has been called Renaissance, Baroque, surrealism, pop art, and so on, various self-descriptions which are as clear as indeterminate, once that we try to find a “law” to explain their specificity. We seem to employ a kind of second-order perception: on the Web, we perceive and use what others have perceived before us, or in Niklas Luhmann’s terms, “Art communicates by using perceptions contrary to their primary purposes.” 17 Maybe it is the machine that perceives and builds works fit for a wider eye, as the gigantic dimensions of many current artworks seem to suggest. The stronger the technologies the wider the scopes of inquiry into evolution or biology or cosmology, and so on, in which organisms play a smallest part and cannot be any point of reference. 18 Is it the human dimension to be over? Or the natural dimension to be blended with the technical? Or is it the machine that is taking over a spirit, or an intention, unknown to us? On a perceptual-aesthetic level, we are less and less certain about our ability to configure an image through the gestalt integration of missing parts in a row of discontinuous elements, or “good continuation law.” The perceptual dynamics of integration is rendered complex by the increasing variety of possible configurations, decided by that collective super-organism just described. What Henri Poincaré called our making continuous what is discontinuous—which allows for our generalizations—is challenged by the super-individual technique of reconstructing out of other constructions, therefore leaving any perceptual amodal reference mostly unusable. 19 The new generations will learn how to quickly activate and disactivate categories, to infer acoustic information from motion information, visual information from tactile, and so on. Their effort will obtain in safeguarding the possibility to reassemble and to avoid taking manipulation for real and definitive (though unavoidable). A thing is partially itself, and partially eludes itself, says Poincaré: “What is revealed will be concealed but what is concealed will again be revealed. 20 Differently from Eisenstein’s insurrectional use of his montage of attractions, digital montage shows compositions that are at everyone’s dis-

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posal to be re-composed again, and to be broken down in parts again, as no composition is essential, but is all that can exist, its evolution does not exhaust the sense of its change; what we call “real” will become the fossil of an obsolete argument, replaced by the idea of a reservoir of infinite acceptance of what becomes real. A NEW SENSE OF REALITY: THE MACHINE AS A STRATEGY OF NATURE As soul is to man, as man is to machine. —Philip Dick, Man, Android, and Machine [Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. —Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

There seems to be no watershed left between the categories of living and the nonliving; machines inform and communicate; natural organisms are explained away by machines. Real objects are products, either of evolutionary, or technical processes, they are in any case artifices, complex phenomena that suggest their own nonsubstantiality, grounded as they are upon artificial constructions. This is how artistic events become models of this epistemological description. Assembled objects-performances, or processes visualized in a theatrical space—represented by a screen or a virtual presence—seem to have a life of their own; they do not represent anything outside of themselves, they can be totally new identities, to be grasped with an intuitive sense, or some guessing power (on Peirce’s terms) that in its turn triggers suggestions for more constructions, and if nature is but another construction, then machines have a “soul.” Whether their souls are their mechanical laws, or us, as intrinsic energies, or as their instruments, giving them the first impulse for their setting in motion, technical constructions have all the (apparent) qualities of natural entities, in any event we need to redefine the concept of machine, or to de-reify it, 21 as Leibniz had already tried to do in paragraph 64 of his Monadology: Therefore every organic body of a living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, infinitely surpassing all artificial automatons. Because a machine constructed by man’s skill is not a machine in each of its parts; for instance, the teeth of a brass wheel have parts or bits which to us are not artificial products and contain nothing in themselves to show the use to which the wheel was destined in the machine. The machines of nature, however, that is to say, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum. Such is the difference between nature and art, that is to say, between divine art and ours. 22

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The only difference left between nature and technique is that natural organisms are far more mechanical than technical tools, as these have natural parts, whereas those are infinitely technical. Technicality is a quality of the natural; it is the human task to integrate their apparent discontinuity into the continuity of the real, replacing the claim to “discover” a law that causes their coming to be, with the awareness that any answer is but another construction, to be plugged in the flow of the network, that it may work or not work, may be corrected or broken down into its parts, to be used as new materials for the next whole. The organic becomes a quality of the machine, whereas the machine needs the human as energy—we might say thermic energy turned into motion energy. The next generations might be generations of artists-technicians, used to recognize the good work (be it an artwork, or a machine, or a virtual entity) as the one in which the intention is disrupted enough as to reveal its being made by many subjects—or means, rather than authors— transcending each of their desires, in such a way that the material work is worth more than its constructors. The Hegelian dissolution of the aesthetic, as already updated by Arthur Danto, is now conceived upside down: it is not the concept, but the machine, which absorbs the material and natural character of the arts. A few conclusive remarks: any “montage” is evaluated from its effects and not its causes; the truth of any entity is replaced by its efficacy, in the pragmatist sense of the term, and also its procedural sense (judgments make sense so far as they are sufficiently valid). The agent communicating that efficacy is the machine itself, while human agencies are collective, uncontrollable, and merged with the network, each being an expert of a small fragment of the big network, nor can they claim any authorship, or right to attack the machine for its lack of order and meaning. They rely upon the self-regulating power of the network, through an indefinite trust into a good orientation, which has now to cope with a rhyzomatic multiplicity of possible amodal integrations, and a readiness to grasp the value of the next emergence. At last and fortunately humans will lose their obsession with private property and possession, not only in knowledge and economy, but also in the arts. NOTES 1. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 314. 2. Andrea Cortès-Boussac, El hombre en las redes de las nuevas technologìas. Aportes à la disoluciòn del enfrentamiento hombre-tècnica (Bogotà: Universidad Srgio Arboleda, 2009), 75. 3. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: A da Capo, 1973), 139. 4. Giovanni Careri, Flights of Love. The Art of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 6. Brunella Antomarini, “The Notion of afterlife in Benjamin’s Philosophy of History,” Proceedings of the International Conference of Critical Theory (2007): Nostalgia for a Redeemd Future. Critical Theory, S. Giachetti, ed. (Rome: John Cabot University Press, 2009), 217–28. 7. François Jullien, La grande image n’a pas de forme. Ou, du non-objet dans la peinture (Paris: Points, 2009), 77. 8. Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 7. 9. Brunella Antomarini, Thinking Through Error: The Moving Target of Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 6–7. 10. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.) 11. Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (London: University of California Press, 2004), 116. 12. Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge, 127. 13. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989). 14. François Jullien, La grande image, 19. 15. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 142. 16. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Perseus Books, 1994), 390. 17. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 22. 18. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche an the Transhuman Condition (Oxford: Routledge, 1997), 125. 19. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (New York: Dover, 1952), 142. 20. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, 106. 21. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, 134. 22. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology (Amherst: Prometheus Books 1992), 81.

EIGHT Aesthetics and Transcoding De-Accelerating the Photographic Image Adam Berg

DIALOGUE Q. The catastrophe of writing and photography recalls Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of the Machine replacing the mute and immediate language of architecture. Yes, indeed. However the consequences of such a “catastrophe” are less deterministically evolving and far more open and mutable over time. As opposed to the notion of an organic philosophy it has more to do with an attempt to articulate a philosophy of the organism closer to Buckminster Fuller’s visionary architecture. And this has a lot do with the overall systemic unfolding of technological aspects as extensions of the organism’s body and in as much organic collectives emerging into networks and cybernetic systems that posit images no longer as either percept or text, input or code, but rather as inexhaustibly transcodable flows. In that sense catastrophe relieves us from the traditional opposition between image and text and introduces us to a new aesthetics at once instable and transformative.

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Q. If chemistry and physics are the tools of this new form of writing, how would you define in a few words this morphing between the mechanical device of photography grounded upon natural dynamics, and nature’s mechanical devices? This is a fascinating question especially in light of the physics of transcoding as based on quantum computation (for example, Qubits) that draws our attention to information not as outside the physical state of affairs but as part of its constituents. In other words, the physics of images as transcodes or qubits is continuous with their extensions as sensory input/output without disrupting the so-called laws of nature. Q. Blurring the traditional distinction subject/object, external/internal, doesn’t photography also blur the Husserlian claim for originary intentionality in any cognitive act? There is common misconception with respect to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology regarding intentionality in relation to the traditional (more Kantian) subject/object divide. The static phenomenological constitution in Husserl’s sense is not about intentional subjects and/or objects but rather intentional acts and/ or objects (that is, noetic-noematic) and this completely obliterates the grounding of intentionality on the basis of a subject. On the other hand, subjectivity as cognitively originary or constitutive to any intentionality is a must! But it is also embedded into a genetic phenomenology that introduces the horizon of pre-givens, of systems and of historical posits all of which comprise our “life-world” (LebensWelt) at once determined and open without being ever totalized—and most importantly in opposition to the Heideggerian finitude of the Dasein that situates the subject/ being in a totalized world (In-der-Welt-Sein). Q. Do you think that a “logic of the real” is still possible, once it is detached from any logic of perception? What demarcates the “real,” mathematics or logic? In this case, are we back to an Aristotelian ontological universe? A particular “logic of the real” is not the logic of reality. The sense in which the “logic of the real” is valuable to us has to do with change and how it is continuously transformed in relation to the organism’s emergent “logic of perception.” Since the organism’s technological extensions in the broadest sense are expanding and transforming the very concept of reality, then it is inevitable that our ontology is not grounded in either math or perception but in how the two are mutually transformed through a shared “logic” of transcoding.

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Q. So what is the role of transcoding? It is not so much an assigned role as it is a new dynamics that has changed the notion of realism from representational correspondence of objects and perceptions into a Unicode, or a transcode that is based on the same universal grammar or logic that is as infinite and inexhaustible as algorithm. In that sense it’s manifested culturally in what Peter Lunenfeld refers to in his contribution as “unimodern.” Q. Can you define “evidence,” once that it is independent of any representational value? Evidence has a new experiential modality, that is, more from a phenomenological standpoint than a naturalistic objective vantage point of a scientific worldview. Let’s think for example on the use of word evident in language to also imply obviousness, being given or encountered on the way. In more than one respect, contemporary technological extensions/mediations are presenting us with “evidence” that poses less the question in reference to its corresponding objects but instead its correspondence in perception. That does not mean that the representational value is either lost or diminished but that instead of being addressed through a mimetic theory of knowledge it emerges out of a representational plexus of transcoded data that draws our attention to it as a new kind of evidence, neither lower nor higher, more or less constitutive. Q. How can we rescue “correspondence” (adaequation) if that split between subject/ object is gone, and if the complexity of the systems of representation (Karl Popper) can never be reduced to a simple reference? Correspondence or evidence like representational values do not disappear or diminish but rather change their reciprocal dynamics. As much as evidence is contextualized through a Qubit and not necessarily in terms of a vulgar kind of Aristotelian realism so does correspondence plays a bigger role in the rapport between emergent “logic of perceptions” and transformative representations of “logic of reals”; in so far as we will always rely on pictures, signs, or symbols we will introduce a growing significance to ontological destratification. It is no longer crucial to center on an aesthetic analysis that is ontically hierarchical (vertical) but rather on a more horizontal one in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux and yet not simply proliferated and ad nausea orbiting outwards but also transcoded and integrative, like a birth of new galaxy. ***

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THE MOVING OF PHOTOGRAPHY INTO THE REALM OF THE INVISIBLE, OR THE HISTORICITY OF PHOTONIC RECORDS The origin of any history is grounded in myth and that of photography is no exception. More specifically, at its historical origin as technique photography coincided with its abduction into the quotidian sphere of appearances and soon after became, as Villem Flusser had provokingly argued, the second biggest “catastrophe” after the invention of writing. 1 Why catastrophe? For it irreversibly changed, like writing had before, the way we construct, construe, and intervene in the world. Photography challenged traditional systems of representations that offered similitude and that could no longer be supported, so it seemed, as happened in the case of the invention of writing that had a detrimental effect on oral traditions, dooming them to disappear. Before the historical occurrence of the second catastrophe, namely the invention of photography, images were either construed as transcendental projections of ideas or pure immanence, never integrating the idea with its shadow, being with its substance. The image in the pre-photographic age was based on the fabrication of visual constructs that provided a continuous fulcrum to human perception within the natural realm. 2 Photography has changed the relation of the image to its grounding in reality by implementing a novel discontinuity between its objecthood and its perception; in Husserlian terms, between the “image-objective content” and the “image-sensation content.” It was photography in the nineteenth century that introduced the possibility of approaching the image as an inseparable “outside and inside.” 3 For the first time, the “outside” and “inside” of an image seemed selfcontained or self-referential, providing “reality” as a subset to its “imagesensation content” and perception as built-in as the “inside” of the structure of optical reality without relying on geometry and perspective as tools of measurement and construction of the visual field. Despite earlier experiments, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s with camera obscura and possibly emulsion methods as ways to fix and transfer optics into painting or Athanasius Kircher’s “cinematic” projections of the “theatre of memory” that can be seen as precursors to photography and cinema, modern photography for the first time embodied the unity between transcendent idea-form (as photonic projection) and immanent proof of evidence. 4 Thus, a new myth was born, that of photographic evidence. But the myth of the photographic image—namely, its historical point of singularity as evidence and as an irreducible stable image—articulates a new form of writing, the writing of the laws of physics or nature’s logos, which inscribes through physics and chemistry (photons and emulsion) the propositional language of the seen.

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The photographic image as evidence led inevitably to the reification of photography as ontologically grounded, and as result solidified the notion that photography is an objective constituents of reality. However, one must bear in mind that photography always had an obvious epistemic role in corroborating what is real and that the polarization between the photographic image as evidence (ontic) and photography as a tool of knowing (epistemic) never culminated in a dialectical interplay that reduced the real to the photographic. Quite to the contrary, the diversification of photo techniques, from the early experiments with photo-transferred images to digital technology widened the gulf between the instant of recording the image and its produced traces. In other words, between the camera obscura and the optical projection there lies a universe of possible modifications as to how the photographic image is both nascent and latent, originary and posthumous. In as much as the temporal structure of myths is defined by what is delineated either as prehistorical (primordial) and post-historical (eschatological) time photography presented an image as the compounding of “before” and “after” or the “inside” and “outside” of temporality. The myth of the photographic image is, thus, like any myth, a potent beginning but also a bifurcation—a split between the logic of the real and the logic of perception. Photography’s “catastrophic” impact on representational systems is not limited only to visual images but to writing itself. It’s worth mentioning two seminal modern writers, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, who looked at the photographic image as intimately connected to writing and its relation to representation, history, and memory. The overlapping between the subject of photography and that of writing resulted in new changes. In Benjamin’s case such overlapping is invoked through the photographic image’s “loss of aura” and with Barthes in respect to the subject’s disappearance—the so-called death of the author. For Benjamin, “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” 5 and hence infiltrates through the realms of images the unconscious that is marked by a new kind of literacy. And as Benjamin contends, “The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.” 6 And as for Barthes, The Photograph . . . represents the very subtle moment when . . . I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter. 7

Being is captured in photographs, as a singular “moment” entailing a sense of subjectivity that otherwise would have remained indeterminable

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in the flux of becoming. The photographic image had erased the arbitrariness of the subject by suggesting its language as mechanical, objective, and reproductive resulting in the amplification of the image’s experience as attesting to an interiority: a plane of pure subjectivity. Photography, thus, for the first time in human history, could annihilate the objectiveness and artifactness of images and instead render them as subjectified, or as the interiorization of the external world. Nonetheless, with such enactment the photographic image had absorbed the duality of a subject, being both “interiority” and a body or exterior object, and such duality makes our response to photo-images exceedingly emotive and charged. As the first astrophysical photos of nebulas and microscopic images of plants and microbes were introduced, nothing remained “outside” the interiority of the perceiving subject. In other words, photography actually produced, contrary to common wisdom, the possibility of subjectivity in vision precisely for “allowing” two radical and novel possibilities: the first: the possibility of multiple interpretations to the image as opposed to the objectified pre-photographic image that retained its totality as indexical sign. The second: the efficacy of the image as “interiorization.” The photographic image imploded as a non-indexical act of representation and indexical object at the same time in the sense that the “enigma of subjectivity” (to use Husserl’s expression) is epitomized in the twofold structure of consciousness as both intentional act and intentional object. Insofar as the intentional act of a subject is first extended as a body directing and moving itself towards a reference it also intends a particular sense. 8 Such twofold structure is detectable in the historical bifurcation between the invention of photography as a scientific technological tool (techne) and its parochial translation into and its discovery as a medium (technique). Insofar as the invention of photography historically bifurcated from its technological scientific discovery into the quotidian sphere that today we regard as “visual communication and culture” it transformed all languages and codes of information. And in as much as photography, more than any mass reproducible means, instigated the inception of pornography and kitsch within the public spheres it also provided the image of the social with a new ontological vividness; such as moments of political unrest, wars, genocides, or nuclear explosions. As photography gained the status of an unadulterated vision it simultaneously introduced and induced the desired illusion for perceptual immediacy. Photography, thus, like science, got situated within the “naturalistic attitude” or vulgar approach to life as science did assuming the knowledge of reality as selfevidence. 9 Science is situated within the world of human experience and is about intervening with the real as much as it is about representing. And representations, as Ian Hacking remarked, are never singular and isolated but instead embedded in a given “web of beliefs,” in a contextual perspective that is intricately connected to what the theory itself delin-

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eates and posits as “real,” and in turn how such scientific theory is demarcated as a “normative” and legitimate science. 10 The concept of evidence grew beyond the scope of empirical and sensationalist epistemologies that assumed the role of perception to be constitutive of scientific theories. 11 Instead, evidence became incorporated into the scientific “world-making” that culminated with both macrocosmic and microcosmic photo-recordings of “events” that no longer were simply explained as “direct” or “indirect” sensations but rather as part of a larger explanatory scheme. Think, for example, about how the first bubble chamber photographs of particles’ collisions—which incidentally not unlike Leonardo’s insertion of the camera obscura into the liquid ocular organs—were “caught” in fluid. These bubble chambers photographs had to be decoded and interpreted as ghostly paths, routes of interactions, traces of collisions, evidence of invisible events. Quantum mechanical photographs that are infused with computer feeding and simulation, as Fermi Lab’s or CERN’s measuring and computer hybridized images, may be construed as forms of intertwined “events” that record the evidence of what cannot be seen, let alone be fixed as a correlate image to the real. The logic of the real and the logic of perception never seemed more apart. Photographs, whether as in the form of quantum mechanical recordings or Nadar’s portrait of Baudelaire, are “events” that prevail on two levels: ontological and historical. What situates photography in a unique place even today is precisely its retention of reality and history in competing measures and without comprising its registration as “something” that occurred in the past (that is, a record or trace) and occurs at present (that is, an index or mark). From the 1980s on, for artists-photographers such as Jeff Wall, Craigie Horsefield, or Roni Horn, photography as a form of event drew attention to the surface of images; in particular to the surface as a potent hiatus between its historical residue of signs and its perceptual stabilization as a staged reality. And since the 1990s, with the growing use of digitalization (and in a way that enforced post-produced aspects of photographic techniques) more artists are invested in exploring the perceptual stability generated by the photographic image and how the photographic image as a “picture” defines not only a visual field but a tactile object as well. However, such a tendency also resulted in a withdrawal from the historically coded image, with its specific epochal referents, to an emphasis on the saturated perceptual status of the photo-image as ahistorical. 12 Artists, in some elusive ways are like sleepwalkers who preview paths, which are then more objectively constructed or discovered by science. Despite the obvious differences between the material and historical within both art and science their reciprocal relation is only resolved, if at all, in retrospect, namely, through a historical perspective. 13 This leaves us with the distinct impression that the photo-image “dwells” in both

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realms and that it is equally constitutive of one’s sense being and of one’s knowledge of that which lies beyond the possibility of vision. Photoimages may also obey a hidden geometry and conceal orders as in the case of photographs of André Kertész or Gabriel Orozco’s accidental/ staged photographs (as in his 1992 Cats and Watermelons). As such, photographs vacillate between enacting epistemological boundaries (that is, the limits of one’s knowledge) or the demarcating of the real (that is, one’s sense of experience) and obey the logic of the real as much as of perception. Photographs are the “events”—moments interrupted, halted, and arrested as seemingly static and fixed in an otherwise constant flux. But “events” as fixed photographic marks are not fossilized and dead moments, but rather, the very invention—via intervention—of events. Events are the nesting and atomizing of a potential tendency/energy that otherwise obeys the quantum mechanical laws of nonlocality. The quantum mechanical limit on measuring a particle’s momentum and place at the same time is exemplified in photography’s temporal and historical structure. Inasmuch, quantum mechanics’ wave function introduces a superposition between multiple possible states and which upon observation “collapses” into a single state. 14 Photographs are hence localizations of the world as event; here, the quantum physical construct of “collapse” can serve as an explanatory model as to how nonlocality is imperceptible yet constitutive to the understanding of natural laws. Observation, or the interacting agent, results in a reduction of multiple possible states into a single description. Likewise, photographic evidence is not simply the evidence of an event but rather the event-unfolding of evidence, detecting the marks and traces of photons and interweaving them into the “language of physics.” In turn, the language of physics is constituted by both “math” and “logic,” deductive and inductive methods and extrapolation of the real; what Einstein insisted as an “element of reality” within the physical theory. 15 Indeed, the language of quantum physics cannot be reduced or simply be construed as continuous with our ordinary common sensical natural language without a concentrated effort to explain its conceptual scheme. However, it is equally viable that our epistemologies are naturalized in ways that allow the laws of physics and of science to shape the ordinary conception of the real and move it again and anew from the false promise of finite and fixed realism to the open horizon of hypothesis and experiment. Put in another way, our language of physics must be reciprocally responsive to our natural language in a similar way to which the photographic image should be addressed as evidence produced and inasmuch event produced. Photography is a language of evidence. And perhaps in ways that are far more subsuming than Heidegger’s notion of event (ereignis) as constitutive to being. 16 This is so because evidence already enfolds event as a

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photonic collapse and frees us from the need to chain event to being and instead allows event to continuously became its emergent language. I’m thinking here of Chantal Akerman’s films, such as Je tu il elle and D’Est, that defy the possibility of relating the stream of cinematic photoimagery to a narrative that is perceivable as a “story.” Instead we “witness” the film’s imagery as evidence that possibly entails hidden or broken world-lines, bits of narratives that are revealed in the saturated reality of images. In a sense, one can construe the event within photography as a reduction into a single description of multiple states that otherwise would have remained irreducible and imperceptible within the proliferating flux of reality. The superposition of states in reality are turned by photography into a chain of discrete images that similar to Edward Muybridge’s photographic motion studies or Chris Marker’s La jetée narrate perception itself. And in the case of Akerman’s Je tu il elle it is the montage of the film that narrates streams of imagery that are erased momentarily by our very act of perceiving them as transient. Photography is not only the language of evidence but also a tool. And as a tool it results in the erasure of writing by imagery. The archaic invention of tools by prehistorical humanoids was an outcome of the most fundamental aspect of techne—that of language. Here again Flusser’s contention about the invention of language as the first human catastrophe resonates with Heidegger’s understanding of the threefold evolution of techne as stemming from language to tool and to fully developed technology (technique) that resulted in the alienation and fragmentation of the embeddings of “being-in-the-world” into a disembodied state, reducing language to a mere tool and tools as extensions of the body into postulates of technology and not of being. 17 The technological invention of photography constitutes, in Heideggerian sense, a moment of “uncovering” of the “worldliness of the world”— a moment, or change in the ways in which we experience the world— precisely since the world in photographs is transformed into its aspects, its “thingness.” Its emulsified or printed image is scorched onto the surface of a film or a paper and announces the image as a “thing in the world” and no longer simply a representation of an image “of the world.” 18 Photographic evidence enables the exceeding acceleration of the real to be perceived as transient. The consequential split between the logic of the real and the logic of perception could be also understood as the problematization of photography as evidence, namely, of the naive or vulgar approach to the photographic image as a visible disclosure of the real in a totalized way and not as a partial and auxiliary trace/s of the real. Photo-images and photo streaming—the real-time transcoding of photography—move in photonic speed and replace the evidence of the event with the event of evidence.

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CORRESPONDENCE AND VERISIMILITUDE OF THE PHOTO-IMAGE The split between the photographic image as evidence and the evidence of photography as trace raises the problem of correspondence. More specifically we may raise the following questions: how can we fully assess the notion of the real in photography if its photonic traces and indexical ciphers are contingently based on probabilistic distribution of dots, pixels, and marks and not on their corresponding phenomena? And in what way can we relate the photographic image to the knowledge of the real as implied by physics and science? In order to address these questions regarding the epistemological foundations of photography in relation to the concept of correspondence, I will first address the concept of verisimilitude. In particular, how verisimilitude—truthlikeness—is positioned in photography in relation to evidence and data transference of traces of the real. Before moving to photography let me examine the concept of verisimilitude as introduced by the late philosopher of science Karl Popper in order to articulate two irreconcilable aspects of scientific theories: history and methodology. Historically it appears that scientific theories are certain to be eventually falsified, even in part. That implies that even though the aim of science is objective truth, the history of science demonstrates that scientific progress inevitably entails the demise of a particular theory in favor of another yet a better one. This bit of Darwinism serves Popper in his methodological principle of falsification as opposed to the positivist commitment to verificationism (as expounded by Popper in his book Conjectures and Refutations). 19 Let us contemplate how the concept of verisimilitude will figure in the case of photography. Imagine for example two photographic images of an apple; one that is based on the traditional photographic shot and another that is computer generated or simulated. They both “appear” to resemble a particular apple and they are equally not the exact replications of the apple that they correspond to. Thus, neither one of the photoimages is a “truer” image. Rather than differ in degree of “veracity” they differ in their reliance on the stratum of evidence that renders them as “truth-like.” The traditional photographed image corresponds to the real apple as a record of a photonic trace through exposure while the computer generated photo-image corresponds with the real apple as its modeling-simulation and therefore as its own constructed likeness, or similitude. Such images are separated by their respective degree of correspondence and not only similitude; while they may appear almost identical their representational manifolds are different. The question of representational manifolds concerns the way we view similitude not as based on a single isolated representation but on a complex nexus of representations which are organized as a system. It is hence such systems of correspondence

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and not the notion of similitude alone that can be construed as falsifiable and be evaluated as more or less truth-like. Therefore, the two examples of photo images of an apple share with two competing scientific theories the problem of verisimilitude, especially if we consider the intertwining of computer imaging and simulating with actual recording of phenomena both in science and photography. It is exceedingly harder to define our photographic and scientific representational manifolds as exclusively either corresponding to the real or rather corresponding with the real. Instead, representational manifolds, precisely because of their hybrid representational/interventional nature are assumed to be only approximation of the real, and therefore inherently falsifiable. However, insofar as two competing theories are always assumed “false” when coming to be judged historically—since the degrees of verisimilitude of the theories in relation to experiment and observations always change—a paradox emerges. And as pointed out by various critics of Popper’s position regarding verisimilitude, a paradox emerges here as well, for it seems logically contradictory to suppose a degree of truthlikeness on the basis of “relative fallacy.” Popper, on his part, would argue that a particular theory would not emerge as more or less false compared to another false theory—since fallacy is not and cannot be conceived as relative—but instead approximate more closely, both quantitatively and qualitatively, truth. Our world of science and visual communication has changed since the decades of Popper’s introduction of the concept of verisimilitude. Our world is of a growing intertwining between representing and intervening with evidence. And as a result, the very concept of the real is problematized and poses a twofold question: what kind of evidence do we find in reality that can be held as independent and above the underlying parameters of the theory with its produced evidence? The intertwining of evidence and reality may lead to epistemological relativism, risking circular logic that either renders knowledge as arbitrarily determined or historicized but never substantiated logically. Popper, on his part, attempted to offer an alternative to the relativistic conceptions of scientific theories as doomed to be eventually repudiated or falsified, and he did so by emphasizing the aim of scientific discovery in general as progressing towards higher degrees of objective knowledge even though it often relies on probabilistic hypotheses to secure its success. His introducing of the concept of verisimilitude to that of truth provides an alternative to positivistic accounts that evaluate propositions either as false or true. Instead, verisimilitude relies on a metalogical consideration of what Popper called “background knowledge” and suggests a highly intricate web of assertions when assessing a theory. Similarly, photo-images need to be contextually decoded in order to determine the nature of their evidence, their ontological grounds. 20

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For Popper, inasmuch as a given theory cannot be proved or falsified on the basis of a single testing a more comprehensive approach to truth is necessary. An approach anchored in part by Alfred Tarski’s definition of truth as conceived through translation and meta-language. Tarski’s metalogical definition of truth relies on translatability and implies the “likeness” or correspondence between explanation and experiment within a defined and outlined context of “reality.” Correspondence in Popper’s articulation implied a complex metalogical conception of truth as being inexhaustibly “translated” from one “language” to another. 21 Introduced to our context, the concept of verisimilitude, as relative but not relativistic criteria for critical assessment, can elucidate how photography and the photographic image rely on a concept of correspondence that is not simply based on direct “raw perception” or “sense data” of the real, but rather, on metalogical constituents. In other words, the concept of correspondence is endlessly inferred from parallel and multiple systems of representation, which are never entirely reciprocally reducible. And so, the very concept of correspondence is to be understood as a complex process/method/conjecture of verisimilitude of a theory/image and as the approximation of “truth” and not its “relative falsity.” The photo-image corresponds with the “real” but does not correspond to the “real.” In order to explicate carefully the concept of verisimilitude and its epistemological implications to photography we need to be reminded of the reciprocity and polarization of the photographic evidence and its corresponding signified objects, namely, between the logical structure of perception and the logical construction of reality as two distinct aspects that can be found also in the way in which scientific theories draw our attention to the rapport between theoretical explanation and its significance to experience. But, unlike science, the photographic image “appears” as a first-order object of perception and not only as its extrapolation. In the case of foundational physics (for example, quantum physics) the impact on cognition and how it’s explained is of paramount importance since it defies common sense intuition about the notions of space, time, and causation. On the one hand, photography’s logic of perception should be addressed within the epistemological context provided by Popper’s concept of correspondence, whereby the illusion of immediacy assumed by empiricist theories of knowledge is replaced by the concept of verisimilitude. Instead of supporting an understanding of photography as reiterating the myth of the given—of “raw sense data”—verisimilitude introduces correspondence as a complex fulcrum for the image’s perception. On the other hand, with its reliance on verisimilitude, photography’s logic of the real asserts, “background knowledge”—both historically and methodologically—and serves as an apparatus to approximate the “real”

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as closely connected to our definition of objective truth. Photography, thus, corresponds to the “real” only insofar as the “real” is defined through its correspondence to an objective truth, which, in turn, is attained through continuous attempts to test and explain what we see. Photography, like a scientific theory, relies on its verisimilitude as a relative quantification and qualification of its translatable content, namely, how the imaging of a particular historical content corresponds to its recording. Photography as connected to the concept of correspondence and verisimilitude advances a paradigm of realism. And such a paradigm provides a new way to approach and articulate the split between the logic of perception and logic of the real. Photography’s reliance on the notion of verisimilitude cannot be explained solely in terms of the image’s content and its conditions of visibility. Instead, the photo-image needs to be addressed through its translations to other kinds of evidence, some of which are not visible. The verisimilitude of the photo-image depends on its translatability to other nonvisible modes of representing the “real.” Photography’s incorporation of modes of intervening implies a radical sense of realism. Rather than simply representing the “real,” photography obliterates the need to ground “realism” within an “objective” epistemology of mere visibility. The outcome is a grounding of the image no longer in either Platonist or Aristotelian senses. Photography’s assessment as based on the concept of verisimilitude (truthlikeness) is tied to a “realist” view of correspondence according to which the “real” is construed not as a proof or an evidence of truth, but rather its extension. Photography’s truthlikeness is in part its own irreducible evidence as photonic trace and not a demonstration of extra-logical reality extended to the senses. A precise epistemology of the photo-image would entail its corresponding evidence as a form of transference, the transference of a given knowledge into a sign or trace. And such transference cannot be reduced to its semiotic constituents either but rather retained within a discursive context that allows multiple levels of description to elucidate what is bracketed as “knowledge.” Let me now mention again the bubble chamber particles’ collision photographs and their implications on the ontological status of the image as cognitively processed. In particular the ways in which artists from early modernity onward articulated through their reliance on photography as trace, evidence, and the possibility of the instantiation of event. Quantum physics and specifically bubble chamber photo recordings are typologically decoded in relation to the traces that particles leave upon collision. The traces however are not of the particles but solely the outcome of their collision. 22 Particles’ collisions are traced through photographic plates—evidence—that is marked by their decay but not through a direct correspondence to their “presence” in spacetime. Consequently, quantum physical photographs are decoded as “drawings” or

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“tracing” of conjectural effects of interactions or events that are invisible, or at least too small to be visible. The bubble chamber is a “relational apparatus” that recodes the in/stability of a particle into a mark or a pattern that is identifiable with its charge, say either neutral or unstable. The lines and spirals that are evident in such photo plates are indicative of the physical nature/character of particles but not of their actual “real” appearance. What appears in these photos is evidence not of appearances—phenomena—but rather “maps” and pathways of otherwise invisible interactions that help us understand how the theory corresponds to the testing. “The number of unstable particles that travel far enough to decay in the bubble chamber is limited. They leave characteristic decay signatures that enable the parents to be identified . . . in bubble chambers this is a comparatively simple matter of visual pattern recognition.” 23 In a sense, these photo plates are diagrams or drawings extrapolated from scientific apparati (for example, a bubble chamber, a collider, and so on) and are complementary to the scientist’s sketches and diagrams that “re-present” the equations, the conceptual scheme of the theory. Photography as means of corresponding with real is a representational manifold—an organized system of inferences rather than a single referential image—that assists us in mapping, classifying, recoding, and reiterating evidence of interactions and events that occur only to be tangential to perception even though perception relies on such interactions as their physical fulcrum. Photography hence introduces a kind of a demarcation of knowledge that guides us out of the labyrinth of perception (the empiricist “flux of sensations”) into the encounter with a type of evidence that is no longer grounded in or by the senses but rather that contains perception as an aspect of its reality. At facilities such as the Fermi lab in Batavia, Illinois, or CERN, the home of the world’s largest particle accelerator in Switzerland, the photographic imaging of experiments are used as means to assess and reconstruct the theoretical posits in a way analogous to the artist/photographer that introduces epistemological constructs into the visible field of the picture. In both cases, the event and the photographic trace unfold twice: once as evidence that corresponds to the real and secondly as a trace/ evidence that corresponds with the real. The trace/evidence that corresponds with the real edifies the image as a shadow reality and that is extrapolated from scientific knowledge that underlines the system or experiment. “The events [that] will have hundreds of particles in the final state, imaginative systems of electronic detectors and software have been designed to do the same job at incredibly high data-acquisition rates.” 24 In the realm of art photography, integration of analog and digital means of photo imaging results in a construction of hyper-reality that can no longer be reduced to direct perception. Rather, photographs are amalgams of the “real” and the “virtual.” They reverse the role or sequence of

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cause and effect and that of experiment and construction. The same integration can be said in reference to photography’s replacement of its critical instant or “shutter” (that is, production) with that of digital imaging (that is, postproduction). There is post-productive aspect of photography today that extends the temporal span of intervention artists employ photography as a mode of producing a signature—overlaying the evidence of the photonic trace. Photographs are thus substantiated and charged by the artist’s subjective import of image processing, overlaying the singular instant of the image as physical photonic evidence. Similarly, quantum physical photo-images are decoded as “decay signatures” of events/interactions. How can one account for the subatomic reality that is provided by physics through photography? The impossibility of representing at once two kinds of correspondence—physically and theoretically constitutive and visually perceivable—is manifested in the physical apparati (for example, accelerators) being subordinated themselves to the reality of visible objects, tools, machines, and systems on the one hand and their corresponding invisible interactions and information on the other hand. Photography, the apparatus and its image aspect, emerges as a witness to the impossibility to see without decoding a “signature.” In other words, there is another sense of correspondence through which photography’s traces of decay are understood as “signatures” of interactions; interactions that took place between measurement and observation and resulted in discrete levels of descriptions. The evidence of photography, its facticity, its irreducible experiential content, is neither self-evident nor reducible to a single description. Rather, the evidence of photography is assumed through a corresponding of the image to aspects (even though mostly invisible and linguistic) of the real. As such, it is the verisimilitude of the image to its other modalities as evidence of the real that alters our perception of reality as partially hidden and removed from direct perception. As such, photography instructs us in accepting the domains which lie beyond the realm of the senses and which are still delineated as its boundaries, its folds. Photography’s ability to articulate the invisible constituents of the real de-accelerates events and diverts them to their corresponding references. These events turn out to be the only evidence that one may rescue from the multiple visual equivocations of images that are never mirroring knowledge and reality as appearances. What we find to our amazement in the de-accelerated photo-image is that verisimilitude is always part photonic and part historic. In other words, we are reminded of the origin of photography as grounded in a myth—one equally constituted as evidence within the realm of nature underlined by the laws of physics and as historical evidence of human experience.

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WHAT HAPPENS TO PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE AGE OF TRANSCODING? I would like now to conclude with an examination of the current aesthetic dynamics that have transposed photography from the realm of aesthetics as grounded in physics and history to a radicalized aesthetic sphere that poses a new phenomenological quandary. Transcoding’s radical role is due to its depolarization of the relation between photographic image as a negative and a positive mediation of object. And such radicalized aesthetics would have never occurred without the role of transcoding in obliterating the ontological fixity of representation. I would first outline three main senses to transcoding that often overlap and particularly relate to the photographic image: 1. Transcoding refers to a digital transference through which a photographic image is decoded to an intermediate and often decompressed format before its recoding onto a new format; a procedure which may result in lower resolution or degradation of the source image. 2. Transcoding may also affect photographic images indirectly through changing assembled software codes as functioning on more than one operating system. Such process acts as intercommunicative agents within systems that may override small “differences” as long as the flow is mentioned. 3. Transcoding may very well be seen as a new kind of creative grounds for photographic images generated on the basis of logarithms and related to cellular automata—the possibility of selfproducing or replicating machines which can be traced back to the early 1950s—Alan Turing, Nills Aall Barricelli’s work and its relation to the Manhatan Project group scientists developing the first modern computers—John von Neumann, Teller, Ulam, and Oppenheimer among others. A more recent example is the work of Wolfram. 25 Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science, which employs an aesthetic approach to scientific theories through transcoding, is an excellent exemplification of the last three decades’ rise of the computer system as the lingua franca that replaced the desire for a meta-language—after they were debunked by modern logics delineating of the limits of systems, theorems such as Gödel’s and Löwenheim-Skolem. Wolfram’s work probes the ways in which elementary computational systems may substitute traditional mathematics in explaining complexity and arguing for laws governed by algorithms to explain fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as other fields of reserach on natural phenomena. 26 But above all, Wolfram’s project is irreverent to science, such as quantum physics, by placing aesthetic principles above foundational laws.

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Representation is inevitably connected to the idea of science and as conveying a picture of world-knowledge. However, science, like history and photography, rely on interventional parameters of cybernetic systems and communication; and these systems are fluid and ever changing and furthermore manifest a disequilibrium that is inherent to systems that rely on transcoding. As in the case of photographic images nowadays, transcoded data not only is used for the purpose of converting images’ formats and platforms, but is also guided by an aesthetic principle. And such a principle regulates the image as evidence and trace of the computer system itself. Computer generated non-indexical photo-imagery is a perfect example of the merging and erasing the “origin” of a sign through its transcoded data. Thus, seen from the vantage point of transcoding the photo-graphic image is in as much photonic and graphic, part natural and part simulated. Photography has been wedged between science and art through transcoding and has called into question the very need to explain it as a residual document, namely, as a trace of something else or the evidence of phenomena other than its own. The emergence of transcoding obliterates the format-platform as ontologically stratified—traditionally construed in terms of the photographic plate or negative—as the photographic image loses its necessary correspondence to events in the physical world that lie outside its phenomenal evidence and thus is diverted into a kind of intervention without relying on representational verisimilitude. The photographic image is caught between science and art’s vacillating between constitutive laws or intentional constitution and their transcoding into a myriad of representational platforms. More specifically, it is this ongoing vacillation between representational models to intervening through transcoding that reassigns a new role to aesthetics. An aesthetics of disequilibrium. To what extent will we be able to negotiate our intentional stance and re-present our ideas and interventions in an age of perpetual transcoded data? The photographic image is peculiarly found at the crossroads of a myriad of possible significations, each appearing to be an equally valid and important “source.” And at the heart of this phenomenon lies transcoding as allowing digital and systemic transference of photographic images through binary coding in multiple platforms. The inevitable outcome is the experience of aesthetic disequilibrium that violently unsettles any ontological fixity to a photographic image, either digitally seen on a screen or printed onto a surface. All images, photographic or pictorial, transitory or static, are tactile surfaces. It is the perceptual differentiation of various tactile surfaces that cognitively registers them as “real” or “illusory.” 27 However, transcoding reduces and at times obliterates tactile differentiation of surfaces by dynamically removing the image in relation not only to its source (that is, extension) but also intention. And such effects

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raise the question: to what extent will we be able to negotiate our intentional stance and re-present our ideas and interventions in an age of perpetual transcoded data? Can such aesthetic disequilibrium mirrored by art’s scientification of the “given”—in Husserl’s sense—the vulgarization of the experiential and its removal from any phenomenological—transcendent/immanent relation into the sphere of habitual perception? Or better, can such aesthetic disequilibrium risks art’s future, as in Heidegger’s sense, as a way to arrive at the disclosure of “truth” that cannot be procured through science but only through poetry? These questions, thus, remain crucial to whether the dismantling of intentionality as result of transcoding will imply above art’s end and our ability to imagine art despite the loss of both intentional critical autonomy and an intentional horizon that does not diminish into science and technology. Transcoding, as we encounter it in photographic image production, stands for the general repudiation of structural, formal, and thematiccontent constraints. Transcoding’s obliteration of the image’s representational primacy implies above all the fluidity of images coding as they change not only formatting but perception itself. There is thus a signification to which all photographic images today are trans-coded not as marks but as logarithms. In other words, all images’ intentional constitutions are ultimately reduced to a single platform. And such a predicament of an all-embracing digital platform, a uni-platform, contradicts the sense of multitude and multiplatitude which we assume as part of our consumer driven culture. Here, it is neoliberal aesthetics that celebrates multicultural codes that appears most deceiving and erratic since its binding forces are the ultimate manifestation of the forces of capitalism and technology married into a single kaleidoscopic aesthetics. How are we to analyze transcoding in light of such bias? Should we give up any phenomenological attempt to retain what aesthetics means in terms of cognition and consciousness and assume an ontological indifference to aesthetic judgment, like a robot or a computer? Beyond the phenomenological scope, aesthetic disequilibrium is also found in recent accounts, such as Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, as a fate to be avoided. In Rancière’s case, art’s political potential to seize representation is “discovered” in the inexhaustible vacillations between image production and its political subjectification. Rancière’s conception of representation does not address the intentional-phenomenological query by precisely positing the image’s “distribution of the visible or sensile” on the premise of arresting or dictating representation rather than replacing it with intervention alone. Rancière’s problematization of the spectator and his call to post-mimetic representational modalities do not face the aesthetic disequilibrium in respect to transcoding or the technological implications but only in reference to the “unpresentable” or the sublime. 28 It is Lyo-

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tard and Baudrillard who would have been more receptive to the farreaching cybernetic implications on aesthetics, and who are both used now by Rancière as a post “postmodern” critical foil to reassigned aesthetics. 29 Aesthetic disequilibrium, like political disequilibrium, is largely affected by new technologies, communication and social media, all of which rely on transcoding. Redirecting art as means for engaging in a constructive politics, as Rancière’s motives, may appear plausible but the question that remains unaddressed is what happens to art—as in the case of photography—in a state of an ongoing aesthetic disequilibrium? Can the photographic image still entail trace and evidence of reality despite transcoding’s subversion of representation and correspondence? NOTES 1. Villem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Gottingen: European Photography, 1984). 2. On the one hand, the Platonist worldview offered a way to decode the visible precisely by invoking the invisible dimensions that are inseparable not from perception (as later Merleau-Ponty would argue) but rather from the structure of reality, on an ontological level. Thus, images’ appearance testified their invisible “ideas-forms” from which they are projected as in Plato’s allegorical tale of the cave with its shadows’ casting on its walls. On the other hand, the Aristotelian categorical conception grounded images as singular aspects of generic types. It moved to the fore of reality, the physical, tangible, and visible facets of the real but it left the duality of Ousìa unresolved as Being/Substance. Here I’m relying on Franz Brentano’s insight in his often-overlooked book On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). And unlike Plato’s dualistic ontology that relied on pluralism and infinity and that defied the reduction of image into Being or Substance, or else Function, the Aristotelian philosophical method introduced reductionism to the very conception of ontology and as result images become a testimony or a proof of the real, of what exists. Think of Aristotle’s definition of a human or a horse: a categorical image. See Ernst Cassirer’s book Substance and Function (New York: Dover, 1953(. 3. It is in 1826 that Nicéphore Niépce possibly produced the first photograph. 4. Leonardo’s insertion of a hypothetical camera obscura into human visual anatomy foresaw the mechanics of human perception as based on the inversion of left/right. Whether or not The Shroud of Turin is Leonardo’s work and a manifestation of his premodern experiments with transferring and fixing a camera obscura’s reflection onto an image-surface does not minimize the extent to which he can be seen as “photographic.” Athanasius Kircher followed the Neo-Platonist tradition of the theater of memory (Teatro della Memoria) can be seen as forerunner to analogical memory systems (before the digital computer), and the cinematic sensory nexus, a kind of gesamtkunstwerk. 5. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, sct. 13. in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken Books, 1968). 6. Walter Benjamin, cited in: Germany—The New Photography, 1927–1933. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 27. 7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 14. 8. As articulated by Edmund Husserl in his books Logical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1970) and Thing and Space (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2010). 9. This particular problem of the “naturalistic attitude” as opposed to the “phenomenological approach” is fully analyzed by Husserl and situated within the frame-

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work of the so-called life-world (LebensWelt) in his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. 10. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 11. Ernst Mach’s sensationalism and his “Thought-Economy” can be regarded as paradigmatic of such positions. 12. Jeff Wall had always insisted on creating “pictures” and not photographs and in that respect we can argue that the amplification of the ontologically saturated photoimage as picture perception attests to the weakening of the historical coding of photography. As opposed to Jeff Wall, Walead Beshty’s photographic work seems to synthesize the photo-image as a saturation of non-indexicality and surface on the hand and historical de-saturation or open-endedness on the other hand. 13. This is how we now historicize Daguerre’s Dioramas as precursor to the cinematic image. 14. Quantum collapse is the reduction into a single “eigenstate” out of many possible “eigenstates” or wave packets. See David Albert’s Quantum Mechanics and Experience, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 15. Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” in Physical Review 47 (1935): 777–80. 16. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2001). 17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008). 18. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art. 19. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, (Oxford: Routledge, 2002). 20. Context-sensitivity points to a need to conceive truth not simply in terms of correspondence to phenomena that can be reduced to sense-data but also extend to the translatability of conceptual nexuses of phenomena into experimentation, testing, observation, and more so today the trans-coding of any information to other systems or manifolds of representation. 21. Popper’s concept of the so-called world-3 purports an epistemology that is grounded in a stratified ontology; see Popper’s Objective Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Popper’s conception supported a version of realism inspired by Plato’s pluralism whence the ontological basis of “truth”—be it numbers, equations, theorems, theories, phenomena and observations, and so on—allows reciprocal translatability without ever being reduced to a single proposition. 22. “The world’s first neutrino observation in a hydrogen bubble chamber was found Nov. 13, 1970, on this historical photograph from the Zero Gradient Synchrotron’s 12-foot bubble chamber. The invisible neutrino strikes a proton where three particle tracks originate (right). The neutrino turns into a muon, the long center track. The short track is the proton. The third track is a pi-meson created by the collision.” 23. Wim Cuppens, et al., “Identification of particles from a collision by their decays,” http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/ BCwebsite/06.htm. 24. Wim Cuppens, et al., “Identification of particles from a collision by their decays,” http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/ BCwebsite/06.htm. 25. In the past decade, the possibility of quantum computation, viz., of qubits, entailing a coding theory that attempts to optimize information propagation and to arrive at the same symmetries as the ones dictated by the laws of physics—quantum theory. Thus, implying a link and a new fundamental principle connecting the two disciplines: the standard quantum theory and quantum computation. Information turns accordingly to be a physical property as energy and following this interpretation transcoding is an extension of qubit computational levels or strands. See Jesse Russell and Ronald Cohn, eds., Qubit (Bookavika: Lennex Corp., 2012).

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26. http://www.ted.com/speakers/stephen_wolfram.html 27. Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). 28. It is interesting to note that Rancière’s critique of Lyotard’s concept of the Kantian sublime as the postmodern “incommensurable” and “unpresentable” is itself a testimony for the former avoidance of any techno-cybernetic constructs of culture and politics, let alone art. See Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007). 29. Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) are perfect examples of post-structural theory that came to grips with role of technological issues.

NINE Ruins Reflections on Aggression and Destruction in Aesthetics Alain J.-J. Cohen

DIALOGUE Q. One of the implications of your analysis of “ruins” in aesthetics is its twofold structure in relation to allegory and spectacle. Yet, can allegory and spectacle evade their mutual annihilation? And if not, what does it say about future aesthetics? A “ruin” is a priori an overdetermined polysemic object, which may be apprehended linearly, in cause and effect associations, or nonlinearly in other and freer associative modes. The phenomenon is not apprehended immediately in its totality, but rather in multiple slow grasps of insights. It can be approached (inter alia) in phenomenological, semiotic, or psychoanalytic aesthetics. Whether it is experienced and enjoyed in its spectacularity or in its conceptual theory (or at times at some possible allegorical dimension) depends upon the level of our apprehension and the intensity of our affect. It may also depend upon the level of analysis which we seek or which we obtain. Rather than in a relation of mutual exclusion, a rich Moebius strip model would propose a relation of constant reversal from the one back and forth with the other, in a system of coexistence in this “twofold structure.” The interpretant may on the one hand surrender to the power of its exciting affect (be it depressive, or anxious, or ecstatic, and so on), while on the other hand it may try to master the ensuing affect. In (Peircian) semiotics, a firstness occurs which is followed by a dyadic relation between the experiencing observer and 149

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the ruin. Thenceforth, a triadic relation would be constituted wherein aesthetic schemata and narrative constructs begin to be fathomed to reframe a deconstructed object. In turn, a psychoanalytic principle of free association pertinent to ruins would come into play to highlight various nonlinear aspects of aesthetic apprehension: the object analyzes us as much as we think we analyze it. The various agencies of the mind switch according to an aesthetics of tension or struggle—an internal push and pull is thus matched by an inevitable external pull and push to play at first randomly with the object, so as to gain insights into the psyche’s functioning when it comes to ruins (negative vs. positive nostalgia as we discussed in our research). All approaches may converge in the aesthetics of our digital age. Q. Federico Fellini’s fading fresco in Roma as well as his ending/fading in Satyricon seems to evoke the intertwining of historical and ephemeral. For Anselm Kiefer, on the other hand, the spectacle of “ruins” is more ambiguous and suggests a sense of loss that in itself begs analysis. Do you recognize a kind of “aesthetic infatuation” with “ruins” in multiple modes and sensibilities in contemporary culture or see them as one? The notion of ruins always leads to every individual’s relationship to death: for example, a twenty-year-old may feel or may be suicidal, a seventy-year-old may be anxious about it or live in denial of the inevitability of death, and so on. In depressive characters, a loss or a catastrophe has already occurred so that ruins mirror their own death-in-life. On the other hand, for anxious characters a catastrophe is about to occur so that, indeed, ruins are signifiers and symbols of their internal “memento mori.” Once again, spectatorial response to Fellini’s fading fresco in Roma will depend upon individual spectators, not to mention the aesthetic awe we may feel for Fellini’s filmic mastery of this evanescence. Even Kiefer’s allusions to the Shoah are not monolithic. Individuals will react variously with feelings of dread or desolation, or perhaps anger and rage, not to mention survivor’s guilt. Perhaps forgiving, or something about Peirce’s “thirdness,” may not be accessible when it comes to such grave matters. The residues of nineteenth-century infatuation and (mistakenly “noble”) melancholy regarding “ruins” may still be with us, but they operate at different velocities in the psyche, in different cultures, or in different eras. We tried to show that such melancholy is one of the multiple apprehensions of the /ruin/ phenomenon. The past, intellectual history, or the history of theories is not ever superseded, as much as it is however taken into account in order to make it a source of insight, perhaps a source of strength.

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Q. Unlike contemporary critics, such as Rancière and Žižek, you offer an interpretation of art and cinema in particularn not as a political plateau or action but rather as a horizon of memory. Any thoughts? Aesthetics precedes ethics (the infant begins by liking/disliking before judging whether it’s good/bad). Perhaps this is why Kant goes in reverse order (from the second to the third of his Critiques), as the aesthetic realm is more primal and harder to grasp. The power of the “Muses,” in museums, (art museums, cinema museums, and so on), captures us into physical and mental universes wherein the new encyclopedias of humanity’s memories gravitate. We live in a new world where art, artifacts, and documents are now digitized, miniaturized, “immaterialized,” and especially made instantaneously immediate. This does not seem to alter questions of aesthetics, though we may argue that such a difference of degree is tantamount to a difference of kind and therefore constitutes an obviously new terrain for new aesthetics. This leads us to speculate, however, about the new configurations of “museums” into the future. The inchoative contemplation inherent in “theory” (theorein) may or may not interweave with an ongoing categorical imperative. In reverse, the dominance of this imperative (and its super-egoic demands) only temporarily obscures the to kalon from its adjacent ka’gathon. In our vignette, the spectator of Kobe’s earthquake results does not remain paralyzed and shocked into inaction, any more than the immediate access to the history of cinema signifies being forever overtaken by memories. On the contrary, it could be argued that the immediacy of access to Resnais’s films mentioned in our research (Night and Fog or Hiroshima mon amour) may have huge psychological and practical efficacy. Q. The use of ruins has a historical origin, associated with modernity. Do you mean to consider the future of this peculiar memento mori as the final destination of modernity? A ruin is a leftover, debris or flotsam, a document, sometimes a system of decodable signifiers derived from history. Sometimes the thresholds between history and mythology are hard to delineate. In the vignette below regarding Vasari’s envy of Leonardo, we shall see that there may be a need to interweave the use of new technologies to retrieve a long lost Battle of Anghiari along with what the English historian R. G. Collingwood described as historical imagination. Hence the connection between such a historical imagination and the psychoanalytic principle of free (meaning “free-er”) association. Baudelaire coined the terms “modern” and “modernity” as denial or repudiation of what was emerging in his day as the new industrial age—along with the other depressed romantic poets and thinkers who saw then the end of their world and sought shelter and escape in another past fantasized universe.

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Q. Considering that metal does not last as stone does, do you think that our future landscapes will be deprived of ruins and will be filled with debris? And what kind of feeling might be associated with that lack of “shaped” past? In Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (upon which Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was based) there are loads of detritus and debris called “kipple” which seem to be ubiquitous, as if humans on Earth, the waste land, could not rid themselves in the present from the debris from the past, in a predicament where you can neither look forward nor can you look in the rearview mirror. Sci-fi and speculative fiction make us anticipate new forms of ruins, beyond stone, metal, or even electronic chips and holograms of our own passage and transit through the universe. As far as scholars like ourselves are concerned, we are already living in a world where libraries are shifted to cyberspace, where everything we have written in a lifetime can be transferred into a single USB flashkey, which itself can be immaterialized into the ethernet. This does give us some insight into the new concepts which will be needed to think through new realities and new aesthetics! ***

PRELIMINARY: “RUINS” VS. “DEBRIS” At a fundamental level, aesthetics most often comes to grips with death and the death drive (Thanatos), the world’s entropy or the self’s mortality, the push and pull of (im)mortality and the salvaging of the object or that of the subject, the reappropriation of the object, or one’s self-definition in the mirror of death. In this spirit, it would seem that an exploration of the concept of “ruins” and its adjacent notion of “debris” may provide an entry into such basic questions of aesthetics—as well as aesthetics in the digital age. A series of vignettes will be presented in this research to reflect upon the notions of “ruins” and “debris” in order to proceed sideways to a vision of twenty-first-century aesthetics. Albeit with marked differences, both ruins and debris evoke notions of the past, or death and destruction. “Ruins” may evoke a more or less distant past, along with the numbing effect of time, and perhaps the desire to query or to fantasize about leftover objects from the past, the fantasy, for example, to reconstitute the object in its pristine state before it became a ruin. In contrast, the sight of “debris” may convoke the sense of destruction, the pulverization or annihilation of the object, perhaps even the residual rage involved in such destruction, and moreover the impossibility of conjuring the beforehand of the destruction. The imaginary or scientific (re)construction or apprehension of various pasts as well as their possible

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continuum into the present may feed the semiotic opposition between the notion of “ruins” vs. “debris.” This opposition may thus prove to be an enriching instrument of existential and artistic investigation for contemporary aesthetics. Afterward, the series of vignettes so presented may also be helpful in leading to the question of what we may construe as “ruins” in our digital age. Ruins A depressive sense of loss runs through the alternatively eloquent, sad or moving meditations of nineteenth-century romantics (be they the idealist philosophers, the English Lake poets, or Chateaubriand) at the sight of Greco-Roman ruins. The gloomy nostalgia and irremediable sense of disconnect (from an idealized and inaccessible golden past), and the loss and end of past civilizations, triggered and mirrored the pervasive sense of their own mortality in the melancholy disposition of their own internal world. On both ends of their lifetime spectrum, their horizons of expectancies fade or die: Looking towards the ruins from the past, the scenarios of imagined catastrophes regarding what must have occurred in the demise of past civilizations justifies anxiety and even dread at the anticipation of equally constructed dead-ends and catastrophes in the future. This may also have justified the romantics’ overwhelming sense of vanity regarding efforts, struggles, or forward striving. Later, this was to be well summed up in the aftermath of WWI by Valéry’s well-known “nous autres civilisations savons que nous sommes mortelles,”—or by the strand of Kierkegaard’s, Sartre’s, or Heidegger’s existentialist notion of dread, and of being cast down and abandoned into this world. Yet the reactive feelings elicited by ruins from the past may not always have been analogous. For example, in his mid-sixteenth-century exile in Rome, surrounded by the same Roman ruins, the poet Jean du Bellay realizes instead how much he misses his home country. The Roman ruins stir in him the longing for “home,” for the softness of life in his native (mothering) Angers. The ruins from Roman times drives him to reconnect with a beforehand of what in his life was not “ruined,” now that his exile makes him face the “ruins” of his life. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym 1 makes a good case for the distinction between “nostalgia” as the incurable disease, (just as John Burton did in his renowned Anatomy of Melancholy), and nostalgia as a necessary creative emotion. In psychoanalytic thinking, we could speak about the necessity of looking deeply at the past in order to struggle in the present with our current conflicts.

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The Fresco in Fellini’s Roma In a fictional sequence from Fellini’s Roma (1972), an archeological team working through the subways in Rome comes upon an ancient Roman fresco, vibrant by its design and its compelling colors. It had obviously remained heretofore unknown and unseen by human eyes since Roman days. However, just as the archeologists find themselves mesmerized by their discovery, the fresco slowly evaporates from the wall under their helpless gaze. Contact with outside air proves fatal (—or is it contact followed by the repudiation of coexistence with modern times? or symbolically, is it not symptomatic of the way the past keeps its secrets?). At the aesthetic intersect of psychological and historical dimensions, it could not sustain being brought back to life after two thousand years of silence and obscurity. The archeologists are thus caught in a dual aesthetics, first the one of privileged discovery and then the aesthetics of stupor in the affect provoked by the simultaneous invaluable loss. Freud was fascinated by archeology, fascinated by Rome with its layers of historical strata which are not unlike the labyrinths of our psychic structures. Fellini stuns his film characters along with his spectators. The sight of Greco-Roman ruins provokes a wide range of emotions which may vary according to characters and temperaments and historical times. We may also imagine a blind person who recovers sight for a few instants and simultaneously loses this precious sight again. Associated with that film sequence could be the feeling of disconnect upon slowly waking up from an intense dream, when furthermore despite intense attention, the mind loses its grip on the recall of a dream upon full awakening. Yet the dream’s effect and intensity permeates into the waking day, just as the evanescent fresco permeates Fellini’s film as a whole. A provocative glimpse of the there-and-then of ancient Rome effloresces into the hereand-now of twentieth-century Rome, albeit in its claustrophobic life experienced underground. Present time had stopped in a quantum jump backwards 2,000 years, in time to catch the fresco of past Roman life and art in such a flashlight glimpse. Nevertheless, Fellini’s simulacrum of this evanescent fresco has been appropriated into the perceptual episodic memory of the modern psyche. The “loss” configured in this film narrative may not be the depressive loss mentioned above as much as the frustration of being cut off from possible epiphanies and thrills of creative meaning systems that the work of archeology had painstakingly retrieved. While referring to archeology, and to the metaphor of the archeology of the unconscious (in Freud’s topographic [first] model of the mind), we may think instead of innumerable examples different from Fellini’s sequence, wherein artworks from the past are rediscovered but also successfully preserved from the ruins of the past into the present. As we’ll discuss in our conclusion, is it not indeed what the haunting power of museums and art history are about?

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Retrieving Laocoön and His Sons In contrast with the shock of the disappearance of a vestigial past by Fellini, the past is often resurrected and celebrated. We may think of the nineteenth-century “discovery” of the city of Troy (whose silent ruins occult its savage destruction mythologized in the Iliad) or, on a much smaller scale closer to us, the retrieval of the Riace bronzes. “Schliemann’s Troy” was indeed a successful archeological excavation under the site of Hissarlik, in the search for the Trojan world presumed to have existed, whereas the discovery of the Riace bronzes was a real surprise. Documentaries were made in sync with the memorable joy of the Italian community, not to mention international art scholars. The retrieval of the spectacular Riace bronzes deep at sea in 1974 may have something in common with the discovery of the Laocoön centuries beforehand. The magnificent Riace bronzes had been found oxidized and quasi ruined, covered by a chalky limestone crust which developed over the centuries as a reaction to saline acidity, as they had remained immersed for centuries off the coast of Calabria; the two Riace warriors needed extensive restoration—albeit with far more sophisticated restoration technologies than during previous times from the Renaissance onwards. After their long restoration in 1981, the Riace bronzes were first displayed and celebrated all over Italy, especially in Rome and Florence, before being reappropriated and safely museified by the city of Riace (in Reggio Calabria where, to this day, the exhibition of the two warriors in full upright standing display is still being delayed, for lack of symptomatic funding). A 1506 event at the heart of the late Rinascimento could be evoked and constructed, today like a film shoot for a docu-drama, or for a remake—a remake from the Greeks to the Renaissance—the event of the spectacular unearthing of Laocoön and His Sons when the sculpture was discovered in Rome from layers or centuries of Greco-Roman and Italian history. At that time, some of the Laocoön’s complex sculptured parts were missing (especially some of the snake’s long coils intertwined with the arms of Laocoön’s sons in the process of being strangled by the snake’s asphyxiating moves). This restoration must not have been daunting for Italian Renaissance artists and artisans in Rome, so habituated and so precisely involved as they had been in the process of bringing back to life, of making the Classical Age reborn (in the etymological sense of “Re-naissance”), and so many other works from the antique classical age. From archival accounts, we know that the sculpture was duly cleaned up, by the means at hand in those days. For people hard at work, it probably also meant completing and bringing the “there-and-then” of this ruined Greek piece of art in sync into the sixteenth-century “here-and-now.” This was the time of Michelangelo’s most inspired creations. Centuries later, in 1766 at the heart of the European Enlightenment, Lessing was to celebrate the Laocoön, its mythological subject matter, as well as its legen-

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dary salvage from the ruins of another era. In almost Freudian tones, Lessing apprehended a cathartic clash of this awe-provoking representation of excruciating suffering, albeit tempered and sublimated by the power of the artistic creation. Art theory and art history lead us to recognize significant aesthetic shifts. Are they to be described as a set of gradients or as a series of distinct micro or macro moves? Are they not sometimes better described as quantum jumps (with due homage to both Popper’s and Kuhn’s work with regard to their dispute regarding the qualifications for true scientific “revolutions”)? An immense such aesthetic shift occurred during the Enlightenment, at the time of Baumgarten, Winckelmann, and Kant—whose 1790 (Third) Critique of Judgment emblematized the new era in aesthetics. As in tectonic plates shifts, the Enlightenment dealt with this singular turn, away from the Platonist and neo-Platonic aesthetics based on the study of “beauty,” to the new aesthetics based upon a study and a recognition of “Affekt” in art. In all the arts and the new arts emerging to this day, the full effect of this shift seems to still be unfolding in slow motion and in fast forward, or backwards. “Affect” is thus of common interest to the neurosciences and to psychoanalysis alike insofar as it points to that which is nonlinear in the psyche. In art history and in art theory, affect allows unusual connections and appropriations from the the present to the past or vice versa (just as the past emerges into the present like a ghost haunting present-day life). We shall first give a few more examples to further illustrate the efflorescence of this shift. DEBRIS: MIYAMOTO AND KIEFER Ryuji Miyamoto’s Representation of the 1995 Earthquake in Kobe Rather than a man-made catastrophe brought about by war, as we shall see in the following vignettes, the earthquake which devastated the city of Kobe in 1995 was, of course, a natural catastrophe. Nonetheless, in terms of death and misery, a natural catastrophe causes the same effects as war would. Architect and photographer Miyamoto had already shown interest in what he called “architectural apocalypse” (compare to the devastation represented in his “Akasaka Shochiku Movie Theatre, Tokyo,” 1984). For the 1996 Venezia Architectural Biennale, he elected to display the Kobe devastation from the micro-perspective of the damage inflicted upon a small home instead of trying to fathom the damage caused to the city as a whole. In hyper-realistic installation style, Miyamoto went for the particular rather than the universal aspect of this devastation. Thus the spectators come face-to-face with the immediacy of the earthquake effect with their own subjectivity as it intersects with the subjectivity of the victims. A house, or what was a home, appears transformed into

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massive debris. The structural elements, constituted by ceilings, floors and foundation, walls and windows, have all collapsed and are barely recognizable in this maelstrom of debris. Rivers of water and mud run through the home. Two somewhat bloodied bodies, presumably a couple, are immersed in the muddy torrent running through their home. As debris themselves of their own human existence, it’s hard to decide whether they are hurt, paralyzed, or dead; to say the least, they seem writhing in wrenchingly silent pain, lost in a modern-day Dantesque inferno. Theirs is not the pain manifested in the Laocoön, sublimated and salvageable by art form, but that of sheer irremediable terror and suffering. In its presence, the spectator speculates how much Miyamoto must have felt profoundly traumatized by the annihilation of parts of Kobe and the death and injuries visiting its inhabitants, and how he then must have felt compelled to bring in his own testimony by the focused recreation of the disaster—to make the world aware, at the most minute level of perception and emotion of the “debris” of people’s lives, for the uniqueness of a particular home is readily more immediate and imminent for the affected spectators’ potential identification with this installation. Miyamoto’s work for the Biennale was all about the “affect” provoked in him by the quake and the parallel affect he wished to transmit to his spectators at the Biennale. His own trajectory (from “architectural apocalypse”) manifests his concern and his affinity for the fragility of human and architectural existence preyed upon and haunted by their forthcoming status of ruin and debris. We may thus perhaps conceive that a testimony is a powerful answer to an ineluctable event against which we are helpless. His entry at the 1996 Biennale earned Ryuji Miyamoto the Leone d’oro for the architecture Biennale (Venezia, 1996). We may speculate that the well-deserved prize recognized the humanist as much as the artist in this singular architectural presentation. Anselm Kiefer’s Exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2008 The renowned German born artist Anselm Kiefer had at his disposal the Grand Palais, its monumental spaces with huge multiple glassdomed ceilings. The spectacle of destruction was made explicit in his 2008 exhibition, which referred to ruins and debris alike. Strewn extensively over the floors were collapsed palaces and their broken-down columns, which evoked the feeling of the passing of several civilizations, Greek, Roman, and so on. The exhibition underscored as well the random aggressions and destructions from wars all over the world: those wars made exponentially more visible in our twenty-first-century everyday lives, with media images continuously displayed and streamed on our screens, hammered into our brains, along with action film shots where car and building explosions and destruction are commomplace. War images are supposed to be the result of vestigial hatreds, but the history of

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such hatreds always seem insufficiently falling short in justifying the unabated rage over centuries to destroy the “other.” We may start out initially shocked by humans’ capacity to kill and destroy one another (and themselves in the process), yet the endless replays and repetitions of these occurrences risks making us numb, or wanting to turn or shy away from these images and documents. We also try not to become immune to the outrage of seeing dead human bodies in streets and open spaces along with the presentation of collapsed and collapsing buildings hit incessantly by artillery fire. Just as with Miyamoto’s exhibition, Kiefer’s exhibition also accomplished the task of inserting the spectacle of such ruins and debris in the museum space. Kiefer’s artistic imaginary plays on a more transcendent scale; it evokes universals regarding notions of devastations meted out by time as well as by human hands, rather than the ravages of an alienated and terrifying “nature” as was the case with Miyamoto’s representation of Kobe’s earthquake effect. As we know, the knowledge of art history is incremental throughout our education and our lifelong experience. Spectators brought to the Grand Palais exhibition their own lifelong awareness of Kiefer’s prior work. One of Kiefer’s artistic aptitudes is to suggest desolation at the bleak history of the Shoah, but without documenting it or naming it. By way of example amongst so many of his artworks, we may recall a frame which simply portrays a brown-striped field in the winter snow—just enough to trigger the suggestion of the barbed wires of concentration camps. Another example would be one of his artworks which portrays a stark winter tree in black ink on photographic paper; yet it suggests a dead-end, an unnamable dread and feelings of annihilation. The striped field or the stark winter tree are displaced signifiers of a threatening nothingness. They convoke spectators to explore their affect and inarticulate reactions, the malaise inchoately attached to their perception of the immense tragedy of WWII and the Shoah. It does remain all the more terrifying—punctually because it is unnamed. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) In his Grand Palais exhibition, Kiefer may have rendered in his artwork what Resnais achieved on film. 2 Night and Fog, with a text scripted by concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol, ends on a slow tight revolving shot of a crematorium in ruin, several years after the war. The crematorium is not quite destroyed: it somehow half-stands like the ruin of a massive indescribable object, left over in the middle of the blocks in the background which formed the concentration camp. As the camera tracks slightly away from it and freezes upon it from a distance, Jean Cayrol meditates in voiceover at that point about the “end” of the concentration scourge, or the “brown plague” as the Nazi era was also known, and he formulates a plea addressed to those who think that WWII and the Shoah

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were an aberration, now gone forever. Instead, the voiceover suggests that the plague may only be dormant, for long perhaps, but that the virus may not necessarily be dead. This crematorium may be in ruins in the present, yet it signifies at the same time the ruin and extermination of millions. In a very poignant sequence towards the last part of the documentary, the camera lingers in successive shots on human “debris” accumulated from the camps’ inmates after their killings: mountains of eyeglasses, combs, shaving brushes, cups and dishes, clothes, shoes, women’s hair (used to make cloth the voiceover comments), human bones (used to try to make fertilizers), bodies used to make soap, skin transformed into paper. Beyond the outrage at the torture and killing of millions, the filmmaker and his scriptwriter leave a blank after this sequence to let the spectator meditate upon the extreme outrage at the second killing of the killed and the second pulverization of human existence in this ultimate “utilitarian” desecration of humans reduced to the debris of a debris. As we know, most of the city of Hiroshima was pulverized to ashes; its destruction also marked the end of WWII. After Auschwitz, Resnais proceeded to Hiroshima in his next film made in collaboration with Marguerite Duras. In their audacious mise-en-scène, the sculptured bodies of interlaced and faceless lovers appear in cropped high angle shots right at the beginning of Hiroshima Mon Amour. The bodies are at first covered with radioactive ashes, then covered with rain, dew, and finally covered with the glowing sensuous sweat of lovemaking. Thus lovemaking prevails, albeit symbolically, as a challenge to the destruction of the city and the destruction of life. In the unfolding simple and profound narrative, we find out that the Japanese man is an architect, as if to signify that Hiroshima can be reconstructed from its ruins. Similarly, the French woman, whose life was destroyed during the war when her German lover was killed and when her hair was shorn as a punishment for loving the enemy, is about to reconstitute her psyche in Hiroshima. Duras and Resnais point to the exact correspondence between the collective destruction and ruin of the city and the personal destruction and fragmentation of the French woman. In recounting her suffering, fragment by fragment, to her new Japanese lover, who functions as her “psychoanalyst,” the French woman can for the first time make sense out of the debris of her existence. Neither Hiroshima nor the French woman are “cured,” but she survives just as Hiroshima re-emerges from it rubble.

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EPIPHANIES: SALVAGING RUINS INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Twenty-first-century Leonardo We could say schematically that the past gave us Leonardo’s works whereas the present is finding technologies to study them closer. Restoration in the plastic arts has a long history. For without restoration throughout the ages, none of the museums of the world would be able to have presentable collections—the objects in their collections would just display as interesting ruins or debris! Twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies have transformed art historical approaches and restoration applications to the study and the repair of arts from the past. An array of techniques are at our disposal (for example, x-ray radiographic attenuation, ultraviolet imaging, 3-D modelling of objects and paintings, multispectral imaging of paintings, radar tomography, and so on) now enable digital engineers, computer experts, and restorers working hand in hand with art historians to determine with every single artwork what were, for example, Leonardo’s first moves and decisions and changes of mind. Lately, advances in neutron imaging seem to have been most promising, without the compromising risk of taking even an infinitesimal sample tear in the fabric of the canvas for closer examination. Maurizio Seracini (Director, Diagnostic Center for Cultural Heritage in Florence) has led a lifelong search for Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari of which only Rubens’s later version exists, based upon Leonardo’s own version. Seracini is convinced that the original is either hidden behind Vasari’s painting in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio or, at worse, that Vasari painted his own over Leonardo’s work. With neutron imaging we could look behind the back of Vasari’s painting. If the case is proven, it would be time to speculate whether Vasari destroyed Leonardo’s version out of jealousy or for any kind of emotional imaginable reason. Issues of ruins and debris thus play out well in the information age and the digital era which characterizes our twenty-first century. In the field of cinema, we may consider schematically as well that the twentieth century was the century of production of cinema, for example, with the thousands of works which we inherited from filmmakers from around the world. On the other hand, as films are being transferred and digititized into digital discs and now transmitted by broadband as immaterial objects, the twenty-first century has developed the technologies which make their instantaneous study or enjoyment possible. Moreover, as part of the application of new technologies, reel after reel of entire cinémathèques, dating from the pioneer age to the silent cinema and beyond, are now in the process of being restored, sometimes pixel by pixel, from a state of quasi ruin and saved from becoming celluloid dust.

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Aesthetics and Ethics of SciFi Can we conceive of a civilization without ruins? Probably not any more than we can conceive of a self without a past, or without conflicts, lest we visit dystopian universes. If the case is being made for the interweave and the synergy between new aesthetics and new technologies, we cannot be as embracing of the future as Ray Kurtzweil is, 3 nor should we remain unaware of the boundaries which may be crossed in the process. References to the hyper-realistic worlds of science fiction stand as warnings against possible excesses. In BladeRunner (1982), Ridley Scott pictured metaphoric premonitions about a possible universe in which his “Replicants” had preserved the ruins and fragments of humanity which the humans who had invented them had lost. In the first sequence of Minority Report (2002, based upon a very modified short story by Philip Dick), Stephen Spielberg is in harmony with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish when he creates a dystopic science fiction world in which the police punish criminal intentions before crimes are committed. The cool transparency of the film image is in sync with the transparency of human brains in exposing their motives and feelings: Film form and film sense are thus meshed to account for the deconstruction of the sci-fi inhabitants. Likewise, with its taste for jovial pessimism, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) made the ambiguous case for a rather terrifying Alex, rather than for his transformation into a conforming “Orang,” a debris of a human as he would be, if deprived of free will by chemical castration. NOTES 1. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 2. These comments are extensively discussed in Alain Cohen, Films which Meditate on WW2 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2013). 3. Ray Kurtzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines. When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999).

TEN About the “Anything Goes in Art” Teresa Iaria

DIALOGUE Q. Can art, as exceedingly more related to technique, support and affect the artist’s identity? Contemporary artists master their techniques by experimenting with their own expressive possibilities, and reflecting upon their limits and flaws, because their objects of research, their conceptual contents, are always present in their search for self-identification. Q. A pressing question arising from social media and technological mediation in general is whether subjectivity, as related to art’s autonomy, is possible at all . . . Technological mediation is in fact a medium between the artist’s project, his/her performance and the contemporary art system. I would stress the “relational” question about the producton and interpretation of art today. The autonomy of art is not a problem. In a recent interview Damien Hirst reflected, “It is old-fashioned today to consider artists more for their technical abilities than their art as such. I am rather concerned with the result and I do my best to get a painting that is exactly as I want it to be. I’ve never been worried about using other people to make it; not even architects build their houses.”

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Q. This also brings up the question of techinque in reference to both media and discipline. How can the notions of disciplinarity in art and art practices be retained? Would you say that the difference between disciplinarity (or interdisciplinary) and discipline, in relation to art, is subsumed in today’s world, by technology and media and therefore creates both the elasticity that you refer to but also a fundamental confusion? Today artists are by nature interdisciplinary; they tend to use both conceptual sources of thought which are distant from the strictly artistic ones, and material sources of work that suggest many degrees of competence and knowledge. However, possible chaos is avoided if the system of art is meant as net-work-like and open to a continuous reconfiguration. Q. Can you discuss a specific artwork or an artist that approaches such continuous reconfiguration? An artist coping with such a complex art system must inevitably be openly related to continuous reconfigurations of his/her intentions, of his/her work, etc. This does not cause confusion within the system so far as the artist himself/herself is an integral part of it; or, at least this may cause some difficulty of interpretation to uninformed viewers. Q. How would you relate to the more recent argument made by Rosalind Krauss (that the notion of medium or media of art is no longer sufficient) and suggesting her concept of “technical support” as qualifying art in a contemporary culture that seems to have lost its mediation and autonomy? I share Rosalind Krauss’ perspective, within a general reflection upon the status of art today, which means by “medium” a nonspecific space, which is “an action-oriented space,” a set of rules and procedures every artist generates and follows to constitute his/her work. Q. It seems that even Krauss has moved away recently from the interdisciplinarity of media, to a notion of a medium in which the criteria of art and skill are intertwined. Does that mean that we have exhausted disciplines extrinsic to art making because of the weight amassed by technological systems? In her latest writings Rosalind Krauss has spoken about a “post-mediatic era” in order to overcome any specific value of the medium or of the merely technical support. In my essay I have mentioned Krauss especially for her reflection upon the so-called medium as a personal set of rules the artist gives himself/herself independently from the chosen support. And I would also like to mention the title of a famous exhibition in 1969 in Bern, Switzerland, which has been a milestone of our times: “When Attitudes Become Form,” curated by Harald Szeemann.

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Q. Through the examples of art that you bring, how do artists show the increasing aesthetic condition of superimposition of states, fragmentation, and fluidity of identity? Conceptual and operative superimposition and stratification are a matter of fact in contemporary art and the examples I use show that fragmentation is often the strength and charm of our times. Q. Can you expound a little more on what you mean by operative superimposition? In a naturally interdisciplinary system, according to whose model contemporary artists utilize different competences and refined technologies, the stratification and fragmentation are intrinsic to their status. Q. Fragmentation is often viewed negatively. How can one at present address it through a positive aesthetic perspective? I would like to answer using a quotation by Mario Perniola drawn from his “Il paradosso del frammento” (1992): “A fragment does not reflect the discontinuity of the world but it creates it. . . . What animates a fragment is the enthusiasm for the affirmation of a singularity which is able to break up the continuity of the world, to infringe its plot.” Q. Does this instability between art, artists, and artworks represent a new paradigm? Certainly it does. Today fragmentation and stratification are inherent in the system of art. Both for artists and a passionate audience to accept this new configuration is the only way to work and succeed, to interpret and unravel this complex system. Q. And yet, it seems that precisely because of the ways in which the art market functions—with its speculative mechanisms and the weakening of institutional autonomy of, say, museums—there is an eager appetite for spectacle and quantitative appeal. Can fragmentation be used critically without losing its relevance in light of such a complexity? Fragmentation and complexity of a system are two sides of the same coin; a critical viewpoint depends on attentive and competent viewers. Q. Does your perspective imply the “historicity” of art or does it destroy it? My perspective emphasizes the importance of a historical knowledge, meant as a chain of anticipations and second thoughts about codes, lan-

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guages and forms. As Nelson Goodman says in Ways of Worldmaking, making is always a re-making of the worlds we have at our disposal. Q. Insofar as the proto-modernist attitude towards historical sedimentation assumed that the “systems of the arts” (Kristeller) or “world-making” (Goodman) were the inevitable outcome of art at present it appears that cultural production precedes art making. Does that mean that we have to be more careful about what we so easily accept as art? Certainly, we have to be more careful and critical about any cultural or artistic event, by living the system from within and by learning to distinguish mere entertainment artworks from real artworks, which leave behind a mark. Is that the repudiation of Carl Andre’s dictum that “Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us”? The relation between art and culture is circular and relational. Where it starts from does not matter. *** Schwitters: “Art is a fundamental notion, as the divine sublime, inexplicable as life, indefinable and without end.” Warhol: The Chelsea Girls is it art? . . . First of all was made by an artist, and secondly, it reveals art.

I would like to focus on the impossibility to define contemporary art as a system, and instead argue that art unpredictably emerges from a multiplicity of complex systems and of relationships that cannot be reduced to a single one. Artists nowadays rely to a lesser degree on the specific materials and media as defining their practice, but rather extemporize a variety of media for the purpose of using them as the materialization of discursive concepts. Thus, the creative outcomes are determined by a changing discursive context that entails complexity that, in turn, is irreducible to the scope of the media. Rather, art reveals itself in the intertwining of possible disciplines such as: art and philosophy, art and technologies, art and physics, or art and crafts. Art becomes more and more relevant as a means of bridging different systems and obeys the following predicaments: 1. Anything contextualized for art’s accomplishment is necessary but not sufficient. 2. The idea and its strength are the center of its production. 3. The complex systems of relationships tend to work only within the scope of art’s productive “interdisciplinarity.” By way of example, I will use the works of artists such as Gino de Dominicis, Alighiero Boetti, Bill Viola, and Olafur Eliasson, to reflect on such interdisciplinarity.

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Inasmuch as contemporary art mirrors our times as elastic, mobile and as interconnected to new ways of living and producing, it cannot but reflect, interact, and suggest a unique vision that may either converge or diverge from production. On the one hand, art can be viewed as a cultural system based on a historical tradition. On the other hand, its particular visionary perspectives are found in flux. Artists, the active nodes of this network, in a perpetual motion of advances and thoughts, interact and address in their work questions relating to a conceptual basis of innovations. Undoubtedly, technology has influenced and changed the ways we live and perceive reality, reconfiguring the territory of perceptual experience through extensions, implementations, and implants that connect and channel our sensing of the world. Thus, contemporary artists, as users and specimens of such technological tendency, rely on their abilities to exert the most of such technical possibilities in their creative and research projects. The artist has always been involved with the issue of the technique as a means to relate to a “state of mind” that is explored within the scope of her or his “project.” The artist’s work exhibits conceptual elements that are closely related to the technical operations introduced or found in the medium of choice and that are an essential vehicle for the shaping of the work as a whole. The technique is therefore designed or chosen as a possible extension to a particular idea or thought. As such, the idea expressed remains the core foundation, important to the choice of medium or material affect and is set a priori. In the process of designing the intersection between idea and medium, the boundaries between process are kept elastic and flap continuously. It should be noted, however, that it is not enough to be a proficient and professional maker in the application of new technologies in the production of works of art. Art always goes beyond the moment of illusion by means of techniques and designates another meaning: art always looks elsewhere! It would be a mistake to support the notion that the artwork is itself a subsidiary technology or a “comment” on technology. Such artworks are only rather “special effects” to entertain superficially a visual carnival or illustrative as in the case of the Cités des Sciences, diffused in many European cities. The question of “medium” is central to the whole tradition of the twentieth-century avant-garde. And new media played a revolutionary role in the creative possibilities of expression and communication. More recently, the technological revolution has affected art in a more comprehensive way through the interaction of two technologies: that of the media and that of the computer. Some theorists, such as Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, 1 reflecting on these issues from a single perspective, claim that the real innovation and revolution of the avant-garde began with the advent of

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the new media. In “The Death of Computer Art,” 2 Manovich distinguishes between two fields of action: the “Duchamp Land” and “Turing Land,” named after Marcel Duchamp and Alan Turing, two father figures of modern culture. Manovich argues that while the research objectives of “Duchamp Land” are oriented toward content, whether symbolic, metaphoric, or critical through the complex use of cultural codings, the focus of “Turing Land” is oriented towards technology and experimentation and denotes new technical possibilities without paying sufficient attention to their outcomes, limitations, and defects. In respect to contemporary art we can argue that the mutual encroachment of both fields of action is not so clearcut now: the “Duchamp Land” fades into the “Turing Land” and vice versa, and both tend to rely upon a strong idea enabling the artist to retain a footage of relationships that pushes him or her to work on artforms and not simply technological innovations. Our present time has exceeded the medial specificity of early modern art and has been characterized as “post-medial.” Rosalind Krauss, in her A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition 3 uses Marcel Broodthaers’ work as an example offering a key to illuminate the critique of artistic developments in recent decades. Only through reinvention and rearticulation of the artist’s tools is Broodthaers, according to Krauss, able to explore differences in respect to the advent of new media. Many artists, in contrast and opposition to the medium, use low resolution in order to highlight the “diegetic horizon,” a space generated by the artist in order to reflect on the content rather than on the spectacle of the medium. In “reinventing the medium” I would say that Rosalind Krauss makes it clear that in order to interpret the work of many contemporary artists, the medium is dealt with as a set of rules, a “generative matrix” of conventions derived from (but not identical to) material conditions, a space of possibilities opened up for the artist. 4 In the 1990s, the concept of post-media art proved to be a key approach for also analyzing the cultural impact of new technologies. In particular, the use of computers and the Web, as argued by French philosopher Nicolas Bourriaud, has expanded the possibilities of interactivity, especially for artists. 5 The contemporary artist, working similarly to a deejay or a programmer, takes possession of cultural objects and fragments and reworks them, remounting and including them in new contexts. If in the past the artist took possession of real objects, as the very well known Duchampian use of “ready-made,” now the artist appropriates what I might call “ready-information,” copying and pasting at will, creating new networks of meaning. In other words, today, it no longer makes sense for the artist to repeat specific media as discrete means, since new technologies affect our thinking and feeling, and renders everything “intermedia.”

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The contemporary artist has an “interdisciplinary mindset,” both from a conceptual and practical standpoint, and can move with ease between different skills as well as alternating hyper-individualistic and hypercollaborative approaches. At the artist’s disposal today is a plethora of working methods that allow a very personal daily practice, working with “discipline” without intermediaries, and possibly collaborating with an indefinite number of people, often specialists in different fields. To clarify these issues I will discuss the works of contemporary artists, in reference to their “poetic vision” that emerges strongly from their works beyond the specific use of the medium. In the works of Gino De Dominicis, an artist from Ancona, Italy, who worked between the early 1970s to the late 1990s, we find the intersection between art and science as exceeding the boundaries of any given medium then in vogue. Another artist, Alighiero Boetti had introduced to his works a poetic and playful research by relying on media outside the artistic tradition and by exploring communal and public participation. In video, the works of Bill Viola introduced the historical-cultural tradition as cleverly interwoven with technological expertise and new media. Another example is the work of Olafur Eliasson, who through “hyper-collaboration” uses various technologies and artificially reconstructs natural events which challenge the limis of our sensorial faculties. We cannot establish a causal relation between an idea or a theory that influences artists’ imagination, or why, by exploring a field different from artistic practice, they are attracted by the one or the other theory. There is no necessary correspondence between theoretical approach or ideas and the media explored and yet various matrices of perception or reasoning can mutually interact and merge into a new intellectual synthesis. Due to the synthesis between extra-artistic and often scientific theories and selected media, novel ideas flow and are reborn. Gino De Dominicis died prematurely at the end of the 1990s. His art transposed concepts from science through the use of video, installation, painting, sculpture, and performance. People who knew De Dominicis, attest to the fact that the artist had been initiated into science by a physicist friend, who responded to his restless inquiries with his explainations on concepts such as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and reversibility and irreversibility of space-time. For De Dominicis the concept of entropy—indicative of a system’s degree of dis/order—inevitably leads to thinking not only of dissolution and death but also of its overcoming. De Dominicis entrusted what can be defined as the “poetic immortality of the body,” and “the eternity of things,” in art, as the only means that could defeat and defy the physical laws of nature. His debut in 1969 was marked by a mortuary poster with the inscription “Gino De Dominicis,” as a means for the artist to condition himself to the most extreme predicament: the anticipation of his own death. The obsession with death and entropy is repeated and sublimated in another

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work from 1969 “The Mistake, Space and Time”—the mistake of running into space to shorten time itself. A fascinating installation which reveals a skeleton of a man with roller skates, holding on one hand the skeleton of a dog on a leash and on the other a long golden rod by one end, in perfect balance. Art in his work appears to resolve the impossible, overcoming the unidirectionality of time and finding an alternative to irreversibility. In 1972, De Dominicis exhibited “Second Solution of Immortality (The Universe is property)” at the Venice Biennale. A work that became a sensation because it displayed to visitors a boy with Down’s syndrome sitting in contemplation of three works, particularly dear to the artist: “Invisible Pyramid,” “The Ball,” and “The Stone.” These three objects are all attributed to De Dominicis’ poetic imagination, the “ball”—or more accurately “Rubber Ball (dropped by two meters) in the moment just before the bounce”—is an attempt to present the paradox of movement, an instant of time “appearing” in the mind and being motionless to perception. “The Invisible Pyramid” as “The Invisible Cube” presented instead the orthogonal projection of the objects in question, by attesting that everything, every thought and every moment are eternal and unrepresentable once they enter and leave the “circle of appearances.” The analogy with scientific concepts goes hand in hand with many of the metaphorical titles De Dominicis gives to his works. For example, his “ubiquitous” artworks can be interpreted in the light of quantum physics as suggesting a sort of “entanglement” in which two physical objects communicate instantaneously across space and time; and the works “Trying to Fly,” and “An attempt to form squares instead of circles of water” are works-experiments in which the artist-scientist subverts and transcends the laws of space and motion. From the 1980s onward, De Dominicis transposed these concepts into images, borrowing from ancient Sumerian iconology and the myth of Urvasi and Gilgamesh that both relate to immortality. De Dominicis’ focus on the relations between art and science reveals a latent poetics that delineates a complex and yet independent path, though one realized in a variety of techniques, in which each representation is presentation, a “situation of work” which depicts a set of visual and conceptual possibilities. Another artist whom I would like to address is Alighiero Boetti, who is still widely influential on younger generations of artists for introducing an original visual language exploring the possibilities implicit in craftsmanship, ingenuity and collective work. By using diverse media, even those which do not properly belong to art, such as the use of weaving, industrial design, mail art, Boetti reflected the complexity of reality and the limitations of scientific systems. His work from 1977, “Classifying the thousand longest rivers in the world,” comes to mind here. Boetti worked on doubling, multiplying, and fragmenting the “one” and on the ambiguity of classification codes and attempted in his art-

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works to transform the logic of numbers into calendars and the maps of the world into Kilims or embroidered alphabets into tapestries. Boetti has used different mathematical laws, such as number systems in playful combinatorial games, as rational systems revealing particular structures of order. He chose the square form as the basis for his space of action, the place of possibilities. Similar to the magical square of Dürer, with its allusions to alchemy, shamanism, and the cabal, Boetti’s tapestries are structured as image-planes through almost only the use of squares of letters that are made up of words and phrases with 4x4 or 5x5 letters. These tapestries are composed as magic squares in the sense that one first needs to know their system in order to read them in the right way. It is the presence of an idea that occupies the center of Boetti’s work and as such can be embodied in any instrument or material. In fact it is important for Boetti to encompass this in fieri process of these works in progress those “happy coincidences” that occur in reality. The countless people who were involved in his projects suggest a type of a multilayered procedure, which is segmented and dissociated: designed by the artist, drawn by someone’s hand and made by still another’s. From the original concept of breaking through to loss of identity, one arrives at “All,” a tapestry made by Afghan women in Kabul in 1988. All images of the world are combined in a single work. All colors of the world are added together in a composite harmony. The multiplicity of images and their contamination provide for infinitely possible variations of words, letters, and colors. Shattering is the very structure of Boetti’s creative process in which the viewer is lost as a mystic in contemplation of his own varied repetition. The logic becomes illogical for a sudden somersault of the invention: art shows, even in an automated and repetitive process, a sudden opening for a mental leap. And it is in this conflict that you test the balance between harmony as regularity of the sign and invention as deviation from the rule. Alighiero Boetti made many experiments in projects involving countless people, as the experiment with 100 citizens of Gavirate (VA) in 1993, in which a sheet of 100 squares was given to each to be filled progressively from 1 to 100, alternating white and black. The finished work was exhibited under the title “personal-collective.” Another example is the popular “ouvre postale,” the result of a collection of materials (telegrams, letters and spreadsheets) sent by the artist to the same sender in a variable period of time according to the principle of numerical determination, produced by all the variables generated by the combinatorial sequence of a certain use of the stamps, in turn arranged according to a different order of colors. Boetti’s code experiences rules of reading and decoding, which are sometimes strictly visual, sometimes strictly conceptual, from those that have to do with recognizable designs and shapes, to those that

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enhance the appearance of combinatorics in which the user is challenged by an encrypted reading. In this work in progress, the artist must find a balance between the idea of the work and the unexpected that emerges from a collective work. An artist is like a skilled conductor who dictates rules and poetry to compose a complex puzzle. The advent of new technologies has allowed experimentation to create advanced forms of crosses between different media. A precursor of this mode of operation is the American artist Bill Viola, a very singular figure for training, sensitivity, and expertise. Graduated from the Faculty of Arts from Syracuse University in New York, he used the influence of the fathers of Video Art and Performance as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and the experience of the most revolutionary body-conscious theatrical directors as Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski. Moreover, Bill Viola is also a scholar of great mystics who became his spiritual fathers: Jelaluddin Rumi, Chuang Tzu, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhardt, all who embody in his eyes the true nature of the artist. In Florence, in the 1970s, Maria Gloria Bicocchi’s video art center Art/ tape/22 became an experimental laboratory for Bill Viola. Florence is also a place rich in cultural stimuli that led him into pre-Renaissance spaces like churches and cathedrals, apt to solve problems related to sound and acoustics in general. Recording space through sound he began to think in terms of record fields and points of view. These experiments on acoustic architectures were precursors of the following “rooms of thought.” In his very well-known installations, in which four backlit panels envelop the viewer, virtually embedded in the work both physically and mentally, a video shows powerful images and sounds of existence, while the viewer, in the room-work, can walk in his or her memory, thanks to the artist who “turns on” the mind’s eye. The American artist has created a poetic universe attentive to the tradition of European painting (Goya, Bosch, Vermeer, Pontormo), to its structural aspects (altarpieces, triptychs, painted rooms), to the memory theaters (Giulio Camillo’s Theater of Memory, Giordano Bruno’s De umbris idearum, Francis Yates’ The Art of Memory), a legacy filtered by experiences involving new media that have been imposing themselves since the 1970s, such as the spread of video projectors (LCD, DLP, CRT) with new solutions and a different relationship with the environment, also involving software engineers and electronic media, who work closely with artists, putting up with the complexity of the work through constant dialogue. I would like to recall that many artworks are made possible thanks to the Digital Video Effecter 1973 Digital Image Articulator, or Imager 1976, and the DVE, which allows smoother transitions from one scene to the other, as well as the morphing effect that gives the possibility to focus on images so suggestive. The wise use of this technology has allowed Bill

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Viola to create immersive spaces that give the viewer the idea of moving in the mind of the artist. Another example of high-tech and sophisticated projects comes from the work of Olafur Eliasson. The Danish artist is concerned with the “transient phenomena,” events limited in space and time. Interested in the natural states of affairs and their possible changes, he is convinced that “nature does not exist in itself, but it coincides with the way we look.” The light in its untouchable presence, has always had an important role in his work. The viewer enters her or his artificial environments and makes an existential experience, confusing nature with artifice, a questioning of perceiving him/herself and the distance that separates him/her from the phenomenon. Among his most spectacular productions I would like to mention Weather Project (2003): Olafur Eliasson has rebuilt the sun, composed of two hundred mono-frequency lamps, a mirror, and disco smoke generators, transforming the huge Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern into a surreal place. Once again we are confronted with the fact that on the ground of every work of art there is a strong idea, an elemental material as light, which in this case becomes internal reference to the Tate, a former power station. It is still light with its variations to be the protagonist at the Venice Biennale in 2005 with Your Black Horizon, at the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni. The work consists of a beam of light which travels—at horizon height—for a 400-square-meter-long cube, designed by David Adjave. The artist has sampled the light of the Venetian lagoon from 4:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., to measure the intensity and levels of white, purple, and blue. He then transferred the data into a mechanism for lighting, compacting the sequence of sunrise-sunset-afternoon-night and speeding up of a few minutes the individual variations of time. The large cube that contains the entire cycle of the light of the Venetian lagoon, artificially reproducing a phenomena and producing an illusion, has to do with an inquiry recalling the “Stream of consciouness,” emphasizing the fact that we are processes that investigate processes. In Eliasson’s studio he gathers a large number of assistants and experts in various disciplines—engineers, architects, computer experts, skilled artisans—a team that manages masterfully to create his fascinating installations. These examples, concerning already established artists, give us a fairly clear picture of the consistency of their experimental production, the strength to use and dominate the new media, and new expressive possibilities. It is more difficult today for younger artists to be recognized, as we can usually only compare and analyze only a few of their works at a time, in which sometimes their voices are not easily distinguishable. In a varied and complex art scene, artists use new materials and advanced technologies, as well as professionals from different fields, and specialized laboratories in which to produce their works. Reflecting on the new techniques,

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it is useful to consider the fact that artists constantly reinvent their own media according to their creative intentions; in other words, it is the rule and the “lawful space” they built as ”style,” to allow them to move safely among possible techniques and technologies. Technological development has critically influenced the change in the language of art, allowed to conceive of things, unthinkable before, and the centrality of the idea in a research project still remains essential to produce a work of meaning and value. NOTES 1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 2. Lev Manovich, “The Death of Computer Art” (1997) www.thenetnet.com/ scmed/schmed12.html. 3. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 4. Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the medium,” in Critical Inquiry 25 (2), 1999: 289–315. 5. Nicolaus Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002).

ELEVEN The Changing Canvas of the City Ysamur M. Flores-Peña

DIALOGUE Q. How do you imagine self-education and self-construction in a conflicted and complex urban setting, which seems to encourage a dynamic, unstable, and nonlinear sense of identity? There is no education without awareness. Owning history provides a sense of place to the individual. It is in a way a cognitive map that provides meaning and by so doing the individual is able to locate his own life within the urban continuum. The notion of place is not limited to here and now but it expands to the time before the individual was “in place.” Education occurs when all these elements enter the objective mind and become a useful tool for negotiating the contradictions imposed by the place. Q. Do you see an aesthetics of place and history as an antidote to the Web’s delocalization? I am not sure. The Web is a tool that can be used to guide individuals to a direct experience of place. Since information is readily available on the Web, for many, their first encounter with their surroundings is through the electronic media. The challenge is to make individuals and communities aware that their real existence is not on the Web but in the real “there.”

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Q. Do you think that what you describe as “self-ethnography” amounts to a new aesthetic mode in approaching the urban-scape? Absolutely! Our perceptions of self and place are always filtered through an aesthetic experience. The idea of “coolness” so pervasive in today’s parlance represents what Robert Farris Thompson calls “an aesthetic judgment.” The urban experience is always spoken in terms of hot and cold referencing rejection or acceptance of a distinct idea of desirability. For example living in the suburbs is considered a “hot” alternative in terms of its desirability; and this is contraposed to how “hot” the urban space is vis-à-vis its criminality. These are aesthetic judgments. On the other hand urban fashion and attitudes are considered more desirable than the artificial suburbs, therefore “cool.” The transformation of the urban place depends on the aesthetic values accorded by society. Those living within the space must operate within a value scale not of good or bad but cool or hot. It is the individual who must place his or her own value and “own it.” Don Quixote’s words echo this feeling: “I know who I am and who I may be.” Q. You are referring to cities’ growing tensions between their internal and international populations; but, to what extents do the resulting cultural manifestations contribute to a new aesthetic sensibility? The amalgamation that inevitably will occur by these encounters is bound to produce the dominant reality within the social structure. The first active bearers of tradition will struggle to keep their experiences unchanged and uncontaminated. Eventually, those who are not from one side or the other will construct a reality that will transform the original raw material into a viable social tool, a reality that harmonizes and makes sense of the new sensibility. This new reality is the bridge between the old layers and the new layers that until superseded will be the public face of culture. Q. Los Angeles in particular has been noted for the “erasure of its history”—to what extent do urban mythology and trends transcend the flux of cultural signs and settle into history? I do not agree completely with the notion that Los Angeles is oblivious to its historical record. Signs and symbols are important in Los Angeles as in other urban areas, which are in a constant state of flux. Civic signage keeps the urban space true to itself. What I truly believe is that Hollywood and the “stage syndrome” have affected Los Angeles. Stages are to be torn down after serving their purpose to be re-erected when needed. The urban space is a constantly changing stage that creates a true absence of historical continuity for those who are considered passersby. It

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is here where the locus serenus works best, by providing a respite for the systematic erasure of recognizable signs. The demolition of structures, which is a reality in all urban spaces, does not erase that sense of history, the real damage is done by the lack of cognitive ownership. Many urban gangs repurpose the history by creating a meta-history within the confines of an apparent historical desert and by so doing begin the long road to achieve the locus serenus which in time will provide its own meaning and historicity. Q. To what extent do urbanization and digitalization, especially in reference to social networks, fuse and mutate the city’s aesthetic landscape? The meta-reality of the electronic media imposes a false sense of reality upon the urban landscape. However, once the individual is confronted with the reality of the urban space the reaction will be pendular; total rejection or total understanding of the space; recognizing that the electronic picture is but a simulacrum. Yet, a third scenario is also plausible, the total alienation of both and the emergence of a romantic vision of the urban space, a truly dismal thought. Q. The aesthetic aspects that define multiple urban identities are also affected by virtual realities. In what sense do they entail participation? I believe that Calderón de la Barca best expressed the feeling of being in two contradictory realities at once. In La Vida es Sueño, the main character, Segismundo, ponders his lot in life and compares it to a dream: “I dream that I am here Tied by these imprisonments, and I dreamed that another state much happier I saw myself. What is life? Just an illusion, A shadow, a fiction, And the greatest good is miniscule; For all of life is a dream, And dreams are nothing but dreams.” [My translation]

Participation in a multi-layered urban experience will inevitable always be translated into sound bites that can convey the passing meaning while leaving the actual “reality” untouched for those who willingly venture to experience it. Educators are those individuals, the bridge builders in the ancient sense of the word “pontifex.” Education bridges the layers of reality with the layers of meaning. The aesthetic experience is derived from how strong these connections are and how meaningful. ***

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As we advance into the twenty-first century, the values and parameters of both education and aesthetics must be revised to reflect an ever-shrinking globalized society. In order to address education in relation to aesthetics and art a new language and paradigm must be developed in relation to the urban context. I argue that the urban landscape with its social sedimentation—equally vernacular and cyber—needs to be analyzed through the notion of self-ethnography. As educators struggle to engage a generation, who sees everything as passing and uncertain, the idea of self-ethnography must come to the forefront of the discourse. Education and aesthetics are reciprocally connected to our ability to engage future generations of students. As evidenced in the increasing dropout rate in American education, the idea of passive learning is not only not working, but also definitely not carrying substantive value. According to a report from Northeastern University: In 2007 nearly 6.2 million students in the United States between the ages of 16 and 24 dropped out of high school. Most of the dropouts were Latino or black, according to a report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Alternative Schools Network in Chicago, Illinois, fueling what the report called “a persistent high school dropout crisis.” The total represents 16 percent of all people in the United States in that age range in 2007. 1

I would like to present the idea of committing the student to self-exploration and exposure through the implementation of urban aesthetics. There are several important questions to consider, such as: Why is education becoming increasingly divorced from social realities? How can the educator engage the aesthetics of place and self in a meaningful way? And finally, is there a place to bring the aesthetics of the urban space into the academic discourse? As we attempt to show, the interrelation between the space and the individual aesthetics must be a significant component of the discussion. The idea of beauty and its relationship with self is connected to the ability of the individual to embed his or her life within the social space they occupy. Often, within the urban context, social transactions codified as antisocial behavior are mostly evident in street art, such as graffiti, in defiance of authority and in attempting to justify human interactions that obey a different social order. Here, the difference between murals and tagging is crucial to such an order’s subversion. As artists and educators come together to explore issues of identity and meaning within these pluralities of environments it is of paramount importance to address and decode that which is not apparent to an outsider of such environments, namely, the aesthetic values that escape definition unless addressed in

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relation to the creators or stakeholders who are key to their meaningful decoding. A meaningful partnership is thus required between the insiders and outsiders of an urban environment. As we assemble trained and untrained artists/students the concept of one-sided discourse must be replaced by a channel of communication that encompasses the understanding the complexity the etic and the emic constructs of a given social context. The subtleties implicit within a visual discourse are manifested also in the ambiguous boundaries of a community as perceived by outsiders and academia. If we are to invest in the future of education, then it must rely on a new self-ethnography as an integral part of the discussion that centers on urban culture and aesthetics. A self-ethnography will help participants to take stock of their influence (positive or negative) within the context of a given community. Hence the Lukumi proverb: “He Who Knows Never Dies as He Who Does Not Know.” Insofar as the aesthetics of the urban environment is to be considered an important educational tool it must engage the creator’s standpoint with that of the outsider as he or she comes to experience it. In other words, the pedagogical point of view coincides with the artist’s or the student’s ability to further enrich his or her visual vocabulary and project on the aesthetic constructs of a specific environment. In order for the student to reach a level of meaningful understanding he or she must rely on a self-ethnographical inquiry into the very encounter with the urban sphere and its aesthetic significations. Urban aesthetics transcend what is passively understood as merely “local” by introducing to it an active sphere of self-reflective presence that engages the vernacular within a larger universal context of representation. THE URBAN DICHOTOMY The United States is becoming increasingly urban and more rural, and isolated communities are either abandoned or have been swallowed by the suburban sprawl. This tendency leads to contradictions since it stratifies the community in socioeconomic terms. Urbanization leads to the growth of a densely populated and economically deprived urban areas but it also plants the seeds for its own demise by privileging neighborhoods that in turn generate ghettos and inner cities. The suburbanites— ghettos and inner cities—still must be part of the old urban areas; albeit during working hours, and the mutual dependence is never broken. Firms, business, or government institutions are still located in the old urban areas and the left-behind population turns the urban areas into the only place of convergence. Thus, consequently, two populations inhabit the city: the diurnal influx of professionals and the working class on the one hand and the nocturnal presence of a culturally/economically de-

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prived population on the other hand. This population shift bears the mark of a class struggle. In most American cities the urban realm of downtown implies a plethora of different things, depending on the time of the day. Insofar as “downtown” entails an urban polarization or dichotomy in a rather structured and controlled way, it is also affected by urban contexts, which shape it from without and turn into a kaleidoscope experience of urban America. Rather than a set reality, the dichotomies in urban environments are stylized in the downtown as characteristic traits particular to the city. In light of such a process, the suburban areas exceedingly look more like old urban areas deprived of the historical prestige and as result the urban boundaries themselves are increasingly being blurred and redrawn in regards to gentrification. There is no single formulation to explain the multiple layering of urban cultures that at times become less conspicuous as the population movement creates a differential tide in resources and prestige. The urban dichotomy is best exemplified in the ways in which old urban areas hold the city’s own historical memory, its staged historicity, whereas the new urban areas are adjusted to economic expansion, growth, and population’s influx, such as migrants, in late modernity. This process is hardly new, given the history of urbanization as result of the industrial revolutions but in the twenty-first century the population movement to developed urban areas marks the tendency of globalization rather than simply the gentrification of the local. According to Phillip Martin: Migration is defined by the United Nations as the movement from one of the world’s 200+ nations states to another for twelve months or more, regardless of the purpose for being outside of the country [of] birth or citizenship or legal status in the new country. According to this fairly inclusive definition, there were 175 million migrants in 2000, which means that three per cent of the world’s residents are outside of their country of birth or citizenship as migrants, foreign students, and workers or unauthorized residents. 2

Many cities are thus confronted with dual migration patterns: the internal and the international. For anyone attempting to draw on a reliable urban ethnography it means separating the layers of significance that each group installs over the social space and its historical encoding. These patterns create what Doug Sounders aptly termed “arrival city.” In characterizing this phenomenon Sounders provides a paradigm that will frame our discussion: Look around: the largest migration in human history is under way. For the first time ever, more people are living in cities than in rural areas. Between 2007 and 2050, the world’s cities will have absorbed 3.1 billion people. Urbanization is the mass movement that will change our world

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during the twenty-first century, and the “arrival city” is where it is taking place. 3

These places of defining the “arrival city” entail fluid identities and shape as well as being shaped by its past and present inhabitants. It is in this environment that education meets its toughest challenge as the power of place overwhelms any attempt to accommodate multiplicity of meanings and symbols, decoding them without using their local signification as universals. Moreover, those individuals who are introduced as new inhabitants or as visitors to the “arrival city” must contend with its reality while interfering with their surroundings and coming to grips with its urban codes. SELF-ETHNOGRAPHY There is a lingering perception of the ethnographer as someone who needs to leave his or her cultural baggage behind in order to engage with a fieldwork. But in order to do so the ethnographer must also construe the scope of what is imported from self-experience and reflexivity. Thus, inadvertently, the researcher always imports his or her own bias to the subject and can only overcome such bias not only by means of defamiliarization but through self-reflective ethnographic analysis of positive and negative constraints. The urban space is an all-encompassing environment that engages and challenges our preconceptions of any given aesthetics through ongoing additions of elements foreign to the urban space. Nonetheless, the blending of elements must be studied as a new way to generate a possible novel aesthetics with a particular sensibility of beauty. Prior histories must be accounted for in relating to an emergent urban aesthetics subsumed by changing realities that destabilizes any cultural fixity. Thus, self-ethnography is necessary for accounting for such an environment in flux and the student/artist must become a participant observer and delineate and relate to his or her bias in order to negotiate the contradictions brought to the field. As part of the new reality—which is a well-accepted anthropological research method—participant observation becomes a tool not only to explain behavior but also for decoding actions that otherwise would be unintelligible. If the artist/student embraces the fact that his or her mere presence is an inevitable intervention that adds a new layer to the field than the idea of a transitional reality becomes more negotiable. The concept of the urban environment as a changing canvas forces the researcher to look into historical and social pasts in order to explain the social present and render his or her intervention as a layer of meaning that cannot be absent from the student’s or ethnographer’s accounts.

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Self-ethnography takes into account the notion of a history in flux in which the researcher must account for the case study in question as well as his or her intervention. The aesthetics of place becomes defined inasmuch by the aesthetic concomitants of self-ethnography and therefore must account for any historical, social, and philosophical issues at hand. Engaging the stakeholder’s interests and intertwining the student and the resident in a meaningful conversation will create an environment in which relevant questions—exposing cultural and psychological gaps— will be posed and addressed. Equally, the outsider will use the insider as a mentor but at the same time the insider will gain a fresh look at his or her inhabited surroundings through the mediation of the intervened student/artist in transforming the common place into an aesthetic object. The urban space as an aesthetic object is thus transcendent to either the place or the environment per se allowing for a new appreciation—hence another layer—to emerge from such an exchange. Any research process requires knowledge of both past and present events to make sense in order to assess the relevance of cultural constructs to such a transcendent object which becomes the canvas for ascertaining meaning in an otherwise in flux and changing experience. If we agree that meaning lies within culture, then the idea of studying the ever changing trends and currents of urban culture becomes an exercise in decoding multiple layers of meaning boarding a context in which the local and global are frequently interchanged. Hence, one’s role in intervening with the urban context should never be overlooked as an active participation in the specific culture. The self-ethnographic collecting and re-collecting processes must synthesize past histories with new and emerging ones and. So allowing the information gathered to become a sort of a cognitive map that reflects all areas and layers of reality. As these layers reciprocally interact they will provide a cognitive platform through which to generate both arguments and critical evaluations. “HOMEBOY” HISTORIES: A CASE STUDY As we embarked in designing an Integrated Learning curriculum for a class that will explore issues of urban violence and recovery in an urban neighborhood, it became clear that a solid research of the past and contemporary history was necessary to engage both the students and mentors alike. Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles neighborhood, with a long history of diversity and conflict became our class’s case study, an urban laboratory. The course teamed up with Homeboy Industries—a community organization that strives to move individuals from gang life and violence to the mainstream of society. Our goal as a program was to expose artists and designers to social issues that can affect their work and at the same time engage their creative efforts to research, and devise alternatives to

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the many problems that plagued the community partner. I made the conscious decision to add another layer of significance and challenge the students to use their talents to devise creative ways in which to address issues to the community members (Homeboy Industries ex–gang members) identified as necessary to meet the community partner’s goals. Boyle Heights is a community with a long history. It was created as a community to house migrant Jews from the East Coast of the United States due to the changing historic realities. Boyle Heights became the residence of the many ethnic groups that at different time periods moved to Los Angeles. To both resident mentors and students, Boyle Heights was embroiled in the violent reality that had been popularized by the media and film culture. Moreover, Boyle Heights history is absent from any school or college curriculum in the area. This erasure of history contributes to further lack of ownership from the stockholders in the community, its residents. As Norman Klein asserts in his book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, in relation to the systematic destruction of Los Angeles neighborhoods, so does Boyle Heights exemplify that erasure. 4 Since its beginning, Boyle Heights has been a microcosm of life in Los Angeles, but the many cultural layers of meaning and identity, although present, are buried under its historical erasure. There is a sense of an absence of historicity, which begs the right for claiming it. I equate Boyles Heights to a “Hollywood stage consciousness” as the culprit and such conscience suggests the lack of permanence of any structure. Everything has a limited lifespan before it is disposed, dismantled, or recycled without any sense of intrinsic historical values. The sense of history as fragmented and as only partially remembered by those who can identify the telltale signs leave Boyle Heights as a modern-day ruin. Through a continual and almost centrifugal process the many layers of forgotten history in the area must be reclaimed in order to convey a sense of historical continuity. Such continuity is important to Boyle Heights’ inhabitants who situate their life and existence within a historical continuum and in relation the rest of the city and state. By so doing this community will create what Edward C. Knox calls a “cultural competence.” 5 As a construct “Cultural Competence” must draw from anthropology the ideas necessary to provide individuals the tools to develop a meaningful selfethnography. The tragic consequence for individuals caught between living in a new environment, cultural amnesia, and personal marginalization is the inability to coordinate and harmoniously weave themselves into the host culture. The result often provokes a reaction against all possible transcendent objects, or phantasmagoric images found in and around the social space and this renders the layered “ruin” a vacant dilapidating environment littered with human debris. Instead what we might inspire to pursue through a self-ethnographic integrated learning course such as the one with Homeboy Industries is a meaningful ex-

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change that identifies the areas negatively impacted by cultural shock and re-directed through the pedagogical parameters of aesthetics. And such aesthetics of urban space may be provocative in its overlapping areas of knowledge that collide and crumble under the weight of senseless historicity; a troubled aesthetic unfolds. This urban aesthetics aims to cave, obliterate, and atomize the previous culture with a collage of new and controversial elements that challenge authorities and baffle onlookers. For the “new creators” this adding of a historical albeit controversial layer may have a therapeutic and liberating outcomes. It centers, decenters, and recenters the resident and the place within what I term locus serenus: a place that provides meaning and comfort. In a sense, such a new creator fulfills the role of what Audrey Bennet ascribes to the figure of the graphic designer: “The graphic designer traditionally behaved as the representative of the audience.” 6 In such a fashion, the creation/design process involves processes of translating known and common signs into novel ways of knowing that apply to anyone serving the role of visual cultural translator similar to what Bennett assigns to the graphic designer: “Since the graphic designer was a member of the audience that s/he represented the design gestalt created would, be intrinsically, appropriate for the prospective audience.” 7 The creation of this transitory space of meaning and comfort requires a high level of maintenance and in order to achieve it participants must forsake all other cares. Hence its controversial and destructive character will definitely change the city yet once more adding another layer to the already complex urban universe. THE CHANGING CANVAS OF THE CITY: THE “LOCUS SERENUS” The creation of the “Locus Serenus” is not quite the spinoff of Horace’s Beatus ille; far from it. The Locus Serenus is not a celebration of tranquility in the classical sense, but rather, a place where meaning and placement come together in uneasy terms to make sense of the oppositional forces active in urban living. The existence of the Locus Serenus as a place of peace and comfort is only illusory and at most a phantasmagorical perception. Such a transitory place provides a safe heaven and a mirror image of the self and its environmental opposites or negations. Moreover, the role of Locus Serenus is to be a place of negotiation of opposites while giving the individual a sense of ownership and perceived control. This is a place in flux that renders a sense of the kaleidoscopic nature to the chaos of the urban environment. The changing nature of the city equals its apparent absence of permanence and yet it provides a canvas for new and transforming realities. The educator in this environment must use the idea of place and place-

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ment to advance a study of Locus Serenus as embedded in the cultural markers but nonetheless ignored due to lack of involvement by the stakeholders. The idea of a changing history and aesthetics must be addressed here in respect to the notion of Locus Serenus such as in the case of Hollenbeck Park as precisely exemplifying equally a place of rest and danger. And because of the pluralistic nature of both its social and cultural plexus Boyle Heights deliberates an almost insular concept of history, one that begins and ends with the oblivious self-emergent individual. To use the city as a text, all forgotten pages must be brought to bear witness to the continuity and relevance of the many “experiences” present in the architecture, names of streets and buildings, urban planning, and the individuals who left their mark on the Boyles Heights walls, graffiti—urban frescos. The city changes exponentially to the growth and decay of urban spaces such as Boyle Heights, but the urban landscape is open-ended and multiple in its memorizing of public and private histories alike. A good example for this memorializing is evident in the works of Graffiti Artists and its relation to the city boundaries: “The geographical boundaries of the East Side and West Side, as defined by the L.A. writers have little to do with how the average residents of Los Angeles distinguish the two areas [East and West].” 8 The gaps and disconnects between “regular” residents and resident street artists account for the creation of two maps, two cities: the politically legitimate one and the subversive one which together comprise an urban aesthetic rebellious other. To ensure that all elements of the urban discourse will be harmonized in the course is naive but not without merits since even though education and public engagement do not always go hand in hand they can be reconfigured to do so. As the neighborhood evolves towards gentrification and urban planning, other layers are added and hopefully this time around Boyle Heights will be turned into a Locus Serenus—incorporating its past and present lives. Through the years in which the “Homeboy” Histories had been taught as a course the concept of change/permanence was introduced into an all-encompassing picture of Boyles Heights as a place of complexities and multiplicities. Through Boyles Heights representations in art and architecture, memories in film and print, its picture is augmented with an aesthetic dimension that renders past and present more coherently. In addition, the human components of the urban space are introduced through mentoring the artists and designers as they begin to incorporate to their visual vocabulary elements that previously were considered unimportant or outright intrusive. The class mentor, a former gang member and a self-taught artist, has begun to incorporate the neighborhood’s architectural elements. These elements historically belong to previous generations of residents who were intending to design Boyle Heights as an ideal urban habitat, into a proto Beverly Hills, were perceived as un-

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important and disruptive, and hence as a fair game for vandalizing. After lectures, field trips, and historical contextualization, the former gang member/artist has begun to incorporate elements such as bridges as a reclaiming of past’s fossils and thus as a way to mediate past and present histories. Seeing the transformation of the former gang member’s art, as the teaching self-ethnography was incorporated into his work, embodied the best testament to creating a stable flow of personal history by appropriating the bridge motif as a metaphor of continuity and permanence. If we agree that meaning is to be found within the cultural sphere, then in the context of these communities to which so many newcomers arrive daily the idea and desire for Locus Serenus becomes an imperative, although the multiple layers of history can become a hindrance to appropriating the place as a Locus Serenus. Moreover, the tensions that arise between the expectations and the new reality can disturb the delicate balance between place and individual. To integrate and embed these past-present layers a Locus Serenus is needed for allowing the incorporation of the individual and his or her expectations in such a manner that offers a sense of continuity. The aesthetics principle of Locus Serenus is also a way through which education can greatly benefit by addressing the values of place and moment within the urban context. Education can deliberate a moral commitment to the place that will result in less of the “brain drain” in these communities by those who experience it as a ground for their arrival. The notion of the urban space as a “revolving door” is amply evident in the Boyle Heights area. Individuals who have attained education are moving out as soon as they obtain a degree and leave behind a deprived community with no hopes for the future except being the landing place to newcomers. This perpetual movement or process has been noted by Spalding while researching Boyle Heights through its changes and time. Commenting about the social problem besieging the city, Spalding asserts, “the problem was principally attributable to a generation gap.” 9 Another tendency can be spotted in the phenomenon of new urbanites that are finding Boyle Heights an attractive alternative to long commutes into the city and are competing with an already strained community for space and meaning. As this new dynamic unravels, the social and economic disparities accentuate and provide yet another layer through which different ethnicities and histories are intertwined to create the present Boyle Heights with its unique aesthetics. To decode such urban aesthetics means to account for the ongoing impact of global migrations and internal shifts in American cities. The challenge lies in ascertaining the role of these new developments in the already strained history of the area. Only time can tell. To education and aesthetics Boyles Heights turns out to be an ideal laboratory for interrogating the ways in which urban-

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ization unfolds in an era in which space is also cyber and no longer only that of neighborhoods, parks, and roads. CODA Using place and locale as a direct reference is important to be able to create a direct and meaningful relationship between the stakeholders and their communities. The detachment created by electronic media creates a virtual illusory second stage that is divorced from the realities on the ground. The visual image is a far cry from reality; it is devoid of the contradictions inherent to being there. The aesthetic experience is not only visual, it is also pluralistic in the many senses it encompasses, and the way it is analyzed varies depending on how invested the individual is. There is no substitute for the experience of being there, and that presence is usually the first and definitive encounter with the Locus Serenus. NOTES 1. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/05/dropout.rate.study/index.html. 2. Philip Martin, “Managing International Labor Migration in the 21st Century,” in South Eastern Journal of Economics 1, 2003: 9–18. 3. Doug Sounders, How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World (New York: Pantheon, 2010). 4. Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Verso Books, 1998). 5. Edward Knox, “Between Cultural Studies and Cultural Competence,” in French Review 72 (4), 1999. 6. Audry Bennett, “Interactive Aesthetics,” in Design Issues 18 (3), 2002. 7. Audry Bennett, “Interactive Aesthetics.” 8. Steve Grody, Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art (New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 2006), 21. 9. Sophie Spalding, “The Myth of the Classic Slum: Contradictory Perceptions of Boyle Heights Flats, 1900-1991,” in Journal of Architectural Education 45 (2), Feb. 1992.

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Index

3-D printer, 47, 115 Abramson, Glenda, 110n9 Acconci, Vito, 172 Adjave, David, 173 aesthetic: disequilibrium, 143–145; education, 1, 186; experience, 3, 11, 68, 69–70, 73, 75, 83, 84, 85, 86, 112, 176, 177, 178, 179, 187; info-, 42; judgment, 58, 144, 176; kinesthetic, 102, 103; machine, 41; neuro-, 2, 3, 71; perceptual-, 122; pleasure, 67–68, 69, 123; principle, 142, 143, 186; program, 1; qualities, 3, 68; responsibility, 1; urban, 5, 178, 179, 181, 184, 185, 186 Akerman, Chantal, 135 Albert, David, 146n14 Alberti, Leon Battista, 17 Andre, Karl, 166 Ansell-Pearson, Keith, 125n18, 125n20, 125n21 Antamoro, Giulio, 117 Antomarini, Brunella, 4, 5, 125n6, 125n9 Arendt, Hannah, 145n5 Aristotle, 19, 22, 23n12, 65, 87n2, 100, 118, 145n2 arrival city, 180–181 Artaud, Antonin, 172 artifice, 111, 113, 118, 119, 121, 123, 173 authorship, 54, 62, 120, 121 automaton/a, 4, 111, 116, 118, 123, 142 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 117 Baird, Davis, 125n11, 125n12 Ball, David, 109n4 Barricelli, Nills Aall, 142 Baudelaire, Charles, 133, 151 Baudrillard, Jean, 12, 22n4, 144, 147n29

Baumgarten, Alexander G., 155 Barthes, Roland, 131, 145n7 the Beatles, 45 Beato Angelico, 117 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 117 Behrman, Marlene, 88n22, 88n23 Bellay, Jean du, 153 Benjamin, Walter, 117, 118, 123, 125n6, 131, 145n5, 145n6 Bennett, Audry, 187n5, 187n6 Berg, Adam, 4, 5 Berg, Alban, 41 Bergman, Ingmar, 84 Bergson, Henri, 112 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 116, 117 Beshty, Walead, 146n12 Bicocchi, Mariagloria, 172 Blakeslee, Sandra, 78, 88n18, 88n19 Boetti, Alighiero, 166, 169, 170–171 Bosch, Hieronymus, 172 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 168, 174n5 Boym, Svetlana, 153, 161n1 Braun, Edward, 110n11 Brecht, Bertolt, 100, 104, 107, 110n11 Brentano, Franz, 145n2 Breuer, Marcel, 41 Broodthaers, Marcel, 168 Brook, Peter, 172 Bruno Giordano, 66n10, 172 Burroughs, William, 44 Burton, John, 153 Calderòn de la Barca, 177 Camillo, Giulio, 172 Caravaggio, 93 Careri, Giovanni, 117, 124n4 Carlos, Wendy, 117 Cassirer, Ernst, 145n2 Castells, Manuel, 63, 66n7 Cayrol, Jean, 158

195

196

Index

Chaplin, Charlie, 41 Chateaubriand, François Réné, 153 Chuang Tzu, 172 Cicero, 42 Cohen, J. J. Alain, 5 Cohn, Ronald, 146n25 Collingwood, R. George, 151 Cortès-Boussac, Andrea, 124n2 Costa, Mario, 22n1 Croce, Benedetto, 117 Cuppens, Wim, 146n23, 146n24 cut-up, 44 Daguerre, Louis, 146n13 Danto, Arthur, 124 Dawkins, Richard, 3, 89 Deleuze, Gilles, 105, 110n12, 112, 125n5, 129 Deutsch, David, 20, 23n11 Dick, Philip, 123, 152, 161 Dickinson, Peter, 109n2 digital : agent, 112; appearance, 22; description, 16; image, 9, 13, 16, 140; memory, 16; new-, 12; presentification, 4; reality, 99; simulation, 93; super-organism, 120; transference, 142, 143; trash, 64; video, 46 Diodato, Roberto, 2, 22n5 Disney, Walt, 47, 48 DIY, 40, 49, 50 Dobbs, Bob, 89 Dominicis, Gino De, 166, 169, 169–170 Donald, Merlin, 120, 125n10 download/upload, 41, 43, 45, 48, 55; downloader/uploader, 3, 39, 41; syndrome, 55 Duchamp, Marcel, 40, 43, 116, 124n3, 167–168 Duras, Marguerite, 159 Dürer, Albrecht, 171 Eckhardt, 172 Edelstein, Barry, 103, 109n5, 109n8, 110n10, 110n14 Einstein, Albert, 134, 146n15 Eisenstein, Sergej, 44, 111, 122 electronic: body, 13; chips, 152; elaborator, 19; picture, 177;

unimedia, 39; warmth, 89 Eliasson, Olafur, 166, 169, 173 Engelberger, Joseph, 91 fabbing, 47, 53 Fellini, Federico, 150, 154, 155 Ffychte, D. H., 88n24 filter, 3, 57, 59, 59–61, 62–63, 64, 65; out and forward, 66n3 Findlay, John, 87n1 Flores-Peña, Ysamur, 5 Flusser, Villem, 130, 145n1 Focillon, Henri, 121, 125n13 Foster, Susan, 101, 107, 109n2, 109n3 Foucault, Michel, 161 Fraser, Simon, 109n2 Frauenfelder, Mark, 50 Freud, Sigmund, 154 Fuller, Richard Buckminster, 52, 53, 127 Gallese, Vittorio, 101 Garroni, Emilio, 65n2 Gehlen, Arnold, 12, 22n2 gestalt, 49, 69, 78–81, 83, 86, 112, 113, 122, 184 Ghirlandaio, 117 Gilchrist, Iain, 87n1 Gödel, Kurt, 142 Goffman, Erving, 109n2 Gònzales-Torres, Felix, 69 Goodale, Mel, 72, 87n1–87n10 Goodman, Nelson, 165, 166 Gould, Glen, 117 Goya, Francisco, 93, 95, 172 Grau, Oliver, 14 Greenaway, Peter, 117 Grody, Steve, 187n7 Grossi, Dario, 88n23 Grotowski, Jerzy, 110n11, 172 Guattari, Félix, 118, 125n5, 129 Gyson, Brion, 44 Hacking, 132, 146n10 hacktivists, 40, 49 Halligan, Peter, 88n22 Halverson, John, 88n25 Heidegger, Martin, 134, 135, 144, 146n16–146n18, 153

Index Hero, from Alexandria, 118 Hirst, Damien, 163 Hollingworth, Andrew, 88n13 Horace, 184 Horn, Roni, 133 Horsefield, Craigie, 133 Howard, R. J., 88n24 Humphrey, Nicholas, 73, 87n12 Humphreys, Glin, 72, 87n8 Husserl, Edmund, 1, 128, 132, 144, 145n8, 145n9, 147n27 hybrid, 11, 13, 22, 50, 136 hypercontext, 43 Iaria, Tersa, 5 image: body-, 9, 11, 13; hybridized, 133; kinetic, 112; mental, 68, 69, 73, 74, 78, 79–81, 82; sensory, 17; -temps, 112; thing-, 9; transcoded, 4. See also digital information: -based art, 42; diets, 59, 62; filter, 62; media, 1; overload, 57, 59, 60, 61, 65; ready-, 168; revolution, 64; sensory, 14; system, 1; technologies, 12 integration, 2, 48, 64, 101, 102, 103, 114, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124 Jacob, Pierre, 72, 87n1, 88n13, 88n14 Jaffe-Berg, Erith, 4 Jägerstätter, Franz, 103, 109n6, 109n7 Jamison, Kay, 88n28 Jay-Z, 45 Jeannerod, Marc, 72, 87n1, 87n10, 88n13, 88n14 John of the Cross, 172 Jullien, François, 121, 125n7, 125n14 Kandinsky, Wassily, 10, 17 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 23n10, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 64–65, 105, 151, 155 Kelly, kevin, 125n16 Kertész, André, 133 Kiefer, Anselm, 150, 156, 157–158 Kierkegaard, Søren, 153 kinesthetics, 4, 100, 109n2. See also aesthetic kinetic, 102, 104, 105, 112 Kircher, Athanasius, 130, 145n4

197

Klein, Norman, 183 Knox, Edward, 183, 187n4 Kockelmans, Joseph, 110n15 Koolhaas, Rem, 43 Kosslyn, Steven, 87n6 Kraus, Karl, 48, 54 Krauss, Rosalind, 164, 168, 174n3, 174n4 Kristeller, Paul, 166 Kubrick, Stanley, 117, 161 Kuhn, Thomas, 155 Kurtzweil, Ray, 161, 161n3 Lanni, Alessandro, 3 Léger, Fernand, 41 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 123, 125n22 Leonardo, 115, 130, 133, 145n4, 151, 160 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 12, 22n3 Lessing, G. Ephraim, 155 Levy, Pierre, 22n8 Lissitzky, El, 41 Llinas, Rodolfo, 88n17 Lloyd Wright, Frank, 127 Löwenheim, Leopold, 142 Luck, Stephen, 88n13 Luhmann, Niklas, 111, 114, 122, 124n1, 125n15 Lunenfeld, Peter, 3 Lynn, Greg, 47 Lyotard, Jean François, 144, 147n26, 147n27 Mach, Ernst, 69, 146n11 machine: aesthetics, 112; copier, 49; culture, 42–46, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55; divine, 123; industrial, 92; information, 118; living, 112; mimeograph, 49; mind-, 122; project, 101, 109n2; replicating, 142; robotical, 2; simulation, 93 machinic, 4, 111, 112, 118 Maistrello, Sergio, 64, 66n9 Manetas, Miltos, 3 Manovich, Lev, 167, 168, 174n1, 174n2 Martin, John, 101, 109n2 Marker, Chris, 135 Martin, Phillip, 22n2, 180 Marx, Karl, 113

198

Index

mash-up, 45, 46 Maturana, Humberto, 112 Mau, Bruce, 46 McConachie, Bruce, 101, 109n2 McGinn, Colin, 67, 87n11, 88n15 McLuhan, Marshall, 58, 89 media: electric, 58; electronic, 172, 175, 177, 187; hyper-, 12; information, 1; interdisciplinarity of, 164; mass, 58; multi, 42; new, 1, 3, 12, 57, 58, 63, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173; popular, 43; post-, 168; social, 58, 145, 163; techno-, 58; technologies, 1, 3; uni-, 39, 42, 43, 44, 53, 54 meme, 3, 45, 54, 89, 91, 92 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 106, 110n15, 145n2 Metzinger, Thomas, 88n17 Michelangelo, 74, 117, 155 Milner, David, 72, 87n1–87n10 Miyamoto, Ryuji, 156–157 mneem, 3, 89, 89–91, 92–93, 94–95 modders, 50 Modern Times, 41 montage, 44, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 121, 124, 135; of attractions, 116, 122; dialectical, 44; digital, 122 Morandi, Giorgio, 93 Muibridge, Edward, 135 multimediality, 14 Murakami, Takashi, 43 Nadar, 133 Nagel, Alexander, 125n8 Nauman, Bruce, 172 Neumann, John von, 142 Newman, Barnett, 76 Niépce, Nicéphore, 145n3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 105, 125n18 Noë, Alva, 87n4 noesis, 11, 16 noetic. See noesis Nouvel, Jean, 48 Oppenheimer, Robert, 142 organic, 16, 58, 112, 113, 114, 123, 124, 127 Orozco, Gabriel, 133

Paik, Nam June, 172 Palmer, S. E., 88n26 Pariser, Eli, 62, 63, 66n5 Parisi, Domenico, 2 Pasolini, Pierpaolo, 117 Pavis, Patrice, 102 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 123, 150 perception: indirect, 68, 77–79; locomotion, 3; logic of, 128, 131, 133, 135, 138, 139; of movement, 107; peripheral, 76; raw, 138; secondorder, 122; sensory, 14, 16, 107; stereoptic depth, 73; -vision, 17 Perniola, Mario, 165 Peterson, Elmer, 124n3 Pierannunzi, Enrico, 117 Plato, 41, 62, 145n2, 146n21 Podolsky, Boris, 146n15 Pòincare, Henri, 122, 125n19 Pontormo, Jacopo, 172 Popper, Karl, 129, 136, 137–138, 146n19, 146n21, 155 Poster, Mark, 147n29 present/presentness/presentification, 4, 5, 42, 55, 99, 105, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 160, 168. See also digital Pylyshyn, Zenon, 88n21 Quéau, Philippe, 17, 23n9 Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 78, 88n18, 88n19 Rancière, Jacques, 144–145, 147n28, 151 randomness, 44 ready-made,. See also virtual 27, 28, 40, 43, 116, 117, 168 Rembrandt, 117 Resnais, Alain, 151, 158, 159 Revonsuo, Antti, 87n4, 88n16–88n20 Riddock, Jane, 72, 87n8 Robertson, Ian, 88n22 robot, 2, 25–28, 29–32, 34, 36, 37, 50, 91, 113, 118, 144 Rosen, Nathan, 146n15 Rothko, Marc, 76 Rubens, 160 ruins: aesthetics of, 5; analysis of, 149; modern-day, 183; new forms of, 152; spectacle of, 150; use of, 151

Index Rumi, Jelaluddin, 172 Russell, Jesse, 146n25 Santhouse, A.M. 5n24 Sanouillet, Michel, 124n3 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 153 Scarlatti, Domenico, 117 Schindler, Rudolph, 41 Schliemann, Heinrich, 155 Schwitters, Kurt, 166 Scott, Ridley, 152, 161 Seracini, Maurizio, 160 Serra, Richard, 67, 73 Shakespeare, Willliam, 113 Sheldon, Kennon, 88n27 Shirky, Clay, 57, 60, 65n1 simulation, 11, 14, 17, 20, 26, 27, 28, 53, 54, 93, 133 Skolem, Thoralf, 142 Sobol, Joshua, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109n5–110n16 Sounders, Doug, 180, 187n3 Spalding, Sophie, 186, 187n8 Spielberg, Stephen, 161 spin-off, 43, 184 Spruijt, Robert, 3 Steuer, Jonathan, 22n6, 22n7 Stewart, Martha, 43 Sustein, Cass, 66n8 Szeemann, Harald, 164 Tarantino, Quentin, 43 Tarski, Alfred, 138 Teller, Edward, 142 Teresa, d’Avila, 100, 104, 116 Thompson, Ean, 87n4, 176 Thompson, Robert Farris, 176 tie-in, 43 tool fatigue, 39 Toveé, Martin, 87n5 transcoding, 3, 4, 128, 129, 135, 142–145, 146n25

199

Trojano, L., 88n23 Turing, Allan, 44, 142, 167 Twitter, 2, 3, 57, 58, 58–59, 60–61, 64, 65 Ulam, Stanislaw, 142 unimodernism, 3, 39, 41, 44, 53 Valéry, Paul, 153 Varela, Francisco, 112 Vasari, Giorgio, 151, 160 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 118 Velazquez, Diego, 94 Vermeer, Jan, 172 videosphere, 12 Viola, Bill, 117, 166, 169, 172 virtual: artifice, 119; artwork, 11; body, 10, 11–22; communities, 50; entity, 124; environment, 9, 10, 11, 17–19; goods, 40; presence, 120, 123; readymades, 117; reality, 17, 20, 75, 177; space, 3, 17; spectator, 10 Wall, Jeff, 133, 146n12 Warhol, Andy, 166 Weinberger, David, 61, 62, 66n3, 66n4 White, Pae, 47 Willett, John, 110n11 Winckelmann, Johann, 155 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 63, 69, 115 Wolfe, Jeremy, 87n6 Wolfram, Stephen, 4, 142 Wood, Christopher, 125n8 Wozzeck, 41 WYMIWYM, 47, 48, 53 WYSIWYG, 46, 47, 48 Yates, Francis, 172 Zeki, Samir, 71, 87n2 Žižek, Slavoj, 151

About the Editors

Brunella Antomarini (PhD in Aesthetics at Gregoriana University, Rome) teaches Aesthetics and Phenomenology at John Cabot University, Rome. Among her publications are Pensare con l’errore (2008; English translation, Thinking through error, 2012), The Maiden Machine (2013), La preistoria acustica della poesia (2013), and La percezione della forma in Hans Urs von Balthasar (2004). Adam Berg is associate professor at Otis College of Art and Design, where he teaches aesthetics and critical studies. He holds a PhD and MA in philosophy from Haifa University and a BA in Philosophy from University of Toronto and Haifa University. Berg studied Academia di Belle Arti in Rome. His video and installations have been shown internationally. He has been artist-in-residence at the McLuhan Center for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California. He is author of Conversations with Giordano Bruno (1997), Adam Berg (2008), and Evidence (2010).

201

About the Contributors

Alain J.-J. Cohen is professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies at University of California, San Diego, where he has spent a career dedicated to the dissemination of psychoanalysis (theoretical and clinical), film analysis/film theory, and semiotics, about which he has single-authored 100-odd research articles in professional journals and scholarly volumes. He is a member of SDPSI (San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute). Roberto Diodato teaches aesthetics in Milan and Filosofia applicata in Lugano. A preeminent Italian specialist in the relationship between aesthetics and cyber-technologies, he has recently published Aesthetics of the Virtual (2012), Logos estetico (2012) L’invisibile sensibile (2012), and Estetica dei media e della comunicazione (2011, with A. Somaini). Ysamur M. Flores-Peña (PhD, Folklore and Mythology) is associate professor of Cultural Studies/Folklore at Otis College of Art and Design. He has extensive publications on African-based religions in the New World, including Santeria Garments and Altars: Speaking Without a Voice (1994) and Fit for a Queen: Analysis of a Consecration Outfit in the Cult of Yemaya. He has been teaching fulltime at Otis since Fall 2005. Teresa Iaria is an artist with a Laurea in Philosophy. She is based in Rome and teaches visual art at the “Brera” Academy of Fine Art in Milan, Italy. Her work explores the potential of the visual language in dialogue with the languages of science, poetry, and music. This interaction produces thought-experiments in which each artwork is the tip of a submerged model. Her works have been published in journals such as Nature Physics and Plastik Art & Science, by the University of Paris Sorbonne. Among her recent exhibitions are Biennale Italia-Cina, Reggia Reale di Monza, 2012; “Strange Attractors” Pio Monti Gallery, Rome 2011; “Cose mai viste,” curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, Diocletian’s Baths Rome, 2008; INFN, National Institute of Nuclear Physics, Frascati, 2006; 42°Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo cinema, Film Festival, Pesaro; and 1998 Traumwelten, Literaturhaus, Salzburg, curated by Tomas Friedmann. Erith Jaffe-Berg is associate professor of theater at the University of California at Riverside where she researches multilingualism in theater, theo203

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About the Contributors

ries of translation, and commedia dell’arte. She is author of The Multilingual Art of Commedia dell’Arte (2009) and several articles in national and international journals. She has contributed chapters to La terra di Babele: Saggi sul plurilinguismo nella cultura italiana, eds. Dario Brancato and Marisa Ruccolo (2011); Performance, Exile and “America,” eds. Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (2009); and International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformation in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker, eds. Maya E. Roth and Sara Freeman (2008). She is also an active member in the Ovation award–winning Los Angeles–based theater ensemble The Son of Semele Ensemble. For her work, Jaffe-Berg has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of California, and the Canadian government. Alessandro Lanni is a journalist and writer based in Rome. His latest book is Avanti Popoli! Democrazia, populismo e militanza 2.0 (2011). Peter Lunenfeld (PhD from UCLA in Film, Television, and New Media) is professor in the Design and Media Arts department at UCLA. He is one of the steering committee members of the campus-wide, interdisciplinary Digital Humanities undergraduate minor and graduate concentration. Lunenfeld’s books include The Digital Dialectic (1999), Snap to Grid (2000), USER (2005), and The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (2011), from which this essay has been excerpted and modified. He is coauthor of Digital_Humanities. As creator and editorial director of the Mediawork project, he produced a pamphlet series for the MIT Press that redefined the relationship between serious academic discourse and graphic design, and between book publishing and the World Wide Web. Miltos Manetas is a multimedia artist, born in Athens, based between Los Angeles and Rome. He earned his degrees in Milan from the Accademia di Brera. He works with oil painting, computer, Internet, and videogame art. His main exhibitions have taken place at international galleries and museums, such as Yvon Lambert and Centre Pompidou, Paris; Gagosian, Los Angeles; PS1 and Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Chicago; and various Biennale in Prague, Valencia, Venice. Domenico Parisi is a pre-eminent linguist, experimental scientist, philosopher, and author of many international publications. He is a member of the Laboratory of Artificial Life and Robotics at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council in Rome. Parisi works at constructing robots that can illuminate how humans behave and their societies and has recently published the articles “Robots that have emotions” and “Male and female robots” in the journal Adaptive Behaviour.

About the Contributors

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Rob Spruijt is associate professor at Otis College of Art and Design and also teaches at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. An internationally exhibiting painter, he has a PhD in Mathematical Psychology, a PhD in Epidemiology, an MS from the University of Amsterdam, and a BFA. In addition to his extensive academic articles and publications on human neuropsychology and perception, Spruijt is a technical expert on Dutch still life painting and produces contemporary still life paintings in oil on panel.