An Ethico-Phenomenology of Digital Art Practices 9780367406295, 9780367808112

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Intro – epiphanies
2. What is digital?
3. From art to art practices (phenomenology)
4. The medium will still be the message until …
5. Looking for an identity (ethics)
6. Outro – broken mirrors
Index

Citation preview

An Ethico-Phenomenology of Digital Art Practices

Digital art practitioners work under the constant threat of a medium – the digital – that objectifies the self and depersonalises artistic identities. If digital technology is a pharmakon in that it can be either cure or poison, with regard to digital art practices the digital may have in fact worked as a placebo that has allowed us to push back the date in which the crisis between digital and art will be given serious thought. This book is hence concerned with an analysis of such a relationship and proposes their rethinking in terms of an ethico-phenomenological practice informed by an in-depth understanding of the digital medium. Giuseppe Torre engages with underground cultures such as Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and its ties with art discourse. The discussion is informed by various philosophical discourses and media theories, with a focus on how such ideas connect back to the existing literature in perfor­ mance studies. Replete with examples of artwork and practices, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies, art and technology. Giuseppe Torre is a Lecturer in Digital Arts at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

An Ethico-Phenomenology of Digital Art Practices

Giuseppe Torre

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Giuseppe Torre The right of Giuseppe Torre to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-40629-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80811-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

1

Intro – epiphanies

1

2

What is digital?

14

3

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

26

4

The medium will still be the message until …

41

5

Looking for an identity (ethics)

54

6

Outro – broken mirrors

62

Index

74

Acknowledgements

To my family and friends with a special thanks to Basil Vassilicos, Tijmen Lansdaal, Lorenzo Girardi and Fabio Tommy Pellizzer and all the philoso­ phy group for the organised seminars, long chats, debates and readings sug­ gestions over numerous pints.

1

1

Intro – epiphanies

In this book I problematise those art practices defined by an engagement with digital technologies. The choice of “digital technology” as opposed to just “technology”, I stress, is not coincidental. I contend indeed that there are important peculiarities of the digital that a generic discourse on modern technology alone does not account for. Only in light of these peculiarities does it make sense to talk of digital art practices; without such acknowl­ edgment saying “art” would suffice. Before entering into the details of such discourse, though, I wish to intro­ duce the broader issue: the one between art and modern technologies. Their relatedness is something that we take too often for granted, as if it was a marriage destined to happen one way or another. After all, many would say any art practice has always been done with an instrument; technology is just a modernly sophisticated one – artists need material to challenge what­ ever that may be. The wealth of festivals, exhibitions, university courses, lit­ erature and more are all proof that such marriage was indeed destined to happen. But things are much more nuanced when looked at from the inside, we know that. Adorno sees problems from the get-go: The suspicious question as to art in the age of technology, as unavoidable as it is a socially naive slogan of the epoch, can be approached only by reflection on the relation of artworks to purposefulness. […] It is not that rationality kills the unconscious, the substance of art, or whatever; technique alone made art capable of admitting the unconscious into itself. But precisely by virtue of its absolute autonomy the rational, purely elaborated artwork would annul its difference from empirical existence; without imitating it, the artwork would assimilate itself to its opposite, the commodity. It would be indistinguishable from completely functional works except that it would have no purpose, and this, admit­ tedly, would speak against it. The totality of inner-aesthetic purposeful­ ness develops into the problem of art’s purposefulness beyond its own sphere, a problem for which it has no answer. (Adorno 2002, 217–218)

2

Intro – epiphanies

A relationship between art and technology implies one between science and aesthetics for which different, at times opposite, ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies and teleologies exist. From the beginning, even outside philo­ sophical circles, a certain tension did not go unnoticed. In the 1960s, we see from the outset an opposition between two groups: the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) and the Computer Art Society (CAS) – an opposition that in many respects is one between the new and old continents. The E.A.T., with its roots in the engineering conference IEEE (Institute of Electrics and Electronics Engineers) and apolitical/pro industry approach to technology, fostered synergies between artist and engineers. By no means did the search for such synergies mean no hierarchies and yet a more open environment was certainly proposed. The Computer Art Society on the other hand (CAS), with roots in the academic critical culture, was also oriented towards divulgating the use of technology among artists but certainly less inclined to foster an equal relationship with engineers when it comes to matters of aesthetic or an equal footing between art and technology. The first direct clash between these two modes of interpreting art and technology’s relationship occurred during the preparations of the Osaka World Fair in 1970. Various critical groups, led by the Research Center Art Technology and Society in Amsterdam, called for an artists’ boycott of the Expo. Their man­ ifesto asked artists to refrain from working for a show that advertises con­ sumerism and the wonders of the same technological progress co-responsible for countless war atrocities. Many followed. Many others did not. The apoli­ tical and pro-industry E.A.T. group worked for the Expo, GUTAI too, and their huge success made the presence of art and technology a constant feature of all subsequent world fairs. Certainly, in the late 1960s, a time in which very few people would have seen a computer, there was a huge need to show people that technology was not something to fear and E.A.T. played a big role in that. CAS and the Research Center Art Technology and Society also sought a relationship with technology and worked tirelessly towards digital literacy but they were also aware of the cultural and economic imbalance between technology and art.1 Today, the situation is unchanged. We have festivals like ArtFutura and Ars Electronica that, substantially, propose technological wonders as art’s progress. Or festivals like Transmediale, where a more critical attitude towards technology and its societal impact is explored (often in dystopic terms to counterbalance, if anything, an overly positive view seen elsewhere). In an always-connected dimension of today’s world these two souls coexist at any one time and place on the web as well as in public spaces, galleries, aca­ demia, funding agencies and so on. Since these early years we see then two camps. One for which technology represents an opening to new possibilities of artistic expression and hence technology is embraced as a positive force leading to always higher highs. The other an opposing side for which technology should be scrutinised more

Intro – epiphanies

3

critically. Technology, in this latter case, is seen as something that has a huge, often bad, impact on society. Consequently, technology’s role into art prac­ tices should be carefully circumscribed within specific functions – usually as a tool – that are only contingent to the realisation of aesthetic intents. Lev Manovich’s article titled Don’t call it art (Manovich 2003) is probably the clearest and the most famous example of the tension between these two positions. But even before all this, we can read again Adorno who already in 1970 pictures the situation with these words: The current tendency, evident in media of all kinds, to manipulate acci­ dent2 is probably an effort to avoid old-fashioned and effectively super­ fluous craftsmanlike methods in art without delivering art over to the instrumental rationality of mass production. (…) the technological art­ work is by no means a priori more consistent than that which, in response to industrialization, turns inward, intent on producing the effect of an “effect without a cause.” The growing relevance of technology in artworks must not become a motive for subordinating them to that type of reason that produced technology and finds its continuation in it. (Adorno 2002, 217) Simply put, Adorno is stating: do not fall prey to technology’s reason! My feelings, matured from a modest, yet long withstanding, activity as a digital art practitioner, are that we either already have fallen prey or we are not navigating safe waters. The reason is simple: the tension between science and art is far from being resolved. What Adorno calls “subordination” is a danger that I see originating from epistemological and ontological perspectives specific to science and art and that informs both tech-enthusiasts and tech-critics. I call these perspectives epistemological optimism and output essentialism. Allow me to illustrate them in order. I use epistemological optimism to describe an idea for which art is seen as set on the same path of progress as science. Karl Popper, from whom I am borrowing the term, used it to describe an enthusiastic attitude towards knowledge and its progress through observa­ tion (empiricism) and intellectual intuition (rationalism) (Popper 2002, 7). For Popper, this is nothing more than a false epistemology that despite having helped people to think for themselves and refuse dogma, is also an attitude that, implying that truth is manifest, leads to fanaticism and authoritarianism. A similar attitude pervades technological art practices. Those sharing an all-too-enthusiastic approach to technology end up aligning or confusing aesthetic objectives with technology’s one. Technology appears able to shorten the path to the achievements of one’s aesthetic objectives while the reality is that such objectives are no one’s, other than technology’s. A clear

4

Intro – epiphanies

example of such an attitude is in the adoption of quantitative and qualita­ tive methods for both the analysis and the making of artworks as evident in evolutionary, cybernetic and AI art but also in the increasing number of students who naively approach my office thinking that asking people their opinion of their work is the way to make a better, if not the best, artwork of all time. Not the student’s fault, I add; it is our fault for not having yet realised how enslaved to the rule of science we have become – an enslave­ ment brilliantly synthesised by Jon McKenzie with: perform or else … (McKenzie 2008). For those who come with a more critical attitude towards technology in the art, the situation is not that different. In this case the optimism is derived by a vicinity, or a self-proclaimed direct lineage, with the 20th century avant-garde for whom the mantra is: innovate, new, push boundaries/state of the art, read the present to see the future – indeed the guard that goes ahead (avant) of the mass. A superficial understanding of the avant-garde would translate contextspecific necessities in a one-size-fits-all epistemology for which the goal of an art practice resides in making something new; something that pushes the boundaries of the art status quo. For this reason, similar to the tech-enthu­ siast group, technology brings on an opportunity, or an excuse, to inform a culture for which “new” is unequivocally “better”. However, even in the case of a more refined analysis we come to the same conclusion. In fact the problem resides in this very “intellectual refinement” for which art has become “merely an object of intellectual consideration – ‘and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philoso­ phically what art is’” (Danto 2014, 31). Art as philosophy means that now the practice is an investigation into the nature of art and for which the answer is manifest. As such art is entrapped not only in a false epistemology but also and more importantly in an episte­ mological discourse that it is not its own, but is in fact dictated by extrinsic and generalised onto-teleologies, rather than a practice of intrinsic and con­ tingent necessities of the self. A problem that more than ever is also engaging academics and researchers who practice art within universities and that are asked, more or less explicitly, to answer epistemological and ontological questions regarding their practice, otherwise invalidating the definition of their efforts as “research”. Art as philosophy is where the Danto/Hegel thesis would locate the end of art. For me it is where Popper’s epistemological optimism becomes relevant to technological art practices. True and powerful is Stiegler when stating that technology, as a pharma­ kon, can be either cure or poison (Stiegler 2012). Yet in relation to art, tech­ nology is neither the cure nor the poison but a placebo that allowed us to push back the date at which such a crisis will be given serious thought. With output essentialism I refer instead to an attitude whereby the essence of a technological artwork resides in its output. The departing point for the

Intro – epiphanies

5

analysis, critique and experience of said work is in what the devices throw back at us. The term connects with what Nick Montfort describes as “screen essentialism”, that is a bias in new media studies to consider the graphical interface as ground zero for an analysis of computer literary texts (Montfort 2004) and from which he will construct his argument to go beneath the visible right down to the computer code. I use “output” in place of “screen” because this book is concerned with works that are not solely experienced and pre­ sented through a screen but through a wealth of other means that target other senses too, such as hearing (speakers), touch (vibrotactile sensors), body (robotics) as well as all the other possible means through which the digital world manifests to us. In digital art practices, similarly to Montfort’s judgment of much digital humanities, the digital output is the ground zero for all discourses on art. Such an attitude towards aesthetic discourse, I should highlight, is not created by the digital but the result of an inherited persistent primacy of the art object, the experience derived from it, our relation to it, its values. The output, rather than the process leading to it as I will counter argue, becomes the essence of the artwork; everything originates, lives and dies through and for it … The primacy, essential nature, of the output manifests itself in either the way in which we hide technology or our ignorance of it. The former refers to works, performances and exhibition for which tech­ nology must be made disappear, made invisible. Audiences must be able to appreciate or engage with digital artworks, as one would do with software – simple, usable, presentable, well-finished and polished on the front end with all the messiness of the technical back end hidden from the public eye. The message is clear: “do not bother with technicalities, focus on the results; there you will find the essence of the artwork”. The latter mode of manifesting – our ignorance of technology – concerns our disregard or inability to fully understand and appreciate material labour in both art (now a concept) and technology (the mere implementation of it). A case in point is the famous work by Arcangel titled Clouds, now part of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A work that the museum describes on their website with these words: Cory Arcangel ‘hacked’ a cartridge of Super Mario Brothers, the original version of the blockbuster Nintendo video game released in the United States in 1985. By tweaking the game’s code, the artist erased all of the sound and visual elements except the iconic scrolling clouds. On a formal level, the project is reminiscent of paintings that push representation toward abstraction: how many elements can be removed before the ability to discern the source is lost? Painting, representation and abstraction are all words describing the output and its effect. The question of removal for the purpose of retaining an identity

6

Intro – epiphanies

is a question very relevant to the arguments discussed in this book. But the most important aspect of this work is not in what was done or achieved but in the way in which it was done and achieved. From this perspective this work appears to be nothing short of a hoax. There is no erasure of everything but the clouds. The ROM hacked is not even the original Nintendo ROM. What was done instead was to approximate the sky and the clouds in Super Mario so as to portray a feeling of endless scrolling Super Mario clouds. But that would have been a different work – different altogether in intentions, motiva­ tion and consequent analysis in countless books of art history. The proof of this was given ten year later when Patrick LeMieux decided to reproduce Cory Arcangel’s hack by studying and following all the doc­ umentation – code, tutorials, VHS tapes – that Arcangel provided in relation to his hack. Soon something emerged very clearly: Arcangel did not do what he said he did. He did not hack the Super Mario console. At best one can say that he took a new ROM and programmed it so as to reproduce the effect of Mario’s clouds. There is, to use the politically correct language of LeMieux, “a discrepancy between art historical accounts and the technical operations of Arcangel’s artwork” (Lemieux 2018). But LeMieux also shows that a true hack can be achieved. In performing the hack as it should have been per­ formed, LeMieux realises that the only thing that cannot be removed is the coin icon for the coin counter: This coin, known as ‘Sprite 0,’ is the first sprite of the Nintendo’s Picture Processing Unit and the only sprite that includes a hard-coded hit flag. Time does not move without money and making ‘Sprite 0’ invisible free­ zes the game. This coin then, only appears to offer the player a ‘heaven’ and, in doing so, reveals the intimate and intractable relation between scrolling software and the processes of the PPU chip as well as the larger circuits of global capital through which this game continues to move. (Lemieux 2015, 34) Suddenly the emperor knows he is without clothes. We discover that resources change results; that material is at the core of an art practice and that art, like the neoliberal culture it often attacks, has instead learned to justify any means in the name of whatever intentions or concepts one may see in it. I do not wish that the Whitney Museum would trash Arcangel’s work. I would wish to have Arcangel’s and LeMieux next to each other for contrast – as a dual work in itself. **** Coming to terms with the diverse epistemologies, ontologies and teleologies of art and technology is only the beginning towards a hopeful resolution of their relational tensions. We need to take technology seriously.

Intro – epiphanies

7

We ought to see technology not as a tool but as a space informed and shaped by an endless process of self-reinvention – a collective individuation process in Simondon’s parlance or a multi-stratified map in Guattari’s one. We need to become competent and fearless technologists or risk paying the price of a Kafkian art practice where we become “functionaries control[ing] a game over which [we] have no competence” (Flusser 2018, 28). With specific reference to the digital world, examples of such efforts exist in both media literature and art practices. At the dawn of the new millennium we see an exponential growth of literature concerned with software and code as a theme for media studies and literature and concerned with the infra­ structure enabling software, its archaeologies, its politics, culture and more3. Critical code studies, for example, as a subdomain of digital humanities, showed how to go beyond the functional elements of code by understanding it as literary text from which to extract a diverse range of the socio-cultural and historical elements, conventions, grammars, gender biases, ethics, work rela­ tions etc.4 Today, many texts are written in a Kittlerian/Simondonian fashion – that is, a style where a humanities discourse is complemented by an in-depth technical knowledge of machines.5 In addition to theoretical works, there are also examples of art practices that have engaged with the inner cogs of the digital world. One could men­ tion Transmediale 2001, README 2002/3, RUNME.ORG, Live Coding and I would also go as far as to add Ars Electronica to this list. Countless more exist and we could go as far back as the early computer art of the 1960s. All these are just a few examples of digital art practices in which there is a direct engagement and manipulation of what many would consider both the material and immaterial6 character of the digital: code. The question I point to here, though, is another. I am not concerned with defining digital art but rather understanding the limits and possibilities of an art practice, intended as individuation, in relation to and through the digital. Can we recognise ourselves and/or others through the digital? Can we tell apart individuals so that what we experience is either the unfolding of, or a trace of, a subjectivising practice? How, where, when? Or, conceding to McLuhan, is it always the digital that is the unnameable under-signatory of all messages conveyed with it through a practice? By no means do I intend to escalate the tension between technology and art to war levels, yet, if you allow me, what comes to mind is the famous passage from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: Hence the saying: if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. (Sunzi and Lionel Giles 2015)

8

Intro – epiphanies

There is no war, of course; certainly not with technology. If it is a war it is perhaps with ourselves. Yet in this individuation journey through the digital we ought to study technology to check where and if the journey may be pre­ vented or lead astray. To date, I can list three deterrents brought about by the digital medium: standardisation, de-responsabilisation and abstraction. To each of them I suggest a possible counterattack, respectively: hack, ethics, phenomenology. Hereafter in order. Standardisation is the way in which digital technology grows and thrives. No standards mean no communication, no programming syntax, no logic, no rules. Without standards, technology would not even exist hence they are very important. Yet, standard cannot mean monoculture although this is what utilitarianism and the business of technology inevitably look for, and very successfully too. We are offered technology as a tool and as a product that, as with any other, a consumer should be able to use without an understanding of its internal mechanics – the tool should just please its consumers. This is not acceptable on many levels but from a strictly art practice per­ spective it may just be nonsense or antithetical. Art practitioners want to (or should) own their tools and engage with them in an open and unlimited manner. They want to personalise them, so they respond to personal needs rather than generic ones. Functions cannot be prescribed in the form of packages. We ought to retain the right to break things apart and put them back together, the way we want, if we want, and for whatever purpose we want. We must hack – a verb many do not like anymore, coincidentally because of the widespread use of another one, “open source”. Yet, I shall recall here that the word “open source” has been popularised by the industry for reasons that do not involve your freedom but to “accelerate technology development and industry adoption” (Linux Foundation) … aka subordination to technological reason.7 Open source culture has done a lot to open knowledge no doubt, but their proponents see themselves as makers not destroyers and, as far as I know, an art practice can only begin from chaos not (artificial) order. Personalisation is possible provided that one questions the boundaries within which such freedom is given. If my interaction with the digital is defined by limits I do not know or see, then I am not making a free choice but I am subordinate to the choices someone else prepared for me. The com­ plexity of the digital realm, exceeding the knowledge attainable by any indi­ vidual and coupled with a stultifying educational system and a pervading animalistic culture, forces a de-resposabilising attitude towards it. All our interactions become commands to command for which we remain “external to what [we] commands” (Simondon 2017, 255). We have timidly settled in our role as choice-makers from menus prepared by others while we have completely forgotten that we ourselves can cook or can certainly learn to!

Intro – epiphanies

9

To rehabilitate a responsible attitude towards the digital, one needs to be an active participant in the very making of it the same way as cooking is not just about mixing ingredients together but also about all the histories, practices, traditions, moods and so on that one’s practice keeps alive. One needs to locate oneself within what might be called a digital polis. This means to engage with an ethical practice oriented towards the self first. Any political engagement might be inevitable but it is certainly secondary in this context. There is no political project informing individual ethical stances such as in the debate that engaged Adorno and Lukacs. For this reason, the kind of ethics I will present are inspired instead by the Foucauldian study of the old greek-roman precept of the care of the self for which the focus on the individual is explicit. Ethics alone, at the same time, cannot define an art practice nor reduce it to ethical, political or scientific statements of sorts. The fashionable tendency to “state something” (Adorno 1986, 168) has distant roots that are still present today in a depoliticised en-mise and it may be for this reason that digital art practices are even more exposed to the winds of science’s epistemological optimism. “Stating” is something that science does. Through an art practice we “assert” instead as Adorno points out. And that is why, in my opinion, we also need a phenomenology of the arts: to assert the individuality of an experience that is both lived and reasoned. No totalising statements, nor generalised laws, nor extrinsic ends, nor, and contrary to Adorno in this case, political ones. To this end there is one last obstacle to overcome: abstraction. The digital is grounded on mathematical abstractions. Such abstraction works as a gravitational field attracting all to itself so as to transubstantiate all aspects of reality to a count too. Such disengaging effects towards the materiality of the world and the body, evident in games addicts, for example, reinstate a mind-body split of Cartesian descendance for which the body and the physical world are now a redundant inconvenience. Although imagining an art practice without a body is strange it should not surprise us, once the gravitational pull of the digital is understood, that a carnal artist such as Orlan considers the apex of her practice a work in which her body exists only as a digital representation of it.8 There is more. Abstraction works in parallel with the ever increasing con­ ceptualising nature of the work of the artist; a process that is incentivised by a division of labour where we have artists as concept generators and technicians as concept implementers. This is not something exclusive to important art studios but a modus operandi of many art schools too where students delegate to technicians the handling and fine tuning of “sophisticated” machinery required for the rea­ lisation of their ideas. This attitude is the heritage of a mode of understanding avant-garde prac­ tices. A mode for which the encounter with the abstract and elusive character

10

Intro – epiphanies

of a work of art acts as an exercise for the mind to comprehend the incom­ prehensible (Adorno 1986, 117). An exercise that helps us to come to terms with the brutality of the world in which we live9 and hence save us – intel­ lectual sophistication as pharmakon to the ignorance of the masses. In contrast, I propose a commitment to a particular mode of questioning art as an art practice. A mode of questioning that breaks and endlessly reconstructs the unity of the dichotomies of existence: body and mind, thinking and doing, concrete and abstract, living and the reasoning of the lived. In this process, what counts is the very process and hence a digital art practice becomes an individuation process led by a problematisation of the otherwise possibilities of being of the self in relation to and through the digital.10 As digital art practitioners we ought to pull up the veil of digital output and assert the self in relation to and through the inner workings of the digital world. To that end, we ought to find a home in both the technical and the aesthetics, the ethics and the phenomenon. Do not fall prey to technology’s reason. Find your signature so as to leave marks, that are undeniably yours, for you and others. I will then know that there is a we before an “I” also through the digital. **** Before embarking on this project there is a serious problem to address – terminology. It is the custom for each discipline to create its own terms to summatively recall complex ideas. Art practices that engage with technology are no exception to this, although exactly what ideas certain terms should refer to is vague. There is, I argue, little clarity coming to its terminology because terms are created not on the premises of an etymological study that points at their essence but rather to situate a set of practices within a specific tradition. The term “digital performance”, for example, highlights ties with the field of theatre and performance studies. The term “new media art” claims a his­ torical lineage with the early 20th century avant-garde. “Digital art”, which is often used interchangeably with “new media art”, differs from it by placing greater emphasis on the novelties brought about by the technical medium and hence it expands the set of practical and theoretical challenges in new media discourse (Simanowski 2011). More recently, the term postdigital has come to designate practices for which the specificity of the media, analogue or digital, is secondary (if of any importance at all) to the conceptual basis of the art­ work (Berry and Dieter 2015). In that, postdigital, while hinting at a con­ nection with digital art, is closer to the conceptual emphasis found in new media artworks. Where definitions are offered on the basis of a philosophical reasoning the matter does not get any clearer. Lopes, in a book that may have pleased more philosophers than media theorists and practitioners, defines computer art as that set of works that

Intro – epiphanies

11

“exploit the technology of computing in order to achieve interactivity” (McIver Lopes 2010, 27). This is hardly a fortunate choice in terminology, if only for the simple reason that early art experiments with computers, histori­ cally labelled as computer art, were not interactive at all. Yet it may be argued that it all depends on what one means by the word “interactive”. Katia Kwastek (2015), for example, would label interactive art any kind of artwork in which both “active participation” (p. 8) or “passive observation” by a human are at play. However, this definition weakens so greatly any boundaries between analogue and digital mediations that one would be inclined to ask why bother at all with a title such as “Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art”. The focus on interaction and hence on those who interact – namely performers and/or audience – easily stirs the conversation towards a consideration of the body, its disembodiment or embodiment, space, time, and soon we are at the doors of performance art studies. David M. Saltz, for example, supports the continuity between interactive art and performance arts but he also argues that “not all kinds of participatory interactions are performative” while only those for which “interaction itself becomes an aesthetic object” are (Saltz 1997). Such continuity and boundaries are also defended by performance art theorists who often extend the remit of performance studies well beyond the walls of what the theatre and the interpretation of a body is. Dixon, for example, uses digital performance to denote “the conjunction of technologies with the live performance arts” (Dixon and Smith 2015). He includes art forms such as gallery installations, net.art and digital games and excludes all other art forms in which no action is performed by either the performer or the audience. For many others, interactivity is not at all a sine qua non of a technological artwork but just one modality of presenting tech­ nological work. Software comes to the fore. For Lev Manovich, then, soft­ ware art is a “balance between the strong concept that is not inherently technological and the attention to software medium” (Manovich 2003). But software is not exclusively its output. It is also its code, and code, as Cox (2013) argues, is both a cultural and a technological action – it is a perform­ ing script/action/language (Speaking Code) … The list would be long and beyond the true scope of this book. The point here is not to delegitimise terms but to stress how such a fluidity of termi­ nology as Paul defines it (2015), in fact more like a Babel’s tower to me, makes it difficult to initiate any theoretical project on the subject of art and technology on solid groundings. To put it more lightly, if, as Agamben (2009) says, terminology is the poetic moment of thought then we may well be under the effects of an overdose of countless epiphanies. What follows is mine, then.

Notes 1 For more details: Fritz, Darko. 2016 “International networks of early digital arts.” In A companion to digital art, Christiane Paul. 46–6

12

Intro – epiphanies

2 Arguably, with the word “accident” Adorno refers to what today we call random or pseudo random routines. 3 A recent and very informative overview is offered in Berry, David M. 2015. The philosophy of software: code and mediation in the digital age. 4–5. But also Fuller (2008), Gourinova (2014), Parrikka (2018) to mention but a few. 4 Marino’s latest work presents a precise account of the field (Marino 2020). 5 Please refer to Kittler (2014) and Simondon (2017) for two eminent examples. But also to Kirschenbaum forensic work on the computer hard disk (2012). 6 Curiously, albeit understandably, code appears to be both material and immaterial in aesthetic literature. Of course, those advocating the primacy of the output would see code as immaterial. Those who study code would highlight its very tangible/ material aspects. 7 In the debate between “open source” and “free software”, many texts which align with the free software movement have adopted the term FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software). An important collection of studies on the influence of FLOSS in digital art practices is in Mansoux and de Val (2008). 8 It is Orlan herself to state this in an interview viewable: www.youtube.com/watch? v=-cgYvHNSNQM (1’50”). 9 “The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be com­ prehended” (Adorno 1986, 117). 10 I borrow the expression “otherwise possibility of being” from Mules (2009, 2) with whom he describes Foucault’s “exercise of freedom”.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1986. Aesthetics and politics. London: Verso. Adorno, Theodor W., Gretel Adorno, and Rolf Tiedemann. 2002. Aesthetic theory. London: Continuum. Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What is an apparatus? and other essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Berry, David Michael, and Michael Dieter. 2015. Postdigital aesthetics: art, computa­ tion and design. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Cox, Geoff, Alex McLean, and Franco Berardi. 2013. Speaking code: coding as aes­ thetic and political expression. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Danto, Arthur Coleman, and Lydia Goehr. 2014. After the end of art: contemporary art and the pale of history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dixon, Steven, and Barry Smith. 2015. Digital performance: a history of new media in theater, dance, performance art and installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Flusser, Vilém. 2018. Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books. Fritz, Darko. 2016. “International networks of early digital arts.” In A companion to digital art, Christiane Paul. 46–68. Fuller, Matthew. 2008. Software studies: a lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goriunova, Olga. 2014. Fun and software exploring pleasure, paradox and pain in computing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501300240. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2012. Mechanisms: new media and the forensic imagina­ tion. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kittler, Friedrich A., and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. 2014. The truth of the technological world: essays on the genealogy of presence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Intro – epiphanies

13

Kwastek, Katja, and Dieter Daniels. 2015. Aesthetics of interaction in digital art. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. LeMieux, Patrick. 2014. Everything but the clouds, Vimeo. Available at: https://vimeo. com/110857483. LeMieux, Patrick. 2015. Platforms games. Available at: www.patrick-lemieux.com/ LeMieux-Platform_Games.pdf. Manovich, Lev. 2003. Don’t call it art. Available at: http://manovich.net/index.php/ projects/don-t-call-it-art. Mansoux, Aymeric and de Val, Marloes. 2008. Floss + Art. Poitiers: GOTO10. Marino, Mark C. 2020. Critical code studies: initial methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McIver Lopes, Dominic. 2010. A philosophy of computer art. London: Routledge. McKenzie, Jon. 2008. Perform or else: from discipline to performance. Abingdon: Routledge. Montfort, Nick. 2004. The early materiality and workings of electronic literature. Available at: https://nickm.com/writing/essays/continuous_paper_mla.html. Mules, Warwick. 2009. Poie-sis and techne- in Foucault and Heidegger: Towards an Aesthetics of Free Being [Revised Version]. Available at: http://warwickmules.com/a rticles/Techne%20and%20Poiesis%20in%20Foucault%20and%20Heidegger.pdf. Parikka, Jussi. 2018. What is media archaeology?Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Paul, Christiane. 2015. Digital art. London: Thames & Hudson. Popper, Karl. 2002. Conjectures and refutations. Abingdon: Routledge Classics. Saltz, David Z. 1997. “The art of interaction: interactivity, performativity, and com­ puters”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 56 (2): 117–127. Simanowski, Roberto. 2011. Digital art and meaning: reading kinetic poetry, text machines, mapping art, and interactive installations. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Simondon, Gilbert, Cécile Malaspina, and John Rogove. 2017. On the mode of exis­ tence of technical objects. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing and University of Minnesota Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2012. “Relational ecology and the digital pharmakon”. Culture Machine 13. Available at: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ 464-1026-1-PB.pdf. Sunzi, and Lionel Giles. 2015. Sun Tzu on the art of war. London: Routledge.

14

2

What is digital?

An often-recounted fact about digital technology is that it operates on long sequences of 0s and 1s. Many would wish for such a level of simplicity to be found on all discourses about Truth. So simple to be almost uninspiring to many others. Not even in The Matrix is the essence of the simulated reality displayed as a stream of 0s and 1s, but rather as a hypnotic rain of falling ASCII characters (aka digital rain). 0s and 1s are as boring and unim­ aginative as anything can get, it seems, so boring that they do not even make the cut for prime quality sci-fi movies. Yet 0 and 1 are not the essence of the digital. They are only a technical escamotage to visualise the invisible. So, what is digital? The usual etymological definition: deriving from the latin digitalis (of finger), derivative of dig˘ıtus (finger), digital means about, or concerned with, fingers. The meaning of finger is still in use today in some languages. In Italian, for example, fingerprint is translated as “impronta digitale” (literally trace of the digit/finger) or with the verb “digitare”, which in English is translated as “to type”. Around the 15th century, the Oxford Dictionary reports, the meaning of the word began to be used not only to denote fingers but also for the way in which these limbs could be used: counting (with fingers). This leap in mean­ ing is not far fetched, nor highly creative, as in fact a digit, for the Romans, used to be already a unit of measurement derived from either a finger or a fraction of the foot (1/16 of foot, which is 18mm ca.). Today we use the word digit to indicate a number symbol between 0 and 9 as inherited from the arabic numeral system. Counting is at the core of what digital means today. Simply put and with reference to computing, digital means count, counted, countable, counting. It is, however, often intended as a peculiar way of counting; one that uses only two digits of the arabic numerals, 0 and 1, and for that it is called binary (counting). For that, the word digital is used as both an attribute denoting the binary mechanism (count) of a device – e.g. a digital computer – and a noun, as in

What is digital?

15

the digital, to denote the set of all devices and derivative universe enabled by such binary count.

**** Digital means counting in binary format, yet one should point out that the binarity of the count is only a contingent attribute of the digital. A lot of research exists in nonbinary circuits, which are said to be digital too. Digital is often used in place of binary only for historical reasons. That is, the first digital devices and all modern consumer devices use binary logic. So, what is digital? We need to look elsewhere. The ability to translate the syntax and logic of an algorithm into its arith­ metical equivalent is one of the milestones that brings us one step closer to an understanding of the peculiarities of digital technologies. A milestone that brings us back to the times of a fervid positivist atmosphere. A story of belief that did not have a happy ending and yet nobody cared. Allow me to quickly recall this story. The main protagonists of this story, which I arbitrarily make begin at the dawn of the 20th century, are Hilbert, Gödel, Church and Turing. Hilbert posed challenges that the others answered a few decades later. The compat­ ibility of the arithmetical axioms (second problem) and the description of an algorithm to solve the Diophantine equation (tenth problems) are the two problems, out of the twenty-three posed by Gilbert in 1900,1 that play a role in this story. In broad terms, these problems concern respectively the prova­ bility of the non-contradictory character of mathematical axioms and the limits of calculation. Hilbert’s second problem asked if all statements within a system, and hence also including the axioms from which a system develops, can be proved to be consistent. Hilbert’s tenth problem, as re-interpreted by Church and Turing, asked instead whether there exists an algorithm written in formal logic that can always provide the correct answers as a yes or no (e.g. this sentence is false). The theoretical nature of these problems will not be discussed here as it would lead the discussion astray. What is of interest for the present discussion is instead the methods used to answer those questions. Gödel answered the second question by devising a system for which any statement can be translated to a unique number (aka Gödel’s number) so that number’s properties can then be used to prove any statement as true or false (aka arithmetisation of syntax) (Gödel 1992). Church and Turing, on their part, decided that in order to provide an answer to Hilbert’s tenth question (Entscheidungsproblem) a definition of algorithm must be provided first. Church’s definition is the one of “effective calculability” (Church 1936) while for Turing it was “computability” (Turing 1936), later to be the main char­ acteristic of his (Turing) Machine. In those approaches to the formulation of an answer to a theoretical question lie the breakthroughs that will inform the subsequent development of computers. Gödel provided a way of translating

16

What is digital?

logic into arithmetic; Church devised a simple and elegant notation system for function abstraction and application (i.e. lambda calculus); Turing showed the extent and limits within which numbers could be deployed in designing and solving algorithms. One important part of this story is that all answers provided negative answers to Hilbert’s problems. Gödel proved that no complete and consistent set of axioms exists nor is it capable of proving its own consistency or the truthfulness of all possible statements formally possible within it. Church and Turing proved that not all problems, such as the Halting problem in Turing’s case, can be solved with an algorithm (or by computation). Such answers crushed Hilbert’s belief that “there is no such thing as an unsolvable problem”.2 Comically or tragically, this story tells us how far from the truth the general idea of computers as omni-programmable and omnipotent machines is. Turing himself, today considered among the founding fathers of AI, well aware of the limits of his machine, felt the need to write about possible ways to overcome such limitations so as to freely dream of truly omnipotent machines (Turing 1950). Maybe more astonishingly is that the theoretical foundations of modern computer science are then grounded on a defeat of the positivist project; a defeat that, for the many advocates of intelligent machines, went unnoticed or just swept under the rug … shh! Concomitantly to these breakthroughs in the theoretical domain, engineer­ ing efforts and achievements were nothing short of exceptional (albeit mostly driven by war needs unfortunately). In 1937, Claude Shannon showed how two-valued Boolean algebra could be used in circuits made of relays and switches.3 In the same year, George Stibitz developed the first relay-based binary calculator. In 1938, Konrad Zuse presented a programmable relay computer that worked on binary floating-point numbers and a binary switching system, the Z1 – soon followed by the Z3.4 From there on it will be mostly a matter of technical improvements, from relays and switches to vacuum tubes to transistors. Miniaturisation, speed and efficiency will lead, for the most, subsequent endeavours.

**** Digital means count, arithmetic and logic. Yet this is not enough to pinpoint the essence of a digital system as we know it today. In fact, the ability to count is not an exclusive aspect of a digital system. Even in the case that this count is a binary count. An analogue system, as well as a mechanical one, can accomplish the same binary operations. A case point is the electrically driven mechanical calculator Z1 (1936–7). Also, George Stibitz’s Model K (1941) was able to perform binary additions using only a few relays and spare electrical parts. You can build a mechanical digital

What is digital?

17

calculator with marble and wood or count in binary format up to 1024 with the ten fingers of your hands. In other words, there is nothing preventing analogue or mechanical systems from performing operations in a digital fashion. The issue is non-trivial, for any history of computers has so far failed to present a coherent transition between an analogue to a digital era of compu­ ters. In fact, the issue appears to be a philosophical one rather than a solely technical one. Goodman and Lewis are the first philosophers to have reasoned on digital systems by contrasting them, as many would do today, with analogue ones. Goodman (2013) argued that “perhaps the best course is to try to dissociate [analogue and digital] from analogy and digits […] and distinguish them in terms of density and differentiation” (ibid, 160). The simplified version of such a dichotomy is what we all refer to today as discrete and continuous, meaning that representation is syntactically and semantically undifferentiated in an analogue system – hence dense or continuous – and syntactically and semantically differentiated in a digital system – hence discrete. Lewis (1971), in response to Goodman, replied that an analogue system can be syntactically and semantically differentiated too, which is a similar point to the one I made earlier in relation to the Z1 and Model K (i.e. analogue systems can behave digitally). Lewis hence suggested a differentiation based on the modes of representation. Accordingly, analogue systems represent numbers by using digits describing physical quantities, for example ohms in a resistor.5 Digital systems, on the contrary, represent numbers by separating token from value and therefore requiring more digits (i.e. multidigital) (Lewis, 327). The fact that Goodman’s discrete/continuous dichotomy is the one that will eventually be used in every engineering textbook is no sign of its correctness but only of its simplicity and clarity. Certainly, the debate is far from being over, in philosophical circles at least. From my perspective, both Goodman and Lewis’s positions bear some truth but at the same time err in thinking that the difference between analo­ gue and digital is exclusively about modes of representation. In response to Goodman, one could argue that an analogue computer is discrete just by the simple fact that, for example, instructions in a punch card are discrete and that input between two consecutive punch cards (or any other type of discrete instruction) must be differentiated somehow – usually delay lines. To Lewis, one could respond that a reading of the states of the bulbs in Model K as either unidigit or multidigit is a posteriori interpretative event that does not point to essential differences in the two systems – that is, you can read the first bulb “on” followed by the second bulb “off” as the binary “10”, which is the number “2” in arabic numerals or just read them as one bulb having current flowing through (on) and the other not (off) – or even just reading one and zero as ten. The fact is that their line of thought is informed by an understanding of systems (i.e. computers) as calculators;6 calculus is abstraction and

18

What is digital?

abstraction requires symbolic representation … and we are again only one degree away from The Matrix’s effect. At the same time and in their defence, a discrete/continuum dichotomy as well as the fact that different levels of abstractions enable different outcomes point us in the right direction. Arguably, their dichotomies would bear greater truth if dealt with in rela­ tion to synthesisers rather than complex calculators. A digital synthesiser dif­ ferentiates syntactically and semantically a current flow while an analogue synth does not. A digital synthesiser operates on multidigital magnitudes while an analogue synth operates on physical magnitudes that are either pri­ mitive or almost primitive. Yet, another difference lies in the modes in which digital and analogue technologies relate to and understand reality. Digital technology understands the world as a discrete count of electric flow and in order to count it must break the unity between events and time – that is, it must count something out in an otherwise uninterrupted flow of energy and time. An analogue system, on the contrary, can do with or with­ out such a dissociation between time and events. Hence counting is necessary for a digital system while for an analogue system counting is, at best, just a method for fine tuning the system. In digital systems counting is an a priori condition and a sine qua non condition for each of its procedures. In analo­ gue systems, one measures for enabling a process but by no means is such measuring a sine qua non for its day-to-day operation. For example, a digital synth can exist only because the digital circuitry from which it is made is designed to have (or compute) a numerical inscrip­ tion of a soundwave. No count is no digital is no sound. An analogue synth works regardless of counting the frequencies that go through it. Provided the appropriate hardware components are in place, an analogue synth will work just with a simple current passing through it, without any calculation being performed. A further example. If one wants to redirect the stream of a river, it will be necessary to build a series of dams, borders, secondary canals, overflowing banks etc. Once the job is done the water will flow without any further intervention. Of course, the dams might break; on an exceptionally rainy year the banks will not suffice and the river will inundate the city etc … Such is life. That is analogue. The digital equivalent of the above would exist only on the condition that we can represent numerically all of the elements in the picture, including the water of the river. That is not to say that digital is only abstraction but that the digital hardware is designed to support numerical abstractions and manipulations of entities. Of course, it may happen that one day the com­ puter (not the dam) might break, or be mistakenly unplugged from the wall, at which point dams, rivers etc. will cease to exist … Such is life. This is digital. Digital is the idea that reality is mathematically representable.

What is digital?

19

**** Digital technologies reduce everything to a series of discrete time-events relayed in binary format in a process that leads along two paths of under­ standing and acting in/on the world: counting natural phenomena and creat­ ing phenomena from counting. Allow me to illustrate how these two modes are enabled by digital technology (and only digital) with some practical examples. Let’s consider the process involved in the digitisation of sound. A digital device such as a sound card counts acoustic phenomena. Simplifying enor­ mously, the process is as follows: a sound hits the membrane of a microphone, which begins to oscillate accordingly. Such oscillation of the microphone’s membrane varies an electrical signal (variation that is said to be analogous to the original sound source). This electrical signal is then passed through an ADC (analogue to digital converter), which is where said signal will be broken into a series of discrete time-events, measured, counted and then stored in binary format. The computer now has a numerical inscription of the sound. Since the sound is represented as a long sequence of binary digits (i.e bits [0/1]), it is up to us to decide what to do with this sequence. If we decide to play it back, we will instruct the computer to send these numbers to a DAC (digital to analogue converter) where the inverse process is actuated – the bits will be used to reconstruct an electrical signal that, in turn, will cause the cone of a speaker to oscillate accordingly and produce the sound. Once digi­ tally stored, however, we can manipulate our sequence of bits in many other ways and even forget that its original source was a sound. Only numerical transformation is at play here. Possibilities are almost endless, while mostly limited by the fantasy of those who can manipulate them. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the skilful and arbitrary work of devising paths for our bits from an input to their output is described with the word mapping, a term derived from cartography. The same process applies to many other physical phenomena. If we wish to record an image, we will need a digital camera where a photodiode converts light into an electrical signal and the ADC, the electrical signal into bits. In short, we need a transducer (a microphone or a photodiode in our examples) and an analogue to digital converter. The large amount of digital devices available today implement such workflow, from the digital scale in your kitchen to the myriads of sensor devices displaced along the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In this discussion, I will name this workflow “analogue­ derived” so as to imply that the origin of what is digitised resides in the measurement of natural phenomena. In the art domain, digital devices of this type are used, for example, in interactive art and performance art where a number of natural phenomena, such as movement, sound, light, are counted and stored as bits. Many digital music instruments work on these premises too – such as the hexaphonic

20

What is digital?

pickups of a MIDI guitar that translate vibration of the strings into binary bits or the cluster of sensors in a data glove used to numerically inscribe in binary form the orientation, position and movement of the hand or parts of. Examples are countless.

**** But not all digital devices require an analogous input to be digitised. Com­ puters, for example, can also generate imagery and sounds that are solely numerically constructed. For example, the folder icon on your Desktop is an image created ex nihilo or, to be more pragmatic, from a numerical repre­ sentation of an idea of a folder-like shape that is mathematically con­ structed and stored in binary format. The same applies to certain sounds, such as the ones you can produce on your terminal window by typing: echo -e “\a”.7 Because in these cases we are only concerned with manipulations of bits, which by the way are nonetheless discrete derivatives themselves of a con­ tinuous signal (i.e. current on the wall plug) but not derived directly from their analogue counterparts (e.g. the sound passing through of microphone for a digitised sound), I say that these artefacts are digitally born – that is, they are not derived from a measurement of natural phenomena but derived through numerical evaluations of mathematical abstractions that, more often than not, attempt to emulate natural phenomena.

**** Digital devices drag us into a counted world via two logically intertwined workflows: in an analogue-derived one, bits are the result of a measurement of natural phenomena at the hands of an ADC while in a digitally born one, bits are the result of what one might call, with a pinch of humour, mathe­ matical “trickery” passed on to a DAC. These two distinct operational workflows also inform two ways of thinking about computers. One, the analogue-derived, defines computers as tools for counting reality. Digital devices of this kind help science fulfil its aims, namely, an under­ standing of reality (natural phenomena). Phenomena can be observed, dis­ cretised, measured, mathematically evaluated and abstracted. Under these circumstances, a digital computer is both an instrument of calculation and an instrument of experimentation through which we can test, emulate and eval­ uate inferences derived from empirical observations. It is on these premises that the entertainment industry uses terms such as hi-fidelity and hi-resolution so as to imply a faithful correspondence between what is real and what is reconstructed via tools regardless, in this case, of the nature of the tools – analogue or digital.

What is digital?

21

The other workflow, the digitally born, sees computers as tools to create realities or phenomena from counting. A sound whose genesis lies exclusively in the manipulation of bits is a sound that did not exist until the moment of its reproduction or instantiation as audible phenomena at the hands of a DAC. The thought process that informs this workflow is simple: reality is coun­ table, hence we can also create reality by counting. This is the fascination we experience when staring at our screens. This is the gist of what is often refer­ red to as virtual.

**** Digital technology enables us to daydream about a reality that can be both numerically resolved and numerically created. We need to accept, however, that an excessive faith in science and its approach to resolve the mysteries of life by numbers and logic is epistemologically unsound. We cannot confuse dreams with reality unless interested in being diagnosed with schizophrenic disorders – which, by the way, may well be the likely diagnosis for our society as a whole. Art practices that engage with digital technologies must come to terms with the ruling of numbers and with it they are exposed to the winds of science’s epistemological optimism too. Are we to maintain that reality as a whole is countable and measurable? The importance of this question for any digital art practice lies in the fol­ lowing longer version of it: If the digital is a count built on a differentiation of the unity between events and time, what is there to guarantee that such unity of the experience with its output stands in an undifferentiated relation­ ship with its original inputs? Nothing – only the illusion of the existence of that undifferentiated rela­ tionship. But it could be told better. So please bear with me for this last deep dive. We often say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Digital technology does not like that. Phenomenology, instead, understands it well. I believe one of the most beautiful examples on this subject, one that is highly relevant to the arts, is given by the pen of Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomen­ ology of Perception. Here it is: Are we to maintain that the organist analyses the organ, that he conjures up and retains a representation of the stops, pedals and manuals and their relation to each other in space? But during the short rehearsal pre­ ceding the concert, he does not act like a person about to draw up a plan. He sits on the seat, works the pedals, pulls out the stops, gets the measure of the instrument with his body, incorporates within himself the relevant directions and dimensions, settles into the organ as one settles into a house. He does not learn objective spatial positions for each stop and

22

What is digital? pedal, nor does he commit them to ‘memory’. During the rehearsal, as during the performance, the stops, pedals and manuals are given to him as nothing more than possibilities of achieving certain emotional or musical values, and their positions are simply the places through which this value appears in the world. Between the musical essence of the piece as it is shown in the score and the notes which actually sound round the organ, so direct a relation is established that the organist’s body and his instrument are merely the medium of this relationship. Henceforth the music exists by itself and through it all the rest exists. (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 168)

Phenomenology appears to interpret almost literally the maxim “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – the whole intended as the unity of the body-instrument-sound experience cannot be reduced to the sum of its time-derivative parts. There is no dichotomy, nor parts, and any movement described by any discrete sequence of smaller movements will inevitably leave behind something so that the whole will always be greater than its parts. We can push the phenomenological interpretation of the maxim one step further without compromising its main thesis and state: The whole is always greater than its parts because its parts and the whole are, substantially, uncountable. For the digital, however, our maxim is nonsense. In a digital device, the whole is just the sum of its parts because there is nothing beyond or beneath what is counted, countable and counting. Reality is no more than a pointillistic painting whose reconstruction can be achieved by numbering each dot on a canvas – the whole is no more not less than the sum of its parts. To reconnect with Merleau-Ponty’s example of the organist, the problem is then this: if one introduces a digital organ, the uncountable unity of the body­ instrument-sound experience is broken in the middle by the discrete timeevent counting of the digital organ. And this calls into question the process of embodiment in a digital art practice. Two possibilities are left: either we prove that reality is countable or that digital can exist without a count of time-discrete events. The latter option, it should be clear, is simply antithetical to what digital means and does. For the former, even if tomorrow, the latest (albeit by no means provable to be the ultimate) frontier of quantum physics will tell us that reality is discrete and hence countable, we will have to face another set of problems: namely the tangible possibility of creating parallel worlds from count and the death of art into a single work created by the formula Art = X. Neither positions are tenable, in my view. The bottom line is that our dis­ cretely numerical interpretation of reality does not have to coincide with rea­ lity in order to exist. Approximation not only suffices but it is intrinsic to it.

What is digital?

23

So is the relationship between real and digital; a relationship that I describe as (see also Figure 2.1) lim ð1=xÞ ¼ 0

x!1

Computing the function f (x) for always greater values of x returns values that get infinitely closer to zero but never equal to it (e.g. 0.01, 0.001, 0.0001, 0.000001 etc.). Likewise, assuming reality being our x axis and f (x) a digital system computing instances of reality (or reality itself), depicted by the dotted curve, f (x) approximates reality but never equals it nor superimposes on it. Looking at the right part of the graph where f (x) appears to match the x axis, one may be tricked into believing that greater values of x, here meta­ phorically representing ever more powerful digital systems, provide us with an exact replica of reality x. As, if the digital sample of a sound of a guitar is mistaken to be identical, not just for the senses but also from an ontological perspective, to the sound of a real guitar. That would be the case, impossible, where f (x) = 0 and hence the case in which reality and its digital representa­ tion coincide. As x moves towards infinity and f (x) approaches zero so will any digital system aiming to describe reality – it will get closer to it but never coincide with it. Digital technology, let’s not be mistaken, does not provide us with an alternative reality (the so-called virtual) nor does it add anything to reality (the so-called augmented reality). It only gives us approximate and discrete snapshots of it. Digital means only to discretise a flow of electrons in time so as to count things one wants to give a number to. For digital art practitioners this means something terrible, namely that anything we do is a count – including all of our action through it … so that at

Figure 2.1

lim ð1=xÞ ¼ 0 x!1

as a metaphor for the digital’s dream of matching reality

24

What is digital?

the end of a journey that moves from input to output we come out not recognising ourselves anymore … because we are not numbers.

Notes 1 Some of these problems were initially presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Sorbonne on the 8th of August 1900, Paris. All 23 problems were later published in 1902 in English in Hilbert (1902). 2 From the transcript of Hilbert’s “Farewell to Teaching” talk in 1930, sourced at Reid (1996, 196). 3 Boolean logic derived from the work of English-born mathematician George Boole who was professor at Queen’s College Cork (now UCC) – whose work was practi­ cally unknown until Shannon’s recovery. 4 Many consider the Z3 (1941) as the first digital device of this kind. However, the Z1 and Z3 were equivalent in their logical and functional points with minor differences in bit count and precision; see Rojas (1997). 5 For clarity, I quote Lewis: “analog representation of numbers is representation of numbers by physical magnitudes that are either primitive or almost primitive” (Lewis, 325). 6 From a historical and etymological perspective, we often think of them as giant calculators. In fact, the very word computer was not chosen randomly. It used to refer to persons whose duty was to perform mathematical calculations or operate calculators. In the late 14th century a computer was essentially an astronomer’s assistant that helped with calculus; around the first half of the 20th century, a computer was a lab technician, usually a woman, that helped operating several machinery (including computers). Today we think of computers as multipurpose machines capable of being much more than calculators. The intuitive understanding of computers as calculators is not wrong though. The reason is that a computer resolves equations by storing the series of procedural steps leading to its solution – aka algorithm. At the same time the algorithm itself is stored and executed as a series of basic mathematical opera­ tions. Any process executed by a computer is always and only resolved via a numerical representation of an algorithm enabling its execution. 7 But you can have fun here: https://github.com/johnath/beep/blob/master/beep.c.

References Church, Alonzo. 1936. “An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory.” American Journal of Mathematics. 58 (2): 345–363. Accessed July 13, 2020. doi:10.2307/2371045. Gödel, Kurt. 1992. On formally undecidable propositions of principia mathematica and related systems. New York: Dover Publications. [Original article in German: Gödel, K. 1931. “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und ver­ wandter Systeme I.” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik. 38: 173–198. doi:10.1007/BF01700692]. Goodman, Nelson. 2013. Languages of art: an approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Hilbert, David. 1902. “Mathematical problems.” Bulletin of the American Mathema­ tical Society: 437–479. www.ams.org/journals/bull/1902-08-10/home.html. Lewis, David. 1971. “Analog and digital.” Noûs. 5 (3): 321–327. Accessed July 13, 2020. doi:10.2307/2214671.

What is digital?

25

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of perception. Abingdon: Routledge. Reid, Constance. 1996. Hilbert. New York: Springer Verlag. Rojas, R. 1997. “Konrad Zuse’s legacy: the architecture of the Z1 and Z3”. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 19 (2): 5–16. Turing, Alan. 1936. “On computable numbers: with an application to the Entschei­ dungsproblem”. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. 42: 3–4. Turing, Alan. 1950. “Computing machinery and intelligence.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. 59 (236): 433.

26

3

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

I hope it will not furrow anyone’s brow if I say that, traditionally, the artist, the art object and the audience have been the axioms on which all discourses on art are grounded. Like all axioms, their existence is given without any proof while the questioning of their value and essence is more or less an excuse to answer the most pressing question of all: what is art? From this perspective, differences between an evaluative and a metaphysical approach to the questioning of art appear minimal. All aesthetic discourses can be read, without stretching the imagination too far, as an ontology of art. Phenomenological approaches to aesthetics, on the wave of studies often inspired by Merleau-Ponty, should have enabled a de-throning of these ontologies and the crowning of the phenomenon of art. Has this happened? Phenomenology’s merit is to have addressed the methodological limits of both the empirical and the metaphysical schools of thoughts in addressing the question concerning reality. Limits are to be found in the unresolvable dis­ tance that exists between a subject investigating and the object to be investi­ gated. Metaphysics promoted a subject who, through logical reasoning, aimed at unveiling the essence of a reality to be found in things after/behind (meta) the natural world (physis). Empiricism, by denying the existence of all sorts of Hyperuraniums, sets out to understand reality through a rigorous and meth­ odological engagement with it but [gave] up living in [it].1 Hence phenom­ enology argues that both approaches err in conceiving reality as something “out there” and separate from the subject investigating it. To this situation, phenomenology’s remedy consisted in moving beyond the subject-object dichotomy by promoting a first-person study of the structures enabling our experience of reality. Subject and object, self and reality, coa­ lesce into a first-person phenomenon: The sensible gives back to me what I lent to it, but this is only what I took from it in the first place. As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some idea of blue such as might reveal the secret of it, I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

27

‘thinks itself within me’, I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue. (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 249) First-person perspectives, phenomena, consciousness, senses, experience are all keywords that made phenomenology akin to artistic discourse. This attraction is felt by philosophers, art critics and practitioners. It is fair to say that both phenomenology and art needed each other. Phenomenology often reverted to art to exemplify the explanation of cer­ tain positions within a phenomenological discourse2 – art as a case in point. Likewise, aesthetic concerns have often used phenomenology to validate a discourse on the epistemological value of various art practices and sensory experiences (Kozel 2007). In other words, each domain used the help of the other for the achievement of objectives specific to each domain. There are certainly merits in these domains’ crosstalks but many grey areas too. For example, there is a tendency in the arts to understand phenomenol­ ogy as an epistemology grounded in the first-person study of sensory experi­ ence. In doing so, a sensory experience becomes the departing point for an aesthetic discourse, while in phenomenology it is the end point of the dis­ course. Phenomenology, as understood within philosophical circles, is pre­ dominantly a study of the genesis of perception; it is a first-person study of the essential structures enabling experience – not the study of the effects of that experience. This is why Merleau-Ponty wrote “(o)ur perception ends in objects”, so as to embark on an analysis that investigated the path leading to that end (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 77). Also problematic is the continual recurrence to quoting Heidegger for all but its aesthetic works. Whether coincidentally or not, Heidegger’s opinion on art as a force extra-partes acting upon the artist and the artwork for its own sake and gain3 is far from what an art practitioner would accept. While this type of transcendentalism would suit better an ontology of art, it is entirely at odds with an art discourse that, especially throughout the 20th century the avant-garde has, despite all efforts, placed the artist’s (and audience’s) will and capacities to conceptualise at the centre of its discourse. Merleau-Ponty, by introducing the spatiality of the body will no doubt offer better points of contact with aesthetic discourse: One might show, for example, that aesthetic perception too opens up a new spatiality, that the picture as a work of art is not in the space which it inhabits as a physical thing and as a coloured canvas. That the dance evolves in an aimless and unorientated space, that it is a suspension of our history, that in the dance the subject and his world are no longer in opposition, no longer stand out one against the background of the other, that in consequence the parts of the body are no longer thrown into relief as in natural experience: the trunk is no longer the ground from which

28

From art to art practices (phenomenology) movements arise and to which they sink back once performed; it now governs the dance and the movements of the limbs are its auxiliaries. (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 335)

Yet, one should be honest and admit that there is more aesthetic discourse in works discussing Merleau-Ponty than the very works of Merleau-Ponty. But one question remains louder than any other, at least in my head: if phenomen­ ology has reformulated the structure of the ontological question “what is reality ” into “what does it mean to be alive”, the correlative transposition in the aes­ thetic domain should have seen a reformulation of the ontological question “what is art” into “what does it mean to practice art”. Has this happened? It has. But I wonder how loud and clear. It is hard to see where phenom­ enological theories have shaped real-world norms about art, practice and aesthetic discourse. Language, for a start, is very behind on that. One may be even brought to question how a theory informed by the living ended up being an ineffective or, should we then say, inaccurate description of the lived itself. And if it has happened, I wonder why the transition from an ontology of art to a phenomenology of art was not born out of internal “aesthetic” ten­ sions instead of piggybacking on broader philosophical discourses. Hence, I wonder if a phenomenology of art could have been born out of words as strong as the ones used by Merleau-Ponty in relation to science and meta­ physics. Whether phrases such as: To say that the world is, by nominal definition, the object x of our operations is to treat the scientist’s knowledge as if it were absolute, as if everything that is and has been was meant only to enter the laboratory. (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 1) ... have appeared elsewhere in aesthetic literature as: To say that art is, by nominal definition, the artwork x of our intentions is to treat the artist’s knowledge as if it were absolute. As if everything that is and has been was meant only to enter the museums. Or, again, if a phrase such as: Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 1) ... has appeared elsewhere as: Aesthetics talks about artworks and gives up living in them. They appear here, of course. But the point is whether a text of the same magnitude of Merleau-Ponty’s has been written from the perspective of

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

29

aesthetic concerns. Whether that text has identified two opposing sides in the aesthetic debate and offered a phenomenology of art as the third way out of the impasse. Whether that text managed to explain in what ways these two sides differed and yet shared the same approach in dealing with subject and object. Whether that text convincingly explained how a phenomenology of art could have helped going beyond a subject-object dichotomy. Roman Ingarden’s work is certainly one fitting the bill.4 It entered the English-speaking world in 1961, when he published a little excerpt of his 1937 book titled “The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art” for the Philosophy and Phenomenological Research journal.5 His opening statement spoke clearly to a phenomenology of art on its own terms: The essential mistake of the views about an aesthetic experience consists in the opinion that the object of such experience is identical with an ele­ ment of the real world and the object of our activities or cognition. […] It is, namely, true that in cases similar to those described we begin [Ingar­ den’s italics] with the perception of the real object. But the question is, first, whether, when starting from the real object, we remain within its limits while an aesthetic perception is taking place in ourselves, and, sec­ ondly, whether the starting from a real object is indispensable in every case of aesthetic perception. (Ingarden 1961, 1–2) Ingarden sees an “essential mistake” in art discourse, namely, the view for which an aesthetic experience is defined by the properties of an art object and a product of our cognitive work. But the use of the conjunction “and” is granted only because Ingarden has already moved beyond their implicit and oppositional duality – that is, he is already discussing an aesthetic experience in place of an ontology of art. It is clear that prior to the “and” there once was an “or” that hinted to a duality for which “an element of the real world” – the artwork – and “the object of our activities or cognition” – the idea of it – have grounded aesthetic discourse to a questioning on the essence of art. Similar to theological and philosophical studies then, the ontological ques­ tion that aesthetic asked was: “does Art (i.e. God/Universals) exist? And if so, what is its essence and what ontological categories describe it?” To these questions, the answers that aesthetic discourse provided, explicitly or not, could only mimic the ones offered in philosophy and theology – answers that converged on the consolidation of dualisms.6 From this perspective, one could read the middle-ages’ nominalist-realist debate from an aesthetic perspective so that the “realists” are those for whom the essence of art lies in an abstract idea that exceeds the sum of its concrete/ contingent instances (i.e. the art objects); the nominalists on the other hand are those for whom the idea of art as universal must be rejected in favour of only particular instances called art objects – art is no more than a cognitive

30

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

idea.7 One could also read the Cartesian mind-body dualism in aesthetic terms as one in which the essence and knowledge about art resides and can be attained either with the body or within the mind. Or, directly descending from Descartes,8 one for which knowledge about art and its value can be attained via reasoning – rationalists – or via the senses – empiricists. For all these dualisms, the proposal of a phenomenology of art on its own terms would depart, as in all phenomenologies, from the simple question: are we sure we are asking the right question? To then ask: isn’t the question “what is art” implicitly ratifying the exis­ tence of art without any proof ? Isn’t the question “what is art” thus axioma­ tising not only art but also the existence of the artist, the art objects and the audience as separate entities? In fact, from the perspective of this ontology of art, isn’t the art object just a totem serving to preserve the belief in the exis­ tence of art? Doesn’t the artist thus become a demigod – that unitary subject ensued with world-shaping intentionality? Doesn’t the audience, lastly, become a group of devotees (the passive and ignorant audience) led by a clergy (art critics) revealing truth to them? Isn’t such art thus an instrument of power as much as anything else? The rhetoric of these questions is to say that we have been led astray by believing in the existence of art as something outside or inside us. Art is not, to use Ingarden’s words, “an element of the real world” or “the object of our activities or cognition.” Art is, at best, the experience of those. Art is neither a question of what nor “when.”9 Hence the proposal of a phenomenology of art: abandon all analyses con­ cerned with objects and/or transcendentals and bring centre-stage the living, the lived and liveable aspects of art – its practice, the art practice. Art as art practice then – not a thing or an idea; a practice that can only be lived and understood in time and that we hence refer to as, in philosophical parlance, the phenomenon of art. A phenomenon that is at once active and passive, individual and societal, open and closed. A phenomenon that is alive, acted, enacted, empathic, pathic and hence perform -ed/ -ing/ -anting /-ance/… in time. The shift from art to an art practice, lastly and reconnecting to the pre­ mises, should change our understanding of the artist, the artwork and the audience. There is no need to grant them a monolithic and axiomatic exis­ tence. There is no need to talk about the artwork as that object being granted autonomy from its maker and preserving in stone the will of the artist. There is no need to treat the artwork as a given, unitary object condensing and manifesting at once the artist’s intentions. There is no need to treat the artist as a given, unitary and pre-constituted subject. There is no need to treat the artist and the audience either as masters of their own will or mere puppets of the art puppeteer. Art objects, artists and audience coalesce into a myriad of experiences, phenomena, aka practices. In so doing the art object is only a trace, a reminder of what once has been a tumultuous practice, while a performance is

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

31

the opportunity to enact that practice publicly. The artist and the audience, at their ends, are not subjects that do and feel but subjects that endlessly form subjects through (per-) a relation with form (-formance). A phenomenology of art thus born is not a technique to learn about art or an art object but a commitment to a particular way of questioning an art practice. A study concerned with questions such as: what does it mean to be an artist? How does it feel to be engaged in an art practice? What does it mean to be an audience? What does it mean to feel the works of others? how is perception realised through an engagement with form, etc.? A commitment that in the case of a digital art practice means a questioning of the modes in which subjects seek to constitute themselves through and in relation to a practice defined, morphed and formed through digital technology. All this means understanding an art practice as an individuation process.

**** Individuation is a process in which a subject’s quest for individuality – the core qualia of an identifiable self – is, so to say, entrapped by an endless cycle of problematisation, interleaved by momentary resolutions, of the relation between the self and alterities of some kind. For Jung, such alterity is one’s unconscious and hence individuation becomes a life project concerned with the “self-realization” of it.10 For Bakhtin, such alterity is given by a dialogism (a two-faced Janus) between action and discourse, between being and meaning. In doing so, individuation is one’s attempt to find a synthesis between that “uninterrupted performance of acts” (Bakhtin 1999, xix) – postuplenie – that is our life and all discursive reasonings that want to account for it. In an attempt to fill the gap between subjective/inner experience and objective/outer knowledge then, one’s life becomes an ethico-aesthetic performance, in which the uniqueness of one’s postupok must endlessly mediate with the social. In one of his most important works, Simondon (2017) sees the alterity in the technical object, itself an individuation process. Individuation becomes a process of integration between man and the technical object via a notion of information that foregrounds, questions and relates with the concrete, histor­ ical and psycho-social aspects of technological objects. Individuation is hence guided by an ethical attitude for an “actor who alone can bring into existence a coherent technological world” (Simondon 2017, xv). In Guattari, alterities become “collective assemblages of enunciation” that shape and are shaped in multi-stratified and delocalised processes of indivi­ duation (Guattari 2006, 8) concerning both the individual and all expressions of the social (the machinic apparatuses). By doing so, Guattari can then discuss the negotiating forces at play between different models of subjectivity so as to allow for an endless redrawing of the space between subject and

32

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

object – a cartography drawn by “a logic of affects rather than logic of delimited sets” (ibid., 9). I want to think of any art practice as a special kind of individuation process too. A process that is perhaps less akin (while certainly still relevant) to those having clearly defined objectives such as the bringing about of a “coherent technological world” in Simondon or the politically oriented embracing of a “chaosmic exploration of an ecosophy” of Guattari (ibid., 134) and perhaps more akin to open-ended processes such as those intrinsic necessities wanting to mediate between the irrational and rational, the living and the account of the lived discussed by Bakhtin or Jung’s inner-life project. But more importantly, an art practice intended as a mode of individuation is one that is concerned with a search and a problematisation of the indis­ soluble unity of the self, the body and the world and oriented by intentional actions that modify the very triad and endlessly reformulate it. It is a practice that cyclically looks for, enacts and problematises embodiment – the unity of experience between mind and body, the self and the world. But in order to release both the cognitive and pathic experiences of embo­ diment, embodiment itself must be constituted after the occurrence of its dis­ solution at the hand of a rational thought that saw itself separate from an object capturing its attention. Past this dissolution, the journey requires a medium, a tool, an instrument that must be appropriated first, to then appropriate the world and rejoin in the unity of experience. We need a body, a voice, ears, hands, a brush, a pen, a musical instrument, a computer. The instrument is important because it grounds the practice within pro­ cesses that are at once speculative and pragmatic. Abstractions must resolve into concrete instances of enunciation and vice versa. It is under this under­ standing of an art practice as an embodied individuation process that an artist’s instrument can be interpreted, legitimately in all cases, as a means to an end, an interlocutor, an oppressor, a limit, a possibility, a transcendental force, a concrete instance of the human intellect, an extension of the body, the world and the self. It is in this sense, in fact, that the word “art”, whose roots are in artus – limb, instrument, articulation – should not imply tools as objects serving a practice but, more importantly, as practice itself through which we open the self to the possibility of manipulating, and hence discovering, the world while embodying it. To re-embody the world then means to first appropriate an instrument. This is not to say “gaining control” over it. The overcoming of the technical challenges involved in controlling an instrument is only the first and initial step for an appropriation of it. The second step, complementing and coroning the true objectives of the first one, is making the instrument an extension of one’s body so much as the stick of the blind person is not just a tool to explore the world but a prolonged limb “extending the scope and active radius of touch” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 165).

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

33

I make no distinction between body and instrument – that is, one can appropriate the body the same way one appropriates any extensions of it. Although Grotowsky would likely disagree with me in not differentiating body and instruments, there is one passage in his book titled Towards a Poor Theater that explains well the hurdle involved in going from a disembodied state – for which a rational self and body/object/instrument/world are apart – to an embodied one: The education of an actor in our theater is not a matter of teaching him something; we attempt to eliminate his organism’s resistance to this psy­ chic process. The result is freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. Impulse and action are concurrent: the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses. Ours then is avia negativa – not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks. (Grotowski 2012, 16) What Grotowski describes as a method for educating an actor is, I argue, a description of the modalities in which any art practice, intended as embodied individuation, takes place. It is then applicable to actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers (as well as audience, critics etc. as I will explain shortly). It is through endless repetitions (i.e. the practice) that the time-lapse between impulse and action can eventually be reduced to zero – point in which there is a re-embodiment of the self and the world into an undividable spatio-temporal flow of being. But in this repetitive cycle each cycle is necessarily diverse. We give to the body/instrument/world the same way as it gives back to us. We endlessly transform while being transformed with each cycle giving rise to a renewed embodied experience to be problematised. Each time searching for the lost unity of the experience of being. From conscious to unconscious and back while endlessly problematising the otherwise possibility of being of the self in and through the world. There is only one end to this cyclical process: death.11

**** An art practice intended as an embodied individuation is not an exclusive journey of the artist because an individuation is in itself a relational journey between the self among other selves. There must be a plural we, a being-with, that enables meaning, Jean Luc Nancy would say. An art practice makes sense only insofar as there is a mutual dependability of diverse embodied individuation processes at the hands of multiple individuals. Unfortunately, in the art domain, the cartographies of such a co-dependent relationship have been repeatedly drawn in terms of a dichotomy between artist and audience in which the former is a willing and controlling subject while the latter a passive recipient.

34

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

It may be argued that such an understanding is outdated and that it does not acknowledge much of what has happened in the past century. Or that, at least, it does not apply to interactive art or those participatory art forms in which the active role of an audience represents a key feature. This may be so, but two things should be considered. First, empowerment, as any psychologist would know, cannot be prescribed by anybody to any­ body – in art even less than psychology. Second, this re-positioning of an audience’s role was and still is consequential to a discourse that is sub­ stantially erroneous in the first place. An audience cannot be saved from its passivity because it is never passive to begin with. To think of this artist-audience relationship in terms of an active/passive dichotomy is not only unnecessary and misleading but perpetrating a number of untenable positions. One is, for example, that an audience must be edu­ cated to understand contemporary art. I have studied art for decades and I still fail to understand most of it, if that re-assures some readers or terrifies others. Or that all artists are born Marxists by default until, of course, they become the next Jeff Koons and being a millionaire in the name of art is not a sin anymore. A more tenable position is instead that both artists and audiences are active and passive with respect to different contexts. An artist must also be an audience as well as an audience must know what it means to embody and transform reality in order to understand what an artist does. They both move and relate in relation to a social context. For example, artists are not free to do anything they want but do within a context (artistic, social, historical, psychological, physical etc.) and certain intentions – not least the one to put a piece of bread on the table. Audiences, on their part, do not understand only in relation to an isolated self but also in relation to the cultural context surrounding them.

**** Yet art developed a discourse that promoted oppositions such as knower/ viewer, active/passive, in which the former repeatedly challenged the adequ­ ateness of the latter. A process that Rancier, borrowing from Joseph Jacotot, calls stultification of the audience as to imply an “a priori distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities attached to these positions [which are then] embodied allegories of inequality” (Ranciere 2011, 12). Left-field theorists, of which Ranciere is the exception, breaking their vow of equality, reinforced, as did no others, the idea of an ignorant and subdued mass (see Adorno 2002, for an eminent example). Artists, on their part, are not innocent either in this process. Whether or not because legitimised and influenced by an elitist Marxist culture, art dis­ course started to address an ever more specialised audience with the result of being fragmented from the inside. And even if more recent theories draw

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

35

more from phenomenology and rhizomes than Marxism, the stultifying dis­ tribution of positions has not been fully addressed, let alone resolved. In the meantime, larger audiences became disenamoured with experimental art and museums began to be seen as temples of absurdity. We do not need theories to attest to this. We can refer to practice. It would be sufficient to attend any avant-garde/experimental exhibition or spectacle and direct our attention to the audience. More likely than not, we will see a mix of emotions or overhear statements that only rarely, or otherwise coin­ cidentally, match the nature of the artwork (as intended by the artist and described by curators and critics). Final applause is often mere formality. Here is a short list of comments I heard or overheard from attendees of these events and that are often discarded in any commentary of experimental art:12 personal inadequateness, discomfort, distress, belittlement, used, ridic­ uled, not understanding motivations nor intentions, boredom, anger etc. and lastly, the most threatening of all, indifference. To this state of affairs, Ranciere suggests that the role of an audience must be reconsidered. His proposal entails the emancipation of the intellect which, in his own words, “does not signify the equal value of all manifestations of intelligence but the self-equality of intelligence in all its manifestations” (Ranciere 2011, 10). This self-equality of intelligence is the premise on which any cultural programme should be reformed so as to reposition capacities, abilities and sensibilities within the artist-audience relationship. This “dis­ tribution of the sensible, which defines [the] way of being together” (Ranciere 2011, 56), is a political act. One thing is certain: Ranciere’s thinking comes as a breeze of much needed fresh air in the stifled room of political-left art.

**** I wish to connect to Ranciere’s project from the perspective of what has been discussed so far and argue that artists and audiences are not only to be con­ sidered equal from the point of view of their capacities but also from their mode of engaging with an art practice. My argument is that audiences engage in the same type of embodied indi­ viduation described earlier for artists. Audiences explore the self in relation to the surrounding world and culture. Beyond interpreting the world, which is already a means of transforming it, audiences curate, select, discard, borrow, make, act in the world. At a glance, an audience is said to be passive because it appears to receive gifts made by someone else. But let’s not be mistaken, this is also the case for an artist who is also passive in relation to other artists, culture and technical norms pre-existing them (and I mean pre-existing in a purely anagraphical way and not trascendental).

36

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

Similarly, audiences share, as the artists, an active attitude towards the practice by actively curating their own intellectual space, carving out and exploring paths where they find things that resonate with them and others that do not. In short, an audience engages in a cyclical process of search, questioning and answering that, fuelled by both a pathos (sentire) and a gnosis (sapere), wants to be embodied, felt through a unity of the self, the body and the world. I retain what resonates with me, discard what does not. I keep exploring what has enabled me to enter in conversation with myself and others. What resonates with me is the practice, the journey of another individual. As an audience I see in a performance or an artwork a part of the artist’s journey that feels like my own. It is as if the artist says: feel this! feel this! Can you feel it too? And an audience replies: yes! This is why we often hear fanatics saying that their idol knows them better than they know them­ selves. Of course, that is not the case. The reality is that the fan has dee­ pened their individuation journey by embodying the one of someone else – their idol. I feel the other and the other feel me, in Merleau-Ponty’s parlance. “Apart we are together” (Ranciere 2011, 51), indeed. “Tied together by a certain sensory fabric” (Ranciere 2011, 56). By practising art we look for that brief moment in which our solipsistic existential agony can find peace in the reassurance that some else feels the same way as us and we hence receive proof that we are not alone.

**** Audiences, artists, curators, critics, philosophers are all art practitioners engaging in an individuation process. It is also their interrelationships that define an art practice. Yet, to say that all these parties engage in the same journey is not to say there cannot be differences. Differences exist – they are circumstantial, neces­ sary and to be defended too. An alternative way to look at the differences between these parties can be proposed. Maybe naive or over-simplistic to some, yet I would argue that such differences can be drawn on a spectrum defined by two points: a public practice and a private practice. On this spectrum, diverse subjects engaging in the same practice can be displaced freely depending on the mode of acting within a given context that they themselves define. Art critics, for example, engage in an art practice that is evidently creative and public but also “in recipient of” and private. Curator’s practice, as another example, has nowadays become a public activity similar to the one of the artist and often dominating the scene even more than the artists themselves.

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

37

Within this spectrum, a practice is public or private depending on the set­ ting and contexts in which it is enacted. Artists, by the very nature of their practice, occupy the public side of the spectrum more evidently compared to others. Artists perform and exhibit in public. Yet it is not a matter of being active. Nor should a practice oriented towards the private sphere, as often the more evident case for an audience, make anyone necessarily passive towards the gifts of someone else. In fact, the act of appreciating a gift characterises an active subject. Rather, what may differentiate artists, audience, curators and all actors defining a practice lies in the modes, direction and speeds with which each subject moves back and forth across the private-public spectrum. If the performance and/or artwork is the moment in which the private experience of a practice becomes public in a direct and immediate way, for an audience, the lived experience of the encounter with someone else’s practice may remain private in the very moment, yet the rationalised thought of the lived will be shared, problematised and reworked later over (private) commu­ nications that will nevertheless come to affect the public realm – and through that it will return to the individual self. This is at least how we have learned to relate to each other’s practices. If this public-private spectrum is understood, one would also understand why the calling out of audience members in a show is always met with embarrassment by both the person in the spotlight and the remaining part of an audience. Or why the audience’s participation is often met with annoyance by the professional avant-garde actor who is now forced to interact with a “partner” that cannot distinguish between everyday beha­ viour and a Schechnerian “restored behaviour” (Schechner 2013) demand­ ing a Grotwoskinan “freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction”. A public-private spectrum allows for different modes of approaching a practice while implicitly suggesting actions, movement, intentions that are necessary to keep the very practice alive, whether one understands the prac­ tice as one that constructs culture (e.g. Butler) or represents it (e.g. Schechner). As a concluding thought, and to re-connect this discourse to digital art practices discussed in the next chapter, it might be clear also why many, like me, dislike being the subject of an interactive installation. As stated, we are used to enjoying our private dimension in relating to a work and do not wish to be in the spotlight in front of others in the gallery. However, there is something more specific to the digital to be said. We do not like to be seen as used users in front of others; nor thought of as such in the mind of someone else – i.e. the artist. One feels used in two ways since we are forced to be participants in the making of a script we do not know while also knowing that such a “mysterious script” cannot be changed. The script is indeed hardcoded in the software that enables the very interaction and we know we are only asked to pretend to command the interface. Agamben, while considering the question, what is a command, wrote:

38

From art to art practices (phenomenology) If we consider the increasing success of the category of the performative, not only among linguists but also among philosophers, jurists, and the­ orists of literature and art, it is permissible to suggest the hypothesis that the centrality of this concept actually corresponds to the fact that, in contemporary societies, the ontology of the command is progressively supplanting the ontology of the assertion. (Agamben 2019, 53)

Simondon, while considering the technical object, instead: To command is still to remain external to what one commands, when commanding consists in the activation according to a pre-established setup, made for this activation, planned in order to operate this activation within the schema of the technical objects construction. (Simondon 2017, 255) Therefore, if art is a command and the relationship with technology trans­ forms it to a command to command for something else, in an interactive installation we have: a command (artists) to command (audience) that com­ mands (audience) to command (digital). Yet, to be seen and feel like a puppet at the hands of master puppeteers there is already the experience of everyday life with the digital – and that is plenty, thank you.

Notes 1 I am rephrasing here the initial sentence in Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Eye and Mind”: “Science manipulates things and gives up living in them” (Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind”. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. 121). 2 For example, in Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind”, the scope of the paper is not to show how a painter engages the body to do art but to prove perception as the means through which the Heideggerian Dasein (Being-in-the-world) realises itself. 3 See The Origin of the Work of Art in Heidegger (1993). 4 Unfortunately, Ingarden’s work is also largely unknown within artistic circles. This is certainly due to the fact that much of Ingarden’s work was written in Polish and that its translation to German and English happened, in many cases, decades after. Yet the collection of studies collated in three volumes of Ingardeniana (Vol. I 1976 – Vol. II 1990 – Vol. III 1991); (Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa 1976, 1991; Rudnick, Hans-Heinrich 1990) did not suffice to grant a steady continuation of the re-elaboration of his aesthetics. Even when Part I of Volume 3, titled “Aesthetic of the Performing Arts: Different Phenomenological Perspectives”, openly attempted a re-elaboration of Ingarden’s thought outside literature. 5 Originally published in Polish in 1937 and translated and published in English in 1979 (Ingarden 1979). 6 The reason why aesthetic is often considered a branch of philosophy. 7 For an example of this debate from a literary perspective see Keiper et al. (1997). 8 Indeed, all phenomenology is a confrontation with Descartes and the con­ sequences of his thinking on the philosophical debate that came after him.

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

39

9 See the “Languages of art: an approach to a theory of symbols” by Goodman (2008). 10 “Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole” (C.G. Jung 1989, 3). 11 I cannot but recall here a passage from Agamben who, while discussing the origins of an act of creation in response to Deleuze, describes mastery in these terms: “Mastery is not formal perfection but […] preservation of the imperfection in the perfect form” (Agamben 2019, 39). Then continues and says: “As opposed to ability, which simply negates and abandons its potential not to play, and talent, which can only play, mastery pre­ serves and exercises in action not its potential to play but its potential not to play” (ibid.). 12 I do not deny, of course, the existence of genuinely pleased audience members.

References Adorno, Theodor W., Gretel Adorno, and Rolf Tiedemann. 2002. Aesthetic theory. London: Continuum. Agamben, Giorgio, and Adam Kotsko. 2019. Creation and anarchy: the work of art and the religion of capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ̌ Bakhtin, Mihail Mihajlovic, Michael Holquist, and Vadim Liapunov. 1999. Toward a philosophy of the act. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Goodman, Nelson. 2008. Languages of art: an approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Grotowski, Jerzy. 2012. Towards a poor theatre. New York: Taylor & Francis. Guattari, Félix, Paul Bains, and Julian Pefanis. 2006. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Heidegger, Martin, and David Farrell Krell. 1993. “The origin of the work of art”. In Basic writings: from Being and time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964). 139–212. London: Routledge. Ingarden, Roman. 1961. “Aesthetic experience and aesthetic object”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 21 (3): 289–313. Ingarden, Roman. 1979. The cognition of the literary work of art. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jung, C.G., and Jaffé, Aniela. 1989. Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage Books. Keiper, Hugo, Christoph Bode, and Richard J. Utz. 1997. Nominalism and literary discourse: new perspectives. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: performance, technology, phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993. “Eye and mind”. In The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader: philosophy and painting. 121–150. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of perception. Abingdon: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques, and Gregory Elliott. 2011. The emancipated spectator. London: Verso. Rudnick, Hans-Heinrich. 1990. Ingardeniana II. New studies in the philosophy of Roman Ingarden: with a new international bibliography. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel.

40

From art to art practices (phenomenology)

Schechner, and Brady. 2013. Performance studies: an introduction. London: Routledge. Simondon, Gilbert, Cécile Malaspina, and John Rogove. 2017. On the mode of exis­ tence of technical objects. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing and University of Minnesota Press. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1976. Ingardeniana: a spectrum of specialised studies establishing the field of research. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1991. Ingardeniana III. Roman Ingarden’s aesthetics in a new key and the independent approaches of others: the performing arts, the fine arts and literature. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

41

4

The medium will still be the message until …

Death should be the only way in which an individuation process comes to an end. I fear though that the digital, in lieu of its peculiar modes of being, brings ways of starving an individuation process prematurely. The issue is especially evident from a perspective that considers embodiment. If embodiment is the eradication of all distances between the self, the instrument and the world to rejoin, transformed, in the unity of experience, what does it mean to embody a medium, the digital, for whom the world is only a count? The above offers only a generic formulation of “the” problem of all digital art practices but it implicitly encapsulates many others. I will tackle three in these pages. The first two will be dealt with by bringing to the table the per­ spective of the performer – mine. One problem is concerned with the ability to sustain a meaningful relationship with the digital instrument. The second is concerned with the odd and yet necessary way in which digital treats time and the ways in which one is forced to relate to it. The third issue is presented from the perspective of a generic experience in dealing with digital technologies.

**** To discuss this first point, I wish to borrow from my personal experience and take into consideration two types of performance: a classical guitar perfor­ mance and a digital musical instrument (DMI) performance (a performance in which the musical instrument is made of digital circuitry). I studied classical guitar for many years. These years required a three part study of music grammar, western music tradition and instrument techniques. I had to learn about music theory, immerse myself in musical literature across several centuries of tradition and overcome technical challenges in controlling the instrument. This learning process could not be reduced to mnemonic nor mechanical exercise. This process entailed a continuous challenge of the relation between

42

The medium will still be the message until …

me and these alterities, which I needed to appropriate and hence embody as unity so as to be moved back to the unconscious. A simple gathering of information about, for example, Bach and Baroque music would not do. I needed to internalise, digest, feel, pathically know Bach. This entailed having at once to hear Bach actively as well as let Bach’s music play through me. It entailed also learning about Bach through the reminder of what was left of him: his scores and the tradition of interpreters that kept his work alive. All this is a process that builds on the alternation between gnostic and pathic knowledge. This cultural appropriation is not exclusively mental but must translate to the body and my instrument. I needed to practise with my guitar in order to overcome the technical challenges that keep my understanding of Bach separate from my ability to realise it through my instrument. How­ ever, in this case, such overcoming is not mechanical and any momentary resolution (e.g. instance of individuation cycle if you wish) shapes my rela­ tionship with Bach, my instrument and me. There is a constant tension in reconciling my possibilities and limits with the instrument with what I hear, feel and know about music and Bach. In the end I look to give my imprint to Bach rather than Bach playing me. The goal of the interpreter is to add themselves to Bach so as to become an ambassador of Bach’s and keep his heritage alive. My individuation is the result of myriads of tensional pulls and mediations between me, the materiality of my instrument, concrete instances of culture (scores, performances), my body, my mind, my experiences, my sensibilities … and countless more. It is a process in which I attempt to re-embody, if only momentarily, the open flow of Being,1 while attempting to leave a trace on it. In this process my instrument is both a medium and an interlocutor for a dialogue between me and it, me and the world. I question my guitar and the guitar responds with a further challenge. But the answer I receive is never exactly what I expect (it is not a rhetorical process) even in the case of my incessantly posing the same question. My quest to bring order to chaos is always denied the same answer and yet this answer is always relevant to the original question. To bring it out of the metaphor, every performance is never the same while always being itself. Every time I play the Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 it is never the same Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565, while always being itself (Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565). In fact, in my proceeding along a Growtoskian via negativa with my instrument, so as to erase all distance between impulse and action, there is a dialogue con­ cerning me and sound before me and Bach. I could take this down to the level of one note too. The making of a note is also not reducible to mechanical events (hold your hand this way, the finger that way, stroke the string this way etc.). Within the making of that note I can fuel my quest for individuality, find myself, that sound of me different from any other, my voice, through an instrument that is no more an object but

The medium will still be the message until …

43

2

extension of my body extending the scope and active radius of touch. A few notes are enough to recognise myself, another few to recognise Pat Metheny, a short movement to recognise Merce Cunningham, a few strokes to recog­ nise Van Gogh.

**** This dialogue with an instrument is different in an individuation process through a DMI. Every question I pose to a digital instrument has an answer, which is, and cannot be other than calculated. The process drives in the opposite direction compared to the one described for the guitar. Instead of proceeding towards a narrowing of the coathic structure of Being down to a thread leading to me (and rejoining chaos at the other end), with a DMI, the process begins by interfacing with an instrument for which reality is struc­ tured a priori order. In doing so, rejoining with the chaotic structure of reality and its uncountable flow requires either a leap in faith or, for the non-believ­ ers, looking into ways of spicing things up in the algorithm defining the digi­ tal instrument. Every gesture questioning a digital instrument provides two types of response: a precise one or a probabilistic one (bar, of course, unpredictable fatal crashes). The first case is the simplest: action A is followed by answer B. Here, the drive for exploration is destined to die quickly. The same question will always receive the same answer transforming what was meant to be an open dialogue into a rhetorical questioning and answering. Infinite nuan­ ces, for example, in modes of touch cannot be explored hence the gesture can at best be staged (i.e. I ask knowing well what the answer will be) or I take the entire process somewhere else, away from the sound-action mechanism (e.g. timbre, compositional rules, concepts etc.). In this case, the search for the self is quickly projected outwards towards the realm of outputs and effects. For example, in my work ‘Agorá’ (see Torre 2015) where I performed with a custom-made data glove, I programmed the bending sensor on my index finger to work as a trigger whose behaviour changed according to the amount of elapsed time since the beginning of the performance. In addition, I used the same bending sensor data to trigger different audio effects according to the attitude and heading of my hand, which was counted by a cluster of threeaxis accelerometers and magnetometers. In other words, it did not matter if the cause-effect link between my gesture and the sonic output was a derivative of a simple or complex algorithm. Gesture A gave rise always to sonic output B; gesture C to sonic output D etc. The best one can do in these situations is to make sure that the digital instrument always recognises a gesture when it is presented with one (the reason why DMI performers always feel more secure having their laptop on stage … you never know with these computers! Some troubleshooting may be needed).

44

The medium will still be the message until …

My quest to bring order to chaos starves because there is no chaos to begin with in an instrument that is pre-programmed and through which my quest for control is always fulfilled to its fullest – making my questioning redundant and the instrument an instrument of control – aka a controller. The second option attempts to offer a greater variety in the type of responses by using probabilities. The degree of variety is important here, of course. If the process is too random, any question will receive an unrelated answer, or better still, given that all digital processes are pseudo-random, what is provided will be an answer whose relatability to the question is unrecognisable to us – the journey stalls. No performance will ever be the same while also never being itself. If the process offers answers that vary within a certain range of predict­ ability, the appropriation process may at least find some room to begin an exploration. Yet this space is defined a priori and confined within the con­ straints and possibilities set in the code that creates it. My questioning will be stifled too; it will just take a bit more time to come to this realisation. For example, the randomness at the core of Pollock’s dripping technique is irre­ ducible to a function. I can emulate/approximate digitally – in fact we know this is what digital does – the general technique and effect quite easily on a computer program by many and diverse numerical elaborations in response to many inputs, but I will never be able to fully open and equate, just through code and count, the uncountable flow of the reality embodied in a perfor­ mance of Pollock’s technique. My quest to bring order to chaos starves because there is no chaos to begin with in an instrument that is pre-programmed, and for which the quest to control it is fulfilled only in so much as I am not too obnoxious with my questioning. In other words, I must submit to technology’s reason that decides for me, without questioning me, where the journey stops.

**** A second concern arising from the relationship between digital devices and the self has to do with time. All kinds of individuation processes revolve around a notion of an ever-changing/negotiating subject. This implicitly roots the process and the individual in time. Simondon puts this in clear words: Becoming is not the becoming of individuated being but the becoming of the individuation of being: what happens occurs in the form of a putting into question of being, in other words, in the form of the element of an open problematic, which is the individuation of resolved being: the indi­ vidual is contemporary of its becoming for this becoming is its indivi­ duation; time itself is essence, not as development starting from an origin

The medium will still be the message until …

45

or tendency towards some end but, rather as resolute constitution of being. (Simondon, quoted in Scott 2014, 6) For an individuation process through the digital the issue is that, when relating with a digital instrument, the discretisation of time-events at the hands of the digital is at odds with the uncountable time-continuum of our experience. Such oddity, please note, does not concern our relationship with the digital output. A direct relationship with digital output is unequivocal to our senses and guaranteed by the speed at which digital works. There is unity in the nowness because digital output presents itself as dissociated from its genesis as count. Output is effect or illusion and we cannot detach from it, like we cannot see anything but water in a desert mirage. The lis­ tening experience of a digital piece of music, the viewing experience of a digitally created film, the attendance at a digital dance performance, the participation in an interactive installation, rejoin with the experience of time that we embody. Our concern is instead in our relationship with the digital from input to output. Just as the desert mirage is not evidence of real water, the nowness of the digital output is not evidence of a continuity of its input. In fact, there is no continuity at all. Our actions, being the input to the digital systems, will inevitably be in a differentiated status from their output. For the digital must inscribe our action as a partial and time-discrete count, there can be no analogousness or con­ tinuity between input and output but only likeness and approximation. In this count, causation gets lost and there is no way for us to correlate input and output other than through more counting. An even bigger problem is the belief that all this can be overcome with speed as if minimising the time to compute input and output would magically make digital disappear leaving us free from its chains. This is only a technical dream to a technical problem often referred to as latency. In digital audio this is a serious issue, which is addressed on countless occasions. Latency is, simply put, the time it takes for a device to compute an output from a given input; for example, a latency of 15 ms indicates the time a computer needs to digitise a sound and play it back. At this point any text concerned with latency in audio will report that a latency of 10 ms or less is sufficient to provide a convincing sound-action mechanism. This means that an interaction with a digital device that responds to my input gestures (e.g. voice, movements etc.) in less than 10 ms appears to me as responding in real time. The solution to latency is hence straightfor­ ward: make things faster. And for that we have always more powerful CPUs, GPUs, algorithms and so on. Under this light, latency is certainly an interesting scientific fact but that does not question if we can recognise ourselves in the process. The unreported

46

The medium will still be the message until …

idea is that from the perspective of a meaningful dialogue between performer and instrument latency is not a problem at all. Many acoustic instruments have greater than 10 ms latencies and this is no issue at all – you learn to deal with it, and it becomes part of your embodied experience with the instrument. For example, the delay between a key pressed and its resulting sound in a pipe organ could be >100 ms depending on the complexity and scale of its tacker mechanism and yet this does not jeopardise the relational process between the organist and the instrument. Latency does not prevent a priori the possibility of embodying the instrument in an open journey. With a pipe organ, the individuation process is boundless despite large latencies. The problem is not time per se but the way in which digital treats it. The inevitable result of any discretisation process is that in between counts there will always be an unfilled gap or void. Take, for example, the sample and hold mechanism in an ADC. The circuit works by holding a voltage for a given time x so that it can be sampled. Yet, this means also that during the given time x there is voltage flowing that is not being recorded. Of course, bigger gaps mean low fidelity and hence the obvious engineering solution: make things faster since faster is better. For the ADC circuitry this means using a higher sampling rate to record a signal with less gaps in between samples. Increasing the sampling rate indefinitely is not possible though. Constant higher values would require, sub­ stantially, infinite storage and bandwidth; the reason why Shannon and Nyquist theorems provide the optimal solution, that is, use a sampling rate high enough to not allow for distortion (aliasing) in the sampled signal. Yet, no matter how high the sampling rate the time gap cannot be zeroed. Hence, the input remains decorrelated from its output or, if one prefers, only a mathematical correlation can exist between the two. To visualise this, let’s imagine slowing down the process involved in digi­ tally recording a body movement so as to “see” it in action. Between the time in which the digital snapshot of my gesture is captured, computed and relayed as output, there is a time gap where no instances of my real-world gestures are captured. In that gap, me, my gestures and the whole world simply do not exist for the digital device. Because of this inevitable gap, no matter how small science and engineering can make it, the output, no matter what it is, will always be a partial, approximate, counted mathematical reconstruction of the input. In this mathematical transubstantiation of the input the cause-effect relationship with the output exists only in its mathe­ matical form. And we do not know anymore where our own self is.

**** These issues concern also audiences, curators, critics and all parties taking part in the ecosystem of digital art practices. Allow me to provide an ordinary life example first and then one relating to the digital art domain.

The medium will still be the message until …

47

Let us consider banking. This is an activity, a phenomenal reality, that most of us have to deal with at some stage in our lives. Banking is a very old and highly complex way of doing business. Recent trends in the business (like many others) have moved towards a digitalisation of the business. Sub­ stantially, a way of automating the business to “ease” the customers’ dealings with the bank (and vice versa) while cutting payroll costs (i.e. sack staff). A winwin deal for the bank management, shareholders and software developers, no doubt. Less so for customers and employees. Here is why. When we go to the bank, more often than not, we deal with a screen. This interface presents us with many options that should (and will) guide us through the most common banking operations (cash in/out, cheques, payments etc.). For more complex operations, or problematic situations, we are generally reverted to a human (one of the few that survived the digital revolution). We assume at this stage that things will get sorted out promptly but our expecta­ tions won’t be met. The employee is also chained to a screen that will not provide the answer required for the “complex” situations at hand. And so, frustration builds up. The problem here is that whoever coded the software to which we, or the employee, interfaces, could not have incorporated in the code all the “ifs” and “buts” (i.e. “if” and “else”) that real life entails. That is not necessarily for lack of will or ignorance (sometimes it might be the case though) but simply because it is impossible. Reality is uncountable in its possibilities but the code, in order to work, requires you to put a finite number to the possibilities real life presents. The software can only encode parts of this “banking reality” and no matter how sophisticated the software can be, it will always approximate reality. On the other hand, by ever-more reliance exclusively on the digital medium, we come to confuse the finite and crippled digital banking with what real banking is. In such a world, the issue we had with the bank is unresolved or, worse, not considered as an issue at all because it is non-exis­ tent among the finite set of possibilities allowed by the interface. In the land of 0s and 1s there is no room for the infinite space between the two integers. We, the customers, and our issue simply do not exist. Extend this to any number of situations in our society and you can easily see how the path to authoritarianism and marginalisation is silently, slyly and innocently paved while everybody acts as happy busy bees. As sad as it may sound, through the digital the conditions of existing or not for the self within a specific context are dictated by the digital. A second example, this time closer to digital art practices, is one concern­ ing audiophiles and, more specifically, the analogue vs digital audio debate. This debate is concerned with the quality of audio and the overall listening experience at the hands of the two types of technologies. Analogue enthusiasts claim that the experience and quality of digital is inferior to analogue sound. Digital enthusiasts would claim that today digital audio technology offers at least equal quality and experience.

48

The medium will still be the message until …

Each side defends their position from a view informed by an experiential engagement with audio output. Technical considerations are often presented in this debate but offered in mere support of what each side already believes to be the best audio experience. In other words, one couldn’t care less that the origins of digital audio lie in mathematical abstraction and should trust their ears. In light of what has been discussed so far, we know, however, that there are peculiarities belonging to the digital medium that are both essential to and unforgiving in our experience and to our art practice. So instead of ques­ tioning the quality of an experience I pose the following question: what are the limits that digital imposes on an audio experience through digital audio? If you, like me, are lucky enough to have lived through times when we used rotary dial phones and analogue networks, you would understand, pathically and rationally, the meaning of the phrase “we spoke on the phone”. We were present to each other at a distance, talking did not matter, the long silences, the breathing, the hisses and hums and all the uncountable flows defining presence were sufficient to experience a nowness and a we before an I. Today, in the era of digital networks where the whole experience must be counted a priori, silence triggers only the threat of disconnection (are you there? Can u he.r ee? He … ooo … c.l … e …. Ck …). Silence, for the net­ work, is only an opportunity to save bandwidth and reduce noise – it is irre­ levant excess for the digital phone network. Today, you call someone under the constant peril of falling into the void between the 0s and the 1s. In an increasingly digital world, new generations are not even given the opportunity to experience analogue, and hence digital appears to them as the only possible mode of mediating a dialogue at a distance. “It is what it is … amen”. Likewise, new generations do not even understand the warm/cold debate in relation to analogue/digital audio, because experiencing audio recorded and played back only via analogue equipment is prohibitively expensive and rare. Yet, dismissing the intrinsic peculiarities of the digital makes you forever oblivious of the conditions under which you have been used. For example, the “lossy” character of the MP3 format is not a consequence of the process of storing but the very process of storing. You have been fed a mathematically mediated (hence approximate) audio-data experience for all the reasons of the world but one: yours.

**** In light of these considerations it is clear that technology, and even less, digi­ tal technology, is not a tool. This is hardly news, as indeed that is what a philosophical discourse on modern technology has been able to debunk in the past century in ways that highlighted how its complexity acts on the indivi­ dual and the society alike.

The medium will still be the message until …

49

This is the lesson that in its many flavours was given by Severino, Hei­ degger, Arendt, Simondon, Marcuse, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Stiegler, Barthes, Kittler and countless more. Treating code, software and hardware as a tool shows complete oblivious­ ness of technology’s ability to mask individuality in order to redraw attention onto itself. It is not the artist to avail of the digital technology as a technical resource but, quite the opposite, the digital to reduce any act to a technical resource. And that is thus how we become, as Kant would have said, “a cog in a machine”. Yet the most threatening lesson in media and art studies was given by McLuhan in 1961 and his provocative maxim “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 2013). McLuhan’s maxim speaks clearly: any message conveyed through “the electric medium” is irrelevant to the magnitude of what the very medium has to say. Is the medium stealing the spotlight?! – the artist might ask in horror. And what would this message be? – the artist may continue to ask with a snarky tone. The answer is yes, it might well be stealing the spot­ light if you treat it as a tool. Its message, furthermore, is nothing anyone can pinpoint exactly but only one about the scale, the loudness and the power derived by the multitude of subjects enabling it. The maxim, as McLuhan will later state,3 is only a teaser to catch the attention of a subject still believing to exert full control over a medium immensely more powerful than the individual. What one says over the phone is irrelevant to the scale with which the telephone network, in its intricate and complex structure, can influence the individual and the society as a whole.4 The complexity of the medium adds noise to the message one wishes to convey through it so that at the other end (i.e. the output) the sender is either unnameable or always the medium itself. Such is the case for all technological art practices that embrace technolo­ gical wonders uncritically and end up looking like they were created by one and only one artist: technology. A critical attitude to technology may help of course. Yet it should be embraced without reducing technology to a tool; nor believing that an ana­ lysis alone of the effects of the medium could cast a magic spell on technology so as to regain our freedom from its influence. We would only fool ourselves. If such discourse applies to all modern/electric technologies, the sheer complexity and nature of the digital dwarf any other. Digital technologies do not only influence our thoughts but constrain them so as to correlate them with the mathematical model of the world they are made of. Digital makes thoughts ex nihilo. The typewriter standardised the egos once embodied by calligraphy.5 You look at a typed page and you need a name to know its author, even if that author is your closest friend. Calligraphy could give it away immediately. If this book was handwritten you could see how my thoughts and emotions

50

The medium will still be the message until …

moved as I was writing them.6 The typewriter removed all the polychromy of my emotions and vested them in monochrome with one font (which is the font with which this book will be printed and which will add to my words a meaning I did not give). Likewise writing made monochrome the polychromy of a speech now without a body. Digital technologies narrow this polychromy too but with a dramatically different method. While the output of an analogue process is the reminder of several processes of transformation that one cannot fully control because it is intertwined in a reality that is uncountable, the output of a digital device is not the reminder of any process but instantiation of a numerical calculation of it (minus approximations and error of the reality). Digital is less a matter of sur­ viving the process and more about creating one ex nihilo … from numbers. Such a realisation makes the McLuhan maxim all the more powerful and terrifying when applied to the digital. If the message of any medium is louder than any message conveyed through it, when it comes to the digital, the message we convey incurs also into the risks of becoming completely delinked from us because of the abstract, anonymous, standardising mathematical processes of which the digital is made. In the discrete, standardising and de-subjectivising counting processes of the digital, everything we do becomes a command to command and for which we remain “external to what [we] commands” (Simondon 2017, 255) and the self gets lost.

**** Digital technologies appear then to starve prematurely an individuation pro­ cess with and through them. The count on which digital creates itself sepa­ rates input from output in an all too arbitrary a manner that masks subjectivising and individualising efforts at the hands of mathematical abstractions. Is there a way out or any hope for a digital art practice? Yes. I want to believe that the problem is not the digital medium but our mode of engaging with it. There is then only one way forwards: deal with and through it. Hence, the (digital) medium will remain the message unless … … we understand the digital as a collective individuation process carried out by that uncountable number of people, thoughts, actions, stories, events, politics, knowledge, success, failures, joys, pain, questions and answers that endlessly informs it and re-creates it. … we understand the specificities of the digital with respect to other technologies: namely count, voids, standardising and de-subjectivising forces. … we engage with the digital not only as humanists but also, and in equal measure, as technologists, scientists and inventors so as to ponder

The medium will still be the message until …

51

the hardware, the code, the mathematics, the physics, the histories, the logics, the tears and the joys of the digital.7 We need to explore the digital from within so as to endlessly take it apart before putting it back together and see where it is “us” in between. Realising the inward direction of our individuation journey is the first step for a digital art practice that as an individuation process attempts to trace a path for the self from input to output striving to not get lost in the derivative shadow, trace, partial, counted, discrete snapshot of the self and the world the digital creates. In this process, the self, intended as the true cause of any output preceding any digitising process, must be recuperated within the digital so as to desig­ nate a subjectivising path that links intentions, input, manipulation and output. The realisation of all this is a societal problem before a strictly aesthetic one. From reforming an educational system that has no doubt fallen prey to technology’s reason to shaking off inherited divisions of labour between artists and technicians. In relation to the former, we ought to aim for an education system that goes beyond a compartmental approach to knowledge and erase disciplinarity with all of its inter/intra/multi/super/sub/extra/pro prefixes. Jacot’s method, Ranciere and Simondon’s proposal offer a way forwards. Certainly, and for a start, we should stop offering branded devices to our youth only because they are simple to use or because it is the industry standard. Standardisation is useful but must be carefully dosed. At the same time, the very idea that technology should be simple to use, more so in education, should be plainly rejected since it is also the fastest route to the cretinisation8 of the masses and the creation of despotic (artistic too) elites. As for the division of labour, we should just abandon an idea of technology as a bunch of sophisticated tools to be handled by technicians while at the same time stop pretending that artistic efforts are cerebral efforts. We ought to free ourselves from a bourgeois attitude for which physical labour is an indecorous affair for the true intellectual and begin to dirty our hands into what Simondon calls the “obscure central zone” – the space between the input and the output where digital gets made. To use Simondon’s words that I reuse here with specific connection to the digital, we know “what goes into the machine and what comes out, but not what happens in it” (Simondon 2017, 254). Shedding light on this obscure central zone offers us the chance to bring to the fore the subjects within an otherwise lifeless digital object. Thus, where there are subjects there are dialogues, possibilities for an exchange, to change, be changed, feel; a renewed hope to find ourselves within it and to hence have the content of our message cutting through the noise generated by digital media; reaching then to our audience who will recognise our voice between many other.

52

The medium will still be the message until …

**** What about the problem of embodiment? Are digital practices embodied individuation processes or not? We have two choices: we can embody the illusion of an embodiment with the digital through its output or embody the digital in the making of it. My suggestion is that, in order to give a proper meaning to embodiment in relation to digital art practices, we would be better off dropping the former and focusing on the latter. Do you feel the pain on your back for the countless hours spent in front of the screen? Have you noticed how nervously you move your toes when com­ pilation does not succeed? Have you noticed how painful it is to force your head to think with the logic of someone else? The joy in understanding? The thrill of exploring and trying things out? Embodiment is inevitable like disembodiment, with the caveat that this latter indicates when the former ends. We are a two-headed Janus, the digital has not changed that. What the digital may have changed is the way in which it forces us to find ourselves through it. A digital art practice may in fact require slowing down what we always wanted from digital – the speed of its counting – so as to tear up this digital veil of maya,9 open the box, find and create a self otherwise lost in it. Con­ trary to what one may think then there is a case to think of digital art prac­ tices as more closely related to plastic art forms than performative ones.

Notes 1 One could also interpret it as a test to the power of will – I wanted to reunite with reality by imposing my presence onto it, hence changing it. It is probably for this reason that art has been often used as a display of power – it is a test of power and a testament to power. 2 In Italian, the word “tocco” (noun for touch) refers indeed to the unique and per­ sonalised approach to touch the instrument that unmistakably identifies its executor. 3 See www.nytimes.com/1967/03/19/archives/mcluhan-now-the-medium-is-the-massa ge.html. 4 It is a matter of scale like for privacy. We are collectively digging our own grave by individually not caring about it. 5 I remember my grandmother, in the later years of her life, crying when unable to properly execute her own signature. Her crying was not caused by the mechanical inability to execute her signature but rather by the frustration in having lost an ability to manipulate reality through an embodied gesture that marked her own individuality – a gesture in which now she sees only her failure to manipulate to her own will. 6 I must confess, furthermore, that each time my thoughts stopped at the computer keyboard, it was sufficient to pick up pen and paper to reignite them. 7 “We have to shed our mechanist vision of the machine and promote a conception that encompasses all of its aspects: technological, biological, informatic, social, theoretical and aesthetic” (Guattari 2006, 107).

The medium will still be the message until …

53

8 I am here referring to technological devices in our educational system. Many other situations may require simplicity, or for a better word – immediacy of use. 9 Schopenhauer’s.

References Guattari, Félix, Paul Bains, and Julian Pefanis. 2006. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Sydney: Power. McLuhan, Marshall. 2013. Understanding media: the extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Scott, David. 2014. Gilbert Simondon’s psychic and collective individuation: a critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Simondon, Gilbert, Cécile Malaspina, and John Rogove. 2017. On the mode of exis­ tence of technical objects. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing and University of Minnesota Press. Torre, Giuseppe. 2015. “A journey towards the development of a sound-led inter­ disciplinary performance: Agorá”. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. 11 (1): 82–99.

54

5

Looking for an identity (ethics)

I wish at this point to explain what it may mean, in more practical terms, to engage in a digital art practice as described thus far. As a form of individuation, a digital art practice becomes a practice that is concerned with a problematisation of the otherwise possibilities of being of the self in relation to and through digital technology. It is a practice con­ cerned with a discovery of self not given by the digital but self-determined in relation to and through the digital. It is a practice concerned with a pro­ blematisation of the very possibility of being creative through the digital under the realisation that the objectifying forces of digital technology are too big to be ignored. The relational aspect of such a practice brings ethics to the fore. Among the many ways in which one could discuss ethics in digital art practices, I wish to advance one in dialogue with a particular aspect of Fou­ cault’s problematisation of aphrodisia: namely his analysis of the GrecoRoman precept of the “care of the self” (Foucault 1988). In general terms, Foucault’s work can be described as concerned with an analysis of various power relations (religious, economic, social) and how we, as individuals, can confront these through an everlasting dialectic inspired, for the most part, by two main concepts: the care of the self and freedom. Informed by an intense study of the systems of thought of the antiquities, the precept epimelesthai sautou, the “care of the self”, refers to a modus vivendi, which first appeared in the Greco-Roman philosophy of the first two centuries AD and was re-interpreted in various ways until the Christian phi­ losophy of the fourth and fifth centuries BC. Originally, this precept was an invitation to speculative practices that helped in situating oneself in relation to others (the Greek city-state). Later, through Christian philosophy, it became a rule for asceticism, guilt and penitence; an attitude that, Foucault says, has informed Western societies until the present times. It is the early interpretation of the precept, I argue, that presents interesting points of contact with a digital art practice. In order to present my argument, I will therefore (1) offer an overview of the main idea of care of the self in Foucault’s work and (2) explain how this concept applies to a digital art practice.

Looking for an identity (ethics)

55

**** The care of the self “constituted, not an exercise in solitude, but a true social practice” (Foucault 1988, 51), a mode of being to which every citizen of a polis (the ancient Greek polis) should commit to shape their conduct. It is not, however, a social rule or law to which everyone should submit to become a good citizen. The practice is primarily instigated by an autonomous initia­ tive. To some, such as Socrates, it is a mission given by the gods. To others, such as Plato’s Alcibiades, it is a prerequisite to embark on political activities. For the Romans, it is a practice to embark on only after having abandoned politics. In all cases there is an emphasis on educating oneself. To use Foucault’s words: there is the inducement to acknowledge oneself as being ill or threatened by illness. The practice of the self implies that one should form the image of oneself not simply as an imperfect, ignorant individual who requires correction, training, and instruction, but as one who suffers from certain ills and who needs to have them treated, either by oneself or by someone who has the necessary competence. Everyone must discover that he is in a state of need, that he needs to receive medication and assistance. (Foucault 1988, 57). The very practice is instigated by a preliminary ability of an individual to acknowledge their state of need. Hence, it is not a diagnosis given by others. Neither is it a doctor’s cure prescribing self-empowerment. The cure is some­ thing within the subject itself and in the way the subject approaches their own ill-status. In these terms, the care of the self becomes an ethical reflection on indivi­ dual freedom (Foucault 2000, 284). It is a way of problematising one’s free­ dom that results in visible ways of being and acting in a society. Thus, a person of admirable ethos was one who was admired for the way he practised freedom (Foucault 2000, 286), a practice perfected through the care of self. Within the historical context in which this precept first appeared, the spec­ ulative struggle of defining freedom consisted of finding a balance between avoiding becoming subject to the power of others (i.e. becoming a slave) while also taking care not to abuse one’s power over others (i.e. despotic attitude) (Foucault 2000, 288). Foucault’s analysis of the care of the self appears first in relation to a broader discussion concerned with a “problematization of aphrodisia” (Fou­ cault 1988, 38), but the philosophising ethos of the precept is presented in his other works too. In his essay titled “What is Enlightenment”, Foucault uses Kant to problematise the complex relationship between “the theme of humanism with the questions of the Enlightenment” (Foucault 2000, 315) and states that this problematisation is necessary “to bring some measure of

56

Looking for an identity (ethics)

clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past” (Fou­ cault 2000, 315). The philosophical ethos required by this process should consist of “a critique of what we are saying, thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves” and “characterised by a limit-attitude” (ibid). As for the problem of freedom then, the critical attitude towards the for­ mation of an ontology of the self is not achieved by the knowing of formal universal or metaphysical transcendentals but through a reflection that, using speculative limits and possible transgressions, aims at recognising ourselves “as subject of what we are doing, thinking and saying” (Foucault 2000, 315). All this, I argue, is useful for a problematisation of digital art practices, so as to investigate one’s relationship to a creative activity constantly threatened by the objectifying forces of technology. Forces that nullify efforts towards individuality and authenticity. In reference to digital technology, this means a self-realisation of the inequalities in the relationship between the self and the digital – all to the advantage of the latter and to the detriment of the individuation processes of the former. Such realisation and any initial step towards a change in the relational status quo is a negotiation on the subject-object relation between the self and technology – who is objectifying whom?

**** The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself is a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth – the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing – central to the formation of the ethical subject. (Foucault 1988, 68)

Foucault identifies three exercises for what he calls a conversion to the self – conversio ad se – that is, a process to become one’s own master, potestas sui (i.e. “his own master”): the test of poverty, speculator sui and diakrisis. The test of poverty is “a way of measuring and confirming the indepen­ dence one is capable of with regard to everything that is not indispensable and essential” (Foucault 1988, 59). For the Epicurean this meant fasting, for the Stoics depriving oneself of habits and opinions. In the digital domain it could be translated to a test seeking to find out how little digital we need, or indeed realise how much superfluous digital we use, so as to confirm our independence from the superfluous. The questions one could ask oneself are, for example: to what degree is all that is offered to me in the digital cosmos of digital devices necessary to my practice? What can I do without? Is software X, its newest or older version, indispensable to my creative ends? Is this software component necessary to my art practice? Do I need a computer with 32GB of RAM? A fully fledged operating system? Or, in more technically sophisticated terms: is memory

Looking for an identity (ethics)

57

allocation management an indispensable feature? What are the indispensable features in a language for the proper construction of one instruction? Or fur­ thermore, in more theoretical terms: what kind of constrictions do imperative languages impose on my creative practices? What are the psychological implications of functional programming? To what extent does pseudo-ran­ domness reflect my true intentions? What concerns me here is not the efficiency of the technology in use. For example, calculating the amount of computational cycles saved in the use of one algorithm in place of another, may bear little fruit if not motivated by reasons pointing towards the self; the same could be said of an investigation for which the questioning is concerned with whether identical results could be achieved with less powerful software and/or hardware. Nor is it about an act of playful cleverness such as the display hack1 for the PDP-1. In other words, technical questions, which respond to a “how to do”, must be sided with ethico-phenomenological ones, for which the concerns are rela­ tional and subjective. Such a test of poverty is concerned with the identification of pathways that question one’s relation within a specific aspect of the digital. It is, to a certain extent, a Growtoskian via negativa through which one minimises the amount of digital technology to which the self relates.2 Scaling down by breaking it down enables a problematisation of the self in relation to the socio-numerical polis on precise terms and that hence veers us away from the good/bad utopian/dystopian bipolarism informing much of the debate on technology. We enter into contact with a specific aspect of digital and we enter into conversation with it by exploring, speculating and realising different ways to relate to and through it. Speculator sui means to be a speculator of the self. This practice is done not in imitation of a judicial procedure on infractions and it does not lead to selfcastigation. Rather, it is a purely speculative work aimed at improving oneself; a self-evaluation on a performed activity (Foucault 1988, 62). With respect to a digital art practice, this precept is in itself a second defi­ nition of an art practice. The questions one reflects on gravitate around something simpler: are my actions correlated with my intentions? Do my thoughts realise and unite with the materiality of the world and me? Do I see myself in my action? How much is the medium talking and how much is me? Who is me through the digital? Where should I look now? Have I reached a dead end? … Yet one thing to stress is that a speculator sui is not someone engaging in a speculative practice for the sake of speculation. The speculator must speculate on performed actions. In other words, there is a constant connection with a praxis that informs the speculation. In digital art practices, where the essence of the digital draws you towards mathematical abstraction, maintaining a performative relation with the concrete instances of the digital (hardware and software, clogs and encoded text) is more important than ever.

58

Looking for an identity (ethics)

Lastly, diakrisis consists in a work of discrimination of those mental repre­ sentations that helps establish what does and what does not depend on us. It is a control point that enables us to accept that which comes under our understanding and reject that which does not depend on us. Foucault calls it a “test of power and guarantee of freedom” (Foucault 1988, 64) that helps us to not become attached to things not coming under our control and “to assess the relationship between oneself and that which is represented, so as to accept in relation to the self only that which can depend on the subject’s free and rational choice” (Foucault 1988, 64). Translated to digital art practices, one must assess what to accept or reject from the digital world. This may appear as the most difficult task in that a full understanding of the complexity of the digital domain is out of reach for a single individual. In fact, a diakrisis intended as such is likely to lead to a complete paralysis of action. Should this scrutiny be applied to all aspects of the digital chain so as to guarantee our freedom in and through an engage­ ment with the digital? Of course not. The focus of our engagement with the digital, I stress, should be narrow and in that narrowness an understanding of the elementary parts is not impossible – or at least, I argue, the more one knows the higher the chances of escaping and confronting successfully the objectifying forces of digital technology. The point is simple: anything escaping this checkpoint is a threat to indi­ vidual freedom and individuality.

**** This conversio ad se practised through these three exercises – test of poverty, speculator sui, diakrisis – is a mode of problematising one’s relationship with the digital in terms of freedom. It is not a search for freedom from the digital though but one for freedom within the digital. Freedom of expression through the digital. Freedom of subjectivising one’s relation to and through it. In doing so, digital technology is no longer considered a mere tool for our artistic ends but a socio-technical landscape, a digital polis within which we need to locate ourselves. The digital is now intended as “the memory of the human entity [.] essen­ tially exteriorised, materialised and spatialised” (Stiegler 2012, 3); as that landscape created and delimited by the work of the many people involved in its making – a collective individuation process. The conversio ad se is then a way of exploring our identity in relation to and within what we can call digital polis. One must practise a critique of the digital through a problematisation of the otherwise possibilities of being in relation to and through it. It is within this practice of the self, not ascetic but at once speculative and pragmatic, that an individuation process may begin and thrive.

Looking for an identity (ethics)

59

**** What all this means for the digital practitioner is not only a generic grasp of the general principles governing the digital and its effects (undoubtedly important) but also an understanding of its mechanics in its most meticulous details: code, hardware, the physical laws that govern them etc. so as to appropriately read the human memory the digital assemblage encapsulates. Yet, at the same time, this does not mean that a comprehensive knowledge of the digital is an a priori requirement for the undertaking of an art practice through it. Rather, it means that the very act of exploring the digital provides fertile ground for artistic endeavours. It is through a gnoseological/explorative process into the depths of the digital that the speculative praxis of the other­ wise possibilities of being of the self in relation to the digital can take place. Simply put, an exploration into the depth of the digital world is part of an art practice through it. Digital art practitioners must be expert technologists or, better, become expert technologists in the process of finding themselves in relation to and through a digital polis. All parties involved in the making of a digital art practice must possess an ability to code, make, assemble, tweak and talk to software and hardware as well as equally understand and engage in aesthetic discourse. It is in this ability to first dig into the depths of the digital world, to then spring back up into the materiality of its output and effects, then, that one may find ways of subjectivising a practice while embodying it. It is in these terms that digital finds its raison d’être in digital art practices. Computer music can’t truly be said to be a digital art practice if the prac­ tice is solely oriented towards the spatio-temporal organisation of sounds and silences. For there is no substantial difference in the way a composer would think of a computer or a traditional musical instrument, bar their musical affordances as tools. Such computer music is simply music. The necessity to specify that a computer is involved in the making of music may have been useful in its infancy in order to highlight the experimental/avant-garde nature of the practice and the origins of some of the sounds created. Today, anyone hearing the word “computer” next to music is more likely to think of disco than avant-garde and the way in which sounds are created is, to most, an uninteresting detail. Beyond judgmental statements though, the bottom line is that computer music today is just music, not only because of the ubiquity of the digital but because even in experimental music what it is called to ques­ tion are forms, grammars, expression, perception of sound – computer is only a means to an end, i.e. music. If we problematise instead the way in which the digital enables us to gen­ erate sounds and we begin reasoning on the otherwise possibilities of being in relation to it, we begin exploring a territory other than music or, likely, revive the true experimental character of an art practice. We would begin navigating a territory in which we may be compelled, if inspired, to the generation of sounds and yet maybe not be at ease in calling it music.

60

Looking for an identity (ethics)

Not that the result of such practice should not be music by default either. Only that discovering the self in and through a relation with the ways in which sound is thought of and represented by the digital takes over, at least in the initial inwards processes and ethos, the making of music. This ethical approach, in rough terms, allows creative energies to act as a spring: one needs to first push down to let the spring bounce up and the further one pushes it initially the higher the spring will bounce back.

**** One last consideration is with the relationship between ethics and politics. For the discussion presented here, ethics comes before politics, or at least no direct connection between ethics and politics should be made a priori. The differ­ ence I make between the two is that while ethics is concerned with a pro­ blematisation of the self in relation to a group, politics is concerned with the realisation of certain objectives for the self and/or the group. One can have ethics informing politics, or politics informing ethics. One can claim to have ethical beliefs and yet state not to subscribe to any political ideology and vice versa. The order is nevertheless important, at least it is for the present discourse on digital art practices. Adorno’s aesthetics, the effect of which still inform contemporary art, would defend the primacy of politics albeit their evolution ended up with only ethics. No formal ethical system nor any prescriptive moral beliefs for the individual can be derived from Adorno’s work,3 because his analysis, although imbued with ethical considerations, is predominantly socio-political. In Adorno’s work, ethics are only inferred so as to provide scope for the existence of a wilful subject still able to react to the oppressive forces that condition him. On one condition though: the independence of art from poli­ tics. Adorno’s aesthetic is political as long as it remains apolitical in its form. The apolitical form, hence, the autonomous essence of art, is what guar­ antees the political effectiveness of its implicit messages – something that Lukacs’ “committed art” failed to see. Art does not provide knowledge for reality by reflecting it photo­ graphically or from a particular perspective but by revealing whatever is veiled by the empirical form assumed by reality, and this is possible only by virtue of art’s autonomous status. (Adorno 1986, 192) For Adorno, that meant a defence of abstract art and a refusal of repre­ sentational art. Art practices after Adorno have retained precisely this abstract nature while also abandoning a shared political project. It may be useful to remember here that the opposite, i.e. political ideologies informing individual practices, is what many European artists fleeing to the United

Looking for an identity (ethics)

61

States in between the two wars, and after, did not miss. Artists, not surpris­ ingly, have had enough to align the self with the political ideologies of this or the other manifesto in order to practise art (Ulrich Obrist 1998). This creates a short-circuit in digital art practices though. The avant-garde defended by Adorno abstracted from reality. Any digital art practice is instead informed by a medium for which reality is already abstracted and hence any manipulation of it ends up being a representation of the abstract – a sort of Frankenstein child of the positions of both Adorno and Lukacs. A Frankenstein for which digital art practices end up uttering ethical statements as commentary on either a positive/utopian or a negative/dystopian view of technology. Such bipolarity survived Adorno’s dialectics, postmodern scepticism, as well as recent revivals of phenomenological accounts. However, in the case discussed here, the ethics of a digital art practice might become political only as an after-effect of a specific discourse. If and when ethics become political is only as an after-effect of a specific discourse for the individual. It is not about ethics discussing technology in relation to the self but of the self in relation to technology. One leads one’s own way through the digital polis; one lives and attempts to find the self while positioning oneself within the digital polis. Ethics that must be both reasoned and lived through the self – the ethico-phenomenology.

Notes 1 Eric Steven Raymond, “The jargon files” defines the value of this kind of hacks as: “proportional to the aesthetic value of the images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the size of the code”. See www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack-value.html. 2 Grotowsky, of course, would remove everything but the body – we, on the contrary, as digital art practitioners, must maintain in relation to some digital artefact in order to practise. 3 An interesting reading on Adorno’s amorality is in Tassone (2005).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1986. Aesthetics and politics. London: Verso. Foucault, Michel, and Robert Hurley. 1988. The care of the self. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. 2000. Ethics: subjectivity and truth. London: Penguin Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2012. “Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon.” Culture Machine 13. Available at: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ 464-1026-1-PB.pdf. Tassone, Giuseppe. 2005. “Amoral Adorno: Negative Dialectics Outside Ethics.” European Journal of Social Theory. 8 (3): 251–267. Ulrich Obrist, Hans. 1998. “Turning to technology – legendary engineer Billy Klüver on artist-engineer collaborations.” Art Orbit 3. Stockholm: Art Node. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20190808163831/http://www.artnode.se/artorbit/issue3/ index.html

62

6

Outro – broken mirrors1

One would think that digital art practices, as described here and informed by both ethics and phenomenology, would belong to a distant utopian or dysto­ pian world. This is a world in which everyone concerned with digital tech­ nology, even before engaging in an art practice through it, is deeply acquainted with its inner mechanics and modes of beings; a world in which the alienating digital illiteracy of an objectified used-user is replaced by the competence of the technologists-humanists – the digital citizens – who can read themselves and others as co-creator of the digital polis. Of course, a competent digital citizen does not necessarily need to be a digital art practitioner. The argument is that the opposite is instead necessary. The difference between the two groups is that the former is concerned with offering a contribution to the betterment of the digital polis and his condition through it, while the latter is concerned with a problematisation of the other­ wise possibilities of being of the self in relation to the digital. Yet this world is closer than one might think – it was and it is now. It is not a society of geniuses, the one I have in mind. It is more a matter of an attitude than one of capacities. Requoting Rancière, it is not about the “equal value of all manifestations of intelligence but the self-equality of intelligence in all its manifestations” (Rancière and Elliott 2011, 10). An attitude, as explained here, informed by the ethos of the care of the self. There are cases that in many respects can be read in light of what has been discussed so far and that offer an opportunity to exemplify where points of contact and divergences are to be found.

**** Net.art is the first case I wish to consider. Net.art is an art movement born in the early 1990s that remained active until the early 2000s when, swallowed up by the same mainstream artworld (i.e. art galleries) who initially fought against it, slowly ceased its activity with each artist pursuing their individual interests. In net.art, the epimelesthai sautou ethos emerges through two fea­ tures in particular: its mode of work and its ideology.

Outro – broken mirrors

63

With regard to the modes of work, the relevant literature concerned with an historicisation of net.art agrees on one point: net.art uses the Internet browser as its primary tool of work and consumption. Net-art lives only on the Web and, as correctly pointed out by Greene, “any net.art project seen out of their native HTML, out of their networked, social habitats, (is the) net. art equivalent of animals in zoos” (Greene 2000). While it is true that net artists were expressing themselves through the digital web, their approach to its use went beyond considering it as a mere tool. Rather than using it, net artists explored networked technologies and the browser in particular. This exploration was both speculative and practical (i.e. conducted through the act of coding). Initially developed in response to needs that were certainly not artistic, for the net.artist the Internet was not a tool found and available to use but a new opening to a new technological world/space, dense with possi­ bilities. In line with the ethos of the care of the self and disinterested in the purely functional features of the medium, net artists interrogated the medium in its expressive capabilities in relation to the self. Their inquisitive attitude led them to an exploration of the Internet structure and its coding syntax, re­ structuring and re-imagining other possibilities of being in relation to it. Jodi’s use of HTML code in https://www.wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ is, in this regard, emblematic – in that the code is used as ink to a canvas rather than as a set of instructions for the display of web pages. The resulting viewable page is only a curtain hiding the real work and an invitation to unveil what lies behind it. Similarly, Form Art by Shulgin re-imagines the use of prototypical HTML elements such as buttons, text area, tables and checkboxes as drawing shapes (rather than purposeful objects for the navigation of web pages). Such approaches required net artists to be acquainted with coding grammar first and foremost with some of them, such as IOD, going as far as developing a web browser from scratch to bring attention to the dangerous and fastmoving standardisation processes in action with regard to “browsing the web”.2 With regard to its ideology, net.art proclaims itself as a continuation of anti-establishment movements such as Dada and Situationist International. In common with those, net.art has an enemy: the highbrow art gallery world. According to Greene, net.art uses two features enabled by the browser as weapons in their battle: immediacy and immateriality (Greene 2000). The former is exemplified in the browser’s ability to provide immediate access to the artwork in any location connected to the web (i.e. the house as opposed to the gallery). The latter, immateriality, refers to the difficulty in controlling the spreading of the artwork because of living in a medium, the Internet, whose control is distributed (at least it was so in its infancy). While this is certainly true, the anti-establishment sentiment of the movement moved quickly beyond the art gallery world and on to more general political territory. In this context, net artists problematised the Internet as a technology destabilising societal relationships and disrupting societal hierarchies. What emerges is a desire to investigate the operational modalities of a specific technology in

64

Outro – broken mirrors

relation to the self and existing power hierarchies. Similarly to the philoso­ phers of the Greek polis then, who engaged in a speculative practice that helped in situating oneself in relation to others, net artists problematised the new dynamics and roles established by the new web-polis. In light of these readings, net.art was an art practice that engaged in a problematisation of the relation between the self, others and networked tech­ nologies through online détournements most often created for, and experi­ enced through, a web browser. The ethos emerging is one of non-acceptance of the Internet medium for what it is and a reasoning on the other possibility of being in relation to and through it. In doing so, the merit of net.art practitioners is the recognition of and the acting upon technology, not as a set of tools freely given but rather as a space dense with power struggles (very human ones) threatening freedom and individuality – powers that must be challenged and problematised through the very use and exploration of the tools through which they emerge, i.e. code.

**** The live coding community is the second example I wish to bring to the table (https://toplap.org/). The most distinctive feature of this community is that its members code music and visuals on the fly in front of an audience. In this approach to an audiovisual live performance there are two features that emerge: one technical and one theatrical. The technical feature is that code is compiled on the fly without interruptions to the programme itself. Anyone that has at least attempted to run a simple “Hello World!” programme would know that changing the string of text from “Hello World!” to “Hello there!” requires quitting the programme, editing the string and re-executing the pro­ gramme. In live coding performance, changing anything in the programme can be done while the programme is running and hence the audiovisual output flows seamlessly.3 The theatrical feature instead concerns the breaking of the most concrete and annoying instance of fourth wall that any kind of live performance has ever had: the laptop. The multipurpose digital tool par excellence, useful for art as well as filling out tax returns, has a screen that, in laptop performances, has been turning its back to its audience and posing instead only for the eyes of the performer. Live coders did the simplest gesture of all: they began pro­ jecting their screen so that an audience could see what they could see. And what is to be seen? The most intimate way of communicating with a compu­ ter: code. Not moving faders or pushing buttons of a software interface (albeit despite its origins, today some do) but lines of code, written and executed (or decommissioned) individually on the fly. Music, visuals and their computer code now co-created simultaneously in front of the eyes of their audience.

Outro – broken mirrors

65

Naturally, depending on where one sits in the wide spectrum between low and high level programming, this co-creation of code and audiovisual may appear either esoteric or an oversimplification and romanticisation of the true state of affairs. A non-coder may see the former, low level coders the latter. The bottom line is that the code written on the fly is a collection of simple code words implicitly triggering a long sequence of back-end instructions that one needs to carefully construct offline at a very slow and well-reasoned pace. This long sequence of back-end instructions remains obscure and hidden to an audience during the live act unless, of course, one wants to make the per­ formance about the making of a programming language itself (and it could be a very long performance). This, however, should not take away anything from the tremendous impact and revolutionary character of live coding perfor­ mances. After all, in the digital domain there is nothing lower level than plugging and unplugging the plug. The case of the live coding community offers, though, an opportunity to discuss two modes of engaging with the practice: as developer and/or as user of live coding programming languages. From the perspective of the case presented here, and considering the direction and depth of an individuation journey into technology, we can agree that there is at least more space to explore for those members of the com­ munity who develop their own coding language and use it in performance settings than for those who just use a language developed by someone else. The former must navigate deep into the realm of the digital world before springing back to the surface and begin thinking about sound and/or visuals. For the developer/performer there is an opportunity to externalise, materialise and spatialise their own “musical and visual” selves from the very ground up. The latter, on the contrary, can begin by assimilating an existing language to then move, relatively quickly, to the creation and organisation of sounds, silence, graphics and so on – the direction of the journey, in this case, moves quickly in the outwards direction (i.e. output) rather than inwards. Allow me then to consider more closely the practice of developers. The development of these languages happens through the pull of two forces driv­ ing in opposite directions: subjectivation and generalisation. On one side, the developer develops the language, the interface and modes of interacting with it, with a subjective understanding of what music or visual art is. The devel­ oper begins developing for herself. What components and according to what criteria those are added or rejected via a diakrisis it is hard to tell but the checking process is nevertheless happening and according to various and personal levels of speculation (speculator sui). This phase of development is an individuation journey in which the relation between the self, digital and culture is problematised. All good up to this point, as this is a definition of practice as an indivi­ duation journey and one that follows the Foucaultian ethos of the care of the self. What has been said to this point about the practice of the developer reflects what was said earlier on the precept of the care of the self.

66

Outro – broken mirrors

On the other hand, however, what one notices is that at some stage the development begins to be informed also by a speculative process that looks into the needs of other people. A set of new concerns arise: is this software readable? Is it usable? Will people use it or toss it? Will they like it? The developer’s work appears not to be for oneself anymore but for others too. There is a hybridisation or move from a speculator sui to a speculator nos­ trum. Software begins a journey towards the implementation of generic fea­ tures and standardised conventions, at times implemented in a collaborative fashion, with the caveat that the larger the audience to please the more gen­ eric, as opposed to subjective, features the final software will have. As a result, the developer constantly attempts to mediate between the desires of the self and the wants of the others with the ultimate result of stalling the individuation process in a middle area that is no man’s land – effectively everyone’s land, the land of tools. For many this is not an issue, including those developers that are also per­ formers, because personalisation is in the customisation of the software, arrangement of the keywords, choice of sound triggered, in short, effort boun­ ces back out of the digital towards the musical matter. But in doing so the digital becomes, once again, a tool, a controller, a means to an extrinsic end. My analysis does not want to discredit the efforts of the live coding com­ munity, which in fact I greatly admire and feel part of. I wish only to bring attention to how difficult it is to escape the standardising forces of digital technology. Forces without which, no doubt, the digital would neither exist nor work, but that at the same time makes the search for the self more diffi­ cult through it.

**** Another community that may be interesting to mention in this discussion is esolang (https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page). The definition for esolang is offered on the community wiki and explains: “An esoteric programming lan­ guage (ess-oh-terr-ick), or esolang, is a computer programming language designed to experiment with weird ideas, to be hard to program in, or as a joke, rather than for practical use”. The page also has a categorised list of purposes or design goals for why one would want to create one: minimalism, new concepts, weirdness, themed, brevity, jokes and obfuscation. A minimal­ ist esolang, for example, would be one created with the goal of having the least amount of instructions possible; Brainfuck, with only six instructions is the most famous one. A “weird” esolang would be one such as INTERCAL (the very first esolang) and Malbolge that are designed to be next to impos­ sible to use. The esolang Nothing is clearly humorous: “In the current soft­ ware industry focus lays on solving complex problems by using complicated algorithms. The language ‘Nothing’ was created to shift this focus from complex problems towards the expectations of the programmer and the user.

Outro – broken mirrors

67

This way even the most complicated programming challenges swiftly dis­ appear as if they never have existed before” (Nothing – Esolang 2020). Of course, these categories are not exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. An esolang such as Whitespaces, which ignores everything but spaces, tabs, or linefeeds, would probably fulfil all the design goals listed.4 As stated on the wiki, an esolang is “not designed for serious functionality or use” (ibid.). Yet despite many esolangers not thinking of their practice as an artistic one, it is exactly this non-utilitarian/tongue in cheek character that gave esolang an easy entrance to aesthetic discourse. Temkin, more than others, has worked tirelessly in defending the importance of esolang in aes­ thetic discourse (Temkin 2018; Temkin “esoteric.codes”). A case in point is Brainfuck, which is likely to be the most mentioned programming language in esolang studies and aesthetic literature and yet one for which his developer, Urban Müller, created it to his own admission with a very goal-oriented question in mind: can I make a programming language even smaller than FALSE, a programming language made with 30 commands and with a compiler of only 1024 bytes? Of course, the question did not imply any other aim other than making a smaller language. Müller did not think that people would then have used it for the most varied scopes from writing a compiler for Minecraft to quines (a program that outputs its own source code – and an old acquaintance in soft­ ware studies). Müller’s was, to a certain extent, a wrongly set test of poverty because it was concerned primarily with a poverty of bytes rather than the self in rela­ tion to them. Its fame is most likely to be dictated by the fact that the name hints at informal language with the reaction/effect that it gives. Once again, then, the visible, the mirage, the output, the effect … For all esolangs, there is however another character that makes them akin to aesthetic discourse, namely the way they appear to operate in a manner similar to conceptual art. As Sol LeWitt describes it, (i)n conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. (LeWitt 1967) Similarly, the conceptual dimension of an esolang is more important than its execution. The non-utilitarian aspect somehow guarantees that the pro­ gramme language is developed via speculative (speculator sui) and judgmental (diakrisis) processes investigating the relation of the self with and through digital logic. It is not the case that users of Brainfuck (or any other esolang for that matter) do not get the same acknowledgement as their inventors. Esolang is an expression of the self.

68

Outro – broken mirrors

What may be missing in the practice of inventors of esolang, compared to the practice of a Sol LeWitt, is an effort beyond a wiki page. A concept is always closer to its general/transcendental/objective form than to its con­ tingent/particular/subjective one. The ethereal/abstract/mathematical essence of the digital makes the material instantiation of the concept all the more problematic and difficult. Yet not impossible; arguably it is more a matter of understanding one’s own practice as an artistic one.

**** A less discussed (albeit certainly known to many) subculture is the one going under the name of demoscene. The demoscene has a long history and is still active today. Its community is the largest of the ones mentioned so far. Yet, to date, it has received very little attention in aesthetic discourse. This should not come as a surprise because demosceners are not interested in entertaining a conversation on the aesthetic merits of their practice. However, the attention they get is even less than that dedicated to esolang – another community in which most members have yet to reflect on the artistic nature of their own practice. Esolang, for example, appears in many media and software studies books. A full chapter is dedi­ cated to esolangs in Software Studies: A Lexicon (Fuller 2008) – one of the most important books about software art – as well as in Mark Marino’s Cri­ tical Code Studies. Esolang also appears in the more recent The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities as well as The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Demoscene, in comparison, does not appear in any of them. Curiously and emblematically, the Monoskop entry for demoscene is likely to be on the few, if the only, page on the entire repository with no information on it but the title. All this is certainly no coincidence nor the fault of an inattentive critic. Let’s begin with an historical contextualisation of the movement to shed light on this. The origins of the demoscene are in the 1980s, in direct response to the widespread use of the first mainstream personal computers such as Commo­ dore 64 (1982) and Amiga (1987). These personal computers could do many things, but their greatest domestic use was video games. Floppy disks were the most popular formats in which these video games were sold and, of course, illegally shared. Indeed many, quite quickly, learned to circumvent the copy protection algorithms that the game companies used to fight the sharing of illegal copies of their floppy disks. These cracked copies of the video games were shared at parties and also via mail. The interesting part of this story is that these cracked copies often came with a little present that could be viewed once the floppy disk was inserted on the reader: a showreel displaying the name of the cracking team supported by flashy sounds and visuals.

Outro – broken mirrors

69

The implicit message of the introduction was clear: we cracked this game and we can do what we want with it. Soon the sophistication of these showreels/intros outdid the interest that the video game came with: the demoscene was born. One of the most interesting features of these demos is that they are not stored as data files but as executable files. This means that the computer is not reading the file via a software application but is running the file as software. In very simple terms, these files are not data but software – audiovisual software. The main goal for demo-ers is to exploit and push their skills and the capacity of the hardware in use to the limits. Intros were, and are still today, an occasion to show off one’s technical virtuosity at the next demoscene gathering – to delight peers and be delighted by the few seconds of glory the community grants you by showing its respect for your talent. And yet, the ethos of the members of this community reflects in many ways a problematisation of the self in relation to and through technology. Certainly, a competition mandating a maximum file size of 64 kilobytes is a test of poverty. Within such a narrow space to think out of the box and not to take anything for granted is a must. Some, in a pure Epicurean fashion, would test even more severe restrictions: 32 KB … 4 KB … 1 KB … 512 B … 128 B … 32 B … Some can be seen performing an act of judgment (diakrisis) on the hard­ ware in use “so as to accept in the relation to the self only that which can depend on the subject’s free and rational choice” (Foucault 1988, 64). This is the case with Craft by Linus Akesson (aka lft), a demo for which he built his own “minimalistic demo platform” made of just a single microcontroller with 8-bit CPU, 1 KB of RAM and 8.5 KB of ROM, a VGA and RCA output. The speculator sui or the self-evaluation of a performed activity in order to improve the self, we cannot have doubts: such level of expertise, competitiveness and camaraderie permeating the community requires not only self-evaluation but perseverance and endurance in wanting to improve and endlessly learn. Anyone is free to see for themselves how much they can do with just a few kilobytes or to what extreme one can push the most powerful hardware (pouet.net 2020). The easiest thought about all this for those not belonging to this commu­ nity is to dismiss it as geeks’ fun and nothing more. The fact that many demosceners are uninterested in reaching out, let alone developing an aes­ thetic discourse around their practice, does not help either. They are just happy in their own world of fun and collaborative competitiveness – and, for sure, I would not begrudge anyone for having found happiness. There are also technical reasons for a disinterest in an aesthetic discourse around this practice. Historically, in an era preceding the Internet, these demos could be seen only if, 1) you had a physical copy of them, and 2) you knew how to execute/run them. At best this was considered a kids’ affair, at worst piracy, certainly not art.

70

Outro – broken mirrors

Today, where all these demos are accessible with a few clicks and types, interest remains low nevertheless. There is just too much mathematics and too little content, one would say. The chief reason is that these demos appear as non-innovative precisely from the point of view of an aesthetic discourse wrongly positioned by an output essentialist and epistemological optimistic view of technology. The appearance, the look, the vibe, the feel of the demos’ audiovisual output is not just retro as in, for example, Vaporwave, where there is a conscious appropriation of the past and hence a more palatable case of study. The output of demoscenes is usually kitsch in that it re-proposes a past without an apparent intellectual corroboration informing that choice.5 Hence, Vaporwave is material for aesthetic discourse because by connecting to the past it re-invents it. Demoscene, on the contrary, is stuck reinventing the same wheel forever. It is not a matter of good or bad taste though. We know the fate of such a position since Hegel for whom “(s)o-called ‘good taste’ takes fright at all the deeper effects of art and is silent when externalities and incidentals vanish” (Hegel 1975, 34). Vaporwave, demoscene as well as all artists’ works, blogs, websites – pur­ posely representing a messy/lo-fi look of the Internet of the 1990s – share the same sentiment: nostalgia. Nostalgia generated by a loss of self-identity in an over-mediatised, mani­ festly overly complex culture, overtly standardised technological society that does not leave space for individuality. But nostalgia for what, one might ask … Simpler times, or a romanticisa­ tion of them. Times in which owning the technology was possible and advi­ sable. Times in which this ownership allowed for at least a tangible hope for an individuation journey leading to the affirmation of one’s identity with and through the digital.

**** Maybe mine is nostalgia too. As, indeed, I have to confess that between the four examples reported, the ones that get close to the ethico-phenomen­ ological sentiment I present in this book are net.art and demoscene – noncoincidentally both sprouting at the dawn of home computers, which I was born into. Net.art combined technical knowledge with the ability to reflect on and defend their aesthetic positions with competence. It should not come as a surprise then that their anti-art establishment battle ended up with them becoming part of it. From the technical perspective, net.artists saw the web and the underlying digital infrastructure as a territory to explore and as a material that posed challenges that called for an individuation/dialogical process.

Outro – broken mirrors

71

The case of demoscene is different. The community has neither sought to interject any aesthetic discourse nor received the attention from art circles. However, the interesting aspect of this community is that it engages with a practice that is anti-dogmatic with reference to technology and yet requires an outstanding understanding of the digital to be both practised and appreciated. In comparison, and I do not mean to belittle anyone, all other efforts barely scratch the surface of the digital. More than a search for balance that in itself is antithetical to any art practice, the real issue is to find equal strength in asserting the self through both a technical and an aesthetic effort. Recalling the spring metaphor of the previous pages, net.art pushes down the spring so as to cause a bounce back directly proportional to it; demos­ cene, on the other hand, pushes back way harder than net.art so as to accu­ mulate a lot more potential energy … but it remains stuck or, better, it springs back into a portion of sky that current aesthetic discourse is not looking into. Yet there is no other way other than to go deep into the depth of the digi­ tal. We have no choice and it is for this reason that, as digital art practi­ tioners, the figure of the hacker is to be aspired to, at least up to a certain point. Let me show you where. Beyond the popularised dichotomy between the good hacker and the bad one that is not of concern here, hackers are, more simply, individuals that hack – literally meaning people that cut things into pieces roughly, violently, almost aimlessly. In digital culture, hacking is a gesture by which one says that to accept things for what they are or as given is, at the very least, uninteresting. As a hacker you want to take a piece of technology, break it apart, study its bits and make it do things it was not designed for. Hence the violence of the act – the hack – does not relate to the mode in which the device is broken into elementary parts – a process often requiring extreme care and precision – but in the way in which the hacker disrupts the original use for which the device was created. It is violence, a sort of brute force attack, on the intentions of its original inventors. In the words of MacKenzie, “to hack is to abstract” (McKenzie 2004, 36) and to abstract means “to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. The hacker then wants to show the many ways in which ‘the virtuality of nature’ can take form so as ‘to make known some instance of its possibilities, to actualize a relation out of infinite relationality, to manifest the manifold’” (McKenzie 2004, 3). These abstractions concern both the material and immaterial manifesta­ tions of technology. Hackers manipulate and create new abstractions as in new relations between unforeseeable parts, software and/or hardware. Theoretical and practical knowledge is what a hacker wants and, beyond political, utilitarian or ethical concerns, the drive for the journey is dictated by an insatiable curiosity and desire to know.

72

Outro – broken mirrors

In many cases, as in any other social endeavour, there is an element of showmanship or showing off, which is just a normal sign of wanting to belong and be appraised by a community of peers. But beyond and before that there is an act of destruction. And it is with this act of destruction that digital art practice must begin because, with the digital, there is no chaos to begin with – only order. This lack of chaos cannot be overcome with pseudo-random generative routines but in the destruction of the systematic order with which the digital presents us. We must cut the digital into pieces first. The true soul of the digital art practitioner – artists, audience, curators, students, teachers etc. – should be the soul of the hacker. But up to a certain point, as I said. There is at least one important differ­ ence between a digital art practitioner and a hacker, and it relates to the way in which one looks at the sky more than the portion of sky one looks at. A hacker is an individual interested in exploring the otherwise possibilities of being of technology. Individual and collective efforts of this kind are what keep technology and technologically advanced societies alive. The act of breaking is oriented towards the making of a new technological artefact. A digital art practitioner is an individual whose praxis concerns a pro­ blematisation of the otherwise possibility of being of the self in relation to and through the digital. Destruction is the initial act from the broken bits of which one does not reconstruct a new piece of technology but attempts to find a renewed piece of the self among gaps of the million shattered pieces of that irreparably broken mirror called digital.

Notes 1 Outro is the concluding section of a piece of music or a performance. 2 Imagine that only a few years later such a standardisation led even to the coinage of a new verb for searching the web: “to google”. 3 In Chuck, one of the earliest languages to enable on-the-fly programming, this is achieved by breaking code instructions into shreds (the user can freely edit those), which are then fed and synchronised to an instance of a virtual machine and asso­ ciated scheduler that execute in time and on the fly (Wang and Cook 2004). 4 And it works too – so that when you open it you see only a white page. To see tabs, spaces and linefeeds you need to Ctrl+A (i.e. select all). 5 Menninghaus offers the following definition of kitsch: “Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of dis­ tance, without sublimation. It usually presents no difficulties in interpretation and has absolutely nothing to do with an aesthetics of negativity. It is unadulterated beauty, a simple invitation to wallow in sentiment – in short a true antidote to any Adorno-type aesthetics of negativity” (Menninghaus 2009, 41).

References Foucault, Michel. 1988. The care of the self. New York: Vintage Books. Fuller, Matthew. 2008. Software studies: a lexicon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Outro – broken mirrors

73

Greene, R. 2000. “Web work: a history of internet art”. Artforum. 38: 162–167. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Hegel’s aesthetics: lectures on fine art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. LeWitt, Sol. 1967. “Paragraphs on conceptual art”. Artforum. 5 (10): 162–190. Marino, Mark C. 2020. Critical code studies: initial methods. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Menninghaus, Winfried. 2009. “On the vital significance of ‘kitsch’: Walter Benjamin’s politics of ‘bad taste’”. In Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (ed.). Walter Benja­ min and the architecture of modernity. Melbourne, Australia: re.press. Nothing – Esolang. 2020. esolangs.org. Available at: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Nothing. Pouët.net. 2020. pouët.net: your online demoscene resource. [online] Available at: www.pouët.net. Rancière, Jacques, and Gregory Elliott. 2011. The emancipated spectator. London: Verso. Temkin, Daniel. 2011. esoteric.codes. Available at: https://esoteric.codes/. Temkin, Daniel. 2018. “Entropy and fatfinger: challenging the compulsiveness of code with programmatic anti-styles”. Leonardo. 51 (4): 405–412. Wang G., and Cook P.R. 2004. “On-the-fly programming: using code as an expressive musical instrument”. Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression, 3–5 June 2004. Shizuoka University of Art and Culture, Hamamatsu, Japan. 138–143. Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A hacker manifesto. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

74

Index

abstraction 5, 8–10, 16–18, 20, 29, 32, 48, 50, 57, 60–1, 68, 71 ADC (analogue-to-digital converter) 19–20, 46 Adorno 1–3, 9–10, 34, 60–61, 72n5 Agamben, G. 11, 37–38, 39n11 Akesson, L. 69 analogue 10–11, 17–18, 20, 47–48, 50; analogue audio 47; analogue-derived 20; analogue synth 18; see ADC appropriation 32, 42, 44, 70 Arcangel, C. 5–6 Ars Electronica 2, 7 ArtFutura 2 artus 32 audience 5, 11, 26–27, 30–31, 33–38, 46, 51, 64–66, 72 Bakthin 31–32 Brainfuck 66–67 broken mirror 72 care of the self 9, 54–55, 62–63, 65 chaos 8, 32, 42–44, 72 Church 15–16 Clouds 5–6 command 8, 37–38, 50, 67 Computer Art Society (CAS) 2 control 7, 32–33, 41, 44, 49–50, 58, 63 controller 44, 66 conversio ad se 56, 58 crack 68–69 Craft see Akesson cretinisation 51 critic 27, 30, 33–36, 46, 72 cure see pharmakon curator 35–37, 46, 72

Danto/Hegel thesis 4 de-responsibilisation 8 de-subjectivising 50 death 41; of art 4; see also Danto/Hegel thesis demo 68–71 demoscene 68–71 Descartes 30, 38n8 diakrisis 56, 58, 65, 67, 69 digital: audio 45, 47–48; digitally-born 20–21; instrument 43, 45; medium 50; synth 18; snapshot 46; see polis display hack 57 DMI (Digital Musical Instrument) 41, 43 embodiment 11, 22, 32–32, 41, 52 epimelesthai sautou 54; see care of the self epistemological optimism 3–4, 9, 21, 70 Esolang (Esoteric Programming Language) 66–68 executable file 69 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) 2 false epistemology 3–4 FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software) 8 Foucault 12n9, 49, 54–58, 69 fourth wall 64 Godel 15–6 Goodman 17, 39n9 Grotowsky 33, 61n2 Guattari 7, 31–32, 49, 52n7

Index hack 6, 8, 57, 61n1, 71 hacker 71–72 Hilbert 15–16, 24n1, 24n2 IEEE (Institute of Electrics and Electronics Engineers) 2 individuality 9, 31, 42, 49, 50, 52n5, 56, 58, 64, 70 individuation 31–33, 36, 41–45, 50–52, 56, 58, 65–66, 70; as problematisation of the self in relation to and the digital 10, 45, 54, 65; collective 7, 58; embodied 32–33, 52 Ingarden, R. 29, 30, 38n4, 38n5 Janus 31, 52

75

pharmakon 4, 10 placebo see pharmakon poison see pharmakon polis: Greek 55, 64; socio-numerical 57; digital 9, 54, 58–9, 61, 62 Popper, K. 3–4 postuplenie/postupok 31 pounet.net 69 pseudo-random 44, 72 public-private spectrum 37 Puppet 30, 38 Ranciere, J. 34–36, 51 Research Center Art Technology and Society 2 restored behaviour 37 retro 70

kitsch 70, 72n5 latency 45–6 LeMieux, P. 6 Lewis 17, 24n5 live coding 7, 64–66 Lukacs 9, 60, 61 Manovich, L. 3, 11 mastery 39n11 McKenzie 71 McLuhan, M. 7, 49–50 Merleau-Ponty, M. 21–22, 26–28, 32, 36, 38n1, 38n2 Montfort, N. 5 net.art 11, 62–64, 70–71 nostalgia 70

screen essentialism 5 Simondon 7–8, 31, 32, 38, 44, 49, 50, 51 Sol Lewitt 67 speculator nostrum 66 speculator sui 56–58, 65–67, 69 standardisation 8, 49, 50–51, 63, 66, 70, 72n2 Stibitz, G. 16 Stiegler, B. 4, 49, 58 stultification of the audience 34 subjectivising 7, 65, 31 50–51, 57–9 Super Mario 5–6 technology’s reason 3, 8, 44, 51 test of poverty 56–58, 67, 69 Transmediale 2, 7 Turing 15–16

obscure central zone 51, 65 open source 8 Orlan 9, 12n7 Osaka World Fair 2 output essentialism 3–4, 70

uncountable 22, 43–45, 47–48, 50

performance 5, 10–11, 19, 22, 30–31, 36–37, 41–45, 64–65; through (per-) a relation with form (-formance) 31

Zuse, K. 16

via negativa 33, 42, 57 Whitney Museum of American Art 5