| Max Herman on Mon, 21 Sep 2020 19:11:45 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Lev on the embarressment of digital art |
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Hi Brian,
In 2007 I proposed that Postmodernism was over, and the new art-historical period should be called Networkism. Think of this as just a random comment, but meant as a prompt to thought. I received one reply that I can recall, stating that Networkism wasn't
a good name, and that Meta should be the name.
I bought the domain for Networkism at that time, as part of a novel I was writing about a philosopher-poet, Thomas Kroner, named in honor of the year I spent living in a Copenhagen suburb in my sixth year, attending kindergarten. Kroner was interviewing people
about what they thought the new art-historical period should be and integrating their replies into his own new idea, which he called Networkism. I thought I might create a website which would be the protagonist's website, yet outside the paper pages of the
novel, which was titled Le Cafe and unpublished. So the idea was the hypothesis of a character in a novel in the sense that I understood it.
However I didn't decide to carry on with the domain and stopped paying for it. In the last couple of years I looked it up again, and the term has been used by several others, probably independently. One of the main exponents is Manuel Lima, for whose 2011
book (which I haven't read, for obvious reasons) Lev Manovich wrote the introduction. Lima now owns the domain but I'm not familiar in detail with his work. I don't know what Lev wrote in the introduction.
There are several other manifestos about Networkism on the internet -- it might be worthwhile to make a list of them and a map so to speak, sequencing in time, who references whom, but perhaps most interestingly to look at where the "idea" was formed independently
by different people, to see what is most commonly included, what the main points are, and what is least frequently included but perhaps important. What might be missing from all of these philosophies of Networkism? What is Networkism? If it is indeterminate,
where might it be going? Can its course be guided, and if yes, should it be, and if so, how? Far be it from me to say that I know.
+++++
One problem that always faces art, both visual and verbal, is the age-old conflict between property rights and voting rights. These two value systems always seem to be at odds to some degree. Most political conflict seems to derive from their antipathy, and
2020 is no exception.
Does the atmosphere of human political conflict affect art? Some would say no, that art transcends politics and should be "spiritual" or removed from the temporal world, an ecclesiastical sphere as it were. Others say that only the temporal world matters,
and that art should never and cannot ever be removed from it in any degree at all. Warhol may have meant something to do with this question when he said "art is commerce and commerce is art," and much of Marx says something similarly economic (though differing
from Warhol on economic policy prescriptions).
Networkism as a way of thinking creates a problem of control. Networks are decentralized, and can't be controlled top-down the way that hierarchies are. Network control has to take different shapes, and those are the power moves we see today among both individual
people and nation-states: how to dominate the network space. Domination of the traditional hierarchies is also still a very contested space, and perhaps this has led to a hybrid model of geopolitical conflict. I have no real expertise in this type of political
theory at all, just a layperson's hunches and fragments of familiarity.
I mentioned the term "Networkism" to a friend recently, who is a retired professor of political science who studied mainly Chinese economic history, but also the tradition of anti-intellectualism in the US, and he said "that term is horrible! That the worst
word I've ever heard." Which I think is OK, it should be ugly and boring. As you quoted Clay someone, about the boredom needed to use a technology, Benjamin said a similar thing: "boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of the imagination." What
happens when boredom is the enemy of capitalism, and the imagination does not hatch, and cannot be allowed to? Seems to me that might be expedient short term, for purposes of manipulation and control which are most eminently not "free market" but utilized
ironically in a bizarrely schizoid concept of self-defense. However in the longer term, Smith himself said that without moral conscience free markets will not create good things. He also said that as people perform automated labor and consume automated products
their faculties will become degraded "as much as can be imagined."
But maybe "Netflixism" should be the next art-historical period. These are just words, and each of us can make up our own and post them online. Maybe to be ignored, maybe not, one can never say for sure.
It's not easy to predict what will happen in politics, such as the upcoming election. I call it a 50-50 chance for either candidate to win. Most problems will remain no matter who wins, what would change would be the approach. I don't think either political
regime -- the one that favors voting rights, and the one that favors property rights -- can succeed very well long-term unless the "virtue" of the populace (the increase of which the ancient Greeks called the "second" priority of every society, after survival)
improves as well.
+++++
I'm now reading Peter Sterling's 2020 book What is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design. It was recommended to me in a roundabout way, partly out of my interest in "Hippocratic Anthropocene agency" and the role of medical theory in literature
and art, Covid's impact on art and science of course, but also my participation since late 2018 in a research group about the links among art, meditation, neuroscience, and networks. Allostasis is an interesting idea and I would recommend Sterling's book.
(Much of its main arguments are in his 2018 article "Predictive Regulation and Human Design" at
https://elifesciences.org/articles/36133.) Allostasis is also a key concept in the work of the late Bruce McEwen, link below, who was a mentor of the co-lead of my research group.
Sterling makes a very strong case that "each cell is an analog computer" and that phenomena are often best understood -- and disease treated -- at the "system level." One could also say "network level," but biological phenomena are not traditionally viewed
as networks (this is now changing with the advance of network neuroscience, network medicine, network genetics, systems chemistry, network biology, and the like). There is an inability to understand analog biological systems as networks, because we associate
networks with electronic and digital technology. This is myopic.
Sterling also makes very clear his view that artistic experience, both creation and contemplation, output and input, are designed into the brain to be "necessary nutrients" as it were -- the embodied imagination as predictive regulation. He says that network
medicine tries to look for network engineering and control, but will fall short in its attempts to "reverse engineer" everything. His points are important I think on many levels. He quotes Smith about the atrophy of the faculties, and calls for "active"
creation rather than "passive" consumption of aesthetic products (citing Smith's remark on loss of faculties). Does this not seem economic? What you say about communication and interaction is exactly on target. Passive communication? Passive interaction?
Impossible and monstrous. But active communication and active interaction are brutally suppressed almost everywhere you look, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, because they are deemed too destabilizing to the prevailing systems of control (economic, political,
military, cultural, academic, etc. etc.). Free interaction and communication among humans is considered too dangerous, too communist, too socialist, too atheist, too radical, too difficult, too boring, too elite, too quotidian, etc. It's like chopping off
your head to spite your face.
Sadly few of us have the time, inclination, or incentive to read anything much outside the realm of our expertise -- publish or perish -- but necessity may be the mother of invention in this regard. Sometimes the generalist can notice what the specialist has
been trained to ignore.
One other thought, your idea about western individualism and reductionism is on target. One reason I have been interested in the
Mona Lisa lately is that I think western academia actually makes a terrible misinterpretation of the painting. Since the painting is one of the "most famous" and "most written about," and the degree of misinterpretation so vast, to me it is perhaps
the pivotal "gap" in western self-misunderstanding and certainly, to my mind, expertly designed to be. So western academia doesn't even understand its own foundational works anymore! It truly is a crisis of the atrophy of the western imagination. And the
atrophy is not just theoretical -- there is physiological, biological atrophy and dysfunction in our brains as the direct result of bad art history, and each reinforces the other in a vicious cycle.
Which is to say in a circuitous fashion, I don't think that digital art is the problem per se, any more than pens or pencils or radio or cameras were the problem. (Could one say that digital writing is the problem?) It's as you say, a systems-level where
the new innovation is needed (which is always a re-nascence or re-discovery of the lost eternal) and that can learn a lot more from indigenous philosophy than smart phone companies. But do I personally love most digital art? No, most of it I know nothing
about. Is my own digital art of great value and importance? Obviously the opposite is true. But in the sense of biological evolution of the planetary human system that kind of inefficiency is totally efficient in a way.
To me, a discussion of allostasis (the human design necessity of imagination for predictive regulation and stability of homeostasis through change) and the Mona Lisa on nettime could be helpful in the big-picture, on the systems level where something different
is needed, but I suspect that nothing could be considered more off-topic.
🙂
All best regards,
Max
McEwen link: https://www.nature.com/articles/1395453
Networkism link: https://www.pnas.org/content/112/8/2295
Sterling book link: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/what-health
From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 12:11 AM To: nettime <nettime-l@kein.org> Subject: Re: <nettime> Lev on the embarressment of digital art As I understand it, Lev Manovich set out to define New Media Art using modernist criteria - notably the tautological gesture whereby the artwork refers to its own components, or its so-called "conditions of possibility."
However, as Steve Kurtz, Molly Hankwitz and John Hopkins have pointed out, most of the artists actually using computerized media, even back in those heavily hyped days of the 1990s and the early 2000s when "New Media" was promoted as a category, were interested in communication and interaction, often around a theme or a specific situation. They wanted to put their creativity, not into the shaping of the object, but into the co-creation of the circuit or the field of interaction that the art helped link together -- even though no individual and certainly no artwork could claim to originate or control this milieu of interaction. One of media philosopher Bernard Steigler's most important insights has been that invention happens not in the subjective depths of an individual, but in the open space of a milieu - that zone or wavelength where people resonate with each other and something new emerges. The milieu is alive, it's emergent, it's multiple, it's dispersed, and it's a world still barely describable in the clumsy Western languages dominated by methodological individualism. Is it any wonder that many of these interactive works don't look so great in a museum? If they do look good, it's because they included a museum component, which was often a strategic decision toward a powerful and ubiquitous funding institution. Nonetheless, it's not a decision that underlines their most important characteristic, which is to work in the middle, between subjectivities. The art object had to look good in a museum because no one in there could be counted on to realize what the media work was really doing, what it was engaged with, where it was dissolving into co-creation. Is it any wonder, then, that many of the most innovative figures didn't bother making work for the museum? A new gaze, a new vocabulary, a new set of criteria for art were being developed somewhere else, in the milieu of interaction. Certain museums and art spaces did follow, and gradually a new gaze, a new language and new evaluative criteria have gradually taken form. What's no wonder at all, though, is the sadness of old white guys who want the world to fit into their definitions, their institutions, and their pocketbooks. Modernist criteria served these sad old white guys very well -- or very badly, depending on how you look at it. As our civilization dies, our institutions are still celebrating the values, the taste and the philosophy that are killing us. I don't have a good read of Lev Manovich because I always got bored with his books. Certainly he has a predilection for modernist vanguards that are more about infinite differentiation than sheer tautology. What I never spotted, however, was an interest in changing the root definition of what art is and what it does -- and above all, where, how, with whom and why it does what it does today. best, Brian On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 6:53 PM John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net> wrote:
On 20/Sep/20 14:12, Molly Hankwitz wrote: |
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