The paper formerly know as
Sean Cubitt
LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY,
ENGLAND
VISITING FELLOW IN THE SCHOOL
OF TELEVISION IMAGING, DUNCAN OF JORDANSTONE COLLEGE OF ART, UNIVERSITY
OF DUNDEE, SCOTLAND
Keynote address for "Digital Aesthetics:
A Symposium on the Cultures of Time and the Everyday", Innis College,
University of Toronto, April 15th 2000
2. Precepts for a digital
artwork
The primary task of the contemporary artwork
is not to represent an object world to a subject supposed to have a monopoly
on consciousness. That task belonged to a historical epoch when the emergent
and then triumphant industrial bourgeoisie required an artistic and scientific
culture to promote the philosophy of willed domination over an alienated
nature and an objectified and to that extent also alienated industrial
class structure. Industrial capital created a culture of materials, including
technology and the labour force, that required the form-giving principles
of an industrial aesthetic, focused on the intensely local hub of manufacture:
the factory. Industrial networks were a function of their nodes.
In the information economy, the nodes are
functions of their networks. The global today is necessarily prior to the
local, especially those localities which, like the border free trade zones
of Tijuana studied by Coco Fusco, are sites of oppression. The reality
of a woman forced into prostitution by the strategic requirements of the
global economy cannot be photographed. No indexical account, anchored in
the preeminence of the local in industrial culture, would be sufficient
to understand the forces acting on her. A photograph would only stir the
sentimentality defined a hundred years ago by the novelist Meredith: pleasure
without responsibility. Responsibility today derives not from empathy,
in any case a metropolitan prurience, but from understanding the networks
that force her into this double economic and sexual oppression, the task
of an iconic art, and the symbolic regimes that describe, define and give
meaning both to her experience and to that of her oppressors, who include
every user of the computers she builds when not supplementing her non-union
subsistence wages with sex labour in the tourist economy. The digital
artwork must be networked, and the formation of alternative networks
is a critical function of them.
An artwork is material, and an artwork
that fails to take account of its materiality fails to that extent. Digital
materials are no exception. What is vital in the indexical quality of media
arts is not that they point away from themselves towards a recorded past
to which is ascribed a reality they deny themselves. Rather, digital indexicality
presents its own materiality as what it is -- a concrete node constituted
in the networks of social relationships, including the NAFTA sweatshops.
As Margaret Morse (1998) argues of digital installation art, the contemporary
artwork must construct its own local, not presume it. The embodiment that
concerns it is not the depicted body abstracted into a type that
can be identified as the body, but a specific body constructed as local
in the locality of the installation itself, a unique body which there confronts
the imbrication of embodiment in the global networks that are brought to
bear in the devices that surround it. In this way the digital index points
not towards the recorded past of representation but to the materiality
of the present as a concrete node of a networked society. The digital
artwork must be material, and its materiality incorporates the bodies
that come into contact with it and the local space and present time of
their co-existence.
Which brings us to a crucial issue: the
digital artwork is processual. When the index depicts its object, it
both objectifies that object and presents itself as another object standing
over against the depicted. But in the information economy, objectality
is a secondary effect of primary flows, an argument made as forcefully
by urbanists like Saskia Sassen (1991) and Manuel Castells (1996) as it
is by Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980). In the attempt to image flow,
the principle of indexicality itself demands abandoning the index as primary
resource, since there is no object toward which it can stand in any relation.
Instead, the intrinsically relational symbol takes priority. Information
flows are relational first: content, expression, even form are secondary
to this materiality. If the digital artwork is to be adequate to this relational
world, it must itself prioritise relations. Communication is that relationship
which precedes its terms -- from the same standpoint, a line is no longer
the shortest distance between two points; instead the terminal points are
defined by the activity of the line. The active principle of communication
defines senders and receivers, not vice versa. The material process of
establishing relationships, which I tend to call mediation, is the core
task of digital art today. It should also be emphasised here that the processes
of mediation are not necessarily exclusively human. In our field, they
also can -- and perhaps must -- engage a relation that determines the material
of mediation, the technologies employed in it, as a term of the relation.
We can no longer deploy machines as fixed capital without submitting ourselves
to the anonymous and to that extent autonomous dead labour of the machine
in pursuit of that anonymity and autonomy which post-subjectivity seeks
in mirroring the dissolution of the object in information flows. The
digital artwork must mediate, and in submitting to the mediation of
technology, offer itself to the task of vindicating the generations whose
lost lives are congealed into the shape of our devices.
The acceleration of modernity in contemporary
societies has reached a point at which the pseudo-instantaneous management
of data flows has resulted in what at first glance appears as a total administration
of the present. When cultural critics as alert as Paul Virilio describe
communication as instantaneous, not only do they deny the materiality of
mediation; they fall into an ideological trap laid precisely by the administration.
Discourse that surrenders to the ideology of light-speed communication
presents as normative the proposition that the present is always already
documented -- represented, distributed, consumed and past. The technological
fact is that transmission is not only delayed by the institutional processing
which administration demands, but by the physical limits to the speed
of electromagnetic wave forms. Very, very fast is still not instantaneous,
and the present should never be mistaken for its occupation by images of
even the most recent past -- the one 25th of a second required, for example,
to build up an electron scan on a video monitor. As process, not object,
the
digital artwork must inhabit the present as a moment of becoming, a
moment whose reception is therefore always deferred into a future which
has not yet become.
The immediate result of this habitation
of the present is that the digital artwork is by nature ephemeral.
The remarkable archiving of web and net art undertaken by Steve Dietz at
the Walker
Art Gallery is a case in point. Dietz is clear as curator, and the
design of the frame that surrounds the documented sites ensures that any
visitor should be too, that what is archived here is not art but documentation.
The important task of archiving does not deny ephemerality: on the contrary,
it affirms the gap between archive and art, and asserts if anything the
necessity of the distinction. Like the special effects blockbuster, the
digital artwork is condemned to be cutting-edge, but unlike the blockbuster
it doesn't suffer from the patina of the out-of-date that so rapidly scratches
the emulsion of films that have passed their sell-by. Instead, that passage
into the archival ensures both that the code enabling the work becomes
a resource for other artists ('The writer who does not teach other writers
teaches no-one' -- Benjamin 1973) at the same time that it ceases to function
as an occupant of the present. If the web, as auto-surveillant traffic
in documents, is a self-mapping device, its cartography is itself effervescent
-- a simulation which is no sooner recorded than it becomes defunct. In
the same way, the instruction set that generates a digital artwork is over
as soon as it has completed its run. This is why the effects movie is never
an artwork, and why Photoshop images are so aesthetically moribund: what
has been aesthetic in them is the process of making -- once that process
is terminated, the art is over, and what is presented to the public is
only its discarded archival image. To this extent, whatever is mimetic
in the digital is a mimesis of a task already accomplished, a body that
is already past, and as such is excluded from the aesthetics of digital
artworks, in which the process is as yet unfinished. The mimetic persists,
but as a raw material for further processes. In this sense, the digital
artwork is obliged to be incomplete, its ephemerality dependent on
the deferral of all goals to a time which cannot be achieved in the artwork,
but toward which it aspires, and in whose direction it gestures.
Moreover, the ephemerality of the digital
is an integral element of its formal properties. As Virilio would say,
the invention of the computer is also of necessity the invention of the
computer crash. Many of the most significant works -- Jodi's are the most
obvious -- are dependent on the disruption of the normative efficiency
which has been inscribed into computer design as an ideology if not a reality.
In a recent piece, Lapses
and Erasures, Sawad Brooks undertakes a related task, writing in a
text note to the piece
In analog media, when something
is erased, it is often possible to sense the mark left by erasure. Thus
Rauschenberg was able to present his "Erased de Kooning" drawing as his
own (ironically). Erasure leaves its own traces, it is writing or drawing.
It is a wiping clean which puts forth an order with the possibility of
decipherment. . . . I make drawing interfaces to draw upon the erasure
of erasure in the realm of the digital.(Brooks 2000: np).
If drawing is a practice in which the artist
subordinates herself to the activity of the line as to a machine designed
to generate a non-volitional autonomy from selfhood, as it is in the work
of David Connearn, subordination
to the technologies of computer memory offer a further tool: the double
negation of the erasure which the computer also enables, its amnemotechnics,
becomes a resource for the construction of the future as the erased erasure
of the past. The proof is that it is almost impossible to erase a file
accidentally. Traces remain from which skilled operators can retrieve even
the most shredded data as, once again, the Microsoft trial researchers
proved in their fossicking among the dead-letter offices of internal e-mails.
Erasure is a making of traces in the form of what has been erased, but
where in analogue media what is revealed is the surface which the erased
drawing itself erased, in the digital there is no preexisting surface,
only the space created by the act of recording, so that what erasure produces
is the evidence of a surface that never existed prior to the erasure. At
the same time, however, the erasure is never complete, but approaches asymptotically
to the mystical point of zero existence. Here, as in the attempt to make
a total artwork, zero resembles infinity more than it does unity, and can
only be approached by infinitesimal subdivisions of the existing. Where
analogue media had the power to work in the binary opposition of presence
and absence, the digital are endowed or cursed with an inability to deal
in absolutes. To this extent then, the digital artwork must be imperfect,
since it can never achieve either absolute existence nor absolute absence.
The greatest benefit of this discovery is that the imperative towards harmony
need not be heeded, and the digital is thus freed of the necessity of harmonising
formally a world which is, in all its relations, so profoundly inharmonious.
The digital is profoundly incapable of that perfected harmony in which
the ideological tasks of societies are achieved under the guise of the
autonomous artwork.
The processual nature of digital art makes
it incomplete and imperfect, in the sense that it cannot achieve the absolute
completion and perfection of pure presence. In fact that metaphysics of
presence, abandoned first by mathematics in the mid 19th century, now haunts,
as absence, only the transitory sublime of annihilation as special effect.
Nonetheless, though practice has all but abandoned it, the sublime still
haunts contemporary aesthetics from Adorno to Danto as both the Kantian
marvelling at domination and its negation -- the abjection of the subject.
This unappetising metaphysical binary suits the times, as visible in the
new cult of Bataille as it is in the neo-Kantianism of Lyotard's late writings.
The result is a performance, typical of idealist metaphysics, that simulates
the aesthetic dialectic in the static play of a rational/irrational binary
that merely enacts modernity's logic of efficiency and degradation. In
aesthetic terms, here rigor mortis masquerades as danse macabre. It fails
not so much because of this stasis, however, nor because of its misreading
of the present as 'what is the case', but because it takes reason and unreason
as essential terms in an epoch in which essences no longer pertain.
What
distinguishes the digital artwork is its elegance, in the sense intended
by David Gelernter: its clarity, economy of means, operational grace.
This is not to say that digital artworks
are passionless and formalist. On the contrary: the hall of binary mirrors
that traps essentialist art produces that affectless manipulation of tear
ducts, erections and fight-or-flight adrenal secretions in sedentary and
stultified consumers. It is rather the case that the characteristic emotions
of digital artworks -- the movement through disorientation to new orientation,
for example, in a dislocated place, the gasp at beauty realised on the
wing, the complex humour of, for example, the First
International Competition of Form Art -- are more subtly and actively
conformed to the changed character of accelerated modernity. They are,
in a word, necessary. The digital artwork must be necessary:
its elegance is a function of the need for the work. That need can no longer
be formed as expression, although it remains true that contemporary capital
is ever more dependent on the hyperindividuated narcissism of the competitive
corporate playpen, and an art that pretends to bypass that lens of subjectivity
thereby fails to respond to the necessity of individuation as a passage
through which a work moves. Expression remains, but now as the anonymous
product of autonomous networks.
Aesthetic necessity arises at once from
the fact of flow, its mediations and the temporalities they engender. The
tendency of capital is toward monopoly; that of its flows toward domination.
Control over financial flows in particular is the goal of transnational
capital. But this goal is realisable only in the eradication of difference,
that difference which produces flow from one place to another. That difference,
since it cannot be eradicated systemically without destroying the flows
themselves, is now displaced into the managed future of corporate planning,
most directly in the simulation of futures markets. But when the future
is evoked as the basis of global stability, capital faces a crisis of unpredictability.
As ideology, future modelling depends on ever more refined data sets
and ever more rigorous algorithms for their projection. But it is precisely
in computer modelling that the problem of turbulence is posed most categorically.
Not only definitionally but technically, the future resists modelling.
By dint of its pseudo-theological position
in the regime of global data flows and their perpetually deferred promise
of perpetually deferred payment, the future is held to vindicate the claims
of the present to wholeness and completion. But the deferral on which that
wholeness rests denies that wholeness to it. As the active relationality
of networks, mediation, by definition in process and incomplete, is thus
forced to pretend to a completion to which it cannot attain. It materiality
is deferred into the not-yet as the price of its present functioning (a
state of affairs that generates the illusion of static binary oppositions).
This contradiction in turn generates the digital aesthetic as its necessary
outcome: the materiality is restored to the present, while the function
is shifted into the unforeseeable future. Hegel's concept of art as the
consciousness of need is the inspiration for this insight, but as the digital
aesthetic arises from the relationality of global networks inclusive of
human and machine components, that consciousness is now not individual
or even merely social, but cyborg. The digital artwork is cyborg:
it responds to the institutional, economic and discursive formation of
corporations as actually existing cyborgs by building an alternative consciousness
in which the mechanical is no longer the object of domination but integral
partner in the production of culture. Neither the consciousness under construction
nor the need to which art responds are then entirely or purely human.
In order for the future to be held up as
the settling of accounts on the promissory notes of the economic, political
and ecological present, it is essential for the administration of global
data flows that the future be isolated from the present, so that the promised
completion on the deals which are the dominant mode of communication today
need never arise. Here a specifically temporal contradiction arises: the
difference between future and present is both affirmed and eradicated.
The future must be both continuous with the present (all debts depend on
the concept that they can eventually be paid) and entirely divorced from
it (since debt is the motor of financial flows, they must never be allowed
to be paid). It is this faultline of difference between present and future
that requires the digital as its necessary outcome: its elegance derives
in part from its determination as the inhabitance of the present as difference.
The digital artwork has no choice but to affirm the immanence of the future
at the point of its emergence.
The necessity of the digital artwork is
then not organic in the sense propounded by Romantic aesthetic philosophy,
since it necessarily abjures wholeness. Instead, the digital works at the
level of mediation as the unhappy conscience of dominant communication,
a cyborg will to grace. The digital is then communicative rather than representational.
This places it in opposition to the evolution of e-cash as the supposedly
immaterial universal signifier of all exchange values, promoting the substitutability
of everything for anything. Asserting aesthetic difference restores neither
the individuality of objects nor the objectality of individuals, the reciprocal
functioning of index and identity resulting from industrial modes of communication.
Instead it assets the primacy of mediation, of the material of relations.
In this perspective, the digital artwork can be assessed according to the
breadth, depth and complexity of the networks it engages or engenders.
Unlike Deleuzean difference, however, aesthetic difference is not an absolute
horizon external to all humanity and all communication, but a difference
intrinsic to communication which, viewed outside the confining determinations
of the actually existing historical conditions, is defined by its
tendency towards inclusiveness and its capacity for translation, misunderstanding
and so for interpretation and systemic innovation. Communication's
own need, bred in the interface of combined human and technological networks,
is that of a newly cyborg communicative species for inclusion and autonomy.
The digital is the necessary next phase in this historical process, a process
which I believe is synonymous with history: hastening the globalisation
of the mediating infrastructure while driving forward those internal contradictions
that make the global and deferred information economy unthinkably neither
present nor future. Like Ed Dorn's railway wagon, everything is behind
and nothing in front. Mediation is the activity through which the hybrid
communicative species become, and specifically how they become other than
they now are.
When, as D.N. Rodowick explains it, Deleuze
argues that 'what philosophy resists' is 'the globalization and banalization
of information as a power that affirms the dominance of late capitalism'
(Rodowick 1997: 192), we perceive both the binarism that hog-ties Deleuze's
philosophy for lack of a dialectic, and the weakness of a politics that
relies on the unequal struggle of philosophy against world capitalism.
You can be guaranteed that philosophy will only ever resist, and that it
will never triumph. Against this brave, pious but ineffectual quietism,
and against what Eco (Eco 1986: 93)refers to as the 'negative theology'
of philosophical nihilism from Heidegger to Baudrillard, the digital
artwork must be communicative, for only communication is vast enough
and necessary enough to endure and to overcome the vicissitudes through
which it is being tortured in the age in which communication is information,
information is power, and money and data are electronically indistinguishable.
The implication of the theses of ephemerality
and communication is that the digital has an altered relation with consumption.
Much electronic art owed and owes its genesis to the conceptual art of
the 1970s and to the critique of the commodity which gave rise to media
as varied as LeWitt's instruction sets, the Situationist dérive
and the community workshop and newsreel movements. But now that the commodity
itself is in a state of implosion, a vacuity both raged against and celebrated
in the rage of mainstream culture from Tarantino to rap, the focus of the
digital is shifting from the provision of objects whose contemplation exposes
the emptiness of the commodity towards building encounters for participation.
This has little to do with what is usually referred to by the term interaction.
It concerns rather factors such as the level of skill required of both
producers and participants in digital artworks. The digital artwork demands
that audiences acquire a determinate set of skills and understandings to
participate fully in the work. In Toshio Iwai's Resonance of Four, for
example, there is a default state which is pretty but dull, while random
gestures with the track ball will produce interactive 'rewards', coloured
lights and sounds. But the experience of the work as artwork demands both
understanding the principle of the device as a composing machine, and working
in consort with three other users to create music. Artisanship is integral
to the digital: so the best artists are also either engineers or groups
including technologists and programmers, and so our students demand of
us programming skills more than bundled packages. This goes against the
current of the televisualisation of the web, where the end-user defined
html language is being submerged in a wave of server-defined Javascript
while, as Tim Berners-Lee (1999) argues, the full interactive power of
alternatives like the Linux-based Amaya browser remain unexplored and marginalised.
The old balance cannot be restored: instead, it must be remade, as it is
in interventions like The
Webstalker that not only offer control but demand active participation.
Something similar is true of RTMark's
web works, which imitate the control structures of corporate web-design
but demand action if they are to be experienced not as parody but as art.
Digital media are grounded in work in a
second sense: to return to an earlier theme, electronic media are grounded
not in leisure, as the televisualisation of the web insists, but in the
workplace. In place of the elite contemplation of the refined consumer,
the digital artwork demands the intellectual and emotional graft needed
to change the work into something else, very clearly in the collective
montage projects now such an integral part of web art, but also in
projects like Sera Furneaux's Kissing Booth, where users not only orchestrate
virtual kisses but record their own into the booth's database. In this
instance, the work does not exist until the user provides the input. This
culture of the database is akin to activist post-artworks like the SOS
Racisme mail-bombing of Le Pen's National Front, or the Zapatista Interneta's
of the Frankfurt stock exchange. Conceptualism left a legacy of anti-commodity
art: its dialectical outcome is a pro-work work. The digital artwork
is work, a labour shared in the human-computer interface and, like
any work, founded in a social process that demands cooperation among workers,
and between workers and those anonymous forebears whose skills are enshrined
and concretised in the dead labour of our machines.
As work, the digital requires the shared
labour, specifically, of artist and audience, to the extent that the distinction
begins to blur. To what extent are Audio-ROM the authors of a sound piece
I might make with their programmes and interfaces but using my own samples
and, since the coding is open, my own coding too? On the one hand, this
scares those brought up in the expressive ideology of the art schools,
and on the other the pious elitism of humanist scholars who, 30 years ago,
leapt at the novel focus of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies to abandon attempts to understand labour. Yet work is today a curiously
liberating principle. To the extent that artists relinquish control over
the artwork and, to that extent, over the audience, the audience must assume
the same degree of responsibility for the work that the artist has abandoned
in offering it to them. Without that assumption of responsibility, the
artwork resorts to the default state of older art: passivity and what we
must now understand as the anaesthetic. The digital artwork demands
responsibility: there is no art where the audience does not take up
this gauntlet and where instead it reserves for itself the sentimental
position, enjoyment without responsibility. This is the burden of Eduardo
Kac's Teleporting
an Unknown State, in which the survival of a small plant depended on
CUSeeMe clients providing it with remote sunlight, or Ken Goldberg's Telegarden
which depended on telerobotic users to tend the garden. Likewise, since
even in death the labour of past centuries is still exploited, the digital
artwork's destiny is to redeem and liberate the concretised labour embodied
in our communicative machines. That is how the past becomes future, beyond
the old lie of posterity. After all, we are the future that our ancestors
looked to to judge and justify them, and we are not worthy -- unless we
seize the present as the becoming of their future. This is the responsibility
which we take up, the only people among all the humans who have ever lived,
who are alive now.
Under the existing circumstances difference
is not a given, a foundation (however complex) or a horizon but a job of
work: making a difference. Communication, under the historical conditions
of contemporary capital, can no longer be presumed as an a-historical given.
In a time in which it is almost entirely identifiable with the circulations
of global finance, such that our consumption of commodities even is merely
a necessary moment in the circuits of capital, communication must be fabricated,
since it is no longer natural. On this fabrication depends the making of
a culture that is no longer crowned by the negation of its own negativity,
as remains the case with accelerated modernity. Instead, the digital must
turn towards the positive construction of the present as difference, a
creation that only becomes possible in the era of a planetary communications
infrastructure. As construction, the digital must forswear the sublime,
for the sublime confronts us not as the incomprehensible but as the incommunicable,
an absolute horizon beyond history. To construct is to act historically,
to embrace the interests, human and technological, that have been left
so egregiously unsatisfied by the culture of the commodity, itself increasingly
embraced in the anaesthetic of its own sublime absence from itself. Change
is the quality of history and of beauty -- what is transient, what comes
into being in the moment as the emergence of futurity. The digital artwork
must be beautiful.
These explorations can be summarised in
terms of a series of principles I have tried to voice here:
The digital artwork must be
networked
The digital artwork must be material
The digital artwork is processual
The digital artwork must mediate
The digital artwork must inhabit the
present as a moment of becoming
The digital artwork is obliged to be
incomplete
The digital artwork is by nature ephemeral
The digital artwork must be imperfect
What distinguishes the digital artwork
is its elegance
The digital artwork must be necessary
The digital artwork is cyborg
The digital artwork must be communicative
Artisanship is integral to the digital
The digital artwork is work
The digital artwork demands responsibility
The digital artwork must be beautiful
The digital is a malleable aesthetics (Deck
1999), based on the principle that anything that can be made can be remade.
Where the artworks of the industrial era hover between existence and non-existence,
presence and absence, the digital seizes on the not-yet for its own domain
at the moment of its emergence. Its time is the time of becoming. The cost
is great: the loss of permanence, of authority, of wholeness. As work,
the artwork that ceases to transform the emergence of the future ceases
to be art and becomes archive: the vibration of binary industrial-era art
no longer animates the démodé. The innocence of play is denied
us in a time when play has become a key strategy of the corporate management
of creativity in hock to the production of new consumer goods. We may no
longer inhabit the present for its own sake, as the impressionists and
the Lumière brothers could, but only for the sake of a future for
which we are enjoined to take responsibility. The great negation which
guided the avant-gardes of the 20th century no longer holds in the 21st,
and without that guide, we risk the sentimental positivity of Ewoks and
tamagotchis. Most of all, we suffer the immense burden of beauty, the terrible
onus of bringing into existence. But on the positive side, we have the
whole of history, its staggering defeats and millennia of immiseration,
to propel us into the new.
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Reflections on Digital Imagery' in TwoNineTwo, n.1, 5-20.
Yampolsky, Mikhail (1993), ‘The Essential
Bone Structure: Mimesis in Eisenstein’ in Christie, Ian and Richard Taylor
(eds), Eisenstein Rediscovered, Routledge, London, 177-188.
SITES CITED and other relevant links
Anti-Rom http://www.antirom.com/antirom01/index.html
Digital Landfill http://www.potatoland.org/landfill/
Digital Souls http://www.digitalsouls.com/
Form Art Competetion Winners http://remote.aec.at/form/winners.html?
ICC Tokyo http://www.ntticc.or.jp/menu_e.html
Jodi http://www.jodi.org/
Eduardo Kac http://www.ekac.org/
Lapses and Erasures (Sawad Brooks) http://www.thing.net/~sawad/erase/
RTmark http://www.rtmark.com/
Telegarden http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/
Teleporting an Unknown State http://www.ekac.org/teleporting.html
Walker Art Gallery New Media Initiatives
http://www.walkerart.org/nmi/index.html
The Webstalker http://bak.spc.org/iod/
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