Art Practice in a Digital Culture

Hazel Gardiner, Charlie Gere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754676232
• eBook ISBN: 9781317178415
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Much as art history is in the process of being transformed by new information communication technologies, often in ways that are either disavowed or resisted, art practice is also being changed by those same technologies. One of the most obvious symptoms of this change is the increasing numbers of artists working in universities, and having their work facilitated and supported by the funding and infrastructural resources that such institutions offer. This new paradigm of art as research is likely to have a profound effect on how we understand the role of the artist and of art practice in society. In this unique book, artists, art historians, art theorists and curators of new media reflect on the idea of art as research and how it has changed practice. Intrinsic to the volume is an investigation of the advances in creative practice made possible via artists engaging directly with technology or via collaborative partnerships between practitioners and technological experts, ranging through a broad spectrum of advanced methods from robotics through rapid prototyping to the biological sciences.

Chapter 1
Research as Art

Charlie Gere

C.P. Snow has a lot to answer for. A phrase he coined in 1959 for a rather polemic lecture about the division between the humanities and sciences has become an enduring cliché, to be wheeled out every time this supposed division is discussed. As recently as August 2007, Johnjoe McFadden, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, and author of a book entitled Quantum Evolution, had an article published in the leader section of The Guardian newspaper, which starts as follows.

In his famous Two Cultures lecture, CP Snow lamented the deep divide that separates the arts and humanities in modern culture. But recent work published in Genome Biology by researchers Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H Miller at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), might be a step towards healing the rift. The scientists designed a computer programme [sic] that turns genes into music. The resulting tunes are surprisingly melodic and have a curious resonance with the roots of both western music and science 26 centuries ago.¹

McFadden then goes on to describe the program in question which initially involved allocating each of 20 different amino acids a note on the twelve-note chromatic scale (all the notes in the same octave), but finding that the compositions tended to jump sporadically from one note to another and lacked melody, Takahashi and Miller ‘reduced the number of possible notes by assigning pairs of similar amino acids to a single note in the seven-note diatonic … scale’, and also allowed ‘the amino acids to encode three-note chords’. For rhythm, they ‘used the frequency of the DNA code that specified each amino acid to assign a time period to each note’. Following this they ‘transposed the thymidylate synthase A protein (involved in making DNA) into a pleasant little melody’, then a segment of the protein that causes the disease Huntington’s chorea, which ‘provided a more sombre tune that was interrupted by a repetitive beat denoting a string of glutamines’. McFadden finishes off his article with the following observation.

It’s nearly 50 years since CP Snow delivered his famous lecture, but the arts and sciences are as far apart as ever. Takahashi and Miller’s transposition of science into music repays an ancient debt; but perhaps also reminds us that the complementary disciplines have a common root, and once shared the same interests.²

Putting aside the rather banal and unimaginative nature of the project itself, what was interesting about McFadden’s article was how it revealed an inversion of Snow’s point about art and science. Rather than those in the arts and humanities being ignorant of science, the situation is vice versa, with many scientists seeming to know little or nothing about cultural developments and in particular about art and how and why it is practised. It also demonstrated a greater degree of ignorance about historical developments in art in relation to science. It is my experience that, in conferences bringing scientists and artists together, the former are considerably more ignorant about art than the latter are about science. The impression is sometimes given that some scientists at least regard art as being about making pretty pictures, and seem to base their understanding of what, for example, visual art is about on the activities of a small group of then-marginalized French painters working between the 1850s and the 1880s, the Impressionists. Of course, in that it disavows any explicit engagement with politics or culture, and in that it is concerned with the purely optical, Impressionism is obviously congenial to the abstraction and ahistoricity of scientific thinking. This is of course grossly unfair, as there are many scientists who understand and engage with art properly, but I believe not entirely inaccurate. This was the point I made in a letter to The Guardian published the next day:

Johnjoe McFadden’s claim that a programme turning gene sequences into music is healing the rift between art and science (Comment, 3 August) ignores decades of collaboration between artists, scientists and engineers that has produced work of considerably more artistic and, more than likely, scientific interest and value.

This rich legacy includes early work in computer graphics and animation by scientists at Bell Labs and elsewhere in the 1960s; the collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers in groups such as Experiments in Art and Technology or the Computer Arts Society in the same period; the investigations into complexity in the 70s and 80s by artists from art schools such as the Slade and scientists in Sante Fe; the long tradition of artistic investigations into the possibilities of robotics and artificial intelligence, from Edward Ihnatowicz to Simon Penny and beyond; and work made in collaboration with scientists about genetics and neuroscience by artists such as Oron Catts, Annie Cattrell, Ruth McLennan and Jane Prophet. Particular mention should be made of the recent work of the Critical Art Ensemble looking at the cultural meaning and effects of biotechnological research – especially given CAE member Steve Kurtz’s recent arrest under the Patriot act in the US …

CP Snow’s two-cultures argument is wheeled out again as if it is a deep truth about our culture, rather than a now-irrelevant piece of polemic. If there is a rift, it is not in modern culture in general, but in how institutions such as Tate and the Science Museum perpetuate and reinforce unjustifiably hard and fast distinctions between the arts and sciences.³

Part of the problem is that there is a kind of cultural cringe at play in the relation between art and science and that we still tend to regard science as the privileged domain in which experimentation takes place, and in which scientific experimental methods are used to find out about the world. Institutions such as science museums tend to reinforce this separation. Yet it can be argued that this presents both a false separation and an overvaluation of science in relation to the rest of culture. Rather than being the master discipline which sets the standards by which we are able to judge truth and knowledge, science is perhaps a particular kind of experimental practice in a more general experimental culture. The experimental is pervasive throughout culture and, for many of us, life is increasingly a kind of experimental process, in which to a lesser or greater extent we have to discover or invent our bodies, ourselves and our communities – culture is the laboratory in which these experiments take place, and our media are some of the principal tools we use. The forms these experiments can take are many and often problematic, including gender reassignment, psychoanalysis, body transformation through plastic surgery, anorexia or bulimia, or prosthetic additions to our biological body, through new kinds of family and other relationships, new kinds of communities, new ways of working, new modes and forms of production.

The roots of this experimental culture can be seen to go back, in the West at least, to the Renaissance in the fifteenth century and the beginnings of the modern scientific world view in the seventeenth century, and to the Romantic ideals of self-creation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the inexorable rise of market capitalism as the dominant force in society. In his famous essay ‘Science as Vocation’, Max Weber suggests that it is the experimentalism of Renaissance artists such as Leonardo that fosters the scientific method, rather than vice versa.⁴ Capitalism, in particular in its current ‘late’ phase, is predicated on harnessing the experimental drives of its subjects and exploiting the desires these drives make manifest. In the nineteenth century Charles Darwin showed that life is one long experiment, while Karl Marx demanded that we experiment with changing the world, rather than merely describing it, and for Friedrich Nietzsche the death of God required that we engage in a testing process of self-creation. Moving into the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud showed that what we think we know is actually a result of continuing experiments in reality testing. The most obvious outcome of experimental culture is science itself, which has transformed our existence dramatically and has also transformed our understanding of the world and our place within it. But science is only one aspect of this culture, and perhaps not the most important.

At the same time experimentalism found expression in the arts with the avant-garde, in which experimentation was both an important strategy and a form of expression – from the early experiments in expression of DADA, the Futurists, the Surrealists, through to postwar avant-garde artists, groups and movements, such as John Cage, Fluxus, early performance, video and conceptual art, as well as those involved in experimental music, free jazz and improvisation. That artists in the mid-twentieth century saw themselves as experimental researchers is nicely indicated by the existence of groups such as Experiments in Art and Technology, founded in the United States in 1966, which I mentioned in my Guardian letter, or the plethora of so-called ‘Arts Labs’ that emerged in Britain in the late 1960s. To this might be added the idea of the artist as researcher, or even, in Hal Foster’s phrase, artist as ethnographer, that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.⁵ Much of the same spirit of experimentalism, which is mostly lacking in contemporary mainstream art found in galleries such as Tate, is to be found in so-called new media art.

Mainstream art galleries perhaps have trouble recognizing this kind of work as art, at least until sufficient time has passed for it to join the canon, precisely because of its experimental nature. Such work is always, implicitly or explicitly, an experiment about art itself. By extension whatever is produced must exceed what can be recognized as art. If it did not, if it could be easily defined as art, then it would not be experimental. The idea of art as experiment or research must not be mistaken for some kind of ‘science envy’, in which artists crave some of the institutional respectability of science and its supposedly more secure claims to truth. In a sense the opposite is more true. A great deal of scientific work is not experiment, but testing, in highly defined and restricted circumstances. Unlike the experimental practices undertaken by artists of the sort described above, scientists cannot afford to exceed what can be recognized by their peers as science. Perhaps, only when a Kuhnian ‘paradigm shift’ takes place does science exceed itself.⁶ Paradoxically, artists may be the true experimentalists in culture, rather than scientists, and art is the place where the very question of what exceeds the known can be properly asked. Interestingly, at the edges of what might still be recognized as science, in areas such as artificial life, what is produced resembles (new media) art as much as it resembles scientific research. The word ‘experiment’ itself can be defined as meaning going beyond the boundaries.

Central to experimental culture is the use of tools, whether they are scientific instruments, information technologies or new media. The more powerful the tools the greater is the capacity to make useful experiments and meaningful statements. The greater the degree of access to such tools, the greater is the capacity for experimentation. The kinds of investigations that constitute science, for example, cannot take place without the instruments used. One might go further and say that the ‘facts’ those investigations supposedly uncover do not exist outside of those instruments. This does not prevent those facts being repeatable and robust, as long as the same kinds of instruments are used, and the facts discovered universally true in that they can be repeated in this manner regardless of the context. But without the apparatus of scientific method, and perhaps most importantly without the observation by scientific peers of experiments, facts of this sort cannot exist for us. Thus, what is produced by science is not a transparent representation of things as they are, but a particular form, albeit both powerful and robust, of contingent enunciation, which produces the truth as much if not more than it represents it (see, for example, Schaffer and Shapin⁷ on early modern experimental culture, Latour and Woolgar⁸ on ‘laboratory life’ or Latour⁹ on ‘science in action’).

Perhaps the most important point is that, with the rise of digital or so-called ‘new’ media, the means of experimentation, production, representation, distribution and consumption are all the same. The technology used by a blogging teen or a member of MySpace, or a net.artist, is more or less the same as that used by a journalist working for a newspaper or, perhaps most importantly, a scientist working on DNA, or artificial life or whatever. This is not to suggest that blogging or being on MySpace or making net.art is the same as those kinds of scientific work, but rather to propose that all are different aspects of a culture in which the experimental is the dominant mode of engagement and production. But there are still essential differences between art and science, and perhaps some are captured by reference to Richard Dawkins’s description of scientific method in his essay ‘Viruses of the Mind’.

Scientific ideas … are subject to a kind of natural selection … But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favor pointless self-serving behavior. They favor all the virtues laid out in textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on.¹⁰

This then might offer a different understanding of the relation, and difference, between science and art. Science is, perhaps, the name we give to the means by which we apprehend the necessary structure, stricture and coding of the universe, and thus makes it answerable to and describable by precisely those virtues listed by Dawkins: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu. These are not criteria imposed upon the universe in some relativistic or constructionist manner but an absolutely integral part of the universe itself, without which there could be no order. Art, on the other hand, is a name for the means by which we come to terms with or remain open to the event, the singular, the monstrous, the contingent, the hazardous, the destinerrant, the elements of play and non-finality within the universe that keep it open to the future, even if this always necessarily involves a process of domestication, much as science must always commence with an openness to play and invention, and an understanding of the necessity of going through the ordeal of the undecidable, that is closer to art than science as we might normally understand it.

In the chapters that follow the relation and differences between art and science in a digital culture are pervasive themes. In Chapter 2, ‘Triangulating Artworlds: Gallery, New Media and Academy’, Stephen Scrivener and Wayne Clements use the work of James Young and Howard Becker to propose an understanding of the different artworlds in which art is made, and to show how they all both connect and are kept separate, and how they relate to each other. In Chapter 3, ‘The Artist as Researcher in a Computer Mediated Culture’, Janis Jefferies recounts some of the experiences of artists, including Stanza, Mick Grierson and Tim Hopkins, who have come to Goldsmiths with AHRC Fellowships in the Creative and Performing Arts Scheme, established in 1999 (and no longer running), in the context of a broader discussion of the whole question of the artist as a researcher in higher education, as it has emerged since the 1960s. Jefferies discusses how these artists were able to work with researchers from other disciplines and the effects this had on their practice. Chapter 4, ‘A Conversatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Research as Art
• 2 Triangulating Artworlds: Gallery, New Media and Academy
• 3 The Artist as Researcher in a Computer Mediated Culture
• 4 A Conversation about Models and Prototypes
• 5 Not Intelligent by Design
• 6 Excess and Indifference: Alternate Body Architectures
• 7 The Garden of Hybrid Delights: Looking at the Intersection of Art, Science and Technology
• 8 Limited Edition – Unlimited Image: Can a Science/Art Fusion Move the Boundaries of Visual and Audio Interpretation?
• 9 Telematic Practice and Research Discourses: Three Practice-based Research Project Case Studies
• 10 Tools, Methods, Practice, Process … and Curation
• Bibliography
• Index