An Ethico-Phenomenology of Digital Art Practices

Giuseppe Torre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367406295
• eBook ISBN: 9781000296990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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 performance 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.

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 acknowledgment saying “art” would suffice.

Before entering into the details of such discourse, though, I wish to introduce 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 whatever that may be. The wealth of festivals, exhibitions, university courses, literature 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, admittedly, would speak against it. The totality of inner-aesthetic purposefulness develops into the problem of art’s purposefulness beyond its own sphere, a problem for which it has no answer.

(Adorno 2002, 217–218)

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 philosophical 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 manifesto asked artists to refrain from working for a show that advertises consumerism and the wonders of the same technological progress co-responsible for countless war atrocities. Many followed. Many others did not. The apolitical 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, academia, 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 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 practices 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 accident² is probably an effort to avoid old-fashioned and effectively superfluous craftsmanlike methods in art without delivering art over to the instru­mental rationality of mass production. (…) the technological artwork 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 observation (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 example of such an attitude is in the adoption of quantitative and qualitative 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 enslavement 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 context-specific 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-enthusiast 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 philosophically 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 epistemological 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 contingent 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 pharmakon, can be either cure or poison (Stiegler 2012). Yet in relation to art, technology 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 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 presented 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• 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