Naked on Pluto proposes a playful yet disturbing online game world, developed with Free/ Libre Open Source Software, which parodies the insidiously invasive traits of much “social software”. The city of “Elastic Versailles” is animated by the quirky combinatorial logics of a community of fifty seven AI bots that glean Facebook data from subscribers to the game. Naked on Pluto’s bot crew, which are hard to distinguish from other agents in this text-based environment, are dysfunctional gatekeepers whose access-control means are broken by the participants only to be elastically “healed” by the bots. Players attempt to override the game’s restrictions, teaming up in order to ultimately crash and escape from the system. Reporting on activities via a blog and Twitter, and issuing a constant stream of incitations to click, declare, poke and buy, the bots run havoc with one’s own and one’s friends’ data, generating more or less spurious links with chillingly escalating speed. Disconcertingly familiar faces and information from one’s personal and associated profiles are indiscriminately blended in a brash prosumer landscape which, like the original Versailles, is designed for promotional parades of inseparable personal and ideological attributes. No player information is shared, stored, or relayed back to Facebook in this malleable social ecosystem where all that counts are glimpses of fleeting visibility.

Naked on Pluto caricatures the proliferation of virtual agents that harvest our personal data to insidiously reshape our online environments and profiles, highlighting the ambivalent hallmarks of major social networks: friends as quantifiable and commodifiable online assets, personas carefully fashioned contrived to impart a sense of “intimacy”, and disingenuous publishing of “private” data as self-advertising. The emergence of intelligence in this game is ultimately, hopefully, that of the players who manage to escape from it.

Project blog, full credits and interviews:
http://pluto.kuri.mu

Paper about the project
http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/naked-pluto

GPL/AGPL/CC/FAL code, art and misc. documentation:
https://gitorious.org/naked-on-pluto

The VIDA Awards were created by Fundación Telefónica in 1999 to promote artistic creation based on new technologies and artificial life. A total of 198 projects from 36 countries entered into contest in this edition. The works will be showcased at Fundación Telefónica?s stand in ARCO 2012.

Natural interfaces and cross-medial technologies allow for the creation of new publishing paradigms in which the term book can be disarticulated and rearranged into unexpected forms, fostering new ways of interacting with data and information.

Leaf++ is the product of a research project that goes in this direction in which a prototypal interactive system involving computer vision, gestural interfaces, augmented reality technologies and cross medial systems to create a novel tool to experience botanical information about plants and their leaves. In Leaf++ an interactive surface and a mobile application can be used to access information of a leaf. By placing the leaf on the interactive surface or by taking a picture of it using the mobile application, a computer vision system is able to recognize it (if it already has been added to a database) and to show available information sources including scientific classification and information, habitat information, world diffusion data, seasonality, curiosities, videos, images and stories regarding the leaf and the plant to which it belongs. Researchers and other forms of users are also allowed to add information to the system: by simply uploading texts, images, videos and geographical locations, they can contribute to the set of information available for the recognized leaf.

The overall interactive system comes out as a really significant experience, employable according to various usage scenarios that go from scientific research to education, to mobile and museum-based entertainment, which not only suggest possible effective uses for these ubiquitous, cross-medial technologies, but also enacts information access and knowledge sharing practices which are outstanding from the point of view of their usability, and of the cognitive approaches fostered by such direct, “augmented” methodologies.

Leaf++ is a cross-medial, augmented reality, multi-author, emergent, evolving and disseminated publication.

See Leaf++: Augmented Reality and the Third Landscape in Parsons Journal for Information Mapping, Volume 3, Issue 3.

Taking cues from the examples and critics cited here, the idea of the commons has emerged as a networked space of creative and generative possibility and risk. To recover is to reclaim. In shaping the commons, Jay Walljasper states that we “recognise some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good of all. The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come. The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as shared social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research and creative works.” However, there’s never just one commons – the commons itself is multiple and complex, in process and becoming. Artists actively keep the commons alive in the face of all kinds of opposition, censorship and antagonism.

So what kind of art and art event is integral to this becoming or emergence? Several essays in Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, edited by Scott McQuire and Nikos Papastergiadis, also explore the possibility of a new network of global cultural dialogue and the construction of a global common. What I see happening in post-disaster work of the three examples cited earlier is a sense of the ‘becoming commons’ emerging from ruins and loss in a situation of what Ross Gibson might describe as ‘changefulness’. It’s what I am inclined to think of as practice based, as ‘changescaping’ (work in progress at http://placing.wordpress.com/changescaping).

How do we reconcile the sometimes exclusive and exclusionary cultural practices with this call for ‘the commons’ and emergence? Whose responsibility is it to do the bridging (politics, art or, as Papastergiadis proposes, the “politics of art”), generating those relationships or draw those connections? What should we risk? The very idea – the possibility, the assumption – of the Biennial itself. Ultimately, there’s a question of governance and stewardship. As Brenson says, “we have to talk about art in ways in which everyone has something to lose”. If critical art, as McQuire and Papastergiadis write, “increasingly take an active role in constituting new social relationships” – or as Richard Rorty proposes, “speaks differently” – curators have a pivotal role to play in cultivation and caring (curare), politics and poetics. We all have a role to play in the poiesis of the commons.

A growing body of research, including literature on cognitive anthropology, software studies and cognitive capital suggests that whatever is called ‘thinking’ occurs amidst mechanisms, habits, codelike systems, devices and other formally structured means. If intelligence, far from being a property of ‘the human’, is an informal and provisional function of the ensemble of mechanisms and relations that comprise a social field, then we need to explore the co-relation of cultural and experiential practices, thought and intelligent devices.

This day-long workshop seeks to evaluate the ways in which contemporary hardware and software augment and distribute intelligence, as well as the ensemble of social relations which form around thinking practices as they synchronise, mesh, de-couple, breakdown and collapse with variable effects. Contributors are proposing analyses and discussions of thinking work as it is imbricated in cultural, material, corporeal, technical, economic and psychic practices, and adopt a range of disciplinary perspectives - from cognitive science and systems theory, through science and technology studies, to cultural theory and philosophy.

Keynotes and Speakers (in alphabetical order)

• Anna Munster, Nerves of data: ‘the neurological turn’ in/against networked media
• Mike Wheeler, Thinking Beyond the Brain: Arguments and Implications
• Ingmar Lippert, Administering Carbon Thinking
• Gabriel Menotti, The interpenetrating boundaries between coding and computation in the performance of Livecoding
• Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova, Soft thought in architecture and choreography
• Chryssa Sdrolia, Intelligent Accidents. Towards an Ethology of Mental Heterogeneity
• Ting-jieh Wang, Intelligence as system-specific property: systems, emergence, and structural coupling

For further information, please contact: Andrew Goffey, Matthew Fuller or Adrian Mackenzie at a.goffeyATmdx.ac.uk, m.fullerATgold.ac.uk or a.mackenzieATlancaster.ac.uk

Simon Biggs wrote: Dear empyre subscribers,

Creativity is often perceived as a product of individual, or group, creative activity. However, it might also be considered an emergent phenomenon of communities, driving change and facilitating individual and ensemble creativity. Expanded concepts of agency allow us to question who, or what, can be an active participant in creative social interactions, providing diverse models for authorship. Creativity might be regarded as social interaction in reflexive mediation.

How might we understand creativity as interaction, as sets of discursive relations? Creativity can be a performative activity released when engaged through and by a community. In this context the model of the solitary artist, who produces artefacts which embody creativity, can be questioned as an ideal for achieving creative outcomes. Creativity can be proposed as an activity of exchange that enables (creates) people and communities.

In his book Creative Land, anthropologist James Leach (one of this month’s guests) describes cultural practices where the creation of new things, and the ritualised forms of exchange (the performative) enacted around them, function to “create” individuals and their social relations, “creating” the community they inhabit. Leach’s argument suggests it is possible to conceive of creativity as emergent from and innate to the interactions of people. Such an understanding functions to combat instrumentalist views of creativity that demand it have social (e.g.: “economic”) value. Creativity need not be valued as satisfying a perceived need nor need it be romantically situated as a supply-side “blue skies” ideal. An alternate model can be proposed where creativity is considered an emergent property of community; an ontology.

Does the internet, the networks of people it facilitates and the communities that emerge through it, render these processes more explicit than they might otherwise appear? Does the internet facilitate the creation of communities where new modalities of creativity, authorship and exchange emerge? Do online communities, such as Furtherfield, 7-11, Nettime and empyre, present models and insights for novel social relations and creativity?

During the month of July we will discuss the issues that relate to these questions concerning creativity and community. Our guests are:

Eugenio Tisselli (Mexico/Spain): Born in Mexico City, 1972. Writer and programmer. Areas of interest include artistic software, social technologies and digital narratives. His work (installation, performance, software and text) has been featured in many publications, festivals and exhibitions around the world. He collaborates regularly with artist Antoni Abad at http://megafone.net. He was an associate researcher at Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris and is currently co-director of the Master in Digital Arts at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Helen Varley Jamieson (New Zealand) is a writer, theatre practitioner and digital artist from New Zealand, currently based in Europe. She holds a Master of Arts (research) in cyberformance - live performance on the internet – a form of networked performance which she has developed and presented internationally for over a decade. Helen is a founding member of the globally-dispersed cyberformance troupe Avatar Body Collision; project manager of UpStage, an open source web-based cyberformance platform; has co-curated online festivals involving artists and audiences around the world; and is the “web queen” of the Magdalena Project, an international network of women in theatre.

James Leach (UK) is a Social Anthropologist. His areas of interest centre on creativity, innovation, intellectual property and on knowledge exchange across cultures, disciplines and contexts. Building on long term fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, recent work has drawn understandings and relationships from that region into research on free software, interdisciplinary collaborations, the design of technological objects and choreography. James is currently Professor and Head of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli (USA/UK/Italy) is an Associate Professor at the University of Edinburgh in Film Studies. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics, and has published articles on digital and performance art, modernism, feminism, nationalism, representations of violence and post-socialist cinema. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Mythopoetic Cinema at The Margins of Europe.

Ruth Catlow (UK) is an artist and curator working at the intersection of art, technology and social change. As co-founder, with Marc Garrett, of Furtherfield.org, a grass roots media arts organisation, online community and HTTP Gallery in North London, she works with international DIY artists, hackers, curators, musicians, programmers, writers, activists and thinkers. Her current focus is on practices that engage an ecological approach featuring an interest in the interrelation of technological and natural processes. Ruth has been involved with developing networked participatory arts infrastructures such as VisitorsStudio and NODE.London. Ruth has worked in Higher Education for over 15 years and is currently running degrees in Digital Art and Design Practice and developing a new MA in Fine Art and Environment at Writtle School of Design.

Magnus Lawrie (UK) has, over the past 15 years, been involved in creative and politically motivated urban communities in the UK, Germany and Spain. This engagement has resulted from a peripatetic lifestyle and an interest in grassroots action deriving from his background in visual arts (BA & MFA Fine Art 1991-97), DIY culture and - by a circuitous route - web design, programming, systems administration, GNU/Linux and Free Software. In September 2010 Magnus will begin a doctoral research studentship at Edinburgh College of Art as part of the pan-European Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) project.

Scott Rettberg (Norway/USA) is a Chicago native who now lives in Norway. He writes, and writes about, new media and electronic literature. Rettberg is co-founder of the Electronic Literature Organization. His work is widely published, including by MIT Press, The Iowa Review Web and the Electronic Book Review. He was co-editor with N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. He is an associate professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen.

Simon Biggs
Research Professor Edinburgh College of Art
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201.

Eugenio Tisselli Vélez wrote:

Dear all,

First, let me thank Simon and Renate for inviting me, I’m very excited to be part of this month’s discussion at empyre.

Please allow me to be straightforward: lately I have grown quite wary of the idea of creativity itself. If I look at it in its traditional sense, as the act of producing something from out of nothing, I find that there is too much theological “background noise” in it. My suspicion surrounding creativity stronlgy developed after reading George Steiner’s book “Grammars of creation” (2001), which starts out in an amazing way by saying that “we have no more beginnings left”. Throughout the book, Steiner argues that our western vision of the act of creation is deeply rooted in religion; in the idea of the Platonic demiurge, who fashions the material world out of chaos. Seen from a contemporary perspective, this original idea seems almost unsustainable. At some point, Steiner proposes that instead of considering our acts as being creative, we should see them as being inventive, suggesting that we actually make new things only by assembling and manipulating their constituent elements, which already existed before. Of course, Steiner was not the first one to question the idea of the artist as a creator: we only need to turn towards the well-known “objet trouvé”. So, the artist as inventor may cause the solitary artist that Simon mentions in his introduction to crumble under his/her own weight, for an artist is never solitary even if working in isolation. The artefacts produced will necessarily be polyphonic, and will contain the echo of those who came before and provided the raw materials, however hidden they may be: the multiple beats within the singular.

Nevertheless, I am willing to accept a contemporary idea of creativity that is detached from its Greek-Latin roots, and which necessarily implies the interweaving of collective threads in innovative ways. I would like to address one of Simon’s questions, “How might we understand creativity as interaction, as sets of discursive relations?”, by refering to Bruno Latour’s book, “Reassembling the social”. In his book, Latour points out that we should not view “the social” as a given entity which exists per se, but rather as something that is continuously re-created (or re-invented) through the multiple interactions of its actors. I largely agree with this vision, but I find that this continuous re-making of the social is not necessarily a creative act. Everywhere we may find groups of people immersed in an array of constant interrelations, from which all sorts of destructive actions can emerge. I believe that creativity emerges from individuals and their social relations (physical or virtual) only when the interaction among them is focused constructively, and is based on the idea of a common good, mutual trust and shared engagement. Emergent communities whose relations are mediated by digital networks may find their creative potential increased quantitatively, in terms of number of individuals, and qualitatively because of their diversity, but I think that building and maintaining trust and engagement within them becomes particularly important, as these networks tend to promote rather detached/ephemeral (”just a click away”) modes of interrelation.

Just a few general thoughts to start off…

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Eugenio

Helen Varley Jamieson wrote:

hi everyone,

thank you simon & renate for the invitation to be part of this discussion, & thanks eugenio for starting things off : )

speaking as a live performance/theatre artist, i’m also of the opinion that creativity doesn’t happen in isolation or on our own; we are always building on what has gone before. in this sense, creativity can be understood as interaction & conversation, or even a translation (interpretation) … my work is pretty much always dialogic, it is a creative exchange between performer(s) & audience in a shared moment (whether we are physically or virtually present, the time is shared).

to begin to respond to simon’s questions, in particular “Does the internet facilitate the creation of communities where new modalities of creativity, authorship and exchange emerge?”, i’ll give as an example one of the projects that i’ve been involved with since 2003: the online cyberformance platform UpStage. the project began with the practical needs/desires of four artists, & over the years a thriving community has evolved around it. there are about 50 artists currently working with UpStage to create performances for the annual festival (& there might well be others using UpStage who i don’t know about), around 300 on the mailing list, & it’s used in educational situations from primary school through to universities. there is a small ongoing developer community as well.

one aspect of the UpStage community that particularly delights me is the emergence of cross-collaboration between the artists; four of the 19 performances selected for this year’s festival involve collaborations between artists who have met through UpStage (& mostly have not met in the flesh). this is similar to my experience with Avatar Body Collision - we came together through online networks & still have not all met, 8 years & 10 performances later. this kind of remote collaboration is not so unusual today, but what’s different with UpStage is the wider context - the ongoing interaction is not only between collaborating artists but also between artists, developers & audience - there is the sense that we are all cross-pollinating at several levels of creation - the performances, the software, & the community. each of these three things is being created by, & contributing to the creation of, the other two in a very organic (ontological?) way.

to pick up on eugenio’s reference to trust - trust is central/essential both to communities and to theatre/performance. establishing trust is something that proximal (i.e. not online) theatre ensembles usually do at the start of a project if the members don’t already know each other - playing games to build familiarity & a sense of connection between the individuals (i.e., community). any sort of live performance requires trust between the players - from trusting that your co-actor will remember their lines, to the confidence that your trapeze partner will catch you & not let you fall to the ground. online, trust takes on a new significance. working remotely with people you’ve never met & know little about can require a risky leap of trust, but one that has to be taken. we also have to place enormous trust in technologies, at the same time as knowing that the internet is an unstable environment …

hmm; i’m not quite sure how to tie that all back into the original questions, but i’ll send this now anyway as i’ve just been handed 5 bamboo stakes which are desperately needed by some rampant tomato plants on the balcony …

h : )

(skipped a few posts)

Kevin Hamilton wrote:

Hello all -

Thanks to Simon for framing this discussion so well. Starting with ontology over epistemology is a great place to go, so I look forward to the coming month.

For now, I’ll just contribute a few quotes and examples in response to the threads so far.

First - in relation to comments about religion - one might just as readily look to the process of secularization when looking for creativity’s problematic heritage. For the 2007 MyCreativity conference in Holland, Marion von Osten described creativity’s modern emergence as a social obligation, linking it to individual freedom as a compulsory part of living in a capitalist economy:

“On the one hand, then, creativity shows itself to be the democratic variant of genius: the ability to be creative is bestowed on everyone. On the other hand everyone is required to develop her/his creative potential…The subjects comply with these new relations of power apparently by free will. In Nikolas Rose’s terms, they are ‘obliged to be free’, urged to be mature, autonomous and responsible for themselves..” (http://eipcp.net/transversal/0207/vonosten/en)

Where religions situated creativity within ritual and processual fantasy, secularism gave us individual compulsory creativity as an economic instrument - complete with mechanisms for reflexivity. Collective creativities are just as susceptible to this. Growing interest in collective creation is as likely as any a sign of modern subjectivity’s transformation during late capital. Newfield and Rayner wrote about the growing interest in collectivism and self-organization among management theorists:

“In the idealised view of its advocates, the learning organisation is a mobile, self-deconstructing system, perfectly suited to the unstable environments of “post-industrial” or “informational” capitalism….The practical question for contemporary management and human resources (HR) theorists is how to create the kinds of workers that are capable of accumulating tacit knowledge and using it in the service of the organisation.” (http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/newfield_rayner.html)

So how do we attend to creativity’s ontology as a condition of being social, without ending up with just another form of instrumentalized “freedom?”

I find some hope in looking to the role of ontology in epistemologies of individual creative action. Sociologist Norbert Elias provided one of my favorite descriptions of creativity:

“The pinnacle of artistic creation is achieved when the spontaneity and inventiveness of the fantasy-stream are so fused with knowledge of the regularities of the material and the judgement of the artist’s conscience that the innovative fantasies emerge as if by themselves in a way that matches the demands of both material and conscience. This is one of the most socially fruitful types of sublimation process.”

I love this description because it accounts for fantasy/desire, the limits of perception, and the fact that the material into which we work is just more regular than we are. Translate this into a discussion of group creativity, and things get very interesting.

It’s also why I keep hacking at the tired rhetoric of creativity in my institutional home. Where I used to roll my eyes and wait for the meeting/lecture to be over (ever sat through a talk by Daniel Pink?), I now look for the inevitable limits against which the fantasies of neoliberal creative economies must hit. The Floridians don’t know their material - they are bad craftspeople, and the stakes are higher than they know. We can make sure to be there to assert other fantasies, to contribute to their limited sensoria, to remind them of the walls against which they will hit, hopefully before more people get hurt.

Kevin Hamilton

Eugenio Tisselli Vélez wrote:

Hi Helen,

I fully agree with you that commonality is a necessary condition for the emergence of a community… which, in turn, will constantly transform the very nature of that commonality through interaction between its members. I also believe that commonality can be subtle, or even contradictory: a community may form even emerge out of people holding antagonistic positions. Let me illustrate:

Last year, megafone.net was invited to do a project in Manizales, Colombia, involving two groups: displaced people (people who had to abandon their home towns because of violence) and de-mobilized people (ex-guerrilleros). Obvously, these two groups are in extreme positions, which can be understood as the opposite ends of the Colombian conflict. However, they were all willing to work on the project. Antoni Abad, the head of megafone.net, went there and started the project by working separately with both groups. Each group would share a common mobile phone, from which the participants could send tagged images and audio clips to a web page. The goal for each group was to create and share a “community memory”, in which they would reflect their daily life. Each week, the phone would change hands and would be passed on to another participant.

Surprisingly, after a few days of activity, the participants themselves asked Antoni if he could arrange a meeting of both groups. And then it happened: displaced and demobilized people were shaking hands and even hugging each other after realizing that they had so many things in common. According to our Colombian hosts, something like this had never happened before.

The web-based community memory they created together is available at megafone.net:
http://www.megafone.net/TEMPORAL

If I have to see this project in retrospective, I must say that the web page both groups created using mobile phones unexpectedly worked as a pretext for their face-to-face meeting. I also have to say that this community’s creative production of itself is reflected in the folksonomy which emerged from their participation in the project, which can be viewed here:
http://www.megafone.net/TEMPORAL/tags.php

The most relevant tags speak for themselves.

Finally, I must admit that my intention to start from a taxonomy of networks was maybe a little too far-fetched. I agree that networks are a good example of a fluid space, which can hardly be made to fit into a set of fixed categories. But I just wanted to try and see if we could characterize and find different types of networks, and see if we could identify which of their traits favor (or inhibit) collective creativity.

Eugenio Tisselli Vélez

[...]

James Leach wrote:

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Simon for inviting me on board. With so much said already, trying to cover all the points made so far will be too much for me. Forgive the late entry into the discussion (I was away all last week), and the partial nature of the response and these thoughts.

Euginio started us off last week with a welcome caution about the idea of creativity.

The idea of creating something from nothing, as he said, is necessarily outside human experience (by definition) in the Judeo-Christian mytho-poetic worldview. Simon generously cited some of my work on a small village on the Northern Coast of Papua New Guinea, where I divined a rather different place for ‘creativity’, stemming from a different mythically structured consciousness of the place of humans in their world. Creativity is not a distant and sought after ideal that can be turned, on appearance, into an individually attributed good, but is inherent in the actions of human beings as they make and remake their position as humans – that is, engage in acts that are consciously and explicitly geared to establishing gendered bodies (initiations) and resultant separations between kinsmen (and emergent named places in the landscape) so that (re)productive exchange is necessary.

In Reite novelty, innovation, invention etc. are not goal of human action. Creativity is not outside human experience, but part of its everyday reality. Creativity is inherent in what it is to be a human being because in myth, the actions referred to above, beginning with the acts which established gender, and thus the possibilities for human reproduction and kinship, were the actions of the first human beings constituting themselves as human and not something else. In their everyday lives of gardening, animal husbandry, hunting etc., these people are the same as those first creator beings, and thus are constantly partaking of the original ‘creativity’ as they also constitute their lives as human and not something else.

Most/all things Reite people do have an aesthetic dimension – their subsistence horticulture, for example, always involves ‘ritual’ forms of planting; things of symmetry and some beauty, that are there for the pragmatic purpose of drawing the correct relations between people, spirits, other people at a distance from the garden etc., at the heart of the garden space. They make fabulous objects for self-decoration, compose extraordinary music, and so forth, all as aspects of the processes of production, kinship, lifecycle changes, reproduction.

However, it seems to make little or no sense to call any of these things ‘art’, as they are not separated from everyday and prosaic acts – and those acts, as I have said, are the ones that reproduces the world (makes it appear over and again - Latour) in the form recognisable as a human world, to Reite people. But unlike the world Latour describes, they are not in the business of consciously creating ‘the social’, or ‘society’ as an entity that can be discussed, analysed etc,

Maybe all I am doing here is concurring with the thread already established about Foucault, the artists, identity and copyright as dependent on a particular place for ‘creativity’ in western, and institutionalised, understandings of society.

But I thought to go somewhere else: and that is to talk about responsibility.

I noted in Euginio’s comments that despite suspicion with the term, it is very hard for any of us to avoid the positive moral valence of ‘creativity’. In his stimulating post, ‘constructively’, ‘common good’, ‘mutual trust’ etc. appeared. My short description of Reite above could be read to speak of ‘constructive’ actions in the ‘common good’. But I think that would be to mistake what is going on, deceived by the conceptual associations of our own understanding of creativity, and partaking of the kind of ‘constructionist’ view of the social world that Latour refers to.

In Reite, the acts that create the human world as it appears are also the acts that make death inevitable, competition and suspicion between people vying for control over the power to reproduce themselves through relationships to other, etc.

So everything for these people can be, and is, explained by the actions of other humans or their associated sentient beings in the land or forest. There are no accidents, no landforms, weather events – all the things we think are there beyond and outside human ‘creativity’ - that are not the responsibility of people. All illness and death there is the direct responsibility of other sentient beings, and mainly human ones. In other words, being creative of the world is also to be unavoidably responsible for its destruction.

That brings me on to say that to want to be creative is a very different thing from the kind of creative/destructive power that exists in Reite.

Having said all that, and given the underlying premise of all the above is that we, just as Reite people do, constitute our existences through the particular way we engage in relations to each other (social ontology), structured through certain key principles available in myths we tell ourselves about how we have got here and what our responsibilities as human being are — what are we to make of the current idea that somehow the mediation of human relations through technological networks will make us more ‘creative’?

What is it about the speeding up of communication, the mediation of geographical and social distance, that makes us believe (and I use the word consciously) that we are going to be doing anything very different?

We are constantly telling ourselves that the world is changing rapidly, that things are speeding up, that technology is now the condition of our existence, its ongoing development and the consequences of that, outside human control.

But as Kriss points to in her comments, these images do political work. The faith and horror in technology is, as always, a projection of the faith and horror in the human ability (or lack of it) to change their circumstances. The personnel who may have control over that change seems to have shifted. And hence the hope in technologically mediated futures. But looking at the fine grain of the worlds and ‘communities’ created in this mediated space, many familiar themes emerge: exclusions, emergent hierarchies, control and secrecy etc.

Can we help but be creative?

What is it we are creating if we think of creativity as a social ontology?

Is it something we can dip in and out of, chose to do, or avoid?

On April 23rd at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial in Gijon, Spain the exhibition Process as Paradigm – art in development, flux and change opened, curated by Susanne Jaschko and Lucas Evers. With this empyre discussion, the we as curators wish to deepen the critical discourse on the concept of Processual Art as formulated with the show. The full catalogue of the exhibition can be found here.

From the curators’ notes in the catalogue: With this exhibition and accompanying programme we curators formulate a bold thesis. We claim that process – and here we mean non-linear and non-deterministic process – has become one of the major paradigms in contemporary art and culture.

More than this, we see a strong connection of this cultural development to the current situation of the globalised world which is shaken by on-going military and religious conflicts, the sudden meltdown of world economy and the threat of climate change, only to name the big headlines. In the light of the current and reoccurring crises it has become obvious that these processes of greater scale and impact are not necessarily following simple rules of predictability or linearity. What might have been a wrong construct in general and the consequence of a deceptive linear narrative of history – a world which is at least partially manageable by us humans – has turned into a scattered, “atemporal” picture.

Susanne Jaschko: Processual Art + real life = ?

I am particularly interested in Processual Art’s potential to mirror, respond to, or comment on the changing, processual nature of life on a long-term basis. I hope that in this discussion we can find some results to the equation “Processual Art + real life = ?” and that we also critically discuss process as a paradigm bridging various practices and genres in contemporary art and culture. Parallel to this empyre debate I am teaching on the subject at Bauhaus University in Weimar in May and hope that the seminar will deliver also interesting perspectives and results, which I can share with the list.

The contemporary perception of us humans as particles of larger networks and systems – an effect of real-time connectedness – is one of the major conditions for the prevalence of the present and of process as a concept in culture and in the arts.

We are involved in new and different typologies of scattered communities, groups, manifold production networks and communication grids, and act within them with different intensities, but with an awareness of our own dispersed presence in all these systems.

No doubt, the degree of performance and presence that is demanded in all these systems is tremendously challenging. We live in a culture of the present in which the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ – in its new interpretation – has become a universal condition. In this celebration of presence and the present lies one of the major factors for the turn in the arts (but also in other related fields like design and architecture) to processuality and performativity, a shift that is gaining momentum.

In 1967, Roy Ascott wrote: “When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure”. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht turned against the exclusive construction of meaning in the humanities, and against their limited focus on signs and meaning structures. He argued that there is another valid access to the world beyond representation – the aesthetic experience of presence.

The flow and continuous changes, the agency of the artist and the public, being characteristic of works of processual art have a strong impact on the specific, subjective perception and understanding of presence. While today we increasingly experience this “tyranny of the here and now,” with its unrelenting demand for our attention, the delicate and ambient nature of processual art allows for shared attention, the choice between active and passive agency on the part of the recipient, and a multiplicity of access points. In this regard, processual art opposes the oppressive canon of the spectacle and instead introduces the idea of art that merges with life – or at least the idea of art that accompanies life.

Lucas Evers: Is Art the way to deal with serious shit?

A remark related to Gumbrecht’s aesthetic experience of presence above was also made in the still ongoing debate on tactical media on empyre. Christopher Sullivan, in his post of April 29, reflecting on the limits of current conventions in art education, notes “that though we come from different places, we should all have read the same materials, and agree on all major topics, primary to this, is the notion that everything is about representation, and everything is an illusion created by prejudices, the government, the media… Ignoring the more interesting conversation that some serious shit is actually happening. I.E. people sneaking across any border in droves, is a problem.”

From this perspective that some serious shit is actually happening, I am are also interested to discuss processual forms of art that blend into other domains of life. Art-Science, not in the sense of art reflecting on science, but maybe art and science as merging creativity with knowledge finding. Reflections of that sort can be made about art and economy and what this means for art as a distinct practice.

Bios:

Susanne Jaschko is curator of contemporary art and based in Berlin, Germany. Her curatorial practice focuses on experimental art which goes beyond art as commodity and renews the concept of art and its social and cultural functions. She was Head of Presentation and of the artist-in-residence program at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam from 2008/09. From 1997 to 2004 she was curator and later deputy director of transmediale. She holds a doctorate degree in Art History/Philosophy.

Among the exhibition projects she curated independently are Process as Paradigm, Laboral, Gijón, 2010; Visual Voltage Amplified , Felleshus, Berlin, 2010; Travelling Without Moving, Oboro, Montréal; urban interface berlin/oslo, 2007; Urban Screens Manchester 07; Open House, Vitra Design Museum/Art Center Pasadena a.o. 2006 – 2008; SCAPE – Biennial of Art in Public Space, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2006. Next to her curatorial work she has taught at institutions in Germany and abroad. She regularly lectures and writes about contemporary art that relates to her curatorial practice.

Lucas Evers is head of the e-Culture programme of Waag Society in Amsterdam, a position from which he is interested and involved in projects where art, science, design and the societal meet, extending the e of e-Culture to a wider range of technology informed arts and their representations of, meaning for and effects on society. His work includes curating, but also organising encounters between those who give meaning to and create our society, organising critical debate, teaching, designing, in order to find and form thoughts, structures and other parameters that shape our everyday/technological life, without necessary always being utilitarian.

Having worked from 1998 until 2003 at De Balie, center for culture and politics on the editorial team for new media, politics and cinema, and parallel from 2001 until 2007 at Melkweg and curator new media he was involved in a large number of international projects that took place in Amsterdam amongst which Re:Mark:Marker - retrospective of the works of Chris Marker (1999); net.congestion - International Festival of Streaming Media (2000); Next Five Minutes; An Archaeology of Imaginary Media (2003); The Upgrade Amsterdam (2004 - 2005); Creative Commons Netherlands (2006 ongoing); Utopian Practices (2008 – ongoing – collaboration with The Arts & Genomics Centre, The Virtual Knowledge Studio). He teaches at Dasarts – master for advanced studies in performing arts.
www.waag.org

susanne jaschko:

Hello,

apologies for not appearing earlier on the list. The first two days of the seminar in Weimar at Bauhaus University showed that it is probably necessary to define more precisely which kind of processes we were interested in when curating Process as Paradigm and how the kind of ‘Processual Art’ that we introduce with the show differs from Process Art.

Process Art that emerged in the mid 60ies as ‘an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The ‘process’ in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and patterning. Process art is concerned with the actual doing; art as a rite, ritual, and performance. Process art often entails an inherent motivation, rationale, and intentionality. Therefore, art is viewed as a creative journey or process, rather than as a deliverable or end product.’ (Wikipedia)

So what are the similarities and where are the differences? What Process Art shares with Processual Art is the focus on the action, the activity and the performance — and less on the final object — although this is debatable, since the form and aesthetics of the object is not neglected.

But in contrast to Process Art it is not the performative gesture and the action of the artist which is key to the artwork, but the action is transfered to a system that performs with a great deal of autonomy. Once released into the world, the system works untouched by the artist and in a more or less unpredictable way. (In the show, Isabelle Jenniches’ works don’t follow that canon - because she remains a major element of the process - however one may argue that the freedom of her activity is relatively limited by the rules she predefined.) Jenniches’ spontaneity and improvisation stays on a low level - in contrast to being relevant factors of Process Art.

Two other characteristics of Processual Art should be mentioned: the aspect of time/duration and the notion of life that Processual Art inheres. While Process Art celebrates the moment and gesture of performance, the event, sometimes the spectacle, Processual Art involves slow and persistent emergence in real-time. It is linked related to ideas of natural cycles like growth and decay or the infinite.

Eventually these qualities - together with the relative autonomy and predictability of the systems’ behaviour, the systems of Processual Art evoke the impression of systems that are ‘alive’. See e.g. Antoinne Schmitt’s ‘Still living’.

This description is certainly neither complete nor too precise, but maybe helps to understand the specific perspective that we have on process in contemporary art. Processual Art is certainly touching upon concepts of generativity, artifical life, software art - but it does not stay on this technological level, but also includes the creation of larger human systems/processes.

It is not our interest to coin ‘Processual Art’ as a new term really, we are more interested to see if this contemporary concept of process and its relation to life/emergence can be found in various artistic practice, can unite those and which potential this type of art has to not only convince on an aesthetic level, but also can have a social/cultural impact.

susanne jaschko
www.sujaschko.de

Yann Le Guennec wrote:

Hello,

I’m very interested in your definition of ‘generative image’. catalogue (p55)

The text describes well what i call ‘variable pictures’ (eg, a networked still picture, always changing, and removing its precedent state, according to some online activities) or ‘evolving pictures’ (eg a networked still picture transforming itself, according to some online data accumulation processes).

I think that the term ‘generative’ is now closely linked to what is called ‘generative art’, dealing with algorithms and systems, looking for some kinds of emergence. That’s ok, but a ‘generative artwork’ is
also often defined by its autonomy and self-containment. Is this approach compatible with the picture as a result of a process where the involved system is wide and open, closely linked to other systems (the internet + its users , for example)?

Furthermore, with the expression ‘generative image’, one can think that the image generates something, not that the image is generated by a system or process ?

Best,

Yann Le Guennec

Simon Biggs wrote:

This question opens a very interesting can of worms regarding what valid agents can compose a system of a particular kind. Conventionally, generative art has been seen to involve artificial agents, such as software routines and hardware processes. However, why we should limit the character of the agents involved. Why not allow all sorts of agents in such systems ­biological, social and ecological systems are just a small number of the potential examples.

The first generation of generative artists emerged at the same time as process became an abiding concern in other areas of creative arts practice. Smithson¹s eco-systems, Campus¹s video systems, Trisha Brown¹s movement systems or Le Witt¹s formal structural systems all share this fascination with constraint, process and emergence. The thinking of people like Jack Burnham, Richard Gregory, Gordon Pask and John Conway were in the mix, blurring differences between aspects of creative practice, engineering and early informatics. The commonality of approach was a structuralist understanding of things, whether formal or more informal.

To take all that in a relaxed manner, where we do not require narrow definitions of what constitutes correct practice, and to situate it in a contemporary post-structuralist context that is very much concerned with notions of expanded agency, complexity and emergent phenomena across all sorts of living and non-living systems might be the more productive route to developing other ways of understanding and imagining the world.

Best

Simon

Johannes Birringer wrote:

hello all.

i enjoyed reading Susanne Jaschko’s comments on “processual art” , and the way she ended her comments:

>>life/emergence can be found in various artistic practice, can unite those and which potential this type of art has to not only convince on an aesthetic level, but also can have a social/cultural impact.>>

what is generated in processual art?

for whom? and who uses or partakes in generative creativeness in a semi or total autonomous system?

what life? whose life?

where is the space/time for social choreographies, (to what end?) and if emphasis is placed on non-outcomes, what does this mean for aesthetic/conceptual perceptions of art or art reception or games or game receptions or AI systems and AI-systems-receptions. what are the different cultural receptions (if these would be amongst behaviors emerging) that you have noted? do curatorial practices (or pedagogics) evaluate how behaviors of interaction or reception of the processual affect exhibitions and performances?

regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
london

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Divination2.0 by Emily Schleiner :: April 23, 2010; 8:00 pm :: Media Labs, 58 North 6th, Brooklyn.

The project has been an exercise in bringing the emergent experience of our social/computerized self to a precise space, creating an architectural feeling with video and sound using visuals of items like screws, wires, and other small parts.

Upon entering Divination2.0, one sees a glowing round mandala that makes visible and frames commonplace words associated with computers. At the touch of movement in the Mandala, people are invited in to meditate in stillness. After calmness is sensed by the computer, people can then enter an on-the-spot-created password to find out what Divination2.0 will respond with. This program utilizes a Google-generated image response as well as recent sociology research on the changing relationship between technology users and culture to treat each participant to his or her unique reading.

Complex, indeterminate, and chaotic systems exist everywhere we look from the flight paths of birds to the growth patterns of plants to the formation of clouds. These systems are not simply random, they are complex systems bounded by discrete natural laws. Through study and investigation much can be learned about how these systems work. Once an artist understands how a system functions they can begin to alter the rules of the system to create their own types of output. Meaning is always in the eye of the beholder, but the strategies this workshop will explore attempt to uncover new ways for artists to put their messages into the world. The natural world is communicating with us all the time, through phenomena generated by these natural systems. This workshop seeks to explore the ways in which artists can learn to speak with the same kind of mysterious power.

This workshop will actively explore the possibilities of several types of natural/complex system programming, particularly those with strong potentials for interesting sorts of manipulation, and augmentation of their systems. These include models of emergent behavior, cellular automata, and genetic algorithms. Projects developed during this workshop will utilize the Processing programming language. Some basic programming experience will be required for this workshop, but the workshop should be suitable for artists/programmers with basic to advanced programming experience. Instead of focusing primarily on development of programming skills, workshop discussions will focus on concepts of natural and complex systems, how these system can be modeled using processing, and how these systems can be modified.

We recommend that you attend the whole workshop.

Support: Activities of CIANT have been co-funded by the City of Prague and the Municipality of Prague 3. This presentation has been funded with support from the European Commission, within Culture Programme, CO-ME-DI-A project. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which maybe made of the information contained therein.

Using Treefingers is easy: simply click the “water” button on thoughts you like, and the “weed” button on thoughts you don’t. You can submit your own thought to the site by clicking “Plant a Thought” in the upper-right corner. Treefingers requires no registration and is completely anonymous. Your thought will appear instantly on the site for other visitors to water and weed!

Treefingers empowers advanced web technologies to provide a website that continuously updates. This means you can track the activities of other Treefingers users in real-time! Plants change colors before your eyes as people water and weed them, and new plants show up instantly. The result is a living, breathing website that is constantly changing! [via Christina Coleman]

Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept from cesar harada on Vimeo.

via Furtherfield.org.