©Stephanie Owens, 2010.

“Bottlenecks are always in the middle.  Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position.¹”

Much has been said about how the collapse of space and time as a result of global communication technologies has fostered a network-based society, perhaps even a network-generated society. Less has been said about how this fundamental change in the way we communicate has challenged the value of representation as the undisputed grammar of art. At the core of the art-representation relationship is the thought that art is a sensuous re-production or “second presence” of a perceivable aspect of the world whose distortions, interpretations, and nuances form the narrative of artistic expression and stylistic historical divisions. Yet the representational balance between perception and art has always been precarious—being at some periods too textual, too illustrative and at other periods too materially literal. But the representational impulse has remained constant even when art has been ephemeral or conceptual, since through the documentation, titles, or reviews of such work we never lose sight of the author—the authority of the subject in the subject/object equation.

But art built for communications networks and technologies presents the greatest challenge to the notion that art is the practice of a subject whose sense perceptions and cultural interpretations constitute the work of art. This challenge no is longer limited by the mechanical way that it can be or has been reproduced, but takes aim at the fundamental assumption, in operation since the Renaissance, that art is a symbolic expression that exceeds its composite, material parts. It is this transformation of material into art that privileges the binary equation between artist and artifact which cannot account for the interactive, generative, and real-time engagements of network-based art. Often in work that has multiple users, occurring in multiple time zones and forms, there is neither artist nor artifact but merely action and context. This kind of “just-in-time” interface, assembled at the moment and site that it is requested asserts art as something outside of the classic subject-object discourse of representation. It demands an aesthetics of the present—an ontology of phenomenal forms and techno-social distillations where we encounter an undifferentiated subject/object.

“Grass has its line of flight and does not take root.”

For many contemporary artists and theorists, the role of art has changed in step with the liquidity of the notion of the subject and the horizontality of form merged with content. Much of what is termed “relational aesthetics” has moved in to fill the gap of a representational aesthetics that cannot account for the hybrid and inter-subjective experiences whose mix of directly-perceived, remotely-sensed, and fabricated realities are not easily parsed, were it still a critical project to do so. Often, art that seeks to define relations is an art informed by a subject in time—an event or exchange—rather than a subject in space. Within this event-based or transactional understanding of art, where art is merely one of many possible constructions of experience, the role of the artist is, to borrow from Bourriaud, “no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real.”

By extending Bourriad’s “models of action” into the space of networks, where form is a synthesis of multiple identities what is made is the frontier of how it is made. The real is as the real does. We increasingly rely on, and accept as a part of our reality, remote presences with whom we interact via emails or text messaging whose corporeality is not signified as much as deferred. The scale of data visualizations, particularly those that aggregate use patterns or filter online behaviour, shows how the contemporary visual parts ways with representation as an interpretive act. Is takes a multitude of actions, by a vast multitude of connected users of which we are part, to access the shape of our collective intention. Yet somehow this shape is more than quantitative. Participating in this vast “shaping” casts our awareness in a peculiar form – one that is simultaneously intimate (private singular decisions made from laptops) and distant (we see our decisions as part of a larger context of activities of others) which magnifies our immediate perception. Through the network—itself a network of networks—what we “perceive” is not an extension of our senses per se but a hybrid of computational order and human intention that results in a plural subjectivity that neither precedes nor follows any singular act.

Through this immersive plurality, (functioning somewhat like a material base that is manifest in myriad figurations), what is visible or visual is merely symptomatic of singularly illegible political and social formations. So much of what we incorporate into our daily understanding of the world is produced by this plurality that we absorb it into our awareness as if directly perceived. This is why such immaterial, yet omnipresent things such as global warming, our human genome sequence, and vast global migrations take shape as a real part of our visual and cultural vocabulary. Given this expansive “eye”, which defines our experience as a visceral, informational contraction of “I” and “we”, artists are confronted with a new model of experience that is trans-subjective, restructuring their role relative to the art they make from that of a perceiver to framer of the perceptions of others.

Although art has traditionally used material objects Recent art projects like We Feel Fine (Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, 2006) and earlier insights like Listening Post (Ben Rubin & Mark Hansen, 2004) which form visualizations from the discreet text and media sentiments of web users, shows how often current art creates an aggregate form that manifests the world at the same time it perceives the world.

It is this multiplied, ordered, aggregate perception—by nature of its scale and reach—that conveys the possibility of art as a transformational form, what some have labeled an “aesthetics of immanence.²” Yet as we have lived for the last 20 or so years with art that assembles affinities and models dialogic exchanges rather than objects, it remains unclear how this can be translated into a replicable practice as art. A form that is in a constant state of becoming resists the perimeters that would give this “becoming” pause long enough to be caught in time or space so that as art we can subject it to judgment or critical assessment. This lack of a space of critical reflection is felt most acutely in new media education where teaching a set of inherited skills or aesthetic axioms cannot be the foundation upon which to support a transmission of formal knowledge or cultural authority. The most urgent question, therefore, for artists and educators of new media is: how do we apprehend or evaluate a form that is in constant flux, not only in shape, but in content and scope? Defining an aesthetics of immanence or becoming thus requires a liquidation of the authority of visual as the beginning and end of the creative process. It is a call for the articulation and valuation of activities in the middle – the meta-, trans-, para- consciousness of a threshold.

“We have grass in the head, not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a ‘particular nervous system of grass.”

Recent theoretical and curatorial interest in transformational or phenomenal forms (“Making Worlds” was the banner of the most recent Venice Biennale and Build Your Own World the current title of the upcoming 01SJ Biennale of digital art) is evidence that the practice of art is increasingly a practice consistent with, rather than separate from, the practice of life. Macro-level or meta-level engagements, where the objectives of creative aims are speculative and organizational may be the one way to get out in front of our cultural storm of images, films, apps, emails, and games which can easily swallow us up in an overwhelming, indecipherable sea of information. In this sense, anticipatory forms or actions are not necessarily the uncritical mirroring of algorithmic computational programs as is sometimes suggested, but a way to work with and against a informational tide that does not stop for or because of some necessary critical reflection.

Network-based art, in a way that is more intentional than derivative, looks to scientific, computational, and social practices as models of a poetics in speculative form. But because they precede or exist outside of fixed notions of representation, organic data visualization, generative algorithms, social media applications, and human computation and other forms of “live” or “real-time” digital interactions still pose difficult questions about the material production of art. To admit these computational, real-time life forms into the discourse of art, artists and educators of new media must grapple with the idea of an enduring present—a plotting, summarizing, conjecturing, testing, framing, filtering, idling—that operates as form only by giving up any territorial ownership whether disciplinary, professional, or aesthetic.

This idea of an enduring but transformational present, is in part network art’s attempt to forge a distinction between ourselves and the networks we use. Contrary to those who feel we have lost some fundamental humanity with the virtualization of society, the networks in question are not fibers of electrical impulses running independent of humanity, but rather the genesis and exchange of human intention, sentiment, and activity. Given that 500 million people are regularly connected to each other via the vast, open “internet working architecture” of various protocol networks³, it seems clear that we are not made immaterial by the networks we use but that we have merely networked our fundamental materiality. And having done so, we have collectively manifested, or manifest daily, yearly in multiple ways, an architecture of our shared consciousness that conveys who we are and what we value. Or as Geert Lovink of the Institute for Network Cultures recently put it, “the network, not the church, is the dominant form of our time.⁴”

“One begins again through the middle.”

Network art practice is a field that operates in paradoxical way between technological or industrial institutions and a critique of those institutions. Given that open and widely accessible technologies have government origins or are products of corporate interest, using existing systems is not necessarily to be complicit with them. Although most consumer technologies that permeate our culture and extend human sense perception (phone, TV, fax, etc.) were generated by the same ideological matrix of interests, the information network seems to be more inherently defined by (and critiqued for) the ideological subtext of its sphere of operation. This may be because much of the standardization is still unsettled and that as global citizens we are deeply invested in its potential to remain a neutral or “open system.” But while it may be possible to define the future network more openly, outside of the logic of the current networking protocols it has inherited, these rules of operation have for now structured a common language of use that makes us alert to volumes, traces, rhizomes, clouds as large patterns of activity that “speak.” In many ways the popularity and reach of networks—scalable both horizontally and vertically to some degree—is what gives emergent media the metabolism it needs to it sustain itself as form.

Through experimentation with technologies new to their time, artists have always sought to frame the social/aesthetic relationships enabled by pervasive technologies rather than simply to adopt wholesale their embedded agendas or instrumental logic. Historical “misuse” or modification of print, photographic, radio, sound, video, and satellite technologies has been one way artists have sought to discover the underlying social desire masked by the electronic lure of the new. Degas and Monet, having to contend with the camera in their time, “produced a photographic way of thinking that went well beyond the shots of their contemporaries.⁵” Artists seek essences where others seek techniques. It is therefore the responsibility of artists and instructors working with new technologies to write yourself into the system—not as a means of servility to dominant modes of industrial logic but as a way to start from a middle space where art can supercede the inevitable trends and cycles of industry. It was the alternate use or experimentation with communication technology and optical media that inspired the Fluxus to create phone/fax events and Paik to use satellite TV to express how changes in perception are tantamount to changes in human awareness.

Any subjectivity inherent in network art is not produced by the transport of messages or media from endpoint A to endpoint B, but in harnessing, or intervening in the collective manifestation of its form. It is by making legible the limits of net accessibility, the hidden aim and goal of “free” online content, the exchange of privacy for customizable functionality, the legacy of military war games that sustain virtual communities, and related existing social/aesthetic templates that can be challenged and changed. And in this act of exposure, where subject/object distinctions no longer anchor critical and cultural spaces, artists can help define the threshold where our interpretation of the world can match the speed at which it now moves.

“Not only does grass grow in the middle of things, but it grows itself through the middle.” 

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References

[1].”It is never the beginning or the end that are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the middle. The English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position. One begins again through the middle.The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of arborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does grass grow in the middle of things but it grows itself through the middle. This is the English or American problem. Grass has its line of flight and does not take root. We have grass in the head and not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a ‘particular nervous system’ of grass.”

Quoted from Dialogues II, by Gilles Deleuze in discussion with Claire Parnet, (Translated by Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam), Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1987.

[2]. Joy James, “Mind the Gap,” from special LEA Issue “Dispersive Anatomies,” Volume 16, Issue 4-5. Leonardo Electronic Almanac. 2009.

[3]. The Internet Society (ISOC), http://www.isoc.org/.

[4].  Spoken by Geert Lovink at Network Conference held by the Department of Humanities at Cornell University, October 2009.

[5]. Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics Copyright Les presses du réel., 1998.

[6]. Quote from Autometric President Dan Gordon, whose Edge (Whole Earth) Viewer visualization tool, presented to Silicon Graphics in 1996, led to the development and distribution of what is now Google Earth.