Networked Workshops on Art and Distributed Subjectivity
Background / Context
“The Networked Self” was a 2-week public project series that addresses the complexity of representations and awareness of the self in the age of distributed information, the social web, and globalized media.
Numerous current online practices use network communication and the web to generate an atomized meta-subject, where one’s individual contribution is not valued as in singular form but only in the plurality of other individuals who together produce a kind of emergent intelligence or expression. Practices such as “crowd sourcing”, –where anonymous online users are asked to contribute to a large creative or industrial tasks, or “human computation”, where online users make context-based matches which computers have failed to identify– require a new understanding of the self as a portion of a greater geographic, cultural, numeric whole. As a result, we see ourselves less as perpetual beings than as contingent propositions with respect to our identity, making for art practices that eschew content for context, and form for point of view.
Notions of self have a rich legacy in the history of art, where the self has been most routinely been associated with self-portraiture or with the equation of artist/self with a signature, identifying style. Both instances underscore the importance of authorship and attribution in how we understand art and determine its social value. While the social context for art has evolved, its discourse and production have been intrinsic, outside the realm of the social itself. But now that the same communication and media technologies are used by corporations, non-profits, governments and artists alike, art practice is tantamount to social practice.
In our age of techno-socio networks, distributed authorship and real-time forms, the notion of art based on singular or original authorship is no longer sufficient to significantly engage with much of contemporary art and media practice. For many artists working today, there is neither a concept of an original work nor any viability to the production of a singular object. Who is the author of a network-based application or the persistent subject of the cluster of related online personas connected to others through web, mobile and SMS worlds?
The Workshops will bring together a small group of international new /social media artists whose work has engaged ideas of authorship, subjectivity and the human condition through network technology and online projects. The 2-week series of Events and Workshops will include: (1) exhibition & opening; (2) telecast panel discussions; (3) 1-day projects that connect Cornell students to artists and theorists internationally.
Stephanie Owens, 2011.