an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, July 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
Landscape Painting of the Information Age
or Romanticism In Media Art¨
In
As the schizophrenia of modernity settled in, nature became a very fertile
ground for the imagination. Romanticism emerged from the contradiction
of trying to be one with nature and feeling to be fundamentally separated
from it. Nature was being objectified by the making-doing of the industrial
revolution and its loss at the same time mourned in the arts. The search for
nature contained also a political question. When the romantic youth
contemplated nature, they could see, in the shape of the mountain ridges, in
this frozen moment of time, the powerful forces at work that were reshaping the
world. In romanticism wild nature symbolized the political changes of the time.
Could nature give an answer to ethical questions, could there be a 'natural'
form of government, was then the theme of many debates? Rousseau constructed a
noble savage, externalizing the European confusion, as a type of human more in
tune with nature than the urbanized citizens of
European intellectuals turned away -- in a move they will repeat again and
again -- from the city. The dirty and overpopulated cities were conceived as
the seat of all evil. This is where political struggles and revolutions were
fought, where the police state was enforced, where new diseases were bred and
could spread rapidly because of the proximity of people living so closely
together. The city was the place of new forms of social coercion, of
alienation, of being repressed. Only in contact with nature, suitably
refashioned and aestheticized, the citizens of the 19th century could get
in contact with the true, the divine self. Romantic landscape painting created
nature as a window to the self, a subjectivity that is transcended by opening
itself up to nature.
Nature and society, the city and the countryside were at odds with each other.
The English Enlightenment produced a compromise solution. On the relatively
small and relatively overpopulated part of the British Isles that is
Romanticism has never really left the arts, even if it, as an
official movement, petered out somewhere at the end of the 19th century.
But the basic attitude of the romantic hero -- her or his fundamental opposition
to bourgeois society, which they were also so deeply part of -- survived, and
so did the trope of 'wild nature' as a mirror of psychological and
socio-political conflict. The romantic hero is a tragic hero because he or she
has not understood the contradictions of the society s/he is part of. A
repressive social situation will always trigger escapist fantasies. Rejection
of society as it is and idealistic protest either leads to death, which
salvages the hero status, retreat into
In media and net art survives a romanticism noir inspired by the Mary Shelley
tradition of sci-fi Goth literary fiction. From there, via the noble savage of
the pulp fiction Western novel, it is a short jump to cyberpunk and the hackers
with Mohican haircuts. Since the 1990s the noble savage has a keyboard. The
aesthetic paradigm of cyberpunk fiction is circumscribed by the dystopian city;
Data Mining
Media and net art increasingly turn to aestheticization of information flows
via sonification and visualization. Thereby they encounter the unresolved
contradictions of capitalist technosocieties. Science fashioned nature as its
object and learned to study it ever more closely. Properties of electromagnetic
waves are used for sophisticated communications systems; space probes are being
sent out, the Hubble telescope scans the depth of the universe; the particle
accelerator gives us insight into the smallest particles that make up matter.
While we are learning more in the depth of the detail about outer space and the
micro-organisation of matter, science encroaches on the inner core of nature.
Will its very object vanish behind all the numbers and formulas once everything
is satisfyingly explained? Or is there a part of nature that withdraws itself
from us?
The scientific instruments of our time have opened rich pipelines into the data
sources of nature. With the constructivist instruments of mathematics and
engineering the datanauts are diving into oceans of information that represent
the physical materiality of the world (oceanography, climate change research,
GIS). Now, nature is becoming quantized and quantified, it is being
dematerialized and turned into information. The ideology of the information age
fetishizes information as a sort of 'divine' substance. Analogies are
constructed between the brain as a computer and life as a code - the genetic
code. Everything is information in the beginning and is turned into information
again at the end of its life cycle. As artists are getting hold of the
techniques of information processing, landscape painting of the information age
emerges as a major theme in the early 21st century.[4]
It shows us nature distilled into information 'flows'.
Artists reinterpret nature along the lines of the noir thread in romanticism.
Networked urban culture is experienced as a second nature. The social
relationships in networks become the raw material. Network scientists are
looking for biological patterns in the information flows produced by networked
communities.[5]We are
craving for natural explanations in the mess of the social to absolve us.[6]
New deterministic answers discovered in those networks would let us off the
hook and avoid politically unpleasant questions. Can pure data[7]
be the source that stills our thirst for the natural, the divine, and the
transcendent? Can we use those data flows to enter into a dialogue with nature
again?
Back to the Bios?
In a discussion of Herbert Marcuse's view on technology and science, Jürgen
Habermas asks what we could expect from a nature opening its eyes. What he
means is that science has dealt with nature as an object. Is it possible to
develop a fundamentally different type of science and technology? Would it be
possible to have an open dialogue with a nature that is not an object anymore
but a lively animated subject? How to start this dialogue without repeating
past mistakes? Or, to ask the question in a modern way, what is the interface?
Scholars of science studies tell us that our dialogues with nature are
obstructed by age-old dichotomies that burden our thinking, such as the
dichotomy between nature and society, between subject and object. What would it
mean to move beyond those dichotomies? Wouldn't that open the doors for a
sweeping relativism? Of course nature and society are not completely separate
entities that are in binary opposition to each other -- the standard definition
of dichotomy. By putting nature to work in the shape of technology, societies
have long become technosocieties, societies in which the technical - the
controlled transformation of the forces of nature - and the social are
linked to each other in many ways so that they evolve together, mutually
influencing each other (in which ways exactly, in a causal or linear way, for
example, would be a point of further reflection). If we try to understand the
co-evolution of the techno-social would it help to introduce, just for a
moment, the metaphor of the BIOS? In computer systems the BIOS is the computer
interface code that gives access to hardware on a low level. Would it be
possible to have something like a Bios of the information society, an interface
between the hardware and software of reality? Could we construct such an
interface where the biological is integrated with the BIOS and where the
concepts of the technical and the political mesh?
Art has traditionally had a very good way of opening itself up to nature. This
way was called 'contemplation'. To contemplate means more than just to reflect
on something intellectually. It means to look and think at the same time which
goes often hand in hand with the experience of feeling calm and balanced and a
heightened expectation at the same time. All the senses are razor-sharp while
the mind is racing. In contemplation we can find ourselves being part of and
standing out of nature. The dichotomy, which maybe will never be solved
theoretically, is transcended temporarily in the mind. The oppositions of the
dichotomy may turn out to be the wheels of a dialectical history. In a
best-case scenario media art can come to some understanding of those axial
connections between society and nature through its actual practice.
Out of contemplation of the forces driving history
and society, media artists can move into action by building working
technological assemblages. I am using this slightly odd phrase to emphasise the
systemic aspects of this type of artwork. A working technological assemblage
might well have a picture as an end-result, but what makes it really
interesting are the inputs and outputs and the processes that happen in
between. If we look behind the picture, we find the process. There is modeled a
complete world-view, an image of the world and its workings. This image, which
is of course not a realistic 'picture' but a constellation of forces, of
energies and motives, is constructed as a montage of information flows. Work of
this type becomes applied critical theory. It exposes the underbelly of the
romanticist beast; it looks into Godzilla's stomach and counts the cars; it
shows us the bios of the information society, the bios-political.
This is the chance and responsibility of media art. Too often media art just
sails in the slipstream of the consumer electronics and IT industry, providing
excuses for commodity fetishism, guiltily snacking on the fruits of
technological determinism. Could media art rid itself of the image of the
romantic hero, single handedly fighting the evils of expansionary
technocapitalism? Can media art, as a 'science of the imagination,'[8]
employ contemplation and critique to overcome the repressive current social
order? The information flows that are increasingly governing our lives on many
levels are understood only by a minority of people. The artists can tap into
the dataflows and make connections that would be 'illegitimate' for scientists.
They have the ability of rendering visible how the mutant cyber-society
emerges. The data artist is providing a mirror to society by giving data eyes
and ears. At least in theory, meaningful representation of data leads to
meaningful participation of the individual. But what does meaningful mean?
Artists dealing with information flows have the not so trivial task of
establishing the ontological status of the data objects. To which extent are we
dealing with numerical fetishes, with fact or fiction (or factishes, Latour[9]
would want us to say)? What are the sources of information and which
transformations have they gone through?
The artist's work can only be done properly, if there exists open access to the
data. As the privatization of knowledge, the expansionary tendency of
intellectual property progresses, the free-libre open source software (Floss)
movement keeps pushing the boundaries and provides artists with the tools to
host their own data landscapes to play with. The liberating potential of the
access provided by Floss developers cannot be underestimated. At the same time
this networked ecology is always under threat of collapsing for a number of
reasons. There is not only the pressure of the market and the
coca-colonialisation of the net, there are also the internal contradictions,
for example, between the expectations that techno-utopianism creates and the
reality in which our cyber-romantic heroes find themselves.
The digital
and back again; it gives nature eyes and ears; our eyes and our ears, by sonification
or visualisation. Would this be the new type of nature Marcuse dreamed about?
Can we speak to it/him/her? Can we close the loop and create complete cycles?
This question must be left for a later date. For now we can say we have enough
work to do by learning to be able to listen when nature speaks. Once we have
made substantial progress in that then the next question will be whether or not
nature might be politically high-jacked again, as the weapon of objective
knowledge. Or is it possible for a number of 'natures' to peacefully
coexist? Media art can provide a specific layer of access to this complex of
questions. It does not need complete theoretic knowledge to proceed to praxis.
It provides experiences by using the bag-of-tricks of technology with a critical
consciousness. The open question is if media art can only surprise once (like
someone providing a novelty or a trick) or can create a legacy with types of
expression that are particular to it and compelling enough for a wide range of
people.
Acknowledgements: This text benefited from
comments by Shu Lea Cheang and Felix Stalder.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, July 2005, ISSN 1552-5112