| Nowadays technological art theorists often
identify technological art only with electronic and digital art operating
a blackout on mechanical, optical and chemical technologies which are however
formative of such crucial art fields as the moving image and photography.
A solid frontier tends to be erected between analogue and digital apparatus,
the first ones are often discredited as obsolete and relevant of an outdated
worldview, and the second ones are invested with a quasi omnipotence. As
early as the 70's Gene Youngblood had operated a division of media in two
evolutionary stages, cybernetic and paleocybernetic (as we would say paleontological)
[7].
In other words these approaches remain
captive of the fiction of progress and consequently tend to transpose
in art the social discriminatory systems constructed on the hierarchical
bipolarities developed/underdeveloped, literate/illiterate, technologically
advanced/technologically retarded, into power/out of power. Identifying
technology with progress leads to misread the opposition future/past as
progressive/obsolete.
Certain trends of political ecology, like
social or democratic ecology and particularly ecological feminism propose
analysis which can be relevant also in the field of media arts.
For example:
- the critique of the materialist and
technoscientific values of industrial society (Ivan Illich)
- the critique of the role of intra-human
hierarchy and centralization (Murray Bookchin)
- the ecological defence of biodiversity
against the extinction of large varieties of vegetal and animal species
provoked by world market politics
- the critique of the escalator account
of evolution
- the critique of the ideologies which
surround colonialism, namely the confrontation with an inferior past and
an inferior non-western other
- the consciousness of the interconnection
of all forms of domination (bell hooks)
- the critique of the hierarchy of reason
and rationality to emotion and instinct, mind to body, etc (ecological
feminism).
It is striking to observe the apolitical
understanding which is usually given to the technological dimension in
the art scene. As the Australian theorist Zoe Sofia remarks, "technology
tends to be pictured as an autonomous entity evolving under its own momentum,
independent of human decisions and motives that could be contested from
a variety of perspectives" [8].
The art scene is pervaded by power politics
- state politics, institutions politics, market politics - all of which
generate aesthetic norms, canons of inclusion/exclusion and contestable
classifications. The history of art is constructed according to these politics.
Media arts, even if they do not fall within
the traditional frame of the art market, constitute a differently structured
market, which is only partially founded on sales of objects and more widely
on grants, subsidies, fees, rights, residencies, etc. Presently this market
tends to be dominated by the state-of the-art trend. Artists are
directly or indirectly encouraged to use certain tools and discouraged
to use others. "Technological art empowers the user of the art work" claims
Spanish curator Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, evoking forms of high tech interactive
art [9]. It also empowers the artist creating
it, but most of all it empowers the state, institution and company capable
of producing it. Independently of the artists' intentions, it is well known
that high tech artworks are promoted as a showcase of rich nations' technological
advancement.
Writing with reference to Latin America
Maria Fernandez says that the fetichization of scientific and technological
aesthetics and artworks produced on the latest high-end machines could
be seen as another instance of a European or U.S. preoccupation being proclaimed
as a "universal aesthetic". She argues that computer arts "are the products
of specific political and economic environments" and that therefore "should
not become the norms by which other forms are judged" [10].
Parallel to this political consciousness,
if we look closely at the technological landscape surrounding us here and
now, if we look at it from the point of view of practicing artists, frontiers
between technologies seem more and more fluctuating. Frontiers certainly
facilitate classifications, but artists often transgress them. Compound
and hybrid technological species appear, transvestite technologies trouble
installed categories. Present technological art territories form a cartography
of moving continents.
To go back to our personal experience,
as European trans-national artists we are aware of living in an era of
technological transition. But the industrial age is being resorbed into
the cybernetic age only gradually. The massive invasion of digital technologies
is still relatively recent in Europe. Non digital technologies are far
from having disappeared. The cybernetic homogenisation announced by cyberprophets
is a project which is not close to its completion. This gives us the privilege
to experience the unsettlement of transitions, of intermediate territories,
of crisis. This permits us to explore antagonist tools, to operate hybridations,
to invent mobilities and complexities on the tissue of multiple technologies
- technologies just coming alive, technologies dying, technologies living
after death or dead after birth. Film, photography, video, computer graphics,
photo-typography, analogue and digital sound, holography. We work on the
spectrum of what has been called technological evolution, which in the
arts is neither linear nor irreversible, but uncertain, unconcluded, unstable.
We operate interconnections past-present-future and intermingle cultural
origins. We cross social, poetic and technical dimensions. Artists have
the power to escape technological determinisms.
M.K. - K.T.
(Konfigurationen. Zwischen
Kunst und Medien, München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Sigrid Schade-Georg
Christoph Tholen editors, 1999 / book and CD-Rom)
Notes
[1] "Klonaris / Thomadaki:
un cinema corporel", propos recueillis par Raphaël Bassan,
Canal
No
35/36, Paris, janvier 1980. English translation
in Undercut No 2, London 1981
[2] Klonaris / Thomadaki
"The Feminine, the Hermaphrodite, the Angel: Gender Mutations and Dream
Cosmogonies. On a multimedia projection and installation practice", Leonardo,
Vol. 29, No 4, 1996
[3] Maria Klonaris - Katerina
Thomadaki eds.: Technologies et imaginaires, Paris, Dis/voir, 1990
and Mutations de l’image, Paris, A.S.T.A.R.T.I., 1994
[4] See Maria Klonaris -
Katerina Thomadaki eds.: Pour une Ecologie des media, Paris, A.S.T.A.R.T.I.,
1998
[5] Marshall McLuhan Source
Book: Key Quotations assembled by William Kuhns in Essential McLuhan,
p. 276
[6] "Codes of Privilege",
An interview with Arthur Kroker by Sharon Grace, Mondo 2000 on line
[7] Gene Youngblood,
Expanded Cinema, London, Studio Vista, 1970
[8] Zoe Sofia "Contested
Zones: Futurity and Technological Art", Leonardo, Vol. 29, No1,
pp. 59-66, 1996
[9] Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
"Perverting Technological Correctness", Leonardo, Vol. 29, No 1,
pp. 5-15, 1996
[10] Maria Fernandez, "Technological
Diffusion and the Construction of a Universal Aesthetic (discussed with
reference to Latin America), paper presented at the Adelaide festival Artists’
Week, Broadsheet 23, No2, 3-6, 1994 |
