Money and time is keeping me from visiting this important event, and I’d write more, but I must visit the family today.

In particular you can find the three main keynote addresses, from Graham Harman (systems) HERE, Jodi Jean (publics) HERE and Matt Fuller (aesthetics) HERE. [Brackets are their terms in the URL headings.].

“Most of what I’ve just said is not new. but the emphasis I’ve put on decision or choice may be. If so, that would be thanks to what’s happened in art itself in recent years. It’s the boringness, the vacuousness of so much of the purportedly advanced art of the past decade and more that has brought home—at least to me—how essential the awareness of decision is to satisfying experience of formal art. For the vacuousness of “advanced” art in this time is more like that of “raw,” unformalized art or esthetic experience, which vacuousness derives precisely from the absence of enough conventions and the want of decisions made or received under the pressure of conventions.

[...] Bad, inferior art is not necessarily boring or vacuous. What is relatively new about the badness of recent “advanced” art— new, that is, in the context of formal art—is that it is so boring and vacuous. This, because of the large absence of decisions that could be felt as “meant,” as intuited and pressured, and not just taken by default. That’s just it: that so many of the decisions that go into the supposedly newest art go by default, become automatic, and by the same token arbitrary, decisions.”

If I had a sixth of Greenberg’s stylistic traits – I’d die a happy academic (not that Greenberg admired academics).

“Yet Duchamp and his sub-tradition have demonstrated, as nothing did before, how omnipresent art can be, all the things it can be without ceasing to be art. And what an unexceptional, unhonorific status art as such—that is, aesthetic experience—really has. For this demonstration we can be grateful. But that doesn’t make the demonstration in itself any the less boring.”

HERE‘s the Furtherfield article.

It looks very very interesting. Basically it’s an art project whereby you install the software on Mac OSX and create your own cloud network straight from your airport.

“unCloud is an application that enables anyone with a laptop to create an open wireless network and distribute their own information. Once it is launched, a passerby using a mobile internet device can connect to this open wireless network. The person running the application can decide what information is shown in any web address. Users can access information wirelessly while at the same time remain disconnected from the internet. unCloud does not depend on a remote datacenter, instead it can be run from a laptop, making it an ideal application to run in a train or at a café.”

So in effect one could potentially bypass the proprietary cloud networks usually required to distribute and disseminate information. A ‘local’ cloud service. Ideal.

It contains the very first physical manifestation of text, co-authored with Geoff Cox. I don’t care if its in Danish and I can’t read it – it’s a good moment to see something you’ve worked on actually in something.

]]> http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/04/byens-digitale-liv/feed/ 0 http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/04/some-questions-about-actor-recursion-theory-art-an-interview-with-me-part-1/ http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/04/some-questions-about-actor-recursion-theory-art-an-interview-with-me-part-1/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:48:24 +0000 parallax00 http://robertjackson.info/index/?p=2116 So what’s Actor Recursion Theory then?

Actor Recursion Theory is a name I’ve given to a specific intervention outlined in my dissertation. It’s not fully developed yet, and as such links or presents my haphazard state of mind during a PhD thesis. It’s reflects an opinion, but I leave plenty of room for others.

The name for it is influenced by Latour and Callon’s Actor Network-Theory, and it upholds most of the methodologies that accompany it, but with one crucial difference; in Actor Network-Theory, the actions of discrete actors can be traced by a synchronic heterogeneous network of relations. In Actor Recursion Theory, actors can be traced and furthermore, executed by diachronic recursion and the repetition of finite rules, which have the capacity to refer to themselves and act on other recursive actors. Recursion is most commonly used in mathematics and computer science and it defines a procedure where a function is applied within its own definition. To put it another way, it is the process a procedure must go through in it’s executant state when one of the steps of the procedural rule involves repeating the procedure itself.

Every theoretical and pragmatic hallmark of Actor Network Theory is carried over, local production, translation, alliance, the naturalisation of culture, the equality between humans and non-humans, (the principle of generalised symmetry) hybrids, the agency of the actors producing time and space, the concreteness of actors in specific situations etc; all with the exception that [ART] actors are constructed and enter into relation with the central mechanism of recursion as the mode of execution and translation between actors. As you can imagine, this may change the dynamics of what an ‘actor’ is constituted by and what it can do. To say that an actor operates by recursion fundamentally revises these hallmarks.

Another important thing; Actor Recursion Theory aims not to totally replace Actor Network Theory nor subsume it – it has a different intervening application linked to its primary concern. It simply provides a different way of understanding the pragmatic capabilities of creating and producing an aesthetic piece of work (‘work’ in the ANT sense of translation is also carried over). Recursiveness is not only just tied to forms of computing and computational art, but to many types of art production. How do actors express themselves aesthetically?

Any other reasons for coining that term?

Well one major part of it happened to rest on the abbreviated acronym of Actor Network-Theory (ANT). I’ve always quite liked the allusive metaphorical capabilities of it. As Latour once stated, “ANT” is “perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler.” (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory [2005: p.9]); not to mention that an ‘ant’ constitutes a discrete unit of action in the dynamic network of an antfarm, which we can trace through observation and testing. A perfect encapsulated fit all round.

Well, the acronym for Actor Recursion Theory is “ART” – and this nicely encapsulates the generative and enumerative aesthetic capabilities of how an actor ‘acts’ in its recursive iteration. Plus on the unlikely chance it got accepted as a major field of research for science and technology studies, perhaps computer science studies, academics would have to always-already deal with ART in its recursive deployment…

In fact, this bemusing play with a movement’s acronyms (OOO notwithstanding) is also recursive. It comes under the rather unimaginative name of recursive acronyms, or ‘metacronyms’. These are acronyms which self-refer to themselves (usually humorously) in the expression for which they self-express. For example, CAVE [Cave Automatic Virtual Environment] or sometimes PHP [jokingly referred to as Personal Home Page]. In this sense, as a preliminary discipline, Actor Recursion Theory can only refer itself as ‘art’ and remain independently self-refering, every time someone wants to use it (if it ever needed to be used in the future and in other fields).

But surely “ART” is epistemologically undefinable, unlike an “ANT” which we can define easily?

True. But Graham Harman’s critical reading of Latour has given us some ground into understanding that something as simple as an ‘ant’ is just as undefinable and complex as ‘art’, whilst also remaining specific, autonomous, discrete and concrete. Whilst this may seem like a retrograde step for aesthetics, I take it as a necessary conjecture in suggesting that aesthetics has only just begun to realise it’s capacity for change in the concrete specificity of determinate things. Aesthetics is no longer confined to sign games, creative malaise or the hopeless drudgery of insular commercialisation within a market trend – instead it has the capacity to lurk in-between real-world structures of all kinds, albeit whether humans are beholden and bewitched by it or not. We just need a theory that not only ferrets it out, but can understand why some works of art have greater qualities than others.

So how does ART ‘Recursion’ contrast with ANT ‘Networks’ in light of aesthetics?

For some reason, there has always been some ambiguity as to what Latour means by a ‘network’. We’re used to conceiving a network as some massive, equivalent ‘syncing’ web of collective communication, which flows together across vast global stretches of nodes, servers and lines. But this would undermine the difference between a network and an actor, (for Latour a subway, or ‘the Internet’ are actors, as well as their components). As Latour states;

“Recent technologies have often the character of a network, that is, of exclusively related yet very distant element with the circulation between nodes being made compulsory through a set of rigorous paths giving to a few nodes a strategic character. Nothing is more intensely connected, more distant, more compulsory and more strategically organized than a computer network. Such is not however the basic metaphor of an actor-network.”

A network in the ANT sense, is a collection of heterogeneous dynamic interactions between discrete units of all kinds, at all levels where new translations can emerge. The network is more than a system, it is a historical collection of meetings, translations and gatherings where action has taken place in one place only. It is the actions which define the network, not the other way round through a representation of patterns. Staring and theorising at the network only produces a translation of it, mostly as the thing that is ‘doing the staring’ is acting upon it, through its own stare. Networks need to be explained through the participation of actors, and are not to be used to explain away the participation of actors. To this end, Latour has earned his following by justifying an approach which analyses the pragmatic empirical networks that contingently bequeath a specific event to emerge at a particular time, and the alliances peculiar to those bunch of actants.

However when one wants to use this theory of dynamic networks for the discussion of a current or future aesthetic event, object, thing or production, we suddenly become unstuck. For one thing, actors and networks are a very good toolkit for understanding and analysing the history of ‘whats come before’ (This is a criticism which Graham Harman has made elsewhere). An actor network theory of art history is perfectly credible, (in particular, see Michael Zell) but the problem comes with justifying and differentiating where the necessary aesthetic action must take place. Specifying the networks which have brought together actors in one place can, in principle, explain specific alliances which demystifies artistic genius (much like ANT has tried to do with scientific geniuses) and makes non-linear the typical linearity of ‘Western Art history’. But can ANT supply a toolkit which provides the means to understand expression itself, and the constructive configurations which may or may not show it? Can ANT explain certain capacities for the future production of art?

There are a few theorists who have attempted to understand the production of aesthetics through ANT, not least through a revised form of substance in OOO, where aesthetics can be located between the withdrawal and sincerity of objects. But it all depends on how one views the aesthetic existence of an ‘artwork’ and the observer reception of that artwork. The explanation of this gap takes on many forms. Many trends of art theory (Bourriaud 2002; Groys 2010) have repeatedly dropped the idea of a discrete work, which is of  determined aesthetic quality in-itself, in favour of discursive indeterminate relations, usually occurring in-between human communities and power structures (although ANT isn’t guilty of these two factors, for it’s rightful refusal in separating natural actors from cultural ones).

Clearly it would be mindless and moronic to suggest that Actor Network Theorists encourage the destruction of aesthetic quality, if one simply concentrates on the networks surrounding and composing it. But the question is a simple one: what are the operational requirements for an unified entity to forge an aesthetic effect in the first place if actors are not constructed (nor contingent) on human observers? If aesthetics can be shown as being a historically contingent relationship between two actors, which are contingent and traceable on a network, then why bother to create art at all? How would one distinguish an artwork under such terms if not human ones?

In the realm of ART then, we seek to supplement the contingent, stochastic exposition of the network with the necessary execution of automatic recursion. Here, we are suggesting that artwork is a mechanical and durable repetition of a finite actor which is executed over and over again, over one pieces or a collection of pieces. The durability of an entity is traced not by the networks of neighbouring localised environment, but by the execution of its acting state as a rule repeated over and over within a formal system irrespective of that system. It is the actor which defines the recursive action. Recursive actors can be non-linear, yet have the bizarre behaviour of being intrinsically auto-determined despite the impact of any contingent environmental influences.

There are two (and only two) interesting things about Hirst. The first is the sheer quantity of work he has produced for an artist under the age of 50. It’s quite something, even if you happen to think most of his stuff is money-grabbing prank-punky frivolous tat (which most of it is, really). I’m a bit more tentative about his corpus though. Yes, most of it is life-threateningly dull, but I take the rather controversial artistic vantage point of qualitative production. If Hirst produces roughly 100 – 200 works a year (there or there abouts), one of them has to be somewhat interesting – you can’t beat randomness.

Secondly, I am also of the opinion that Hirst’s finest work was the extremely clever and downright genius double bluff that was the Sotherby’s auction in 2008; the first time a living artist had the gusto to sell a entire show’s worth of work directly through an auction rather than exhibit in the gallery, and completely bypass the traditional artist-gallery-dealer network. Hirst might be an awful artist, but he isn’t an idiot – he knew what he was doing. That stunt wasn’t about the work he was selling, it was about upstaging the churlish, crass, corpulent wealth of the London art market, and recession proof buyers in Russia and the Middle East, and showing them for what they really were (why else would he have sold a ‘golden calf’?).

Hirst is probably the only artist who could have been in the position to do it, and get away with it. He had the richest dealers in the palm of his hand for two days.