Re: <nettime> ars lecture on software / art / culture

[Marc Lafia <marclafia@earthlink.net>]

Andreas

Thanks for posting your excellent talk. An open question/thought follows.

I was reading an interview with Annette Insdorf, a film scholar at Columbia
and in it she quotes Truffaut saying: "For me a great film is one that
simultaneously expresses an idea of the cinema and an idea of the world." I
think this rings true with your comments on software art. Today we would
call such work performative - it performs the medium in which it is produced
and the context in which it is received.   For Nicolas Bourriand the art
work produces social relations in the conception and distribution of work.
In his book, 'Relational Aesthetics, he states, 'For art, no technique or
technology is a subject.' Of course techniques and technologies produce
social relations, ideological points of view, at the very least, ways to
perceive - is it possible that certain formal investigations have a
criticality not so much on the surface but procedurally, not wrapped up so
beautifully, performatively and conceptually, as the 'scezda' virus - but
think of, for example, the very incisive trope of the breakbeat, a radical
inscriptional technique, which opens up vistas of new materials and
perceptual sounds, consider certain spatial writings, mez, database, glitch,
computation - there must be a moment before these things become technique
and are a necessity, coming from an urgency, that can only be found in and
through material (can we say extend the notion of mechanical here to
material in Kittler's sense?) and all social dimensions that such materials
carry - think only of Schoenberg's tonal system, how radical this was in its
conception, and when picked up by others became more mannered and
domesticated as it becomes a technique. Soon the technique becomes
innocuous, convention, a standard, invisible, deadening and as such artists
pick up on this and make this invisible become seen again. Technique then at
times results from an urgency to open entirely new spaces of thought,
perception and subjectivity and at other times a different arsenal of
technique, perhaps more deconstructive, is used to open up and re-invigorate
the social perceptions and relations therein.




> [this is the script of the talk that I gave on the last day of the ars;
> some of the themes discussed here over the last days resonate, and I
> thought it might be interesting to chip it in; apologies for the loose
> style, but it had to work as a talk way at the end of a 5-day conference;
> comments welcome, of course; -ab]
> 
> Notes on the cultural dimensions of software and art
> 
> Andreas Broeckmann, Berlin
> 
> (lecture manuscript; ars electronica 2003, CODE, Software and Art 2, 911.03)
 <...>

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