<nettime> Vienna Declaration thoughts

Hello Florian (& nettime),

thanks for the post of your Vienna Declaration critique that gave me something to think! As I made my own living as a media artist/el.composer for some years I´m now in a PhD aspirant in a research project within a funding guideline from a German ministry researching on digitization processes in art practices (in the widest sense, a field labeled with the term „Kulturelle Bildung“). From time to time I had some very similar thoughts and impressions like you without knowing about the Vienna Declaration.

However, I was able to change the research design in a way I would have liked it as an artist (not being the scientifically observed white rabbit in a laboratory). As I hoped we saw unpredictable things happen, uses and developments that no usability study of the music technology lent to our participants would have ever revealed. And many of the (not so rich) participants were very happy to have the opportunity to be part of the study and get stuff for several thousend euro for their use for 2 years. For some of them the project really changed their prospects on what they want to do, how they want to work artistically and so on.

But there are of course questions, beginning with the demand to get and safe as much data from the field as possible to store it if possible forever while on the other hand the privacy law (DSGVO) forbids it in our case (so we won´t…). I do not have the feeling to affirm directly a neoliberal agenda within the project. Luckily no need for that in this funding guideline. I´d say I try to develop the trojan horse approach you mentioned – at least as good as I can and with backing on this. Sometimes I even ask myself if the kind of Vienna Declaration language might be a camouflage for well-meaning attempts as you write. It may be just the institutions game that usually is pressurized to follow the dominant political narratives. But on the other hand one can´t deny that such a language infiltrates the self-understandings within the field by superordinating economic and innovations goals and terminology. Indeed the whole situation reminds me a bit on the ambivalence of Batesons second order learning cybernetics and its sympathy for emergent art practices while at the same time it remained a theory of control. In a way it seems to be a similar situation these days.

It`s a fine line: we were also involved in a conference where artists, tech designers and musical educators were brought together which was quite fascinating because it was (as intended) a clash of worlds. However there it is, the relation to enterprise Research and Development you wrote about. Of course we do not sell or give our project data to techdesign industries. The idea of the conference was more to establish a dialogue between those different spheres which worked astonishing well despite of all differences. Indeed the field of institutional music education is already very formalised but mostly with a strong emphasis on classical „high“ arts practices and a certain refusal of new technologies (especially in Germany with its music traditions). Or at least with a favour for „high arts“ electronics as e.g. at IRCAM. I would say one political agenda behind the guideline is to research how to change that refusal – which could also be described as a kind of colonization of a widely non-digitized field if you want so. It depends on your perspective…

While reading your article I asked myself what you might think about Denzins New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research: The Arts (2020). The book´s approach is clearly meant to be a liberating and activist one. Chapter 6 contains some Arts-based Research definitions and I think it was in chapter 7 where a division (similar to yours) is made between art which can serve for PhD projects and art which cannot serve for it (because it´s „unethical“ for instance). As a former artist i was able to understand some of the examples mentioned there but I didn´t see it as narrowly as the author. However, my point (or question) is: while you seem to argue for a complete freedom of the arts (which could be surely doubted in consideration of the art market and art [learning] institutions) the author argues for new and more ethical forms of art which are culturally more embedded and which give up the famous and deeply historical (!) concept of the autonomy of art with its special role for modern societies and artist subjectivation. But I´d say this insight came from theory not from art practice. So in this argument there is a kind of good and responsible art and its opposite (which then is not usable in PhD projects). With real interest: Does that already sound like a normalization or formalization approach to you?

My personal thoughts at the moment are that art as practice was always quite resilient against absorption. But I concur that it is easily possible that „two forms of arts“ may establish within that Vienna development like you presumed. However I already had that impression before the Vienna Declaration. As I didn´t study art (but media science) I wasn´t able to contend for institutional art stipends and stuff like that which so many studied artist do and have to do to make their living until they´re maybe a bit more famous and able to live from their art. Almost no chance to ‚become an artist‘ without studying some art form, even the composers association asked for it. I just did it all my life without any official higher education in this field and it was more or less a coincidence that I had the possibility to live from it. So to me that old status quo of institutionalised arts education seemed already like a two-forms-of-art approach in a way.

Historically the spheres of art and technology were mostly institutionally separated (which has to do with the modern condition) and each field had its own funding strategies and opportunities. If you don´t fit in from your education biography you fall through the cracks, either way from which side you are. And it may be no coincidence that the boundaries between institutional research and art practice get blurred discursively on a governance level just when the ideology of modernity and its social forms get under pressure in an unmistakable way. A bit like Max wrote: like at the beginning of that strict separation, in times of the Renaissance man, but I´d say now under a posthuman omen. Just a thought…

The promise (and problem as well) might be that arts education in general seems to serve divergent desires depending from which perspective and with which interest one is looking. The field itself often isn´t so clear about its own standpoint, too. On the one side critique in art is a common courtesy. On the other side people are happy about fundings, individual success and so on within a field where so much casualization is going on. I saw things like that: officially critical and „left wing artists“ were kinda corrupted over night when they got the prospect of a secure and well paid arts field managing job in the widest sense. This is not unusual and it doesn´t only happen in PhD programmes adressing individuals.

The political promises which seem to be needed for official fundings are insofar divergent as on the one hand art is associated with dealing with the social, with self-understanding of societies, with inclusion, with giving the marginalized a voice, with being a laboratory for alternative forms of living, thinking and so on. In the eyes of social policy makers this is deeply needed in our times. On the other side art promises innovation of all kinds, e.g. the focus on practice may help in HCI contexts to develop better interfaces which then sell better (from the standpoint of enterprises) and which help to bring forth digitization processes between those who do not have much knowledge about them but have to change their behavior within the upcoming posthuman conditions (from the standpoint of political agendas, to be an optimised self) and so on. Sometimes it feels to me like the field is taking every argument that is out there to escape marginalisation. It´s really a tricky melange.

Best regards,

Martin