Future of Aesthetics

What occurs in many contemporary plays is that there is the use of simultaneous time frames designated by different lighting or spatial location on stage. This allows the writers to explore narrative in a nonlinear fashion. It also means that the audience can be more at liberty to focus on different stage locations to derive meaning independent from a singular narrative. Both of these consequences conform to a less hegemonic way of conveying a story, which also accords with a more multicultural ethos in general.

Q. How will the difference between this all-presence and that “instant” digitized presentification be detected and felt by the new generations?

I suppose the tendency is to see digital reality, which suggests the Internet, as itself un-hierarchical in the same way that the plurilistic temporal-spatial designation in performance is. I think the diversity of points of attention on stage, the lack of a strongly inforced singular plot and singular narrative would be very appealing for new generations. I think of my daughter, who is ten, and is so attuned to diverse technologies and able to split her attention. For her, a split screen is a natural mode of communicating with the world. The simultaneous action on stage in effect realizes what a split screen does.

Uses of technology within performance also would appeal to new generations because they would fuse different technologies in the very language of performance. That is, for young audiences, the use of liquid screens in scenography, the incorporations of dense lighting fields, and the ability to incorporate the Internet, computers, and the language of the cyberworld is appealing in performance.

Q. Concerning the emphasis on the gesture (making sense by repetition), does its reenactment jeopardize the theatrical actions (making sense through accomplishment of an aim)?

This question really underscores the fact that the contemporary modes I discuss disrupt an Aristotilean sense of unity of plot. Aristotle urged that effective conveying of an idea is best handled by a unitary plot or storyline. In effect, performances which are less focused on a singular story, based on one character, disrupt this Aristotilean dictum. One can see in iWitness the struggle Sobol has between keeping to a singular story and interrupting it with Brechtian trajectories into other plots. But in BlackWatch, the Scottish National Theater is much more interested in a complexity of human situations rather than the story of a single soldier’s journey. I think the latter will be much more the tenor of where theater and performance are going.

Q. How distant is your perspective from Brecht’s political mission?

Interestingly, your question refers me to Brecht, whom I thought of often, especially in relation to Sobol’s play. I think that technology is much more complementary to Brecht’s mission of estrangement, critical disengagement, and social change than we might think. In fact, you can argue that with a play like Mother Courage and Her Children we have an enactment of kinesthetics’ complementarity to social change. In that play, the main character’s action throughout is staged as a circular walking around the stage area; a counterpart to Sobol’s having his main character clean a metal pot with circular motion as a nod to Teresa d’Avila’s statement about God’s presence in all things. When Mother Courage walks but learns nothing, the futility of her loss to war is punctuated by the fact that she is walking in a circle, getting nowhere, learning nothing. That statement is underscored visually and kinetically for the audience when she is staged as walking her wagon in a circle, as the famous production of the Berliner Ensemble with Helen Wegel accomplished. The urge to awaken the audience to active engagement with the social reality of the play is coaxed by this central performative image in a similar way to the kinesthetic proddings I have discussed in the contemporary performances. It is only that the technologies have changed.

In a world increasingly defined by technology, kinesthesia, with its connotations of embodied, sensory experience, holds special relevance today as we look at developments within the arts now and in the future. Whereas some may argue movement is increasingly lacking in our sedentary, computer-driven world, others would counter that the development of portable technology, and the incorporation of this technology within entertainment signals our future.^[1] This chapter draws on performance and dance studies to explore how kinesthesia has become an area of exploration in recent performances.

The formation last year of a research center for Cognition, Kinesthesia and Performance at the University of Kent in the UK; the research work of Bruce McConachie integrating cognitive studies within performance studies; and the publications online and elsewhere of groups such as The Watching Dance Project and The Machine Project, the work of dance critic John Martin, and the work of cognitive scientist Vittorio Gallese all reflect a growing attention to the integration of cognitive sciences within performance studies.^[2] Furthermore, the dance scholar Susan Foster dedicated a recent book to the study of kinesthesia and its connection to empathy.^[3] While Foster’s work emerges from the field of dance, her methodology is applicable to other performing arts, such as theater, because of her focus on the connection between empathy and kinesthesia.

When approaching play content that has to do with conflict, especially in so-called war plays, the question of empathy looms central to the dramaturgy. In theater, a number of “war plays” have made central use of kinesthesia in their combined dramaturgy and staging. Performances of plays such as the work of the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol as well as the Scottish National Theater’s BlackWatch have made use of a heightened kinesthesia in their experimentations with empathic dramaturgy in works about war. This chapter offers a fuller exploration of how kinesthesia gains importance in contemporary performances in order to suggest a direction that may be more pronounced in the arts created in light of continuing quagmires. How the arts are responding to these situations in the message of their plays and also in the communicative mechanism they employ has become a central concern for theater production globally. Plays directed at international audiences have come to rely on meta-linguistic mechanisms of expression which are one way of bridging incommensurabilities of culture, language, and content. While focused on very specific historic incidents, these works nevertheless managed to broaden to a more international audience by offering material whose interpretation can be taken in different directions by the audiences.

Part of this broad appeal, I argue, lies in the deliberate integration of a kinesthetic aesthetic within the performances. The integration of specifically kinesthetic gestures and staging of scenes appeals to an audience that is versed in technology, and conversant in vicariously experiencing empathy through kinesthesia. Kinesthesia becomes an important “language” of the performance text, to borrow the terminology of the theorist Patrice Pavis in Theater at the Crossroads of Culture.

In using the term kinesthesia, I refer to the dictionary definition quoted above. In performance, this can mean an emphasis on kinetic motion that has a kinesthetic effect on either the performer or, by association and empathy, on the audience. I first look at kinesthesia and its use as a counter-reaction to velocity and tempo by providing examples of theatrical responses to digitized pace. I then look at affirmations of the body and bodily through performance with examples in which theater reenacts the sense of bodily imminence through kinesthesia, affirming a sense of presence. In connection with this point, I study the importance of empathy within the mechanism of kinesthesia on stage. Finally, I look at uses of physical language and repetition as extreme forms of verbal kinesthesia rehearsed in performances.

Kinesthesia and Performative Responses to Digitized Time

Theater emphasizes to the audience the presence of the body, and the importance of the audience as a collaborator in the creation of meaning. As opposed to other media, which are not dependent on this co-presence (film, television, YouTube, the Net), theater relies on the inhabiting of a given space by actor and audience in a time-bounded event. This aspect has always been a creative constraint in theater making and has induced alternative structural devices such as the relaying of exposition, the integration of flashbacks, and—more recently in postmodern theater—simultaneous stage action. While theater is itself bound by a temporal structure that other media can overcome, this very limitation has always enabled theater to become an ideal vehicle for exploring questions of time. Almost any play that includes exposition, foreshadowing (often referred to as “forwards” in play analysis),^[4] split screens, scrims, and nonlinear framing would serve as an example of this. In two recent examples, both of which happen to be war plays, the repudiation of temporal limitation in the dramatic material is felt particularly in reference to kinesthetically foreground moments.

These two recent performances, one from Scotland and the other from Israel, grapple with the dilemmas of a soldier and the ethical parameters of participation or refusal to participate in war. As such, the plays are implicitly invested in questions of empathy; for this reason, they are ideal examples of how theater uses kinesthetic means in performance strategy. While both plays are directed at audiences of different national backgrounds, they were presented to international audiences as well, and, in so doing, greatly increased the scope of their message. While focused on very specific historic incidents—a Scottish regiment stationed in Iraq during the recent war in Iraq and the refusal of an Austrian citizen to serve in the army of the Third Reich during the Second World War—the two projects toured and were presented to audiences of different countries and language backgrounds. Clearly, both had international appeal. Part of this broad appeal lies in the deliberate integration of a kinesthetic aesthetic within the performances. The integration of specific kinesthetic gestures and scenes appeals to an audience that is versed in technology, and conversant in vicariously experiencing empathy through kinesthesia.

iWitness and BlackWatch suggest a deliberate smelting of time through visceral kinesthetic means. The play Ed Reiya (translated into English as iWitness) was written by Joshua Sobol, first staged in Israel in the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv in 2003, and was subsequently translated and adapted by Barry Edelstein for an English language production, premiered at the Mark Taper Theater in Los Angeles in 2006, and directed by Edelstein himself.^[5]^,^[6] The play is based on real events following the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who resisted serving in the Nazi army both as a soldier as well as nonmilitary personnel and was killed in 1943 for his refusal to serve. His absolute resistance was marked by his refusal to wear any uniform or take on any job, in one instance even a janitorial job, remotely associated with the Nazi army.^[7] The play traces this singular act of civil disobedience in the context of Nazi Germany in order to raise broader questions about the efficacy and ethics of the act of conscientious objection. In its original performance context in Israel, in the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, where it premiered in 2002, the play was unquestioningly interpreted as a reference to refusenics, soldiers refusing to serve in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) in the occupied Palestinian lands in Gaza and in the West Bank.^[8] This comparison is the reason the play was received with some objections in Israel where several people even argued Sobol was feeding into the provocative paralleling of Nazi atrocities and genocide against the Jews with the Israeli occupation and violence against Palestinians.^[9] It is important to emphasize that Sobol himself has denied this claim about his play by emphasizing the play is not about this paralleling nor is it about Israel per se. In this way, Sobol has suggested the play to be more universal than its interpreters have claimed.

In the dramatic text, actions emphasize the gestural potential on stage for kinetic action. In other words, Sobol deliberately creates physical moments on stage that require a director to integrate kinetic action within the performance. One example of this suggests that movement on stage can become meditative. The main character, Franz, is seen cleaning and scrubbing throughout the play—whether it be his boots, the latrines, or even a simple pot. Franz explains his level of activity by suggesting that repetitive movements, even merely the scrubbing of a pot, reveal the lie force implicit in all things and people. This recalls the famous statement by St. Teresa that “God can be found in a scrubbed pot.” Franz’s articulation shifts the godliness of work to a sense of individualized spirituality Franz finds in deeds, in improvement of one’s surrounding:

In fact, the actor is constantly scrubbing throughout the play. The audience thereby is enmeshed in his hypnotic movements, repetitive and simple. The circularity of these motions communicates a meditation on the circularity of life: as on the tactile presence of one person’s spirit in the objects he or she relays to others; in the simple acts connoted by a boot or a skillet—eating, feeding, serving others; and in the metallic material of the skillet itself, forged in heat from different metals, shaped by human hands, withstanding of fire when it is exposed to it once again. The cleaning of the skillet or pot, the shining of a boot, may enact the Brechtian gestus: using a gesture on stage that refers to the broader social significance of the gesture or object.^[11] But the use of the gesture is also something different in its mesmerizing kineticism. It seems to enfold the audience into a shared moment of co-created spirituality. So, while the play uses the episodic style common to Brecht and makes use of scene titles that suggest a pointilistic rather than smooth scenic progression, in other ways it develops Brechtian elements in a direction that emphasizes kinesthetic elements and a muted, meditative spiritualism. In this meditative use of time, the connection between things and people is not “instant” as it may be in a digitized reality—for example, as one writes an email, instant messages, sends a tweet, or checks the Web. In this kineticism, the audience becomes more aware of time as circular and cyclical—or, as may be explained, more mythical.

In Nietzsche, Kant, and Deleuze, modeling of time as related to repetition can fall into polarities between a circular and linear model. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze considers the connection between different models of time and finds in repetition not sameness but difference: “Difference lies between two repetitions.”^[12] This is not the inevitability of seasonal or cyclical time, which suggests a determinism in which the subject takes a passive role. Instead, Deleuze connects the idea of repetition as a linking of events each of which is constituted by moments of presence. In performance, the repetitive motions created by Franz are never the actions of a bored man; rather, they are his way of affirming his existence and his connection to the past and future. These are moments in which the character is “hyperpresent,” in the sense of Deleuze’s notion of repetition. Interestingly, they are also actions that link the audience kinesthetically to time in an actively present way.

The Body and Bodily Through Kinesthetic Means

Another way in which theater offers an alternative to technological communication is by its emphasis on perception and sensation as united in the body. Performance foregrounds the body and emphasizes the humaneness of the body even in the midst of seemingly mechanical actions.^[13] Presence and the body are always emphasized in BlackWatch and iWitness. One of the most stunning moments in the Scottish National Theater’s performance of BlackWatch involves a single actor chronicling the historical development of the regiment from the eighteenth century to the present. This piece of exposition overcomes its verbal exegesis when the actor physically embodies each of the phases of the historical periods by transforming into wearing the costumes common in each of the periods. He does this while walking across the stage, and while speaking to the audience in an uninterrupted flow of movement and verbosity. The transformations are accomplished by his fellow actors dressing and undressing him, removing shirts, boots, hats, and other garments by turning the speaking actor on his head, upside down, enabling him to make the necessary costume changes. The feat is accomplished in an almost circus-like fashion, and the audience delights in the accomplishment of the costume changes and the historical time travel through a highly physical means. The action on stage is highly kinetic, and for the audience the experience is vicariously kinesthetic, as the sensations of motion are indirectly felt.

The presence of the body is also underscored in iWitness. Franz’s omnipresence on stage results in his appearing in scenes in which other characters speak to each other in a different temporal and spatial frame than he is in. For example, in the sixth scene, his wife and daughter speak to each other in their home while he is still imprisoned. Since realistically, Franz could not be present in this moment, he serves as a commentary on the mother’s explanation to her daughter that her father is refusing to serve in the Nazi regime.^[14] This lends an empathic element to his presence; furthermore, Sobol’s enactment of a temporal anachronism in this scene introduces another purpose to Franz’s presence, a more bodily or kinesthetic purpose.

In this scene, Franz is buried under the bed on which Franca and his daughter sit. He remains and is overlaid by the furniture, contorted in his position. But this is not a passive presence: it is a relentless presence. It is Sobol’s refusal to render the actor invisible and his insistence that the actor’s body be present to such a degree that the audience becomes hyperaware of it. This moment creates a visceral poignancy: the staging is literally striking at the body, enacting a kind of violence towards the body, while at the same time the dramaturgy calls for the inclusion of the body in the scene. In this way, the audience becomes aware of both the character as well as the actor’s body as a conduit for the performance. The audience’s awareness of the body’s presence is a marked contrast to the stand-in for the player in a video game, the player character or avatar. In the video game, the avatar makes our body as player and audience transparent and it is substituted for that of the avatar. Our body becomes a conduit for the movements performed by our avatar, and those movements influence the “narrative” or plot and outcome of the game. In contrast, in the example of Franz, our awareness of the body of the actor and our own, and our mutual presence as witnesses of the character’s progress through the plot suggest a cognitive acknowledgement of the fictional and the real timeframes simultaneously. As the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the centrality of the body in perception:

The body of the actor is hence both a conduit for the character but also an independent force that demands our acknowledgement as well. While this generally occurs at the end of plays, in the curtain call, in which the audience acknowledges the labor of the actor, Sobol’s example, greatly influenced by Bertolt Brecht, reveals that within the play itself this awareness can be emphasized.

Kinesthesia and Empathy

In my example of Franz being under the bed during a scene in which his wife and daughter speak of him, his presence amplifies the sorrow and empathy the audience feels for his being lost to his daughter and wife. In addition, kinesthesia itself relates to empathy on another level. In fact, implicit in studies of kinesthesia is the question of empathy, as Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance has shown. Movement and the perception of movement by an audience would induce, the argument goes, a sense of movement, motion, and emotion in the perceiving audience member. In this way, the audience member could be guided on an emotional journey by kinesthetic means. Foster has offered a noteworthy caution to this oversimplified association of the perceiving audience member and the performance. Nonetheless, even her work is geared to exploring the levels of empathy, which undergird a kinesthetic exchange in performance between audience and performer.

With regard to empathy, a notable moment (in the inserted scene labeled Four-A) occurs earlier in iWitness and also involves Franca. The scene of Franca reading a letter to Franz is inserted within a raucous scene between Franz and his friends Martin and Hans who visit him in prison. While Martin and Hans’ visit is volatile—the men break out in a fight and grotesquely imitate Hitler—Franca’s reading of her letter to Franz is full of wistful longing and tenderness. The text is simple, almost banal:

While the reading of the letter is even-keeled, at the end Sobol adds the following stage direction: “She repeats the text a few times, each in a different manner. She exits.”

Interestingly, Sobol asks that the actress playing Franca read from her letter, which is highly emotional:

But at the end of the letter Sobol asks that she repeat it a few times, each time with a different emotion. The linear frame is broken by this tactic and the suggestion is both logical—the evocation of the many times she may have mulled over this letter, the many times she felt this sadness and longing, but also the many mixed emotions of grief, anger, love, desire that were part of her mourning his absence. One may also remark that, similarly to Franz’s bodily presence under the bed, in which the actor’s bodily presence is foreground, here Sobol once again is very aware of the actor’s own body performing the character. When Sobol asks the actress to repeat the reading, he is setting her up for a sense of climactic frustration. The actress would be hard-pressed to resist the kinesthetic reaction to repeated motion and verbal articulation: frustration. The actor’s frustration feeds into the character’s frustration and the effect that Sobol is after, as signaled by the stage direction. The scene derives its power from creating a literal reading of the letter only in order to deconstruct that emotion and offer a different line reading. The reconstitution of meaning derives not from the semantic sense, which remains the same, nor from the emotional dimension but from the enactment over and over by the actress.^[17]

I am reminded of a scene in the Scottish National Theater’s touring performance of the play BlackWatch in which a group of soldiers each receives a letter from home. Rather than text this intimate scene, the director chose to have each actor/character gesture in signs his response to the letter in a silent and evocative self-expression that was personal and at the same time repeated by many on stage to suggest that, while personal, the gestures and emotions were relatable and shared and for that reason there was an underscoring not of individualism, and one person’s pain and loss, but rather on a moment of echoed emotiveness whose strength came from its repetition by other figures on stage. As the line are repeated, as in iWitness, a different pacing allows for a variety of emotions to be expressed, culminating in a similar sense of frustration and loss.

In conclusion, in this chapter, I suggest the possibilities offered by kinesthetic analysis in the arts in application to examples drawn from recent theater production. Because of the inherent connection between kinesthesia and empathy, I looked at plays—iWitness and BlackWatch—whose content has to do with conflict and, specifically, war, where the question of empathy looms central to the dramaturgy. These plays exist among a larger list in which we may include the work of Suzan-Lori Parks, especially the 365 Project; the Medea Project, which involved global, synchronized performances; the work of the Son of Semele Ensemble in LA; and others. I demonstrated how central use of kinesthesia in staging signal a preoccupation in performance today and may indicate a direction for further exploration in future productions.

Notes

^{1. In either case, kinesthesia has become increasingly evident in learning styles and
pedagogical approaches, in technological applications, and in the arts.}

^{2. See John Martin’s work as a dance critic on “kinesthetic sympathy” and its further
development in Susan Foster’s work, already referred to above. See also Bruce McConachie’s
publications, and recent work on Erving Goffman. In Britain, the University of Kent’s
Center which combines the disciplines of architecture, anthropology, drama, engineering,
digital arts, and psychology. The work of Peter Dickinson at Simon Fraser at University
of British Colombia, Canada. Dickinson has a blog on these topics of cognition and
kinesthetics within performance. The Machine Project is an experimental art center
in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their exhibition “How Not to Be Seen,”
GhillicSuit Workshop and Camouflage performance (July 2008) resonates with the issues
of kinesthetics that I will be discussing.}

^{3. For example, see Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London: Routledge, 2011).}

^{4. See David Ball, Backwards and Forewards. A Technical Manual for Reading Plays. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).}

^{5. Published in its Hebrew edition by Or-Am in 2004. For this chapter, I have consulted
both the performance text of the Hebrew version, archived at the Cameri Theatre in
Tel Aviv, as well as the subsequently published version in Hebrew. I have also referred
to the English version, iWitness, adapted by Barry Edelstein from an English language version by Joshua Sobol which
Barry Edelstein has kindly shared with me. This draft version is dated October 12,
2006. All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this version which I
refer to as the “Rehearsal copy. Draft 10.12.06,” and in shorthand simply as iWitness, as opposed to Ed Reyia, the title of the play as originally published in Hebrew.}

^{6. The program notes for the English premier at the Mark Taper Forum indicate this background:
“In 1938 when Hitler’s troops moved into Austria, Jägerstätter was the only man in
the village to vote against the unifying of Austria with Nazi Germany. He remained
openly anti-Nazi and publicly declared he would not fight in Hitler’s war” (“Franz
Jägerstätter,” in iWitness program notes, Center Theatre Group, Performances: Mark Taper Forum at the Music
Center [May 2006] P7).}

^{7. Some have contended his act of refusal was based on his Catholicism and was an act
of conscientious objection. However, as Sobol points out, Jägerstätter had served
in the Austrian army for three years and his refusal was a pointed refusal to serve
in the Nazi regime (Sobol, radio interview, 1). In fact, he had been drafted in 1939
and called into active duty in 1943, occasioning the crisis that would lead to his
beheading by the Reich Military Tribunal (Program notes, P7). For more on Jägerstätter,
see In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (New York: Zahn, 1964.)}

^{8. For example, it is possible to see how there would be a resonance of the Israeli-Palestinian
context for many in the Israeli audience when Franz states that: “This State has occupied
and robbed peoples who have done us no harm and who owe us nothing. It perpetrates
horrors in the occupied lands” (Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness “Rehearsal copy. Draft 10.12.2006”). At the same time, in the original text in Hebrew
used in the performance (and available in the Cameri theater archive) as well as in
the published text in Hebrew the translation is not “occupied lands” but “occupied
countries” (“Aratzot kvushot”) (Joshua Sobol, Ed Reyia, Or-Am 2004, 63). While the first part of Franz’s statement may be read as resonant
with a liberal perspective on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the
final statement about “occupied countries” contextualizes this firmly in the German
setting. Thus, Sobol presents an interesting interplay between historic specificity
and its capacity to resonate for a present-day audience.}

^{9. Glenda Abramson offers a good review of the controversial reception of Sobol’s plays
(pre-dating iWitness) in Israel and abroad, in: “Zionism on the Stage: Sobol’s Case” in Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101–2.}

^{10. Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness, 10; Sobol, Ed Reyias, 24–25.}

^{11. The concept of “gestus” was to become a cardinal feature of Brecht’s theater practice;
in John Willett’s definition, “It is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point:
one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and
physically or verbally expressed. It excludes the psychological, the sub-conscious,
the metaphysical unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms” (Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage; From Naturalism to Grotowski [London: Methuen Drama, 1982], 173–74).}

^{12. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 76.}

^{13. While in early-twentieth-century theater (The Adding Machine and Machinal) the body was used as a template on which mechanical movements were imposed to critique
the ways in which machination and industrialization are dehumanizing us, the opposite
is true of repetitive movements in theater in the two pieces I have referred to. The
repetition actually emphasizes the bodies’ presence.}

^{14. Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness, 67.}

^{15. Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Merleau-Ponty on Space Perception and Space,” 274–311. In Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences: Essays and Translations, eds. Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1970), 279. Kockelmans writes of Merleau-Ponty: “The chief concern of his work
lies in the query about the very Being of man and about the fundamental significance
of our body-subject” (280).}

^{16. Sobol, Ed Reiya, 40–41; Sobol and Edelstein, iWitness, 17.}

^{17. BlackWatch was staged in LA as part of the UCLA Live series in the fall of 2007/2008, Sept 18
to October 14, Freud Playhouse. It was written by Gregory Burke and directed by John
Tiffany.}

Artifice, or a New Nature

Dialogue

Q. You appear to posit a new creative agent in the age of post-artifice and you relate to it as the “constructor”; can you expound on it?

The “constructor” is actually only aspect or part of the agent, which is the complex machinic apparatus. Every singular human constructor animates the real agent of construction, a kind of super-organism, made of natural and technical elements.

Q. In what ways does the art object as a collective manifestation of one’s aesthetic constitution suggest that it may be regarded as an automaton?

This super-organism builds “artifacts,” which are apparently automata, as they do not depend on any particular aesthetic perspective. It is becoming clearer and clearer that artworks as artifacts result from a collective work, which corresponds to no one’s singular intention, they make themselves while, in Luhmann’s words, they describe themselves.

Q. You seem to suggest a different articulation of the notion of montage, and not quite as Bergson’s cinematic metaphor to cognition or later Deleuze’s articulation of time and space in relation to image and perception. Can you explain what your motives are in approaching montage in reference to cognition and aesthetics?

This perspective has no opposition to Bergson or Deleuze, but the natural development of their views: kinetic image, or image-temps, already resolves and overcomes the linearity of narrative. The still image as such is an illusion which montage reveals. What the radical use of montage through the digital network develops further is the disillusionment about a “hidden” meaning, or an ideological aim, as in the case of Eisenstein.

Q. What are the differential aspects that lie today between sensory inputs and the symbolic in light of your arguments on the interplay between the analogue and digital?

The sensory inputs are secondary to the symbolic ones (symbolic itself is a term that recalls montage, meaning unifying what is separate), as if we had here an extreme version of the gestalt theory: anything may become symbolic. Or: nothing has meaning, therefore anything may get one. As a consequence, the totally artificial meaning brings about second-order sensory data (through the network I see a place before seeing it). After all, the term digital stems from digitus, that is, finger, or touch, as it is needed in both organic and technological inputs.

Q. How does Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis help us in explaining the emergence of an aesthetics infused with analogue as well as digital agents?

The notion of autopoiesis has been used to replace the mechanic model of the real with an organic one. But today, being able to speak about “living machines” (which is Varela’s expression), we can expand the notion of the organic to the mechanical, and vice versa we discover mechanical dynamics in the organic (chemical reactions, chaotic impulses giving place to life, and so on). Nature makes and reproduces itself adding the machinic as an emergent factor of its autopoiesis.

Q. Can you explain what is the significance of the new kind of machine situated as nature? Is it a naturalized machine (of aesthetic experience) or rather a naturalistic version of the aesthetics of machines (for example, Futurists or cyber art)?

Certainly this model of both cognition and ontological commitment deals with a naturalized machine. To what extent machine aesthetics can be associated to it, is to be found out over time. It is too early to say.

Artifice, or a New Nature

Artificio, in Italian, denotes that which is not natural, namely, what is made by us, ours, of art, or has been built by hands or machines. In both cases, the result is given by assembling together separate parts, which in turn are smaller wholes made of parts. The origin of the term “montage” is to be traced back to the assembly lines in factories: a material and mechanical activity of the hands or of robots, aimed at saving time in producing goods and tools.

Its metaphoric extension to the cinema has come to refer to the technique of editing, breaking down filmic scenes or sequences and re-composing their pieces into new sequences, integrating juxtaposed elements into a whole.

Assembling parts is the fundamental act through which complex products are constructed; and all artificial and artistic productions can be brought back to such an act whose outcome is a composite, which can be virtually broken down again to its simple parts.

Until recently the construction of an artifice was considered the opposite of what we used to call “nature.” The organic does not share the existence of distinguished parts to be stuck together. Organisms have parts that make sense only thanks to the whole. Nature has this claim that it cannot be broken down into parts; it does not need hands to build its creatures. Its form is gestalt (the whole makes sense of the parts) whereas the form of any artifact is associationist (the whole is always the result of parts). Can we keep that distinction today, or shouldn’t we rather recognize that each definition fades into the other?

This chapter concerns the epistemological consequences of the merging of artificial montage-making (from mechanical to digitized, or machinic artifices) and nature. Today, both our technological and cognitive tools allow for an overcoming of “nature” as distinct from technique. Art—as the paramount artificial—in its current forms anticipates or intimates at this new nature, both living and technical, while losing a specific status, or theoretical assessment.

A phenomenological description of this aesthetic-epistemological orientation regards:

The Constructor

There is an increasing difficulty for art critics and art historians to define “art” and consequently to find a criterion of evaluation for artworks. Probably we are headed to the conclusion that an aesthetic theory is impossible or unnecessary, due to the complexity of current art expressions and to the redundancy of the artist’s quality of the poietic “skill,” that is the ability to make something out of nothing, also defined as “creativity.” A definition of “art” or of “artist” fades into a definition of “constructor” or “construction,” in that it is a ground-concept: “beauty” seems to be dismissed and replaced with “fit” and “unfit,” as suggested by Niklas Luhmann, who defines the strictly systemic relationship between art and social dynamics:

Artists seem to construct a product out of some technical skill, in which poiesis is replaced by techne, or the practical ability to build an object or a scenario, or a visual happening, and so on, which is a matter of re-elaborating, re-interpreting, re-composing pre-existing objects, being at constant disposal of the interpreter, in a renewed hermeneutic circle.^[2] According to the ancient Greeks, who distinguished two kinds of intelligence, one theoretical and the other one technical, this second intelligence is the one used by artisans and inventors, called metis, the ability to find stratagems and devices aimed at making something work; metis is a specific kind of techne, that defines the ability to overcome obstacles, and of mechane, the practical application of techne. Instead of ideas and meanings and conceptual or spiritual values implied in artworks, we have simple work here, defined basically as the transformation of thermic energy into mechanic energy, and on more complex levels, as the transformation of mechanic energy into informational energy.

By way of example we recall the use sculptors make of a 3D printer, which accomplishes what the artist could not make manually; the printer is the real poietes, or the real craftsman, of which the sculptor or the expert who invented and the ones who built the printer are the assistants, or supports, or instruments. The source of information and the source of energy are concentrated on the machine. The artist knows just something, makes just something. Most of the work and information comes from the machine.

And of course this becomes apparent in the case of the various forms of Net art. Artists are endowed with the ability to use technologies and previous objectual structures in order to re-compose them in a new, or different level of a whole, making them significant, through editing, in a totally different context (which causes as a consequence copyright issues).

It is a method of work that shares with the artisans the difficulty of speaking about it (as they said: ut videbitur operandi, it will be seen as it must be done) and the need to show it, independently of any “theory” or conceptual frame (it was Wittgenstein who said that concerning art, it is very difficult to say something that is more worth than saying nothing). Should we imagine silent artists-constructors, who do not care anymore about their recognition, disregarding any critical support, busy, as they will be, to work inside the machine? Ancient artisans in fact were not held in high consideration, exactly because of their reluctance to talk about their works, both due to the necessity to keep a technical secret (Leonardo’s secret writing code is an example) and to the inability to represent the practical products of techne in words. The technique speaks for itself, it shows the rule according to which it works, it informs about itself, by simply presenting it functioning. The artist-constructor knows the rule but does not know the causes. It is not a matter of ignorance, but it is the very structure of the work that implies and requires an exploratory attitude. The result must be left to its own automatic nature: it may make itself, if duly worked upon, and if duly left to its own self-making chance. Within this epistemological frame the purposeful is inextricably intertwined with the unintended; the assemblage adjusts itself; at each step it shows its own succeeding or failing; hands or fingers on a keyboard are its helps and its instruments. A kind of chemistry occurs between all the actors involved (hands, minds, tools, machines), from which a new entity emerges, aimed to modify the environment and its “reality,” whether by practical use or by aesthetic reception.

Between the initial intention and the final result occurs what Marcel Duchamp called the “art coefficient,”^[3] suggesting that it is the work that makes a decision at each step of its making. Its author/instrument can only detect how the work asks to be corrected or modified in order for it to succeed (and succeeding here does not mean to correspond to the author’s intentions, but to its resulting in the “right” re-composition of parts). Duchamp’s ready-mades can be read as self-making works, respect to which the artist is the first spectator, receiving and following external suggestions. The parts to be assembled in fact pre-exist the choice and the perspective from which to use them. The parts can match one another in different and alternative ways; they do not follow a necessary route, but suggest themselves their contingent possible montages. Any cause-effect relationship in this way of making is discarded in favor of trial and error, repetition, probability, unpredictable issues, parallel possibilities; the contingent way the parts may be assembled inform about their interchangeability or lack of necessity of the whole.

The Object as Automaton

At the end of retinal art, ready-mades, combines, Dadaism, superimposition in photography, Eisenstein’s montage of attractions, surrealism, introduced exploration as a step-by-step construction of a work, which is not so much the application of any previous law or theory, as it is itself the cause of a or rule for its construction. The constructor explores parallel possibilities, allowed by the multiple potential integrations of discrepant parts. The auto-poietic system resulting from that work, independent from any intentions on the part of the artist (or the recipient) modifies the theory and the rule while working: conceptual clarity is the result of the machine that works well, but the guide is more the hand than the mind. Knowledge takes on an automatic character, as if the constructor followed suggestions given by the tool or machine itself. He tries, whether the next move matches the previous one, and then he knows, so far as his knowledge—local and flexible—is not challenged again by the next move. His intention is continuously challenged by the gesture, whose decision is faster than any language or concept can grasp. The constructor does not think before making; what he communicates arrives later than the visual presentation. This is why the traditions of craftsmanship hardly survive time: it is difficult to be transmitted in words; the technical skill intertwined with seconding what contingent factors require, makes it “showable” rather than communicable. The constructor knows his object without mastering all of it. And even though this is most true today, when complex technological objects require so much specialized and piecemeal knowledge of each part, that it is a (virtual) collective cooperation, of which no one in particular is the author, or the center or the coordinator, we can nonetheless re-read in hindsight and trace back its historical prototype in baroque bel composto (beautiful composition) as Gian Lorenzo Bernini would call his sculptures, integrated as they were with architecture, painting, bas-relief, theater, composing a scenario of juxtaposed heterogeneous elements, aimed at displacing the spectators’ frontal point of view, making them need to move around the scene in order to make sense of it, as is the case of Santa Teresa in Rome, or of the various “macchine sceniche” the sculptor built for the Church festivities, composed of mechanical fountains, automata, or light games, aimed at showing off the power of Catholicism. And this cost him the early-twentieth-century Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce’s comment: “Il barocco è il brutto nell’arte” (Baroque is ugliness in art).

Ugliness, that is to say, the lack of a planned order that makes the artwork a clearly symbolic value, or a manifesto of its author’s intentions. We have to wait until later in the century to find a re-evaluation of that unintentional juxtaposition in Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “allegorical,” that is the fragmented and incomplete as meaningful, or Giovanni Careri’s reading of Bernini as the first filmmaker who introduced motion picture and “montage” in the arts.^[4]

With this paradigm in mind, we can read the historical changes in style as an auto-poiesis of painting and its metamorphosis into cinema: by way of example, we can re-read the cinematic propensity of Michelangelo or Beato Angelico in Giulio Antamoro’s film Christus (1916), Ghirlandaio in Bill Viola’s The Greeting, or in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone, Rembrandt in Greenaway’s Nightwatching; and expanding to music, we could re-read Bach in Glenn Gould, Scarlatti in Enrico Pierannunzi, Beethoven through the Moog synthesizer compositions by Wendy Carlos for Kubrick, and so on.

What is to be emphasized now is that that propensity has been more and more reinforced by the new technologies, to the point that any hand-making, or creative power of the artist-poietes, tends to be neglected and replaced by the use of bits and pieces of what can be found at hand on the Web—virtual ready-mades, Net art productions, uploading of videos edited from other videos, soundtracks stolen from found music—or whatever the interaction with the machine allows. The same can be said of certain street spectacles like flash mobs, or freeze, in which the impact of the dancers with the random quality of the surroundings makes the real show. Or even more cogently, we may recall smart objects: everyday life digital tools and machines that, by being interconnected to the Web, are in constant mutual dialogue and provide the users with services, real-time information about parking, traffic, weather, better food, and so on. They are tools, though reducing their users to used puppets, devoid of any chance to make decisions. They are both extra-organs added to our bodies, and our “masters,” in the Hegelian sense of the slave ending up to master its master.

These are only a few examples of the increasing freedom of montage that the Web allows and fosters, unleashing a new disregard for the authorship, almost a step back into times when the craftsman, the sculptor or painter didn’t need to sign what they did.

These objects are automata, in that they share these qualities: the artifice is built upon another artifice; it loses what Aristotle called its material cause, or at least the material of its stuff is so complex and indefinite that we might call it a second-order matter, or a new nature; a kind of hidden soul—or fake soul of the mechanic-machinic object (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s information machines^[5]) which moves itself. As ancient automata, birds or dragons sang and moved in fountains by the very water pressure, like the ones built by Hero from Alexandria, or the early modern mechanical robots, like the flute player by Jacques de Vaucanson, activated by clockwork mechanisms, among many other mirabilia, these objects are ironic: they all seem to have an inner energy or an aim that they have not: what this new nature in fieri brings about is human indifference, both subjective (psychological) and objective (indiscernible objects) and its consequent laugh, an irony quite pervasive in the present-day arts, which are not so much the product of aisthesis (perceptual involvement), as rather the product of an absolute artifice, perceived only in its radical self-reference and self-description, in which it simulates itself, brings itself to life, discouraging all attempt find out its author as genius.

This perspective gives the traditions of art history a renewed afterlife (in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term.)^[6] Every artwork can be seen as a part to be assembled in the montage of potential other wholes-artworks, which seamlessly alternate in the flowing environment of this new nature. In the oscillations between dissolutions and re-associations, every artwork will be more and more often conceived, since its very birth, as a fragment of a bigger picture, which is always possible and always allegorically missing.^[7]

The very meaning of the Italian Renaissance can be re-read as “anachronic,”^[8] in the sense of juxtaposing and integrating past and present motives, displaying time in an atemporal plural space. Renaissance artists would single out formal elements from classical art and place them in their works without any formal need or justification.^[9]

Cognitive Modalities

As it is commonly and widely shown, the ongoing paradigm shift provides artists, intellectuals, and users of the Net in general with new inhibitions and new abilities. Among the first we witness a decrease of memory storage, projected onto the computer storage; shorter and shorter attention span and concentration; a lack of center of reference and hierarchy of choices; the consequent risk to become easily manipulated by media and commercial (or worse, political) aims. Among the second (which are the interface of the first) we can list the increasing speed of real-time information, flexibility of perspectives, readiness in skipping redundancy, suspension of judgment, due to the fast modifications in the net of events, that is, the ability not to judge too quickly, with the advantage of keeping the distinction between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, in constant motion. It is as if cognitive agents became cognitive instruments of recognition of the very flows of facts. If twentieth-century epistemology was based upon the idea of the theory-laden facts, the twenty-first century might introduce an epistemology of self-making facts, or provisional theorizations of facts, with a strong natural-selective criterion of their own definitions.

Facts seem to emerge and disappear in the virtual artifice, without being supported by a perceptual or conceptual reference, which used to work as an original, to be endlessly reproduced.

Even now that I am writing on the computer, the whole of my text is partly hidden and invisible to me. The sequential verticality of the paper page, which I used to hold in my hands, is reduced to a continuum’s fragment, which I can place elsewhere. I discover that that sequence did not rigorously follow a logical frame; rather its coherence results from a plurality of possibilities. The necessity of the argument is blurred in favor of its intuitive grasp. Readers roll these pages on their computers, they will catch the gist of it, without feeling the need to retain the whole, certain that the memory of the whole chapter is kept at hand any time that they want to go deeper into it. Their attention decreases and increases discontinuously, it may be weak or intense, but surely short. Lacking the material object of a book, they do not have any idea of the volume of what they are reading. The velocity of information allows them to collect many of the texts on their desktops to be read after or in between the reading of this one. And I, being the first reader of my text, know that my rhetoric strategies to connect what I said to what I am going to say are useless, if I can move one period or one argument or one sentence wherever I want at any moment. My text reveals its logical contingency, which does not prevent it from being understandable and consistent. My montage does not leave any trace; my text is not so much mine as it is self-making, as it happens in film.

In addition I am working simultaneously on two or more screens, files, or applications. I can go back to correct what I have written, also depending on the suggestions of the other work I am writing, or reading or watching or listening to. I can retrieve a word from all of my documents and re-apply it elsewhere. As a spectator of myself, I become aware of the multiple associations that exist by chance between one text and the other. Growingly a multitasker, I make many things seemingly at the same time, which means quickly interrupting the one to pass to the other one and back again. Skipping passages and then integrating attention gaps, making it faster to get information and elaborate it without waste of time or dead moments. I rely upon my attention being attracted here or there, or being deactivated if nothing is attracting it. I am partly guided by randomly activated triggers. Where attention is not drawn, it doesn’t go. I resort to the translator online if I need a word, which I can’t find in my memory, or to information online without first even trying to remember it.

Production and reception of texts are so strictly intertwined that producers function as the ancient artisans, focused more on the visual result than on their argumentative authorship, and communication becomes a secondary need with respect to the visualization of the text itself. The text describes itself as the container of other texts, exactly as a poem does, without referring to any external or perceptual data.

As being functional to the machine, I make my moves, as the machine requires me to. I feel my thoughts are partly generated elsewhere than myself; they have an extension that range from a wide temporal and cultural distance. But that distance is annulled by its virtual presence, and its virtual presence is exempt from being a substantial whole. And the idea of our personal identities will evolve from being like discrete particles to being interactive fields, which do not need to master the construction, but only to partially contribute to its accomplishment.

It is an epistemological structure that cognitive anthropologist Merlin Donald called, in his seminal book Origins of the Modern Mind, “ESS” (External Symbolic Storage), a network of collections of symbols, stored in a material but disseminated and digital super-organism to which each individual (each of its parts) is plugged.^[10] Whereas the ESS is a fluid center of modifiable symbols and values and truths, our minds are in constant active systemic feedback relationship with it, being modified by and modifying it at the same time. All advancement, progress, and learning emerge from this network structure, and are not due to any genius, any solitary mind, any evident origin. We can say that it has always been like that, but it is only now we cannot invent stories about origins, causes, and beginnings: the groundlessness of this cognitive model is clear enough to exclude the idea of authorship from a creative act, which is actually an act of construction, built upon other constructions, in total heterogenesis of intentions and lack of “initial conditions.”

Integration, Emergence, Auto-Poiesis

For our purposes, what this scenario, more and more discussed in different fields of scholarly research, suggests for future art is the juxtaposition of elements, as they virtually propose themselves; the consequent emergence of artworks which are the products of “nobody”; the auto-poiesis, or self-construction of the product itself, whose identity rests upon the contingent manipulation that successive users, including spectators and audiences, will make of it. All of these elements at play bring up a new use of contingency: the necessity that governs an “artwork” is produced by the guidelines of contingent suggestions, independent of theories (are we at a turning point, in putting an end to the search for an art theory that claims to include all possible forms of art?), having as sole criterion its being fit for functioning: a clear feedback loop and circularity, the same that we find in the ESS model of cognition and which shows that there is an epistemological value in the thing itself, which is not reducible to any theoretical value.^[11] Knowledge shifts its agent from the human subject to the emergent self-descriptive phenomenon.^[12] (But hasn’t it always been like this?)

What is learned and used in one context, becomes a source of cognition and use in another one; what is efficacious in one field, may be found out to be efficacious in another; it is the very experimental performativity of the product that makes it artistic. So far as it works within the Net (or the ESS), it is considered a form of art, which decides itself (being itself an interconnected object) for its own value and destiny, as if there were, on Henri Focillon’s terms, a “life of forms,”^[13] generating one another, and working even in absence of any intention to make them work, and the more rhyzomatic the forms, the weaker their actual presences. We perceive first their montage character, their being integrated parts, their being essential modifications; something close to Jullien’s description of the Chinese painter’s gesture, who “paints modifications.”^[14]

Instead of looking for an art theory, we will have to cope with the increasing complexity in the systemic reference technology/artifice/nature, in which the phenomenon “art” rejects the need for any human authorship and acquires a self-referential memory:

This distributed, beehive-like being is able to guarantee a horizontal order of organized structures, on condition that the enormous quantity of its human actors is out of control.^[16] We witness the emergence of entities which regulate the behavior and development of other entities, which regulate the behavior of other entities, and so on, though not to infinity, but in an endless circularity and shifts of balance, which gives the advantage to change one’s mind easily, to use previous errors as sources of novelty, to take advantage of unbalance to construct other balances.

So if today artworks are arbitrary, are absurd, have no beauty, or have no arguable “meaning,” if it is almost impossible to assess their aesthetic value, maybe it is because they, being the product of collective constructive mind-machines, do not need those requirements anymore. In a beehive, bees do not need to evaluate their actions; they simply act, out of an aim that can be either pragmatic, or for its own sake.

Again, we can trace in hindsight a constant of this cognitive structure even in the aesthetic tradition: painting can be seen as the paramount example of the “intelligence of the hand,” of the step-by-step work of which artworks are stages of a bigger collective construction, which has been called Renaissance, Baroque, surrealism, pop art, and so on, various self-descriptions which are as clear as indeterminate, once that we try to find a “law” to explain their specificity.

We seem to employ a kind of second-order perception: on the Web, we perceive and use what others have perceived before us, or in Niklas Luhmann’s terms, “Art communicates by using perceptions contrary to their primary purposes.”^[17]

Maybe it is the machine that perceives and builds works fit for a wider eye, as the gigantic dimensions of many current artworks seem to suggest. The stronger the technologies the wider the scopes of inquiry into evolution or biology or cosmology, and so on, in which organisms play a smallest part and cannot be any point of reference.^[18]

Is it the human dimension to be over? Or the natural dimension to be blended with the technical? Or is it the machine that is taking over a spirit, or an intention, unknown to us?

On a perceptual-aesthetic level, we are less and less certain about our ability to configure an image through the gestalt integration of missing parts in a row of discontinuous elements, or “good continuation law.” The perceptual dynamics of integration is rendered complex by the increasing variety of possible configurations, decided by that collective super-organism just described. What Henri Poincaré called our making continuous what is discontinuous—which allows for our generalizations—is challenged by the super-individual technique of reconstructing out of other constructions, therefore leaving any perceptual amodal reference mostly unusable.^[19] The new generations will learn how to quickly activate and disactivate categories, to infer acoustic information from motion information, visual information from tactile, and so on. Their effort will obtain in safeguarding the possibility to reassemble and to avoid taking manipulation for real and definitive (though unavoidable). A thing is partially itself, and partially eludes itself, says Poincaré: “What is revealed will be concealed but what is concealed will again be revealed.^[20]

Differently from Eisenstein’s insurrectional use of his montage of attractions, digital montage shows compositions that are at everyone’s disposal to be re-composed again, and to be broken down in parts again, as no composition is essential, but is all that can exist, its evolution does not exhaust the sense of its change; what we call “real” will become the fossil of an obsolete argument, replaced by the idea of a reservoir of infinite acceptance of what becomes real.

A New Sense of Reality: The Machine as a Strategy of Nature

There seems to be no watershed left between the categories of living and the nonliving; machines inform and communicate; natural organisms are explained away by machines. Real objects are products, either of evolutionary, or technical processes, they are in any case artifices, complex phenomena that suggest their own nonsubstantiality, grounded as they are upon artificial constructions. This is how artistic events become models of this epistemological description.

Assembled objects-performances, or processes visualized in a theatrical space—represented by a screen or a virtual presence—seem to have a life of their own; they do not represent anything outside of themselves, they can be totally new identities, to be grasped with an intuitive sense, or some guessing power (on Peirce’s terms) that in its turn triggers suggestions for more constructions, and if nature is but another construction, then machines have a “soul.” Whether their souls are their mechanical laws, or us, as intrinsic energies, or as their instruments, giving them the first impulse for their setting in motion, technical constructions have all the (apparent) qualities of natural entities, in any event we need to redefine the concept of machine, or to de-reify it,^[21] as Leibniz had already tried to do in paragraph 64 of his Monadology:

The only difference left between nature and technique is that natural organisms are far more mechanical than technical tools, as these have natural parts, whereas those are infinitely technical. Technicality is a quality of the natural; it is the human task to integrate their apparent discontinuity into the continuity of the real, replacing the claim to “discover” a law that causes their coming to be, with the awareness that any answer is but another construction, to be plugged in the flow of the network, that it may work or not work, may be corrected or broken down into its parts, to be used as new materials for the next whole. The organic becomes a quality of the machine, whereas the machine needs the human as energy—we might say thermic energy turned into motion energy.

The next generations might be generations of artists-technicians, used to recognize the good work (be it an artwork, or a machine, or a virtual entity) as the one in which the intention is disrupted enough as to reveal its being made by many subjects—or means, rather than authors—transcending each of their desires, in such a way that the material work is worth more than its constructors.

The Hegelian dissolution of the aesthetic, as already updated by Arthur Danto, is now conceived upside down: it is not the concept, but the machine, which absorbs the material and natural character of the arts.

A few conclusive remarks: any “montage” is evaluated from its effects and not its causes; the truth of any entity is replaced by its efficacy, in the pragmatist sense of the term, and also its procedural sense (judgments make sense so far as they are sufficiently valid). The agent communicating that efficacy is the machine itself, while human agencies are collective, uncontrollable, and merged with the network, each being an expert of a small fragment of the big network, nor can they claim any authorship, or right to attack the machine for its lack of order and meaning. They rely upon the self-regulating power of the network, through an indefinite trust into a good orientation, which has now to cope with a rhyzomatic multiplicity of possible amodal integrations, and a readiness to grasp the value of the next emergence. At last and fortunately humans will lose their obsession with private property and possession, not only in knowledge and economy, but also in the arts.

Notes

^{1. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 314.}

^{2. Andrea Cortès-Boussac, El hombre en las redes de las nuevas technologìas. Aportes à la disoluciòn del enfrentamiento
hombre-tècnica (Bogotà: Universidad Srgio Arboleda, 2009), 75.}

^{3. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: A da Capo, 1973), 139.}

^{4. Giovanni Careri, Flights of Love. The Art of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).}

^{5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).}

^{6. Brunella Antomarini, “The Notion of afterlife in Benjamin’s Philosophy of History,”
Proceedings of the International Conference of Critical Theory (2007): Nostalgia for a Redeemd Future. Critical Theory, S. Giachetti, ed. (Rome: John Cabot University Press, 2009), 217–28.}

^{7. François Jullien, La grande image n’a pas de forme. Ou, du non-objet dans la peinture (Paris: Points, 2009), 77.}

^{8. Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 7.}

^{9. Brunella Antomarini, Thinking Through Error: The Moving Target of Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 6–7.}

^{10. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.)}

^{11. Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (London: University of California Press, 2004), 116.}

^{12. Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge, 127.}

^{13. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989).}

^{14. François Jullien, La grande image, 19.}

^{15. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 142.}

^{16. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Perseus Books, 1994), 390.}

^{17. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 22.}

^{18. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche an the Transhuman Condition (Oxford: Routledge, 1997), 125.}

^{19. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (New York: Dover, 1952), 142.}

^{20. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, 106.}

^{21. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, 134.}

^{22. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology (Amherst: Prometheus Books 1992), 81.}

Aesthetics and Transcoding

Dialogue

Q. The catastrophe of writing and photography recalls Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of the Machine replacing the mute and immediate language of architecture.

Yes, indeed. However the consequences of such a “catastrophe” are less deterministically evolving and far more open and mutable over time. As opposed to the notion of an organic philosophy it has more to do with an attempt to articulate a philosophy of the organism closer to Buckminster Fuller’s visionary architecture. And this has a lot do with the overall systemic unfolding of technological aspects as extensions of the organism’s body and in as much organic collectives emerging into networks and cybernetic systems that posit images no longer as either percept or text, input or code, but rather as inexhaustibly transcodable flows. In that sense catastrophe relieves us from the traditional opposition between image and text and introduces us to a new aesthetics at once instable and transformative.

Q. If chemistry and physics are the tools of this new form of writing, how would you define in a few words this morphing between the mechanical device of photography grounded upon natural dynamics, and nature’s mechanical devices?

This is a fascinating question especially in light of the physics of transcoding as based on quantum computation (for example, Qubits) that draws our attention to information not as outside the physical state of affairs but as part of its constituents. In other words, the physics of images as transcodes or qubits is continuous with their extensions as sensory input/output without disrupting the so-called laws of nature.

Q. Blurring the traditional distinction subject/object, external/internal, doesn’t photography also blur the Husserlian claim for originary intentionality in any cognitive act?

There is common misconception with respect to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology regarding intentionality in relation to the traditional (more Kantian) subject/object divide.

The static phenomenological constitution in Husserl’s sense is not about intentional subjects and/or objects but rather intentional acts and/or objects (that is, noetic-noematic) and this completely obliterates the grounding of intentionality on the basis of a subject. On the other hand, subjectivity as cognitively originary or constitutive to any intentionality is a must! But it is also embedded into a genetic phenomenology that introduces the horizon of pre-givens, of systems and of historical posits all of which comprise our “life-world” (LebensWelt) at once determined and open without being ever totalized—and most importantly in opposition to the Heideggerian finitude of the Dasein that situates the subject/being in a totalized world (In-der-Welt-Sein).

Q. Do you think that a “logic of the real” is still possible, once it is detached from any logic of perception? What demarcates the “real,” mathematics or logic? In this case, are we back to an Aristotelian ontological universe?

A particular “logic of the real” is not the logic of reality. The sense in which the “logic of the real” is valuable to us has to do with change and how it is continuously transformed in relation to the organism’s emergent “logic of perception.” Since the organism’s technological extensions in the broadest sense are expanding and transforming the very concept of reality, then it is inevitable that our ontology is not grounded in either math or perception but in how the two are mutually transformed through a shared “logic” of transcoding.

Q. So what is the role of transcoding?

It is not so much an assigned role as it is a new dynamics that has changed the notion of realism from representational correspondence of objects and perceptions into a Unicode, or a transcode that is based on the same universal grammar or logic that is as infinite and inexhaustible as algorithm. In that sense it’s manifested culturally in what Peter Lunenfeld refers to in his contribution as “unimodern.”

Q. Can you define “evidence,” once that it is independent of any representational value?

Evidence has a new experiential modality, that is, more from a phenomenological standpoint than a naturalistic objective vantage point of a scientific worldview. Let’s think for example on the use of word evident in language to also imply obviousness, being given or encountered on the way.

In more than one respect, contemporary technological extensions/mediations are presenting us with “evidence” that poses less the question in reference to its corresponding objects but instead its correspondence in perception. That does not mean that the representational value is either lost or diminished but that instead of being addressed through a mimetic theory of knowledge it emerges out of a representational plexus of transcoded data that draws our attention to it as a new kind of evidence, neither lower nor higher, more or less constitutive.

Q. How can we rescue “correspondence” (adaequation) if that split between subject/ object is gone, and if the complexity of the systems of representation (Karl Popper) can never be reduced to a simple reference?

Correspondence or evidence like representational values do not disappear or diminish but rather change their reciprocal dynamics.

As much as evidence is contextualized through a Qubit and not necessarily in terms of a vulgar kind of Aristotelian realism so does correspondence plays a bigger role in the rapport between emergent “logic of perceptions” and transformative representations of “logic of reals”; in so far as we will always rely on pictures, signs, or symbols we will introduce a growing significance to ontological destratification. It is no longer crucial to center on an aesthetic analysis that is ontically hierarchical (vertical) but rather on a more horizontal one in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux and yet not simply proliferated and ad nausea orbiting outwards but also transcoded and integrative, like a birth of new galaxy.

The Moving of Photography Into the Realm of the Invisible, or the Historicity of Photonic Records

The origin of any history is grounded in myth and that of photography is no exception. More specifically, at its historical origin as technique photography coincided with its abduction into the quotidian sphere of appearances and soon after became, as Villem Flusser had provokingly argued, the second biggest “catastrophe” after the invention of writing.^[1]

Why catastrophe? For it irreversibly changed, like writing had before, the way we construct, construe, and intervene in the world. Photography challenged traditional systems of representations that offered similitude and that could no longer be supported, so it seemed, as happened in the case of the invention of writing that had a detrimental effect on oral traditions, dooming them to disappear. Before the historical occurrence of the second catastrophe, namely the invention of photography, images were either construed as transcendental projections of ideas or pure immanence, never integrating the idea with its shadow, being with its substance.

The image in the pre-photographic age was based on the fabrication of visual constructs that provided a continuous fulcrum to human perception within the natural realm.^[2] Photography has changed the relation of the image to its grounding in reality by implementing a novel discontinuity between its objecthood and its perception; in Husserlian terms, between the “image-objective content” and the “image-sensation content.”

It was photography in the nineteenth century that introduced the possibility of approaching the image as an inseparable “outside and inside.”^[3] For the first time, the “outside” and “inside” of an image seemed self-contained or self-referential, providing “reality” as a subset to its “image-sensation content” and perception as built-in as the “inside” of the structure of optical reality without relying on geometry and perspective as tools of measurement and construction of the visual field.

Despite earlier experiments, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s with camera obscura and possibly emulsion methods as ways to fix and transfer optics into painting or Athanasius Kircher’s “cinematic” projections of the “theatre of memory” that can be seen as precursors to photography and cinema, modern photography for the first time embodied the unity between transcendent idea-form (as photonic projection) and immanent proof of evidence.^[4]

But the myth of the photographic image—namely, its historical point of singularity as evidence and as an irreducible stable image—articulates a new form of writing, the writing of the laws of physics or nature’s logos, which inscribes through physics and chemistry (photons and emulsion) the propositional language of the seen.

The photographic image as evidence led inevitably to the reification of photography as ontologically grounded, and as result solidified the notion that photography is an objective constituents of reality. However, one must bear in mind that photography always had an obvious epistemic role in corroborating what is real and that the polarization between the photographic image as evidence (ontic) and photography as a tool of knowing (epistemic) never culminated in a dialectical interplay that reduced the real to the photographic. Quite to the contrary, the diversification of photo techniques, from the early experiments with photo-transferred images to digital technology widened the gulf between the instant of recording the image and its produced traces. In other words, between the camera obscura and the optical projection there lies a universe of possible modifications as to how the photographic image is both nascent and latent, originary and posthumous.

In as much as the temporal structure of myths is defined by what is delineated either as prehistorical (primordial) and post-historical (eschatological) time photography presented an image as the compounding of “before” and “after” or the “inside” and “outside” of temporality. The myth of the photographic image is, thus, like any myth, a potent beginning but also a bifurcation—a split between the logic of the real and the logic of perception.

Photography’s “catastrophic” impact on representational systems is not limited only to visual images but to writing itself. It’s worth mentioning two seminal modern writers, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, who looked at the photographic image as intimately connected to writing and its relation to representation, history, and memory.

The overlapping between the subject of photography and that of writing resulted in new changes. In Benjamin’s case such overlapping is invoked through the photographic image’s “loss of aura” and with Barthes in respect to the subject’s disappearance—the so-called death of the author.

For Benjamin, “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses”^[5] and hence infiltrates through the realms of images the unconscious that is marked by a new kind of literacy. And as Benjamin contends, “The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.”^[6]

Being is captured in photographs, as a singular “moment” entailing a sense of subjectivity that otherwise would have remained indeterminable in the flux of becoming. The photographic image had erased the arbitrariness of the subject by suggesting its language as mechanical, objective, and reproductive resulting in the amplification of the image’s experience as attesting to an interiority: a plane of pure subjectivity. Photography, thus, for the first time in human history, could annihilate the objectiveness and artifactness of images and instead render them as subjectified, or as the interiorization of the external world. Nonetheless, with such enactment the photographic image had absorbed the duality of a subject, being both “interiority” and a body or exterior object, and such duality makes our response to photo-images exceedingly emotive and charged.

As the first astrophysical photos of nebulas and microscopic images of plants and microbes were introduced, nothing remained “outside” the interiority of the perceiving subject. In other words, photography actually produced, contrary to common wisdom, the possibility of subjectivity in vision precisely for “allowing” two radical and novel possibilities: the first: the possibility of multiple interpretations to the image as opposed to the objectified pre-photographic image that retained its totality as indexical sign. The second: the efficacy of the image as “interiorization.”

The photographic image imploded as a non-indexical act of representation and indexical object at the same time in the sense that the “enigma of subjectivity” (to use Husserl’s expression) is epitomized in the twofold structure of consciousness as both intentional act and intentional object. Insofar as the intentional act of a subject is first extended as a body directing and moving itself towards a reference it also intends a particular sense.^[8] Such twofold structure is detectable in the historical bifurcation between the invention of photography as a scientific technological tool (techne) and its parochial translation into and its discovery as a medium (technique).

Insofar as the invention of photography historically bifurcated from its technological scientific discovery into the quotidian sphere that today we regard as “visual communication and culture” it transformed all languages and codes of information. And in as much as photography, more than any mass reproducible means, instigated the inception of pornography and kitsch within the public spheres it also provided the image of the social with a new ontological vividness; such as moments of political unrest, wars, genocides, or nuclear explosions. As photography gained the status of an unadulterated vision it simultaneously introduced and induced the desired illusion for perceptual immediacy. Photography, thus, like science, got situated within the “naturalistic attitude” or vulgar approach to life as science did assuming the knowledge of reality as self-evidence.^[9] Science is situated within the world of human experience and is about intervening with the real as much as it is about representing. And representations, as Ian Hacking remarked, are never singular and isolated but instead embedded in a given “web of beliefs,” in a contextual perspective that is intricately connected to what the theory itself delineates and posits as “real,” and in turn how such scientific theory is demarcated as a “normative” and legitimate science.^[10]

The concept of evidence grew beyond the scope of empirical and sensationalist epistemologies that assumed the role of perception to be constitutive of scientific theories.^[11] Instead, evidence became incorporated into the scientific “world-making” that culminated with both macrocosmic and microcosmic photo-recordings of “events” that no longer were simply explained as “direct” or “indirect” sensations but rather as part of a larger explanatory scheme.

Think, for example, about how the first bubble chamber photographs of particles’ collisions—which incidentally not unlike Leonardo’s insertion of the camera obscura into the liquid ocular organs—were “caught” in fluid. These bubble chambers photographs had to be decoded and interpreted as ghostly paths, routes of interactions, traces of collisions, evidence of invisible events. Quantum mechanical photographs that are infused with computer feeding and simulation, as Fermi Lab’s or CERN’s measuring and computer hybridized images, may be construed as forms of intertwined “events” that record the evidence of what cannot be seen, let alone be fixed as a correlate image to the real. The logic of the real and the logic of perception never seemed more apart.

Photographs, whether as in the form of quantum mechanical recordings or Nadar’s portrait of Baudelaire, are “events” that prevail on two levels: ontological and historical. What situates photography in a unique place even today is precisely its retention of reality and history in competing measures and without comprising its registration as “something” that occurred in the past (that is, a record or trace) and occurs at present (that is, an index or mark).

From the 1980s on, for artists-photographers such as Jeff Wall, Craigie Horsefield, or Roni Horn, photography as a form of event drew attention to the surface of images; in particular to the surface as a potent hiatus between its historical residue of signs and its perceptual stabilization as a staged reality. And since the 1990s, with the growing use of digitalization (and in a way that enforced post-produced aspects of photographic techniques) more artists are invested in exploring the perceptual stability generated by the photographic image and how the photographic image as a “picture” defines not only a visual field but a tactile object as well. However, such a tendency also resulted in a withdrawal from the historically coded image, with its specific epochal referents, to an emphasis on the saturated perceptual status of the photo-image as ahistorical. ^[12]

Artists, in some elusive ways are like sleepwalkers who preview paths, which are then more objectively constructed or discovered by science. Despite the obvious differences between the material and historical within both art and science their reciprocal relation is only resolved, if at all, in retrospect, namely, through a historical perspective.^[13] This leaves us with the distinct impression that the photo-image “dwells” in both realms and that it is equally constitutive of one’s sense being and of one’s knowledge of that which lies beyond the possibility of vision. Photo-images may also obey a hidden geometry and conceal orders as in the case of photographs of André Kertész or Gabriel Orozco’s accidental/staged photographs (as in his 1992 Cats and Watermelons). As such, photographs vacillate between enacting epistemological boundaries (that is, the limits of one’s knowledge) or the demarcating of the real (that is, one’s sense of experience) and obey the logic of the real as much as of perception. Photographs are the “events”—moments interrupted, halted, and arrested as seemingly static and fixed in an otherwise constant flux.

But “events” as fixed photographic marks are not fossilized and dead moments, but rather, the very invention—via intervention—of events. Events are the nesting and atomizing of a potential tendency/energy that otherwise obeys the quantum mechanical laws of nonlocality. The quantum mechanical limit on measuring a particle’s momentum and place at the same time is exemplified in photography’s temporal and historical structure. Inasmuch, quantum mechanics’ wave function introduces a superposition between multiple possible states and which upon observation “collapses” into a single state.^[14] Photographs are hence localizations of the world as event; here, the quantum physical construct of “collapse” can serve as an explanatory model as to how nonlocality is imperceptible yet constitutive to the understanding of natural laws. Observation, or the interacting agent, results in a reduction of multiple possible states into a single description. Likewise, photographic evidence is not simply the evidence of an event but rather the event-unfolding of evidence, detecting the marks and traces of photons and interweaving them into the “language of physics.” In turn, the language of physics is constituted by both “math” and “logic,” deductive and inductive methods and extrapolation of the real; what Einstein insisted as an “element of reality” within the physical theory.^[15]

Indeed, the language of quantum physics cannot be reduced or simply be construed as continuous with our ordinary common sensical natural language without a concentrated effort to explain its conceptual scheme. However, it is equally viable that our epistemologies are naturalized in ways that allow the laws of physics and of science to shape the ordinary conception of the real and move it again and anew from the false promise of finite and fixed realism to the open horizon of hypothesis and experiment. Put in another way, our language of physics must be reciprocally responsive to our natural language in a similar way to which the photographic image should be addressed as evidence produced and inasmuch event produced.

Photography is a language of evidence. And perhaps in ways that are far more subsuming than Heidegger’s notion of event (ereignis) as constitutive to being.^[16] This is so because evidence already enfolds event as a photonic collapse and frees us from the need to chain event to being and instead allows event to continuously became its emergent language. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

I’m thinking here of Chantal Akerman’s films, such as Je tu il elle and D’Est, that defy the possibility of relating the stream of cinematic photo-imagery to a narrative that is perceivable as a “story.” Instead we “witness” the film’s imagery as evidence that possibly entails hidden or broken world-lines, bits of narratives that are revealed in the saturated reality of images.

In a sense, one can construe the event within photography as a reduction into a single description of multiple states that otherwise would have remained irreducible and imperceptible within the proliferating flux of reality. The superposition of states in reality are turned by photography into a chain of discrete images that similar to Edward Muybridge’s photographic motion studies or Chris Marker’s La jetée narrate perception itself. And in the case of Akerman’s Je tu il elle it is the montage of the film that narrates streams of imagery that are erased momentarily by our very act of perceiving them as transient.

Photography is not only the language of evidence but also a tool. And as a tool it results in the erasure of writing by imagery. The archaic invention of tools by prehistorical humanoids was an outcome of the most fundamental aspect of techne—that of language. Here again Flusser’s contention about the invention of language as the first human catastrophe resonates with Heidegger’s understanding of the threefold evolution of techne as stemming from language to tool and to fully developed technology (technique) that resulted in the alienation and fragmentation of the embeddings of “being-in-the-world” into a disembodied state, reducing language to a mere tool and tools as extensions of the body into postulates of technology and not of being.^[17]

The technological invention of photography constitutes, in Heideggerian sense, a moment of “uncovering” of the “worldliness of the world”—a moment, or change in the ways in which we experience the world—precisely since the world in photographs is transformed into its aspects, its “thingness.” Its emulsified or printed image is scorched onto the surface of a film or a paper and announces the image as a “thing in the world” and no longer simply a representation of an image “of the world.”^[18]

Photographic evidence enables the exceeding acceleration of the real to be perceived as transient. The consequential split between the logic of the real and the logic of perception could be also understood as the problematization of photography as evidence, namely, of the naive or vulgar approach to the photographic image as a visible disclosure of the real in a totalized way and not as a partial and auxiliary trace/s of the real.

Photo-images and photo streaming—the real-time transcoding of photography—move in photonic speed and replace the evidence of the event with the event of evidence.

Correspondence and Verisimilitude of the Photo-Image

The split between the photographic image as evidence and the evidence of photography as trace raises the problem of correspondence. More specifically we may raise the following questions: how can we fully assess the notion of the real in photography if its photonic traces and indexical ciphers are contingently based on probabilistic distribution of dots, pixels, and marks and not on their corresponding phenomena? And in what way can we relate the photographic image to the knowledge of the real as implied by physics and science?

In order to address these questions regarding the epistemological foundations of photography in relation to the concept of correspondence, I will first address the concept of verisimilitude. In particular, how verisimilitude—truthlikeness—is positioned in photography in relation to evidence and data transference of traces of the real.

Before moving to photography let me examine the concept of verisimilitude as introduced by the late philosopher of science Karl Popper in order to articulate two irreconcilable aspects of scientific theories: history and methodology. Historically it appears that scientific theories are certain to be eventually falsified, even in part. That implies that even though the aim of science is objective truth, the history of science demonstrates that scientific progress inevitably entails the demise of a particular theory in favor of another yet a better one. This bit of Darwinism serves Popper in his methodological principle of falsification as opposed to the positivist commitment to verificationism (as expounded by Popper in his book Conjectures and Refutations).^[19]

Let us contemplate how the concept of verisimilitude will figure in the case of photography. Imagine for example two photographic images of an apple; one that is based on the traditional photographic shot and another that is computer generated or simulated. They both “appear” to resemble a particular apple and they are equally not the exact replications of the apple that they correspond to. Thus, neither one of the photo-images is a “truer” image. Rather than differ in degree of “veracity” they differ in their reliance on the stratum of evidence that renders them as “truth-like.”

The traditional photographed image corresponds to the real apple as a record of a photonic trace through exposure while the computer generated photo-image corresponds with the real apple as its modeling-simulation and therefore as its own constructed likeness, or similitude. Such images are separated by their respective degree of correspondence and not only similitude; while they may appear almost identical their representational manifolds are different. The question of representational manifolds concerns the way we view similitude not as based on a single isolated representation but on a complex nexus of representations which are organized as a system. It is hence such systems of correspondence and not the notion of similitude alone that can be construed as falsifiable and be evaluated as more or less truth-like. Therefore, the two examples of photo images of an apple share with two competing scientific theories the problem of verisimilitude, especially if we consider the intertwining of computer imaging and simulating with actual recording of phenomena both in science and photography. It is exceedingly harder to define our photographic and scientific representational manifolds as exclusively either corresponding to the real or rather corresponding with the real. Instead, representational manifolds, precisely because of their hybrid representational/interventional nature are assumed to be only approximation of the real, and therefore inherently falsifiable.

However, insofar as two competing theories are always assumed “false” when coming to be judged historically—since the degrees of verisimilitude of the theories in relation to experiment and observations always change—a paradox emerges. And as pointed out by various critics of Popper’s position regarding verisimilitude, a paradox emerges here as well, for it seems logically contradictory to suppose a degree of truthlikeness on the basis of “relative fallacy.” Popper, on his part, would argue that a particular theory would not emerge as more or less false compared to another false theory—since fallacy is not and cannot be conceived as relative—but instead approximate more closely, both quantitatively and qualitatively, truth.

Our world of science and visual communication has changed since the decades of Popper’s introduction of the concept of verisimilitude. Our world is of a growing intertwining between representing and intervening with evidence. And as a result, the very concept of the real is problematized and poses a twofold question: what kind of evidence do we find in reality that can be held as independent and above the underlying parameters of the theory with its produced evidence? The intertwining of evidence and reality may lead to epistemological relativism, risking circular logic that either renders knowledge as arbitrarily determined or historicized but never substantiated logically.

Popper, on his part, attempted to offer an alternative to the relativistic conceptions of scientific theories as doomed to be eventually repudiated or falsified, and he did so by emphasizing the aim of scientific discovery in general as progressing towards higher degrees of objective knowledge even though it often relies on probabilistic hypotheses to secure its success. His introducing of the concept of verisimilitude to that of truth provides an alternative to positivistic accounts that evaluate propositions either as false or true. Instead, verisimilitude relies on a metalogical consideration of what Popper called “background knowledge” and suggests a highly intricate web of assertions when assessing a theory. Similarly, photo-images need to be contextually decoded in order to determine the nature of their evidence, their ontological grounds.^[20]

For Popper, inasmuch as a given theory cannot be proved or falsified on the basis of a single testing a more comprehensive approach to truth is necessary. An approach anchored in part by Alfred Tarski’s definition of truth as conceived through translation and meta-language. Tarski’s metalogical definition of truth relies on translatability and implies the “likeness” or correspondence between explanation and experiment within a defined and outlined context of “reality.” Correspondence in Popper’s articulation implied a complex metalogical conception of truth as being inexhaustibly “translated” from one “language” to another.^[21]

Introduced to our context, the concept of verisimilitude, as relative but not relativistic criteria for critical assessment, can elucidate how photography and the photographic image rely on a concept of correspondence that is not simply based on direct “raw perception” or “sense data” of the real, but rather, on metalogical constituents. In other words, the concept of correspondence is endlessly inferred from parallel and multiple systems of representation, which are never entirely reciprocally reducible. And so, the very concept of correspondence is to be understood as a complex process/method/conjecture of verisimilitude of a theory/image and as the approximation of “truth” and not its “relative falsity.” The photo-image corresponds with the “real” but does not correspond to the “real.”

In order to explicate carefully the concept of verisimilitude and its epistemological implications to photography we need to be reminded of the reciprocity and polarization of the photographic evidence and its corresponding signified objects, namely, between the logical structure of perception and the logical construction of reality as two distinct aspects that can be found also in the way in which scientific theories draw our attention to the rapport between theoretical explanation and its significance to experience. But, unlike science, the photographic image “appears” as a first-order object of perception and not only as its extrapolation.

In the case of foundational physics (for example, quantum physics) the impact on cognition and how it’s explained is of paramount importance since it defies common sense intuition about the notions of space, time, and causation.

On the one hand, photography’s logic of perception should be addressed within the epistemological context provided by Popper’s concept of correspondence, whereby the illusion of immediacy assumed by empiricist theories of knowledge is replaced by the concept of verisimilitude. Instead of supporting an understanding of photography as reiterating the myth of the given—of “raw sense data”—verisimilitude introduces correspondence as a complex fulcrum for the image’s perception.

On the other hand, with its reliance on verisimilitude, photography’s logic of the real asserts, “background knowledge”—both historically and methodologically—and serves as an apparatus to approximate the “real” as closely connected to our definition of objective truth. Photography, thus, corresponds to the “real” only insofar as the “real” is defined through its correspondence to an objective truth, which, in turn, is attained through continuous attempts to test and explain what we see. Photography, like a scientific theory, relies on its verisimilitude as a relative quantification and qualification of its translatable content, namely, how the imaging of a particular historical content corresponds to its recording.

Photography as connected to the concept of correspondence and verisimilitude advances a paradigm of realism. And such a paradigm provides a new way to approach and articulate the split between the logic of perception and logic of the real. Photography’s reliance on the notion of verisimilitude cannot be explained solely in terms of the image’s content and its conditions of visibility. Instead, the photo-image needs to be addressed through its translations to other kinds of evidence, some of which are not visible. The verisimilitude of the photo-image depends on its translatability to other nonvisible modes of representing the “real.” Photography’s incorporation of modes of intervening implies a radical sense of realism. Rather than simply representing the “real,” photography obliterates the need to ground “realism” within an “objective” epistemology of mere visibility. The outcome is a grounding of the image no longer in either Platonist or Aristotelian senses.

Photography’s assessment as based on the concept of verisimilitude (truthlikeness) is tied to a “realist” view of correspondence according to which the “real” is construed not as a proof or an evidence of truth, but rather its extension. Photography’s truthlikeness is in part its own irreducible evidence as photonic trace and not a demonstration of extra-logical reality extended to the senses. A precise epistemology of the photo-image would entail its corresponding evidence as a form of transference, the transference of a given knowledge into a sign or trace. And such transference cannot be reduced to its semiotic constituents either but rather retained within a discursive context that allows multiple levels of description to elucidate what is bracketed as “knowledge.”

Let me now mention again the bubble chamber particles’ collision photographs and their implications on the ontological status of the image as cognitively processed. In particular the ways in which artists from early modernity onward articulated through their reliance on photography as trace, evidence, and the possibility of the instantiation of event.

Quantum physics and specifically bubble chamber photo recordings are typologically decoded in relation to the traces that particles leave upon collision. The traces however are not of the particles but solely the outcome of their collision.^[22] Particles’ collisions are traced through photographic plates—evidence—that is marked by their decay but not through a direct correspondence to their “presence” in spacetime. Consequently, quantum physical photographs are decoded as “drawings” or “tracing” of conjectural effects of interactions or events that are invisible, or at least too small to be visible. The bubble chamber is a “relational apparatus” that recodes the in/stability of a particle into a mark or a pattern that is identifiable with its charge, say either neutral or unstable. The lines and spirals that are evident in such photo plates are indicative of the physical nature/character of particles but not of their actual “real” appearance.

What appears in these photos is evidence not of appearances—phenomena—but rather “maps” and pathways of otherwise invisible interactions that help us understand how the theory corresponds to the testing. “The number of unstable particles that travel far enough to decay in the bubble chamber is limited. They leave characteristic decay signatures that enable the parents to be identified . . . in bubble chambers this is a comparatively simple matter of visual pattern recognition.”^[23] In a sense, these photo plates are diagrams or drawings extrapolated from scientific apparati (for example, a bubble chamber, a collider, and so on) and are complementary to the scientist’s sketches and diagrams that “re-present” the equations, the conceptual scheme of the theory. Photography as means of corresponding with real is a representational manifold—an organized system of inferences rather than a single referential image—that assists us in mapping, classifying, recoding, and reiterating evidence of interactions and events that occur only to be tangential to perception even though perception relies on such interactions as their physical fulcrum. Photography hence introduces a kind of a demarcation of knowledge that guides us out of the labyrinth of perception (the empiricist “flux of sensations”) into the encounter with a type of evidence that is no longer grounded in or by the senses but rather that contains perception as an aspect of its reality.

At facilities such as the Fermi lab in Batavia, Illinois, or CERN, the home of the world’s largest particle accelerator in Switzerland, the photographic imaging of experiments are used as means to assess and reconstruct the theoretical posits in a way analogous to the artist/photographer that introduces epistemological constructs into the visible field of the picture. In both cases, the event and the photographic trace unfold twice: once as evidence that corresponds to the real and secondly as a trace/evidence that corresponds with the real. The trace/evidence that corresponds with the real edifies the image as a shadow reality and that is extrapolated from scientific knowledge that underlines the system or experiment. “The events [that] will have hundreds of particles in the final state, imaginative systems of electronic detectors and software have been designed to do the same job at incredibly high data-acquisition rates.”^[24] In the realm of art photography, integration of analog and digital means of photo imaging results in a construction of hyper-reality that can no longer be reduced to direct perception. Rather, photographs are amalgams of the “real” and the “virtual.” They reverse the role or sequence of cause and effect and that of experiment and construction. The same integration can be said in reference to photography’s replacement of its critical instant or “shutter” (that is, production) with that of digital imaging (that is, postproduction). There is post-productive aspect of photography today that extends the temporal span of intervention artists employ photography as a mode of producing a signature—overlaying the evidence of the photonic trace. Photographs are thus substantiated and charged by the artist’s subjective import of image processing, overlaying the singular instant of the image as physical photonic evidence. Similarly, quantum physical photo-images are decoded as “decay signatures” of events/interactions.

How can one account for the subatomic reality that is provided by physics through photography? The impossibility of representing at once two kinds of correspondence—physically and theoretically constitutive and visually perceivable—is manifested in the physical apparati (for example, accelerators) being subordinated themselves to the reality of visible objects, tools, machines, and systems on the one hand and their corresponding invisible interactions and information on the other hand. Photography, the apparatus and its image aspect, emerges as a witness to the impossibility to see without decoding a “signature.” In other words, there is another sense of correspondence through which photography’s traces of decay are understood as “signatures” of interactions; interactions that took place between measurement and observation and resulted in discrete levels of descriptions. The evidence of photography, its facticity, its irreducible experiential content, is neither self-evident nor reducible to a single description. Rather, the evidence of photography is assumed through a corresponding of the image to aspects (even though mostly invisible and linguistic) of the real. As such, it is the verisimilitude of the image to its other modalities as evidence of the real that alters our perception of reality as partially hidden and removed from direct perception. As such, photography instructs us in accepting the domains which lie beyond the realm of the senses and which are still delineated as its boundaries, its folds. Photography’s ability to articulate the invisible constituents of the real de-accelerates events and diverts them to their corresponding references. These events turn out to be the only evidence that one may rescue from the multiple visual equivocations of images that are never mirroring knowledge and reality as appearances. What we find to our amazement in the de-accelerated photo-image is that verisimilitude is always part photonic and part historic. In other words, we are reminded of the origin of photography as grounded in a myth—one equally constituted as evidence within the realm of nature underlined by the laws of physics and as historical evidence of human experience.

What Happens to Photographic Images in the Age of Transcoding?

I would like now to conclude with an examination of the current aesthetic dynamics that have transposed photography from the realm of aesthetics as grounded in physics and history to a radicalized aesthetic sphere that poses a new phenomenological quandary. Transcoding’s radical role is due to its depolarization of the relation between photographic image as a negative and a positive mediation of object. And such radicalized aesthetics would have never occurred without the role of transcoding in obliterating the ontological fixity of representation.

I would first outline three main senses to transcoding that often overlap and particularly relate to the photographic image:

Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science, which employs an aesthetic approach to scientific theories through transcoding, is an excellent exemplification of the last three decades’ rise of the computer system as the lingua franca that replaced the desire for a meta-language—after they were debunked by modern logics delineating of the limits of systems, theorems such as Gödel’s and Löwenheim-Skolem. Wolfram’s work probes the ways in which elementary computational systems may substitute traditional mathematics in explaining complexity and arguing for laws governed by algorithms to explain fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as other fields of reserach on natural phenomena.^[26]

But above all, Wolfram’s project is irreverent to science, such as quantum physics, by placing aesthetic principles above foundational laws.

Representation is inevitably connected to the idea of science and as conveying a picture of world-knowledge. However, science, like history and photography, rely on interventional parameters of cybernetic systems and communication; and these systems are fluid and ever changing and furthermore manifest a disequilibrium that is inherent to systems that rely on transcoding.

As in the case of photographic images nowadays, transcoded data not only is used for the purpose of converting images’ formats and platforms, but is also guided by an aesthetic principle. And such a principle regulates the image as evidence and trace of the computer system itself. Computer generated non-indexical photo-imagery is a perfect example of the merging and erasing the “origin” of a sign through its transcoded data. Thus, seen from the vantage point of transcoding the photo-graphic image is in as much photonic and graphic, part natural and part simulated.

Photography has been wedged between science and art through transcoding and has called into question the very need to explain it as a residual document, namely, as a trace of something else or the evidence of phenomena other than its own. The emergence of transcoding obliterates the format-platform as ontologically stratified—traditionally construed in terms of the photographic plate or negative—as the photographic image loses its necessary correspondence to events in the physical world that lie outside its phenomenal evidence and thus is diverted into a kind of intervention without relying on representational verisimilitude.

The photographic image is caught between science and art’s vacillating between constitutive laws or intentional constitution and their transcoding into a myriad of representational platforms. More specifically, it is this ongoing vacillation between representational models to intervening through transcoding that reassigns a new role to aesthetics. An aesthetics of disequilibrium.

To what extent will we be able to negotiate our intentional stance and re-present our ideas and interventions in an age of perpetual transcoded data? The photographic image is peculiarly found at the crossroads of a myriad of possible significations, each appearing to be an equally valid and important “source.” And at the heart of this phenomenon lies transcoding as allowing digital and systemic transference of photographic images through binary coding in multiple platforms. The inevitable outcome is the experience of aesthetic disequilibrium that violently unsettles any ontological fixity to a photographic image, either digitally seen on a screen or printed onto a surface.

All images, photographic or pictorial, transitory or static, are tactile surfaces. It is the perceptual differentiation of various tactile surfaces that cognitively registers them as “real” or “illusory.”^[27]

However, transcoding reduces and at times obliterates tactile differentiation of surfaces by dynamically removing the image in relation not only to its source (that is, extension) but also intention. And such effects raise the question: to what extent will we be able to negotiate our intentional stance and re-present our ideas and interventions in an age of perpetual transcoded data?

Can such aesthetic disequilibrium mirrored by art’s scientification of the “given”—in Husserl’s sense—the vulgarization of the experiential and its removal from any phenomenological—transcendent/immanent relation into the sphere of habitual perception? Or better, can such aesthetic disequilibrium risks art’s future, as in Heidegger’s sense, as a way to arrive at the disclosure of “truth” that cannot be procured through science but only through poetry? These questions, thus, remain crucial to whether the dismantling of intentionality as result of transcoding will imply above art’s end and our ability to imagine art despite the loss of both intentional critical autonomy and an intentional horizon that does not diminish into science and technology.

Transcoding, as we encounter it in photographic image production, stands for the general repudiation of structural, formal, and thematic-content constraints. Transcoding’s obliteration of the image’s representational primacy implies above all the fluidity of images coding as they change not only formatting but perception itself. There is thus a signification to which all photographic images today are trans-coded not as marks but as logarithms. In other words, all images’ intentional constitutions are ultimately reduced to a single platform. And such a predicament of an all-embracing digital platform, a uni-platform, contradicts the sense of multitude and multiplatitude which we assume as part of our consumer driven culture. Here, it is neoliberal aesthetics that celebrates multicultural codes that appears most deceiving and erratic since its binding forces are the ultimate manifestation of the forces of capitalism and technology married into a single kaleidoscopic aesthetics.

How are we to analyze transcoding in light of such bias? Should we give up any phenomenological attempt to retain what aesthetics means in terms of cognition and consciousness and assume an ontological indifference to aesthetic judgment, like a robot or a computer?

Beyond the phenomenological scope, aesthetic disequilibrium is also found in recent accounts, such as Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, as a fate to be avoided.

In Rancière’s case, art’s political potential to seize representation is “discovered” in the inexhaustible vacillations between image production and its political subjectification. Rancière’s conception of representation does not address the intentional-phenomenological query by precisely positing the image’s “distribution of the visible or sensile” on the premise of arresting or dictating representation rather than replacing it with intervention alone. Rancière’s problematization of the spectator and his call to post-mimetic representational modalities do not face the aesthetic disequilibrium in respect to transcoding or the technological implications but only in reference to the “unpresentable” or the sublime.^[28] It is Lyotard and Baudrillard who would have been more receptive to the far-reaching cybernetic implications on aesthetics, and who are both used now by Rancière as a post “postmodern” critical foil to reassigned aesthetics.^[29]

Aesthetic disequilibrium, like political disequilibrium, is largely affected by new technologies, communication and social media, all of which rely on transcoding. Redirecting art as means for engaging in a constructive politics, as Rancière’s motives, may appear plausible but the question that remains unaddressed is what happens to art—as in the case of photography—in a state of an ongoing aesthetic disequilibrium? Can the photographic image still entail trace and evidence of reality despite transcoding’s subversion of representation and correspondence?

Notes

^{1. Villem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Gottingen: European Photography, 1984).}

^{2. On the one hand, the Platonist worldview offered a way to decode the visible precisely
by invoking the invisible dimensions that are inseparable not from perception (as
later Merleau-Ponty ‬would argue) but rather from the structure of reality, on an
ontological level. Thus, images’ appearance testified their invisible “ideas-forms”
from which they are projected as in Plato’s allegorical tale of the cave with its
shadows’ casting on its walls.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ On the other hand, the Aristotelian categorical
conception grounded images as singular aspects of generic types. It moved to the fore
of reality, the physical, tangible, and visible facets of the real but it left the
duality of Ousìa unresolved as Being/Substance. Here I’m relying on Franz Brentano’s insight in his
often-overlooked book On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). And unlike Plato’s dualistic ontology
that relied on pluralism and infinity and that defied the reduction of image into
Being or Substance, or else Function, the Aristotelian philosophical method introduced
reductionism to the very conception of ontology and as result images become a testimony
or a proof of the real, of what exists. Think of Aristotle’s definition of a human
or a horse: a categorical image. See Ernst Cassirer’s book Substance and Function‬‬‬ ‬(New York: Dover, 1953).}

^{3. It is in 1826 that Nicéphore Niépce possibly produced the first photograph.}

^{4. Leonardo’s insertion of a hypothetical camera obscura into human visual anatomy foresaw
the mechanics of human perception as based on the inversion of left/right.Whether
or not The Shroud of Turin is Leonardo’s work and a manifestation of his pre-modern experiments with transferring
and fixing a camera obscura’s reflection onto an image-surface does not minimize the
extent to which he can be seen as “photographic.” Athanasius Kircher followed the
Neo-Platonist tradition of the theater of memory (Teatro della Memoria) can be seen as forerunner to analogical memory systems (before the digital computer),
and the cinematic sensory nexus, a kind of gesamtkunstwerk.}

^{5. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, sct. 13. in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken Books, 1968).}

^{6. Walter Benjamin, cited in: Germany—The New Photography, 1927–1933. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 27.}

^{7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 14.}

^{8. As articulated by Edmund Husserl in his books Logical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1970) and Thing and Space (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2010).}

^{9. This particular problem of the “naturalistic attitude” as opposed to the “phenomenological
approach” is fully analyzed by Husserl and situated within the framework of the so-called
life-world (LebensWelt) in his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction
to Phenomenological Philosophy.}

^{10. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).}

^{11. Ernst Mach’s sensationalism and his “Thought-Economy” can be regarded as paradigmatic
of such positions.}

^{12. Jeff Wall had always insisted on creating “pictures” and not photographs and in that
respect we can argue that the amplification of the ontologically saturated photo-image
as picture perception attests to the weakening of the historical coding of photography.
As opposed to Jeff Wall, Walead Beshty’s photographic work seems to synthesize the
photo-image as a saturation of non-indexicality and surface on the hand and historical
de-saturation or open-endedness on the other hand.}

^{13. This is how we now historicize Daguerre’s Dioramas as precursor to the cinematic image.}

^{14. Quantum collapse is the reduction into a single “eigenstate” out of many possible
“eigenstates” or wave packets. See David Albert’s Quantum Mechanics and Experience, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).}

^{15. Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description
of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” in Physical Review 47 (1935): 777–80.}

^{16. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2001).}

^{17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008).}

^{18. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art.}

^{19. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, (Oxford: Routledge, 2002).}

^{20. Context-sensitivity points to a need to conceive truth not simply in terms of correspondence
to phenomena that can be reduced to sense-data but also extend to the translatability
of conceptual nexuses of phenomena into experimentation, testing, observation, and
more so today the trans-coding of any information to other systems or manifolds of
representation.}

^{21. Popper’s concept of the so-called world-3 purports an epistemology that is grounded
in a stratified ontology; see Popper’s Objective Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Popper’s conception supported a version
of realism inspired by Plato’s pluralism whence the ontological basis of “truth”—be
it numbers, equations, theorems, theories, phenomena and observations, and so on—allows
reciprocal translatability without ever being reduced to a single proposition.}

^{22. “The world’s first neutrino observation in a hydrogen bubble chamber was found Nov.
13, 1970, on this historical photograph from the Zero Gradient Synchrotron’s 12-foot
bubble chamber. The invisible neutrino strikes a proton where three particle tracks
originate (right). The neutrino turns into a muon, the long center track. The short
track is the proton. The third track is a pi-meson created by the collision.”}

^{23. Wim Cuppens, et al., “Identification of particles from a collision by their decays,”
http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/BCwebsite/06.htm.}

^{24. Wim Cuppens, et al., “Identification of particles from a collision by their decays,”
http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/BCwebsite/06.htm.}

^{25. In the past decade, the possibility of quantum computation, viz., of qubits, entailing
a coding theory that attempts to optimize information propagation and to arrive at
the same symmetries as the ones dictated by the laws of physics—quantum theory. Thus,
implying a link and a new fundamental principle connecting the two disciplines: the
standard quantum theory and quantum computation. Information turns accordingly to
be a physical property as energy and following this interpretation transcoding is
an extension of qubit computational levels or strands. See Jesse Russell and Ronald
Cohn, eds., Qubit (Bookavika: Lennex Corp., 2012).}

^{26. http://www.ted.com/speakers/stephen_wolfram.html}

^{27. Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).}

^{28. It is interesting to note that Rancière’s critique of Lyotard’s concept of the Kantian
sublime as the postmodern “incommensurable” and “unpresentable” is itself a testimony
for the former avoidance of any techno-cybernetic constructs of culture and politics,
let alone art. See Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007).}

^{29. Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) are perfect examples of post-structural theory that
came to grips with role of technological issues.}

Ruins

Dialogue

Q. One of the implications of your analysis of “ruins” in aesthetics is its twofold structure in relation to allegory and spectacle. Yet, can allegory and spectacle evade their mutual annihilation? And if not, what does it say about future aesthetics?

A “ruin” is a priori an overdetermined polysemic object, which may be apprehended linearly, in cause and effect associations, or nonlinearly in other and freer associative modes. The phenomenon is not apprehended immediately in its totality, but rather in multiple slow grasps of insights. It can be approached (inter alia) in phenomenological, semiotic, or psychoanalytic aesthetics. Whether it is experienced and enjoyed in its spectacularity or in its conceptual theory (or at times at some possible allegorical dimension) depends upon the level of our apprehension and the intensity of our affect. It may also depend upon the level of analysis which we seek or which we obtain. Rather than in a relation of mutual exclusion, a rich Moebius strip model would propose a relation of constant reversal from the one back and forth with the other, in a system of coexistence in this “twofold structure.” The interpretant may on the one hand surrender to the power of its exciting affect (be it depressive, or anxious, or ecstatic, and so on), while on the other hand it may try to master the ensuing affect. In (Peircian) semiotics, a firstness occurs which is followed by a dyadic relation between the experiencing observer and the ruin. Thenceforth, a triadic relation would be constituted wherein aesthetic schemata and narrative constructs begin to be fathomed to reframe a deconstructed object. In turn, a psychoanalytic principle of free association pertinent to ruins would come into play to highlight various nonlinear aspects of aesthetic apprehension: the object analyzes us as much as we think we analyze it. The various agencies of the mind switch according to an aesthetics of tension or struggle—an internal push and pull is thus matched by an inevitable external pull and push to play at first randomly with the object, so as to gain insights into the psyche’s functioning when it comes to ruins (negative vs. positive nostalgia as we discussed in our research). All approaches may converge in the aesthetics of our digital age.

Q. Federico Fellini’s fading fresco in Roma as well as his ending/fading in Satyricon seems to evoke the intertwining of historical and ephemeral. For Anselm Kiefer, on the other hand, the spectacle of “ruins” is more ambiguous and suggests a sense of loss that in itself begs analysis. Do you recognize a kind of “aesthetic infatuation” with “ruins” in multiple modes and sensibilities in contemporary culture or see them as one?

The notion of ruins always leads to every individual’s relationship to death: for example, a twenty-year-old may feel or may be suicidal, a seventy-year-old may be anxious about it or live in denial of the inevitability of death, and so on. In depressive characters, a loss or a catastrophe has already occurred so that ruins mirror their own death-in-life. On the other hand, for anxious characters a catastrophe is about to occur so that, indeed, ruins are signifiers and symbols of their internal “memento mori.” Once again, spectatorial response to Fellini’s fading fresco in Roma will depend upon individual spectators, not to mention the aesthetic awe we may feel for Fellini’s filmic mastery of this evanescence. Even Kiefer’s allusions to the Shoah are not monolithic. Individuals will react variously with feelings of dread or desolation, or perhaps anger and rage, not to mention survivor’s guilt. Perhaps forgiving, or something about Peirce’s “thirdness,” may not be accessible when it comes to such grave matters. The residues of nineteenth-century infatuation and (mistakenly “noble”) melancholy regarding “ruins” may still be with us, but they operate at different velocities in the psyche, in different cultures, or in different eras. We tried to show that such melancholy is one of the multiple apprehensions of the /ruin/ phenomenon. The past, intellectual history, or the history of theories is not ever superseded, as much as it is however taken into account in order to make it a source of insight, perhaps a source of strength.

Q. Unlike contemporary critics, such as Rancière and Žižek, you offer an interpretation of art and cinema in particularn not as a political plateau or action but rather as a horizon of memory. Any thoughts?

Aesthetics precedes ethics (the infant begins by liking/disliking before judging whether it’s good/bad). Perhaps this is why Kant goes in reverse order (from the second to the third of his Critiques), as the aesthetic realm is more primal and harder to grasp. The power of the “Muses,” in museums, (art museums, cinema museums, and so on), captures us into physical and mental universes wherein the new encyclopedias of humanity’s memories gravitate. We live in a new world where art, artifacts, and documents are now digitized, miniaturized, “immaterialized,” and especially made instantaneously immediate. This does not seem to alter questions of aesthetics, though we may argue that such a difference of degree is tantamount to a difference of kind and therefore constitutes an obviously new terrain for new aesthetics. This leads us to speculate, however, about the new configurations of “museums” into the future. The inchoative contemplation inherent in “theory” (theorein) may or may not interweave with an ongoing categorical imperative. In reverse, the dominance of this imperative (and its super-egoic demands) only temporarily obscures the to kalon from its adjacent ka’gathon. In our vignette, the spectator of Kobe’s earthquake results does not remain paralyzed and shocked into inaction, any more than the immediate access to the history of cinema signifies being forever overtaken by memories. On the contrary, it could be argued that the immediacy of access to Resnais’s films mentioned in our research (Night and Fog or Hiroshima mon amour) may have huge psychological and practical efficacy.

Q. The use of ruins has a historical origin, associated with modernity. Do you mean to consider the future of this peculiar memento mori as the final destination of modernity?

A ruin is a leftover, debris or flotsam, a document, sometimes a system of decodable signifiers derived from history. Sometimes the thresholds between history and mythology are hard to delineate. In the vignette below regarding Vasari’s envy of Leonardo, we shall see that there may be a need to interweave the use of new technologies to retrieve a long lost Battle of Anghiari along with what the English historian R. G. Collingwood described as historical imagination. Hence the connection between such a historical imagination and the psychoanalytic principle of free (meaning “free-er”) association. Baudelaire coined the terms “modern” and “modernity” as denial or repudiation of what was emerging in his day as the new industrial age—along with the other depressed romantic poets and thinkers who saw then the end of their world and sought shelter and escape in another past fantasized universe.

Q. Considering that metal does not last as stone does, do you think that our future landscapes will be deprived of ruins and will be filled with debris? And what kind of feeling might be associated with that lack of “shaped” past?

In Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (upon which Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was based) there are loads of detritus and debris called “kipple” which seem to be ubiquitous, as if humans on Earth, the waste land, could not rid themselves in the present from the debris from the past, in a predicament where you can neither look forward nor can you look in the rearview mirror. Sci-fi and speculative fiction make us anticipate new forms of ruins, beyond stone, metal, or even electronic chips and holograms of our own passage and transit through the universe. As far as scholars like ourselves are concerned, we are already living in a world where libraries are shifted to cyberspace, where everything we have written in a lifetime can be transferred into a single USB flashkey, which itself can be immaterialized into the ethernet. This does give us some insight into the new concepts which will be needed to think through new realities and new aesthetics!

Preliminary: “Ruins” vs. “Debris”

At a fundamental level, aesthetics most often comes to grips with death and the death drive (Thanatos), the world’s entropy or the self’s mortality, the push and pull of (im)mortality and the salvaging of the object or that of the subject, the reappropriation of the object, or one’s self-definition in the mirror of death. In this spirit, it would seem that an exploration of the concept of “ruins” and its adjacent notion of “debris” may provide an entry into such basic questions of aesthetics—as well as aesthetics in the digital age. A series of vignettes will be presented in this research to reflect upon the notions of “ruins” and “debris” in order to proceed sideways to a vision of twenty-first-century aesthetics. Albeit with marked differences, both ruins and debris evoke notions of the past, or death and destruction. “Ruins” may evoke a more or less distant past, along with the numbing effect of time, and perhaps the desire to query or to fantasize about leftover objects from the past, the fantasy, for example, to reconstitute the object in its pristine state before it became a ruin. In contrast, the sight of “debris” may convoke the sense of destruction, the pulverization or annihilation of the object, perhaps even the residual rage involved in such destruction, and moreover the impossibility of conjuring the beforehand of the destruction. The imaginary or scientific (re)construction or apprehension of various pasts as well as their possible continuum into the present may feed the semiotic opposition between the notion of “ruins” vs. “debris.” This opposition may thus prove to be an enriching instrument of existential and artistic investigation for contemporary aesthetics. Afterward, the series of vignettes so presented may also be helpful in leading to the question of what we may construe as “ruins” in our digital age.

Ruins

A depressive sense of loss runs through the alternatively eloquent, sad or moving meditations of nineteenth-century romantics (be they the idealist philosophers, the English Lake poets, or Chateaubriand) at the sight of Greco-Roman ruins. The gloomy nostalgia and irremediable sense of disconnect (from an idealized and inaccessible golden past), and the loss and end of past civilizations, triggered and mirrored the pervasive sense of their own mortality in the melancholy disposition of their own internal world. On both ends of their lifetime spectrum, their horizons of expectancies fade or die: Looking towards the ruins from the past, the scenarios of imagined catastrophes regarding what must have occurred in the demise of past civilizations justifies anxiety and even dread at the anticipation of equally constructed dead-ends and catastrophes in the future. This may also have justified the romantics’ overwhelming sense of vanity regarding efforts, struggles, or forward striving. Later, this was to be well summed up in the aftermath of WWI by Valéry’s well-known “nous autres civilisations savons que nous sommes mortelles,”—or by the strand of Kierkegaard’s, Sartre’s, or Heidegger’s existentialist notion of dread, and of being cast down and abandoned into this world.

Yet the reactive feelings elicited by ruins from the past may not always have been analogous. For example, in his mid-sixteenth-century exile in Rome, surrounded by the same Roman ruins, the poet Jean du Bellay realizes instead how much he misses his home country. The Roman ruins stir in him the longing for “home,” for the softness of life in his native (mothering) Angers. The ruins from Roman times drives him to reconnect with a beforehand of what in his life was not “ruined,” now that his exile makes him face the “ruins” of his life. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym^[1] makes a good case for the distinction between “nostalgia” as the incurable disease, (just as John Burton did in his renowned Anatomy of Melancholy), and nostalgia as a necessary creative emotion. In psychoanalytic thinking, we could speak about the necessity of looking deeply at the past in order to struggle in the present with our current conflicts.

The Fresco in Fellini’s Roma

In a fictional sequence from Fellini’s Roma (1972), an archeological team working through the subways in Rome comes upon an ancient Roman fresco, vibrant by its design and its compelling colors. It had obviously remained heretofore unknown and unseen by human eyes since Roman days. However, just as the archeologists find themselves mesmerized by their discovery, the fresco slowly evaporates from the wall under their helpless gaze. Contact with outside air proves fatal (—or is it contact followed by the repudiation of coexistence with modern times? or symbolically, is it not symptomatic of the way the past keeps its secrets?). At the aesthetic intersect of psychological and historical dimensions, it could not sustain being brought back to life after two thousand years of silence and obscurity. The archeologists are thus caught in a dual aesthetics, first the one of privileged discovery and then the aesthetics of stupor in the affect provoked by the simultaneous invaluable loss. Freud was fascinated by archeology, fascinated by Rome with its layers of historical strata which are not unlike the labyrinths of our psychic structures. Fellini stuns his film characters along with his spectators. The sight of Greco-Roman ruins provokes a wide range of emotions which may vary according to characters and temperaments and historical times. We may also imagine a blind person who recovers sight for a few instants and simultaneously loses this precious sight again. Associated with that film sequence could be the feeling of disconnect upon slowly waking up from an intense dream, when furthermore despite intense attention, the mind loses its grip on the recall of a dream upon full awakening. Yet the dream’s effect and intensity permeates into the waking day, just as the evanescent fresco permeates Fellini’s film as a whole. A provocative glimpse of the there-and-then of ancient Rome effloresces into the here-and-now of twentieth-century Rome, albeit in its claustrophobic life experienced underground. Present time had stopped in a quantum jump backwards 2,000 years, in time to catch the fresco of past Roman life and art in such a flashlight glimpse. Nevertheless, Fellini’s simulacrum of this evanescent fresco has been appropriated into the perceptual episodic memory of the modern psyche. The “loss” configured in this film narrative may not be the depressive loss mentioned above as much as the frustration of being cut off from possible epiphanies and thrills of creative meaning systems that the work of archeology had painstakingly retrieved. While referring to archeology, and to the metaphor of the archeology of the unconscious (in Freud’s topographic [first] model of the mind), we may think instead of innumerable examples different from Fellini’s sequence, wherein artworks from the past are rediscovered but also successfully preserved from the ruins of the past into the present. As we’ll discuss in our conclusion, is it not indeed what the haunting power of museums and art history are about?

Retrieving Laocoön and His Sons

In contrast with the shock of the disappearance of a vestigial past by Fellini, the past is often resurrected and celebrated. We may think of the nineteenth-century “discovery” of the city of Troy (whose silent ruins occult its savage destruction mythologized in the Iliad) or, on a much smaller scale closer to us, the retrieval of the Riace bronzes. “Schliemann’s Troy” was indeed a successful archeological excavation under the site of Hissarlik, in the search for the Trojan world presumed to have existed, whereas the discovery of the Riace bronzes was a real surprise. Documentaries were made in sync with the memorable joy of the Italian community, not to mention international art scholars. The retrieval of the spectacular Riace bronzes deep at sea in 1974 may have something in common with the discovery of the Laocoön centuries beforehand. The magnificent Riace bronzes had been found oxidized and quasi ruined, covered by a chalky limestone crust which developed over the centuries as a reaction to saline acidity, as they had remained immersed for centuries off the coast of Calabria; the two Riace warriors needed extensive restoration—albeit with far more sophisticated restoration technologies than during previous times from the Renaissance onwards. After their long restoration in 1981, the Riace bronzes were first displayed and celebrated all over Italy, especially in Rome and Florence, before being reappropriated and safely museified by the city of Riace (in Reggio Calabria where, to this day, the exhibition of the two warriors in full upright standing display is still being delayed, for lack of symptomatic funding).

A 1506 event at the heart of the late Rinascimento could be evoked and constructed, today like a film shoot for a docu-drama, or for a remake—a remake from the Greeks to the Renaissance—the event of the spectacular unearthing of Laocoön and His Sons when the sculpture was discovered in Rome from layers or centuries of Greco-Roman and Italian history. At that time, some of the Laocoön’s complex sculptured parts were missing (especially some of the snake’s long coils intertwined with the arms of Laocoön’s sons in the process of being strangled by the snake’s asphyxiating moves). This restoration must not have been daunting for Italian Renaissance artists and artisans in Rome, so habituated and so precisely involved as they had been in the process of bringing back to life, of making the Classical Age reborn (in the etymological sense of “Re-naissance”), and so many other works from the antique classical age. From archival accounts, we know that the sculpture was duly cleaned up, by the means at hand in those days. For people hard at work, it probably also meant completing and bringing the “there-and-then” of this ruined Greek piece of art in sync into the sixteenth-century “here-and-now.” This was the time of Michelangelo’s most inspired creations. Centuries later, in 1766 at the heart of the European Enlightenment, Lessing was to celebrate the Laocoön, its mythological subject matter, as well as its legendary salvage from the ruins of another era. In almost Freudian tones, Lessing apprehended a cathartic clash of this awe-provoking representation of excruciating suffering, albeit tempered and sublimated by the power of the artistic creation. Art theory and art history lead us to recognize significant aesthetic shifts. Are they to be described as a set of gradients or as a series of distinct micro or macro moves? Are they not sometimes better described as quantum jumps (with due homage to both Popper’s and Kuhn’s work with regard to their dispute regarding the qualifications for true scientific “revolutions”)? An immense such aesthetic shift occurred during the Enlightenment, at the time of Baumgarten, Winckelmann, and Kant—whose 1790 (Third) Critique of Judgment emblematized the new era in aesthetics. As in tectonic plates shifts, the Enlightenment dealt with this singular turn, away from the Platonist and neo-Platonic aesthetics based on the study of “beauty,” to the new aesthetics based upon a study and a recognition of “Affekt” in art. In all the arts and the new arts emerging to this day, the full effect of this shift seems to still be unfolding in slow motion and in fast forward, or backwards. “Affect” is thus of common interest to the neurosciences and to psychoanalysis alike insofar as it points to that which is nonlinear in the psyche. In art history and in art theory, affect allows unusual connections and appropriations from the the present to the past or vice versa (just as the past emerges into the present like a ghost haunting present-day life). We shall first give a few more examples to further illustrate the efflorescence of this shift.

Debris: Miyamoto and Kiefer

Ryuji Miyamoto’s Representation of the 1995 Earthquake in Kobe

Rather than a man-made catastrophe brought about by war, as we shall see in the following vignettes, the earthquake which devastated the city of Kobe in 1995 was, of course, a natural catastrophe. Nonetheless, in terms of death and misery, a natural catastrophe causes the same effects as war would. Architect and photographer Miyamoto had already shown interest in what he called “architectural apocalypse” (compare to the devastation represented in his “Akasaka Shochiku Movie Theatre, Tokyo,” 1984). For the 1996 Venezia Architectural Biennale, he elected to display the Kobe devastation from the micro-perspective of the damage inflicted upon a small home instead of trying to fathom the damage caused to the city as a whole. In hyper-realistic installation style, Miyamoto went for the particular rather than the universal aspect of this devastation. Thus the spectators come face-to-face with the immediacy of the earthquake effect with their own subjectivity as it intersects with the subjectivity of the victims. A house, or what was a home, appears transformed into massive debris. The structural elements, constituted by ceilings, floors and foundation, walls and windows, have all collapsed and are barely recognizable in this maelstrom of debris. Rivers of water and mud run through the home. Two somewhat bloodied bodies, presumably a couple, are immersed in the muddy torrent running through their home. As debris themselves of their own human existence, it’s hard to decide whether they are hurt, paralyzed, or dead; to say the least, they seem writhing in wrenchingly silent pain, lost in a modern-day Dantesque inferno. Theirs is not the pain manifested in the Laocoön, sublimated and salvageable by art form, but that of sheer irremediable terror and suffering. In its presence, the spectator speculates how much Miyamoto must have felt profoundly traumatized by the annihilation of parts of Kobe and the death and injuries visiting its inhabitants, and how he then must have felt compelled to bring in his own testimony by the focused recreation of the disaster—to make the world aware, at the most minute level of perception and emotion of the “debris” of people’s lives, for the uniqueness of a particular home is readily more immediate and imminent for the affected spectators’ potential identification with this installation. Miyamoto’s work for the Biennale was all about the “affect” provoked in him by the quake and the parallel affect he wished to transmit to his spectators at the Biennale. His own trajectory (from “architectural apocalypse”) manifests his concern and his affinity for the fragility of human and architectural existence preyed upon and haunted by their forthcoming status of ruin and debris. We may thus perhaps conceive that a testimony is a powerful answer to an ineluctable event against which we are helpless. His entry at the 1996 Biennale earned Ryuji Miyamoto the Leone d’oro for the architecture Biennale (Venezia, 1996). We may speculate that the well-deserved prize recognized the humanist as much as the artist in this singular architectural presentation.

Anselm Kiefer’s Exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2008

The renowned German born artist Anselm Kiefer had at his disposal the Grand Palais, its monumental spaces with huge multiple glass-domed ceilings. The spectacle of destruction was made explicit in his 2008 exhibition, which referred to ruins and debris alike. Strewn extensively over the floors were collapsed palaces and their broken-down columns, which evoked the feeling of the passing of several civilizations, Greek, Roman, and so on. The exhibition underscored as well the random aggressions and destructions from wars all over the world: those wars made exponentially more visible in our twenty-first-century everyday lives, with media images continuously displayed and streamed on our screens, hammered into our brains, along with action film shots where car and building explosions and destruction are commomplace. War images are supposed to be the result of vestigial hatreds, but the history of such hatreds always seem insufficiently falling short in justifying the unabated rage over centuries to destroy the “other.” We may start out initially shocked by humans’ capacity to kill and destroy one another (and themselves in the process), yet the endless replays and repetitions of these occurrences risks making us numb, or wanting to turn or shy away from these images and documents. We also try not to become immune to the outrage of seeing dead human bodies in streets and open spaces along with the presentation of collapsed and collapsing buildings hit incessantly by artillery fire. Just as with Miyamoto’s exhibition, Kiefer’s exhibition also accomplished the task of inserting the spectacle of such ruins and debris in the museum space. Kiefer’s artistic imaginary plays on a more transcendent scale; it evokes universals regarding notions of devastations meted out by time as well as by human hands, rather than the ravages of an alienated and terrifying “nature” as was the case with Miyamoto’s representation of Kobe’s earthquake effect. As we know, the knowledge of art history is incremental throughout our education and our lifelong experience. Spectators brought to the Grand Palais exhibition their own lifelong awareness of Kiefer’s prior work. One of Kiefer’s artistic aptitudes is to suggest desolation at the bleak history of the Shoah, but without documenting it or naming it. By way of example amongst so many of his artworks, we may recall a frame which simply portrays a brown-striped field in the winter snow—just enough to trigger the suggestion of the barbed wires of concentration camps. Another example would be one of his artworks which portrays a stark winter tree in black ink on photographic paper; yet it suggests a dead-end, an unnamable dread and feelings of annihilation. The striped field or the stark winter tree are displaced signifiers of a threatening nothingness. They convoke spectators to explore their affect and inarticulate reactions, the malaise inchoately attached to their perception of the immense tragedy of WWII and the Shoah. It does remain all the more terrifying—punctually because it is unnamed.

Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

In his Grand Palais exhibition, Kiefer may have rendered in his artwork what Resnais achieved on film.^[2] Night and Fog, with a text scripted by concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol, ends on a slow tight revolving shot of a crematorium in ruin, several years after the war. The crematorium is not quite destroyed: it somehow half-stands like the ruin of a massive indescribable object, left over in the middle of the blocks in the background which formed the concentration camp. As the camera tracks slightly away from it and freezes upon it from a distance, Jean Cayrol meditates in voiceover at that point about the “end” of the concentration scourge, or the “brown plague” as the Nazi era was also known, and he formulates a plea addressed to those who think that WWII and the Shoah were an aberration, now gone forever. Instead, the voiceover suggests that the plague may only be dormant, for long perhaps, but that the virus may not necessarily be dead. This crematorium may be in ruins in the present, yet it signifies at the same time the ruin and extermination of millions. In a very poignant sequence towards the last part of the documentary, the camera lingers in successive shots on human “debris” accumulated from the camps’ inmates after their killings: mountains of eyeglasses, combs, shaving brushes, cups and dishes, clothes, shoes, women’s hair (used to make cloth the voiceover comments), human bones (used to try to make fertilizers), bodies used to make soap, skin transformed into paper. Beyond the outrage at the torture and killing of millions, the filmmaker and his scriptwriter leave a blank after this sequence to let the spectator meditate upon the extreme outrage at the second killing of the killed and the second pulverization of human existence in this ultimate “utilitarian” desecration of humans reduced to the debris of a debris.

As we know, most of the city of Hiroshima was pulverized to ashes; its destruction also marked the end of WWII. After Auschwitz, Resnais proceeded to Hiroshima in his next film made in collaboration with Marguerite Duras. In their audacious mise-en-scène, the sculptured bodies of interlaced and faceless lovers appear in cropped high angle shots right at the beginning of Hiroshima Mon Amour. The bodies are at first covered with radioactive ashes, then covered with rain, dew, and finally covered with the glowing sensuous sweat of lovemaking. Thus lovemaking prevails, albeit symbolically, as a challenge to the destruction of the city and the destruction of life. In the unfolding simple and profound narrative, we find out that the Japanese man is an architect, as if to signify that Hiroshima can be reconstructed from its ruins. Similarly, the French woman, whose life was destroyed during the war when her German lover was killed and when her hair was shorn as a punishment for loving the enemy, is about to reconstitute her psyche in Hiroshima. Duras and Resnais point to the exact correspondence between the collective destruction and ruin of the city and the personal destruction and fragmentation of the French woman. In recounting her suffering, fragment by fragment, to her new Japanese lover, who functions as her “psychoanalyst,” the French woman can for the first time make sense out of the debris of her existence. Neither Hiroshima nor the French woman are “cured,” but she survives just as Hiroshima re-emerges from it rubble.

Epiphanies: Salvaging Ruins Into the Twenty-first Century

Twenty-first-century Leonardo

We could say schematically that the past gave us Leonardo’s works whereas the present is finding technologies to study them closer. Restoration in the plastic arts has a long history. For without restoration throughout the ages, none of the museums of the world would be able to have presentable collections—the objects in their collections would just display as interesting ruins or debris! Twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies have transformed art historical approaches and restoration applications to the study and the repair of arts from the past. An array of techniques are at our disposal (for example, x-ray radiographic attenuation, ultraviolet imaging, 3-D modelling of objects and paintings, multi-spectral imaging of paintings, radar tomography, and so on) now enable digital engineers, computer experts, and restorers working hand in hand with art historians to determine with every single artwork what were, for example, Leonardo’s first moves and decisions and changes of mind. Lately, advances in neutron imaging seem to have been most promising, without the compromising risk of taking even an infinitesimal sample tear in the fabric of the canvas for closer examination. Maurizio Seracini (Director, Diagnostic Center for Cultural Heritage in Florence) has led a lifelong search for Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari of which only Rubens’s later version exists, based upon Leonardo’s own version. Seracini is convinced that the original is either hidden behind Vasari’s painting in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio or, at worse, that Vasari painted his own over Leonardo’s work. With neutron imaging we could look behind the back of Vasari’s painting. If the case is proven, it would be time to speculate whether Vasari destroyed Leonardo’s version out of jealousy or for any kind of emotional imaginable reason.

Issues of ruins and debris thus play out well in the information age and the digital era which characterizes our twenty-first century. In the field of cinema, we may consider schematically as well that the twentieth century was the century of production of cinema, for example, with the thousands of works which we inherited from filmmakers from around the world. On the other hand, as films are being transferred and digititized into digital discs and now transmitted by broadband as immaterial objects, the twenty-first century has developed the technologies which make their instantaneous study or enjoyment possible. Moreover, as part of the application of new technologies, reel after reel of entire cinémathèques, dating from the pioneer age to the silent cinema and beyond, are now in the process of being restored, sometimes pixel by pixel, from a state of quasi ruin and saved from becoming celluloid dust.

Aesthetics and Ethics of SciFi

Can we conceive of a civilization without ruins? Probably not any more than we can conceive of a self without a past, or without conflicts, lest we visit dystopian universes. If the case is being made for the interweave and the synergy between new aesthetics and new technologies, we cannot be as embracing of the future as Ray Kurtzweil is,^[3] nor should we remain unaware of the boundaries which may be crossed in the process. References to the hyper-realistic worlds of science fiction stand as warnings against possible excesses. In BladeRunner (1982), Ridley Scott pictured metaphoric premonitions about a possible universe in which his “Replicants” had preserved the ruins and fragments of humanity which the humans who had invented them had lost. In the first sequence of Minority Report (2002, based upon a very modified short story by Philip Dick), Stephen Spielberg is in harmony with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish when he creates a dystopic science fiction world in which the police punish criminal intentions before crimes are committed. The cool transparency of the film image is in sync with the transparency of human brains in exposing their motives and feelings: Film form and film sense are thus meshed to account for the deconstruction of the sci-fi inhabitants. Likewise, with its taste for jovial pessimism, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) made the ambiguous case for a rather terrifying Alex, rather than for his transformation into a conforming “Orang,” a debris of a human as he would be, if deprived of free will by chemical castration.

Notes

^{1. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).}

^{2. These comments are extensively discussed in Alain Cohen, Films which Meditate on WW2 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2013).}

^{3. Ray Kurtzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines. When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999).}

About the “Anything Goes in Art”

Dialogue

Q. Can art, as exceedingly more related to technique, support and affect the artist’s identity?

Contemporary artists master their techniques by experimenting with their own expressive possibilities, and reflecting upon their limits and flaws, because their objects of research, their conceptual contents, are always present in their search for self-identification.

Q. A pressing question arising from social media and technological mediation in general is whether subjectivity, as related to art’s autonomy, is possible at all . . .

Technological mediation is in fact a medium between the artist’s project, his/her performance and the contemporary art system. I would stress the “relational” question about the producton and interpretation of art today. The autonomy of art is not a problem. In a recent interview Damien Hirst reflected, “It is old-fashioned today to consider artists more for their technical abilities than their art as such. I am rather concerned with the result and I do my best to get a painting that is exactly as I want it to be. I’ve never been worried about using other people to make it; not even architects build their houses.”

Q. This also brings up the question of techinque in reference to both media and discipline. How can the notions of disciplinarity in art and art practices be retained? Would you say that the difference between disciplinarity (or interdisciplinary) and discipline, in relation to art, is subsumed in today’s world, by technology and media and therefore creates both the elasticity that you refer to but also a fundamental confusion?

Today artists are by nature interdisciplinary; they tend to use both conceptual sources of thought which are distant from the strictly artistic ones, and material sources of work that suggest many degrees of competence and knowledge. However, possible chaos is avoided if the system of art is meant as net-work-like and open to a continuous reconfiguration.

Q. Can you discuss a specific artwork or an artist that approaches such continuous reconfiguration?

An artist coping with such a complex art system must inevitably be openly related to continuous reconfigurations of his/her intentions, of his/her work, etc. This does not cause confusion within the system so far as the artist himself/herself is an integral part of it; or, at least this may cause some difficulty of interpretation to uninformed viewers.

Q. How would you relate to the more recent argument made by Rosalind Krauss (that the notion of medium or media of art is no longer sufficient) and suggesting her concept of “technical support” as qualifying art in a contemporary culture that seems to have lost its mediation and autonomy?

I share Rosalind Krauss’ perspective, within a general reflection upon the status of art today, which means by “medium” a nonspecific space, which is “an action-oriented space,” a set of rules and procedures every artist generates and follows to constitute his/her work.

Q. It seems that even Krauss has moved away recently from the interdisciplinarity of media, to a notion of a medium in which the criteria of art and skill are intertwined. Does that mean that we have exhausted disciplines extrinsic to art making because of the weight amassed by technological systems?

In her latest writings Rosalind Krauss has spoken about a “post-mediatic era” in order to overcome any specific value of the medium or of the merely technical support. In my essay I have mentioned Krauss especially for her reflection upon the so-called medium as a personal set of rules the artist gives himself/herself independently from the chosen support. And I would also like to mention the title of a famous exhibition in 1969 in Bern, Switzerland, which has been a milestone of our times: “When Attitudes Become Form,” curated by Harald Szeemann.

Q. Through the examples of art that you bring, how do artists show the increasing aesthetic condition of superimposition of states, fragmentation, and fluidity of identity?

Conceptual and operative superimposition and stratification are a matter of fact in contemporary art and the examples I use show that fragmentation is often the strength and charm of our times.

Q. Can you expound a little more on what you mean by operative superimposition?

In a naturally interdisciplinary system, according to whose model contemporary artists utilize different competences and refined technologies, the stratification and fragmentation are intrinsic to their status.

Q. Fragmentation is often viewed negatively. How can one at present address it through a positive aesthetic perspective?

I would like to answer using a quotation by Mario Perniola drawn from his “Il paradosso del frammento” (1992): “A fragment does not reflect the discontinuity of the world but it creates it. . . . What animates a fragment is the enthusiasm for the affirmation of a singularity which is able to break up the continuity of the world, to infringe its plot.”

Q. Does this instability between art, artists, and artworks represent a new paradigm?

Certainly it does. Today fragmentation and stratification are inherent in the system of art. Both for artists and a passionate audience to accept this new configuration is the only way to work and succeed, to interpret and unravel this complex system.

Q. And yet, it seems that precisely because of the ways in which the art market functions—with its speculative mechanisms and the weakening of institutional autonomy of, say, museums—there is an eager appetite for spectacle and quantitative appeal. Can fragmentation be used critically without losing its relevance in light of such a complexity?

Fragmentation and complexity of a system are two sides of the same coin; a critical viewpoint depends on attentive and competent viewers.

Q. Does your perspective imply the “historicity” of art or does it destroy it?

My perspective emphasizes the importance of a historical knowledge, meant as a chain of anticipations and second thoughts about codes, languages and forms. As Nelson Goodman says in Ways of Worldmaking, making is always a re-making of the worlds we have at our disposal.

Q. Insofar as the proto-modernist attitude towards historical sedimentation assumed that the “systems of the arts” (Kristeller) or “world-making” (Goodman) were the inevitable outcome of art at present it appears that cultural production precedes art making. Does that mean that we have to be more careful about what we so easily accept as art?

Certainly, we have to be more careful and critical about any cultural or artistic event, by living the system from within and by learning to distinguish mere entertainment artworks from real artworks, which leave behind a mark. Is that the repudiation of Carl Andre’s dictum that “Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us”? The relation between art and culture is circular and relational. Where it starts from does not matter.

I would like to focus on the impossibility to define contemporary art as a system, and instead argue that art unpredictably emerges from a multiplicity of complex systems and of relationships that cannot be reduced to a single one. Artists nowadays rely to a lesser degree on the specific materials and media as defining their practice, but rather extemporize a variety of media for the purpose of using them as the materialization of discursive concepts. Thus, the creative outcomes are determined by a changing discursive context that entails complexity that, in turn, is irreducible to the scope of the media. Rather, art reveals itself in the intertwining of possible disciplines such as: art and philosophy, art and technologies, art and physics, or art and crafts. Art becomes more and more relevant as a means of bridging different systems and obeys the following predicaments:

By way of example, I will use the works of artists such as Gino de Dominicis, Alighiero Boetti, Bill Viola, and Olafur Eliasson, to reflect on such interdisciplinarity.

Inasmuch as contemporary art mirrors our times as elastic, mobile and as interconnected to new ways of living and producing, it cannot but reflect, interact, and suggest a unique vision that may either converge or diverge from production. On the one hand, art can be viewed as a cultural system based on a historical tradition. On the other hand, its particular visionary perspectives are found in flux. Artists, the active nodes of this network, in a perpetual motion of advances and thoughts, interact and address in their work questions relating to a conceptual basis of innovations.

Undoubtedly, technology has influenced and changed the ways we live and perceive reality, reconfiguring the territory of perceptual experience through extensions, implementations, and implants that connect and channel our sensing of the world. Thus, contemporary artists, as users and specimens of such technological tendency, rely on their abilities to exert the most of such technical possibilities in their creative and research projects.

The artist has always been involved with the issue of the technique as a means to relate to a “state of mind” that is explored within the scope of her or his “project.” The artist’s work exhibits conceptual elements that are closely related to the technical operations introduced or found in the medium of choice and that are an essential vehicle for the shaping of the work as a whole. The technique is therefore designed or chosen as a possible extension to a particular idea or thought. As such, the idea expressed remains the core foundation, important to the choice of medium or material affect and is set a priori. In the process of designing the intersection between idea and medium, the boundaries between process are kept elastic and flap continuously. It should be noted, however, that it is not enough to be a proficient and professional maker in the application of new technologies in the production of works of art. Art always goes beyond the moment of illusion by means of techniques and designates another meaning: art always looks elsewhere!

It would be a mistake to support the notion that the artwork is itself a subsidiary technology or a “comment” on technology. Such artworks are only rather “special effects” to entertain superficially a visual carnival or illustrative as in the case of the Cités des Sciences, diffused in many European cities.

The question of “medium” is central to the whole tradition of the twentieth-century avant-garde. And new media played a revolutionary role in the creative possibilities of expression and communication. More recently, the technological revolution has affected art in a more comprehensive way through the interaction of two technologies: that of the media and that of the computer.

Some theorists, such as Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media,^[1] reflecting on these issues from a single perspective, claim that the real innovation and revolution of the avant-garde began with the advent of the new media. In “The Death of Computer Art,”^[2] Manovich distinguishes between two fields of action: the “Duchamp Land” and “Turing Land,” named after Marcel Duchamp and Alan Turing, two father figures of modern culture.

Manovich argues that while the research objectives of “Duchamp Land” are oriented toward content, whether symbolic, metaphoric, or critical through the complex use of cultural codings, the focus of “Turing Land” is oriented towards technology and experimentation and denotes new technical possibilities without paying sufficient attention to their outcomes, limitations, and defects.

In respect to contemporary art we can argue that the mutual encroachment of both fields of action is not so clearcut now: the “Duchamp Land” fades into the “Turing Land” and vice versa, and both tend to rely upon a strong idea enabling the artist to retain a footage of relationships that pushes him or her to work on artforms and not simply technological innovations.

Our present time has exceeded the medial specificity of early modern art and has been characterized as “post-medial.” Rosalind Krauss, in her A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition^[3] uses Marcel Broodthaers’ work as an example offering a key to illuminate the critique of artistic developments in recent decades. Only through reinvention and rearticulation of the artist’s tools is Broodthaers, according to Krauss, able to explore differences in respect to the advent of new media. Many artists, in contrast and opposition to the medium, use low resolution in order to highlight the “diegetic horizon,” a space generated by the artist in order to reflect on the content rather than on the spectacle of the medium. In “reinventing the medium” I would say that Rosalind Krauss makes it clear that in order to interpret the work of many contemporary artists, the medium is dealt with as a set of rules, a “generative matrix” of conventions derived from (but not identical to) material conditions, a space of possibilities opened up for the artist.^[4]

In the 1990s, the concept of post-media art proved to be a key approach for also analyzing the cultural impact of new technologies. In particular, the use of computers and the Web, as argued by French philosopher Nicolas Bourriaud, has expanded the possibilities of interactivity, especially for artists.^[5] The contemporary artist, working similarly to a deejay or a programmer, takes possession of cultural objects and fragments and reworks them, remounting and including them in new contexts. If in the past the artist took possession of real objects, as the very well known Duchampian use of “ready-made,” now the artist appropriates what I might call “ready-information,” copying and pasting at will, creating new networks of meaning.

In other words, today, it no longer makes sense for the artist to repeat specific media as discrete means, since new technologies affect our thinking and feeling, and renders everything “intermedia.”

The contemporary artist has an “interdisciplinary mindset,” both from a conceptual and practical standpoint, and can move with ease between different skills as well as alternating hyper-individualistic and hyper-collaborative approaches. At the artist’s disposal today is a plethora of working methods that allow a very personal daily practice, working with “discipline” without intermediaries, and possibly collaborating with an indefinite number of people, often specialists in different fields.

To clarify these issues I will discuss the works of contemporary artists, in reference to their “poetic vision” that emerges strongly from their works beyond the specific use of the medium.

In the works of Gino De Dominicis, an artist from Ancona, Italy, who worked between the early 1970s to the late 1990s, we find the intersection between art and science as exceeding the boundaries of any given medium then in vogue. Another artist, Alighiero Boetti had introduced to his works a poetic and playful research by relying on media outside the artistic tradition and by exploring communal and public participation. In video, the works of Bill Viola introduced the historical-cultural tradition as cleverly interwoven with technological expertise and new media. Another example is the work of Olafur Eliasson, who through “hyper-collaboration” uses various technologies and artificially reconstructs natural events which challenge the limis of our sensorial faculties.

We cannot establish a causal relation between an idea or a theory that influences artists’ imagination, or why, by exploring a field different from artistic practice, they are attracted by the one or the other theory. There is no necessary correspondence between theoretical approach or ideas and the media explored and yet various matrices of perception or reasoning can mutually interact and merge into a new intellectual synthesis. Due to the synthesis between extra-artistic and often scientific theories and selected media, novel ideas flow and are reborn.

Gino De Dominicis died prematurely at the end of the 1990s. His art transposed concepts from science through the use of video, installation, painting, sculpture, and performance. People who knew De Dominicis, attest to the fact that the artist had been initiated into science by a physicist friend, who responded to his restless inquiries with his explainations on concepts such as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and reversibility and irreversibility of space-time. For De Dominicis the concept of entropy—indicative of a system’s degree of dis/order—inevitably leads to thinking not only of dissolution and death but also of its overcoming. De Dominicis entrusted what can be defined as the “poetic immortality of the body,” and “the eternity of things,” in art, as the only means that could defeat and defy the physical laws of nature.

His debut in 1969 was marked by a mortuary poster with the inscription “Gino De Dominicis,” as a means for the artist to condition himself to the most extreme predicament: the anticipation of his own death. The obsession with death and entropy is repeated and sublimated in another work from 1969 “The Mistake, Space and Time”—the mistake of running into space to shorten time itself. A fascinating installation which reveals a skeleton of a man with roller skates, holding on one hand the skeleton of a dog on a leash and on the other a long golden rod by one end, in perfect balance. Art in his work appears to resolve the impossible, overcoming the unidirectionality of time and finding an alternative to irreversibility.

In 1972, De Dominicis exhibited “Second Solution of Immortality (The Universe is property)” at the Venice Biennale. A work that became a sensation because it displayed to visitors a boy with Down’s syndrome sitting in contemplation of three works, particularly dear to the artist: “Invisible Pyramid,” “The Ball,” and “The Stone.”

These three objects are all attributed to De Dominicis’ poetic imagination, the “ball”—or more accurately “Rubber Ball (dropped by two meters) in the moment just before the bounce”—is an attempt to present the paradox of movement, an instant of time “appearing” in the mind and being motionless to perception.

“The Invisible Pyramid” as “The Invisible Cube” presented instead the orthogonal projection of the objects in question, by attesting that everything, every thought and every moment are eternal and unrepresentable once they enter and leave the “circle of appearances.”

The analogy with scientific concepts goes hand in hand with many of the metaphorical titles De Dominicis gives to his works. For example, his “ubiquitous” artworks can be interpreted in the light of quantum physics as suggesting a sort of “entanglement” in which two physical objects communicate instantaneously across space and time; and the works “Trying to Fly,” and “An attempt to form squares instead of circles of water” are works-experiments in which the artist-scientist subverts and transcends the laws of space and motion.

From the 1980s onward, De Dominicis transposed these concepts into images, borrowing from ancient Sumerian iconology and the myth of Urvasi and Gilgamesh that both relate to immortality. De Dominicis’ focus on the relations between art and science reveals a latent poetics that delineates a complex and yet independent path, though one realized in a variety of techniques, in which each representation is presentation, a “situation of work” which depicts a set of visual and conceptual possibilities.

Another artist whom I would like to address is Alighiero Boetti, who is still widely influential on younger generations of artists for introducing an original visual language exploring the possibilities implicit in craftsmanship, ingenuity and collective work. By using diverse media, even those which do not properly belong to art, such as the use of weaving, industrial design, mail art, Boetti reflected the complexity of reality and the limitations of scientific systems. His work from 1977, “Classifying the thousand longest rivers in the world,” comes to mind here.

Boetti worked on doubling, multiplying, and fragmenting the “one” and on the ambiguity of classification codes and attempted in his artworks to transform the logic of numbers into calendars and the maps of the world into Kilims or embroidered alphabets into tapestries.

Boetti has used different mathematical laws, such as number systems in playful combinatorial games, as rational systems revealing particular structures of order. He chose the square form as the basis for his space of action, the place of possibilities. Similar to the magical square of Dürer, with its allusions to alchemy, shamanism, and the cabal, Boetti’s tapestries are structured as image-planes through almost only the use of squares of letters that are made up of words and phrases with 4x4 or 5x5 letters. These tapestries are composed as magic squares in the sense that one first needs to know their system in order to read them in the right way.

It is the presence of an idea that occupies the center of Boetti’s work and as such can be embodied in any instrument or material. In fact it is important for Boetti to encompass this in fieri process of these works in progress those “happy coincidences” that occur in reality. The countless people who were involved in his projects suggest a type of a multi-layered procedure, which is segmented and dissociated: designed by the artist, drawn by someone’s hand and made by still another’s.

From the original concept of breaking through to loss of identity, one arrives at “All,” a tapestry made by Afghan women in Kabul in 1988. All images of the world are combined in a single work. All colors of the world are added together in a composite harmony.

The multiplicity of images and their contamination provide for infinitely possible variations of words, letters, and colors. Shattering is the very structure of Boetti’s creative process in which the viewer is lost as a mystic in contemplation of his own varied repetition. The logic becomes illogical for a sudden somersault of the invention: art shows, even in an automated and repetitive process, a sudden opening for a mental leap. And it is in this conflict that you test the balance between harmony as regularity of the sign and invention as deviation from the rule.

Alighiero Boetti made many experiments in projects involving countless people, as the experiment with 100 citizens of Gavirate (VA) in 1993, in which a sheet of 100 squares was given to each to be filled progressively from 1 to 100, alternating white and black. The finished work was exhibited under the title “personal-collective.” Another example is the popular “ouvre postale,” the result of a collection of materials (telegrams, letters and spreadsheets) sent by the artist to the same sender in a variable period of time according to the principle of numerical determination, produced by all the variables generated by the combinatorial sequence of a certain use of the stamps, in turn arranged according to a different order of colors. Boetti’s code experiences rules of reading and decoding, which are sometimes strictly visual, sometimes strictly conceptual, from those that have to do with recognizable designs and shapes, to those that enhance the appearance of combinatorics in which the user is challenged by an encrypted reading.

In this work in progress, the artist must find a balance between the idea of the work and the unexpected that emerges from a collective work. An artist is like a skilled conductor who dictates rules and poetry to compose a complex puzzle.

The advent of new technologies has allowed experimentation to create advanced forms of crosses between different media. A precursor of this mode of operation is the American artist Bill Viola, a very singular figure for training, sensitivity, and expertise. Graduated from the Faculty of Arts from Syracuse University in New York, he used the influence of the fathers of Video Art and Performance as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and the experience of the most revolutionary body-conscious theatrical directors as Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski. Moreover, Bill Viola is also a scholar of great mystics who became his spiritual fathers: Jelaluddin Rumi, Chuang Tzu, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhardt, all who embody in his eyes the true nature of the artist.

In Florence, in the 1970s, Maria Gloria Bicocchi’s video art center Art/tape/22 became an experimental laboratory for Bill Viola. Florence is also a place rich in cultural stimuli that led him into pre-Renaissance spaces like churches and cathedrals, apt to solve problems related to sound and acoustics in general. Recording space through sound he began to think in terms of record fields and points of view. These experiments on acoustic architectures were precursors of the following “rooms of thought.” In his very well-known installations, in which four backlit panels envelop the viewer, virtually embedded in the work both physically and mentally, a video shows powerful images and sounds of existence, while the viewer, in the room-work, can walk in his or her memory, thanks to the artist who “turns on” the mind’s eye.

The American artist has created a poetic universe attentive to the tradition of European painting (Goya, Bosch, Vermeer, Pontormo), to its structural aspects (altarpieces, triptychs, painted rooms), to the memory theaters (Giulio Camillo’s Theater of Memory, Giordano Bruno’s De umbris idearum, Francis Yates’ The Art of Memory), a legacy filtered by experiences involving new media that have been imposing themselves since the 1970s, such as the spread of video projectors (LCD, DLP, CRT) with new solutions and a different relationship with the environment, also involving software engineers and electronic media, who work closely with artists, putting up with the complexity of the work through constant dialogue. I would like to recall that many artworks are made possible thanks to the Digital Video Effecter 1973 Digital Image Articulator, or Imager 1976, and the DVE, which allows smoother transitions from one scene to the other, as well as the morphing effect that gives the possibility to focus on images so suggestive. The wise use of this technology has allowed Bill Viola to create immersive spaces that give the viewer the idea of moving in the mind of the artist.

Another example of high-tech and sophisticated projects comes from the work of Olafur Eliasson. The Danish artist is concerned with the “transient phenomena,” events limited in space and time. Interested in the natural states of affairs and their possible changes, he is convinced that “nature does not exist in itself, but it coincides with the way we look.” The light in its untouchable presence, has always had an important role in his work. The viewer enters her or his artificial environments and makes an existential experience, confusing nature with artifice, a questioning of perceiving him/herself and the distance that separates him/her from the phenomenon.

Among his most spectacular productions I would like to mention Weather Project (2003): Olafur Eliasson has rebuilt the sun, composed of two hundred mono-frequency lamps, a mirror, and disco smoke generators, transforming the huge Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern into a surreal place. Once again we are confronted with the fact that on the ground of every work of art there is a strong idea, an elemental material as light, which in this case becomes internal reference to the Tate, a former power station. It is still light with its variations to be the protagonist at the Venice Biennale in 2005 with Your Black Horizon, at the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni. The work consists of a beam of light which travels—at horizon height—for a 400-square-meter-long cube, designed by David Adjave. The artist has sampled the light of the Venetian lagoon from 4:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., to measure the intensity and levels of white, purple, and blue. He then transferred the data into a mechanism for lighting, compacting the sequence of sunrise-sunset-afternoon-night and speeding up of a few minutes the individual variations of time. The large cube that contains the entire cycle of the light of the Venetian lagoon, artificially reproducing a phenomena and producing an illusion, has to do with an inquiry recalling the “Stream of consciouness,” emphasizing the fact that we are processes that investigate processes. In Eliasson’s studio he gathers a large number of assistants and experts in various disciplines—engineers, architects, computer experts, skilled artisans—a team that manages masterfully to create his fascinating installations.

These examples, concerning already established artists, give us a fairly clear picture of the consistency of their experimental production, the strength to use and dominate the new media, and new expressive possibilities.

It is more difficult today for younger artists to be recognized, as we can usually only compare and analyze only a few of their works at a time, in which sometimes their voices are not easily distinguishable. In a varied and complex art scene, artists use new materials and advanced technologies, as well as professionals from different fields, and specialized laboratories in which to produce their works. Reflecting on the new techniques, it is useful to consider the fact that artists constantly reinvent their own media according to their creative intentions; in other words, it is the rule and the “lawful space” they built as ”style,” to allow them to move safely among possible techniques and technologies. Technological development has critically influenced the change in the language of art, allowed to conceive of things, unthinkable before, and the centrality of the idea in a research project still remains essential to produce a work of meaning and value.

Notes

^{1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).}

^{2. Lev Manovich, “The Death of Computer Art” (1997) www.thenetnet.com/scmed/schmed12.html.}

^{3. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).}

^{4. Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the medium,” in Critical Inquiry 25 (2), 1999: 289–315.}

^{5. Nicolaus Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002).}

The Changing Canvas of the City

Dialogue

Q. How do you imagine self-education and self-construction in a conflicted and complex urban setting, which seems to encourage a dynamic, unstable, and nonlinear sense of identity?

There is no education without awareness. Owning history provides a sense of place to the individual. It is in a way a cognitive map that provides meaning and by so doing the individual is able to locate his own life within the urban continuum. The notion of place is not limited to here and now but it expands to the time before the individual was “in place.” Education occurs when all these elements enter the objective mind and become a useful tool for negotiating the contradictions imposed by the place.

Q. Do you see an aesthetics of place and history as an antidote to the Web’s de-localization?

I am not sure. The Web is a tool that can be used to guide individuals to a direct experience of place. Since information is readily available on the Web, for many, their first encounter with their surroundings is through the electronic media. The challenge is to make individuals and communities aware that their real existence is not on the Web but in the real “there.”

Q. Do you think that what you describe as “self-ethnography” amounts to a new aesthetic mode in approaching the urban-scape?

Absolutely! Our perceptions of self and place are always filtered through an aesthetic experience. The idea of “coolness” so pervasive in today’s parlance represents what Robert Farris Thompson calls “an aesthetic judgment.” The urban experience is always spoken in terms of hot and cold referencing rejection or acceptance of a distinct idea of desirability. For example living in the suburbs is considered a “hot” alternative in terms of its desirability; and this is contraposed to how “hot” the urban space is vis-à-vis its criminality. These are aesthetic judgments. On the other hand urban fashion and attitudes are considered more desirable than the artificial suburbs, therefore “cool.” The transformation of the urban place depends on the aesthetic values accorded by society. Those living within the space must operate within a value scale not of good or bad but cool or hot. It is the individual who must place his or her own value and “own it.” Don Quixote’s words echo this feeling: “I know who I am and who I may be.”

Q. You are referring to cities’ growing tensions between their internal and international populations; but, to what extents do the resulting cultural manifestations contribute to a new aesthetic sensibility?

The amalgamation that inevitably will occur by these encounters is bound to produce the dominant reality within the social structure. The first active bearers of tradition will struggle to keep their experiences unchanged and uncontaminated. Eventually, those who are not from one side or the other will construct a reality that will transform the original raw material into a viable social tool, a reality that harmonizes and makes sense of the new sensibility. This new reality is the bridge between the old layers and the new layers that until superseded will be the public face of culture.

Q. Los Angeles in particular has been noted for the “erasure of its history”—to what extent do urban mythology and trends transcend the flux of cultural signs and settle into history?

I do not agree completely with the notion that Los Angeles is oblivious to its historical record. Signs and symbols are important in Los Angeles as in other urban areas, which are in a constant state of flux. Civic signage keeps the urban space true to itself. What I truly believe is that Hollywood and the “stage syndrome” have affected Los Angeles. Stages are to be torn down after serving their purpose to be re-erected when needed. The urban space is a constantly changing stage that creates a true absence of historical continuity for those who are considered passersby. It is here where the locus serenus works best, by providing a respite for the systematic erasure of recognizable signs. The demolition of structures, which is a reality in all urban spaces, does not erase that sense of history, the real damage is done by the lack of cognitive ownership. Many urban gangs repurpose the history by creating a meta-history within the confines of an apparent historical desert and by so doing begin the long road to achieve the locus serenus which in time will provide its own meaning and historicity.

Q. To what extent do urbanization and digitalization, especially in reference to social networks, fuse and mutate the city’s aesthetic landscape?

The meta-reality of the electronic media imposes a false sense of reality upon the urban landscape. However, once the individual is confronted with the reality of the urban space the reaction will be pendular; total rejection or total understanding of the space; recognizing that the electronic picture is but a simulacrum. Yet, a third scenario is also plausible, the total alienation of both and the emergence of a romantic vision of the urban space, a truly dismal thought.

Q. The aesthetic aspects that define multiple urban identities are also affected by virtual realities. In what sense do they entail participation?

I believe that Calderón de la Barca best expressed the feeling of being in two contradictory realities at once. In La Vida es Sueño, the main character, Segismundo, ponders his lot in life and compares it to a dream:

Participation in a multi-layered urban experience will inevitable always be translated into sound bites that can convey the passing meaning while leaving the actual “reality” untouched for those who willingly venture to experience it. Educators are those individuals, the bridge builders in the ancient sense of the word “pontifex.” Education bridges the layers of reality with the layers of meaning. The aesthetic experience is derived from how strong these connections are and how meaningful.

As we advance into the twenty-first century, the values and parameters of both education and aesthetics must be revised to reflect an ever-shrinking globalized society. In order to address education in relation to aesthetics and art a new language and paradigm must be developed in relation to the urban context. I argue that the urban landscape with its social sedimentation—equally vernacular and cyber—needs to be analyzed through the notion of self-ethnography. As educators struggle to engage a generation, who sees everything as passing and uncertain, the idea of self-ethnography must come to the forefront of the discourse.

Education and aesthetics are reciprocally connected to our ability to engage future generations of students. As evidenced in the increasing dropout rate in American education, the idea of passive learning is not only not working, but also definitely not carrying substantive value. According to a report from Northeastern University:

I would like to present the idea of committing the student to self-exploration and exposure through the implementation of urban aesthetics. There are several important questions to consider, such as: Why is education becoming increasingly divorced from social realities? How can the educator engage the aesthetics of place and self in a meaningful way? And finally, is there a place to bring the aesthetics of the urban space into the academic discourse?

As we attempt to show, the interrelation between the space and the individual aesthetics must be a significant component of the discussion. The idea of beauty and its relationship with self is connected to the ability of the individual to embed his or her life within the social space they occupy. Often, within the urban context, social transactions codified as antisocial behavior are mostly evident in street art, such as graffiti, in defiance of authority and in attempting to justify human interactions that obey a different social order. Here, the difference between murals and tagging is crucial to such an order’s subversion. As artists and educators come together to explore issues of identity and meaning within these pluralities of environments it is of paramount importance to address and decode that which is not apparent to an outsider of such environments, namely, the aesthetic values that escape definition unless addressed in relation to the creators or stakeholders who are key to their meaningful decoding.

A meaningful partnership is thus required between the insiders and outsiders of an urban environment. As we assemble trained and untrained artists/students the concept of one-sided discourse must be replaced by a channel of communication that encompasses the understanding the complexity the etic and the emic constructs of a given social context. The subtleties implicit within a visual discourse are manifested also in the ambiguous boundaries of a community as perceived by outsiders and academia. If we are to invest in the future of education, then it must rely on a new self-ethnography as an integral part of the discussion that centers on urban culture and aesthetics. A self-ethnography will help participants to take stock of their influence (positive or negative) within the context of a given community. Hence the Lukumi proverb: “He Who Knows Never Dies as He Who Does Not Know.”

Insofar as the aesthetics of the urban environment is to be considered an important educational tool it must engage the creator’s standpoint with that of the outsider as he or she comes to experience it. In other words, the pedagogical point of view coincides with the artist’s or the student’s ability to further enrich his or her visual vocabulary and project on the aesthetic constructs of a specific environment. In order for the student to reach a level of meaningful understanding he or she must rely on a self-ethnographical inquiry into the very encounter with the urban sphere and its aesthetic significations. Urban aesthetics transcend what is passively understood as merely “local” by introducing to it an active sphere of self-reflective presence that engages the vernacular within a larger universal context of representation.

The Urban Dichotomy

The United States is becoming increasingly urban and more rural, and isolated communities are either abandoned or have been swallowed by the suburban sprawl. This tendency leads to contradictions since it stratifies the community in socioeconomic terms. Urbanization leads to the growth of a densely populated and economically deprived urban areas but it also plants the seeds for its own demise by privileging neighborhoods that in turn generate ghettos and inner cities. The suburbanites—ghettos and inner cities—still must be part of the old urban areas; albeit during working hours, and the mutual dependence is never broken. Firms, business, or government institutions are still located in the old urban areas and the left-behind population turns the urban areas into the only place of convergence. Thus, consequently, two populations inhabit the city: the diurnal influx of professionals and the working class on the one hand and the nocturnal presence of a culturally/economically deprived population on the other hand. This population shift bears the mark of a class struggle.

In most American cities the urban realm of downtown implies a plethora of different things, depending on the time of the day. Insofar as “downtown” entails an urban polarization or dichotomy in a rather structured and controlled way, it is also affected by urban contexts, which shape it from without and turn into a kaleidoscope experience of urban America. Rather than a set reality, the dichotomies in urban environments are stylized in the downtown as characteristic traits particular to the city. In light of such a process, the suburban areas exceedingly look more like old urban areas deprived of the historical prestige and as result the urban boundaries themselves are increasingly being blurred and redrawn in regards to gentrification. There is no single formulation to explain the multiple layering of urban cultures that at times become less conspicuous as the population movement creates a differential tide in resources and prestige.

The urban dichotomy is best exemplified in the ways in which old urban areas hold the city’s own historical memory, its staged historicity, whereas the new urban areas are adjusted to economic expansion, growth, and population’s influx, such as migrants, in late modernity. This process is hardly new, given the history of urbanization as result of the industrial revolutions but in the twenty-first century the population movement to developed urban areas marks the tendency of globalization rather than simply the gentrification of the local. According to Phillip Martin:

Many cities are thus confronted with dual migration patterns: the internal and the international. For anyone attempting to draw on a reliable urban ethnography it means separating the layers of significance that each group installs over the social space and its historical encoding. These patterns create what Doug Sounders aptly termed “arrival city.” In characterizing this phenomenon Sounders provides a paradigm that will frame our discussion:

These places of defining the “arrival city” entail fluid identities and shape as well as being shaped by its past and present inhabitants. It is in this environment that education meets its toughest challenge as the power of place overwhelms any attempt to accommodate multiplicity of meanings and symbols, decoding them without using their local signification as universals. Moreover, those individuals who are introduced as new inhabitants or as visitors to the “arrival city” must contend with its reality while interfering with their surroundings and coming to grips with its urban codes.

Self-Ethnography

There is a lingering perception of the ethnographer as someone who needs to leave his or her cultural baggage behind in order to engage with a fieldwork. But in order to do so the ethnographer must also construe the scope of what is imported from self-experience and reflexivity. Thus, inadvertently, the researcher always imports his or her own bias to the subject and can only overcome such bias not only by means of defamiliarization but through self-reflective ethnographic analysis of positive and negative constraints.

The urban space is an all-encompassing environment that engages and challenges our preconceptions of any given aesthetics through ongoing additions of elements foreign to the urban space. Nonetheless, the blending of elements must be studied as a new way to generate a possible novel aesthetics with a particular sensibility of beauty. Prior histories must be accounted for in relating to an emergent urban aesthetics subsumed by changing realities that destabilizes any cultural fixity. Thus, self-ethnography is necessary for accounting for such an environment in flux and the student/artist must become a participant observer and delineate and relate to his or her bias in order to negotiate the contradictions brought to the field. As part of the new reality—which is a well-accepted anthropological research method—participant observation becomes a tool not only to explain behavior but also for decoding actions that otherwise would be unintelligible. If the artist/student embraces the fact that his or her mere presence is an inevitable intervention that adds a new layer to the field than the idea of a transitional reality becomes more negotiable. The concept of the urban environment as a changing canvas forces the researcher to look into historical and social pasts in order to explain the social present and render his or her intervention as a layer of meaning that cannot be absent from the student’s or ethnographer’s accounts.

Self-ethnography takes into account the notion of a history in flux in which the researcher must account for the case study in question as well as his or her intervention. The aesthetics of place becomes defined inasmuch by the aesthetic concomitants of self-ethnography and therefore must account for any historical, social, and philosophical issues at hand. Engaging the stakeholder’s interests and intertwining the student and the resident in a meaningful conversation will create an environment in which relevant questions—exposing cultural and psychological gaps—will be posed and addressed. Equally, the outsider will use the insider as a mentor but at the same time the insider will gain a fresh look at his or her inhabited surroundings through the mediation of the intervened student/artist in transforming the common place into an aesthetic object. The urban space as an aesthetic object is thus transcendent to either the place or the environment per se allowing for a new appreciation—hence another layer—to emerge from such an exchange. Any research process requires knowledge of both past and present events to make sense in order to assess the relevance of cultural constructs to such a transcendent object which becomes the canvas for ascertaining meaning in an otherwise in flux and changing experience. If we agree that meaning lies within culture, then the idea of studying the ever changing trends and currents of urban culture becomes an exercise in decoding multiple layers of meaning boarding a context in which the local and global are frequently interchanged. Hence, one’s role in intervening with the urban context should never be overlooked as an active participation in the specific culture. The self-ethnographic collecting and re-collecting processes must synthesize past histories with new and emerging ones and. So allowing the information gathered to become a sort of a cognitive map that reflects all areas and layers of reality. As these layers reciprocally interact they will provide a cognitive platform through which to generate both arguments and critical evaluations.

“Homeboy” Histories: a Case Study

As we embarked in designing an Integrated Learning curriculum for a class that will explore issues of urban violence and recovery in an urban neighborhood, it became clear that a solid research of the past and contemporary history was necessary to engage both the students and mentors alike. Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles neighborhood, with a long history of diversity and conflict became our class’s case study, an urban laboratory. The course teamed up with Homeboy Industries—a community organization that strives to move individuals from gang life and violence to the mainstream of society. Our goal as a program was to expose artists and designers to social issues that can affect their work and at the same time engage their creative efforts to research, and devise alternatives to the many problems that plagued the community partner. I made the conscious decision to add another layer of significance and challenge the students to use their talents to devise creative ways in which to address issues to the community members (Homeboy Industries ex–gang members) identified as necessary to meet the community partner’s goals. Boyle Heights is a community with a long history. It was created as a community to house migrant Jews from the East Coast of the United States due to the changing historic realities. Boyle Heights became the residence of the many ethnic groups that at different time periods moved to Los Angeles. To both resident mentors and students, Boyle Heights was embroiled in the violent reality that had been popularized by the media and film culture. Moreover, Boyle Heights history is absent from any school or college curriculum in the area.

This erasure of history contributes to further lack of ownership from the stockholders in the community, its residents. As Norman Klein asserts in his book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, in relation to the systematic destruction of Los Angeles neighborhoods, so does Boyle Heights exemplify that erasure.^[4]

Since its beginning, Boyle Heights has been a microcosm of life in Los Angeles, but the many cultural layers of meaning and identity, although present, are buried under its historical erasure. There is a sense of an absence of historicity, which begs the right for claiming it. I equate Boyles Heights to a “Hollywood stage consciousness” as the culprit and such conscience suggests the lack of permanence of any structure. Everything has a limited lifespan before it is disposed, dismantled, or recycled without any sense of intrinsic historical values. The sense of history as fragmented and as only partially remembered by those who can identify the telltale signs leave Boyle Heights as a modern-day ruin. Through a continual and almost centrifugal process the many layers of forgotten history in the area must be reclaimed in order to convey a sense of historical continuity. Such continuity is important to Boyle Heights’ inhabitants who situate their life and existence within a historical continuum and in relation the rest of the city and state. By so doing this community will create what Edward C. Knox calls a “cultural competence.”^[5] As a construct “Cultural Competence” must draw from anthropology the ideas necessary to provide individuals the tools to develop a meaningful self-ethnography. The tragic consequence for individuals caught between living in a new environment, cultural amnesia, and personal marginalization is the inability to coordinate and harmoniously weave themselves into the host culture. The result often provokes a reaction against all possible transcendent objects, or phantasmagoric images found in and around the social space and this renders the layered “ruin” a vacant dilapidating environment littered with human debris. Instead what we might inspire to pursue through a self-ethnographic integrated learning course such as the one with Homeboy Industries is a meaningful exchange that identifies the areas negatively impacted by cultural shock and re-directed through the pedagogical parameters of aesthetics.

And such aesthetics of urban space may be provocative in its overlapping areas of knowledge that collide and crumble under the weight of senseless historicity; a troubled aesthetic unfolds. This urban aesthetics aims to cave, obliterate, and atomize the previous culture with a collage of new and controversial elements that challenge authorities and baffle onlookers. For the “new creators” this adding of a historical albeit controversial layer may have a therapeutic and liberating outcomes. It centers, decenters, and recenters the resident and the place within what I term locus serenus: a place that provides meaning and comfort.

In a sense, such a new creator fulfills the role of what Audrey Bennet ascribes to the figure of the graphic designer: “The graphic designer traditionally behaved as the representative of the audience.”^[6]

In such a fashion, the creation/design process involves processes of translating known and common signs into novel ways of knowing that apply to anyone serving the role of visual cultural translator similar to what Bennett assigns to the graphic designer: “Since the graphic designer was a member of the audience that s/he represented the design gestalt created would, be intrinsically, appropriate for the prospective audience.”^[7]

The creation of this transitory space of meaning and comfort requires a high level of maintenance and in order to achieve it participants must forsake all other cares. Hence its controversial and destructive character will definitely change the city yet once more adding another layer to the already complex urban universe.

The Changing Canvas of the City: the “Locus Serenus”

The creation of the “Locus Serenus” is not quite the spinoff of Horace’s Beatus ille; far from it. The Locus Serenus is not a celebration of tranquility in the classical sense, but rather, a place where meaning and placement come together in uneasy terms to make sense of the oppositional forces active in urban living. The existence of the Locus Serenus as a place of peace and comfort is only illusory and at most a phantasmagorical perception. Such a transitory place provides a safe heaven and a mirror image of the self and its environmental opposites or negations. Moreover, the role of Locus Serenus is to be a place of negotiation of opposites while giving the individual a sense of ownership and perceived control. This is a place in flux that renders a sense of the kaleidoscopic nature to the chaos of the urban environment.

The changing nature of the city equals its apparent absence of permanence and yet it provides a canvas for new and transforming realities. The educator in this environment must use the idea of place and placement to advance a study of Locus Serenus as embedded in the cultural markers but nonetheless ignored due to lack of involvement by the stakeholders. The idea of a changing history and aesthetics must be addressed here in respect to the notion of Locus Serenus such as in the case of Hollenbeck Park as precisely exemplifying equally a place of rest and danger. And because of the pluralistic nature of both its social and cultural plexus Boyle Heights deliberates an almost insular concept of history, one that begins and ends with the oblivious self-emergent individual. To use the city as a text, all forgotten pages must be brought to bear witness to the continuity and relevance of the many “experiences” present in the architecture, names of streets and buildings, urban planning, and the individuals who left their mark on the Boyles Heights walls, graffiti—urban frescos. The city changes exponentially to the growth and decay of urban spaces such as Boyle Heights, but the urban landscape is open-ended and multiple in its memorizing of public and private histories alike. A good example for this memorializing is evident in the works of Graffiti Artists and its relation to the city boundaries: “The geographical boundaries of the East Side and West Side, as defined by the L.A. writers have little to do with how the average residents of Los Angeles distinguish the two areas [East and West].”^[8]

The gaps and disconnects between “regular” residents and resident street artists account for the creation of two maps, two cities: the politically legitimate one and the subversive one which together comprise an urban aesthetic rebellious other.

To ensure that all elements of the urban discourse will be harmonized in the course is naive but not without merits since even though education and public engagement do not always go hand in hand they can be re-configured to do so. As the neighborhood evolves towards gentrification and urban planning, other layers are added and hopefully this time around Boyle Heights will be turned into a Locus Serenus—incorporating its past and present lives.

Through the years in which the “Homeboy” Histories had been taught as a course the concept of change/permanence was introduced into an all-encompassing picture of Boyles Heights as a place of complexities and multiplicities. Through Boyles Heights representations in art and architecture, memories in film and print, its picture is augmented with an aesthetic dimension that renders past and present more coherently. In addition, the human components of the urban space are introduced through mentoring the artists and designers as they begin to incorporate to their visual vocabulary elements that previously were considered unimportant or outright intrusive. The class mentor, a former gang member and a self-taught artist, has begun to incorporate the neighborhood’s architectural elements. These elements historically belong to previous generations of residents who were intending to design Boyle Heights as an ideal urban habitat, into a proto Beverly Hills, were perceived as unimportant and disruptive, and hence as a fair game for vandalizing. After lectures, field trips, and historical contextualization, the former gang member/artist has begun to incorporate elements such as bridges as a reclaiming of past’s fossils and thus as a way to mediate past and present histories.

Seeing the transformation of the former gang member’s art, as the teaching self-ethnography was incorporated into his work, embodied the best testament to creating a stable flow of personal history by appropriating the bridge motif as a metaphor of continuity and permanence.

If we agree that meaning is to be found within the cultural sphere, then in the context of these communities to which so many newcomers arrive daily the idea and desire for Locus Serenus becomes an imperative, although the multiple layers of history can become a hindrance to appropriating the place as a Locus Serenus. Moreover, the tensions that arise between the expectations and the new reality can disturb the delicate balance between place and individual.

To integrate and embed these past-present layers a Locus Serenus is needed for allowing the incorporation of the individual and his or her expectations in such a manner that offers a sense of continuity. The aesthetics principle of Locus Serenus is also a way through which education can greatly benefit by addressing the values of place and moment within the urban context.

Education can deliberate a moral commitment to the place that will result in less of the “brain drain” in these communities by those who experience it as a ground for their arrival. The notion of the urban space as a “revolving door” is amply evident in the Boyle Heights area. Individuals who have attained education are moving out as soon as they obtain a degree and leave behind a deprived community with no hopes for the future except being the landing place to newcomers. This perpetual movement or process has been noted by Spalding while researching Boyle Heights through its changes and time. Commenting about the social problem besieging the city, Spalding asserts, “the problem was principally attributable to a generation gap.”^[9]

Another tendency can be spotted in the phenomenon of new urbanites that are finding Boyle Heights an attractive alternative to long commutes into the city and are competing with an already strained community for space and meaning. As this new dynamic unravels, the social and economic disparities accentuate and provide yet another layer through which different ethnicities and histories are intertwined to create the present Boyle Heights with its unique aesthetics. To decode such urban aesthetics means to account for the ongoing impact of global migrations and internal shifts in American cities. The challenge lies in ascertaining the role of these new developments in the already strained history of the area. Only time can tell. To education and aesthetics Boyles Heights turns out to be an ideal laboratory for interrogating the ways in which urbanization unfolds in an era in which space is also cyber and no longer only that of neighborhoods, parks, and roads.

Coda

Using place and locale as a direct reference is important to be able to create a direct and meaningful relationship between the stakeholders and their communities. The detachment created by electronic media creates a virtual illusory second stage that is divorced from the realities on the ground. The visual image is a far cry from reality; it is devoid of the contradictions inherent to being there. The aesthetic experience is not only visual, it is also pluralistic in the many senses it encompasses, and the way it is analyzed varies depending on how invested the individual is. There is no substitute for the experience of being there, and that presence is usually the first and definitive encounter with the Locus Serenus.

^{1. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/05/dropout.rate.study/index.html.}

^{2. Philip Martin, “Managing International Labor Migration in the 21st Century,” in South Eastern Journal of Economics 1, 2003: 9–18.}

^{3. Doug Sounders, How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World (New York: Pantheon, 2010).}

^{4. Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Verso Books, 1998).}

^{5. Edward Knox, “Between Cultural Studies and Cultural Competence,” in French Review 72 (4), 1999.}

^{6. Audry Bennett, “Interactive Aesthetics,” in Design Issues 18 (3), 2002.}

^{7. Audry Bennett, “Interactive Aesthetics.”}

^{8. Steve Grody, Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art (New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 2006), 21.}

^{9. Sophie Spalding, “The Myth of the Classic Slum: Contradictory Perceptions of Boyle
Heights Flats, 1900-1991,” in Journal of Architectural Education 45 (2), Feb. 1992.}

Future of Aesthetics

Aesthetics and Kinesthetics in Performance

Dialogue

Q. Is the merging of different time lapses a spacialization of time? And is the theatrical hyperpresence a way to anull the linearity of time and its cultural-ideological origin?

Q. How will the difference between this all-presence and that “instant” digitized presentification be detected and felt by the new generations?

Q. Concerning the emphasis on the gesture (making sense by repetition), does its reenactment jeopardize the theatrical actions (making sense through accomplishment of an aim)?

Q. How distant is your perspective from Brecht’s political mission?

Kinesthesia and Performative Responses to Digitized Time

The Body and Bodily Through Kinesthetic Means

Kinesthesia and Empathy

Notes

Artifice, or a New Nature

Dialogue

Q. You appear to posit a new creative agent in the age of post-artifice and you relate to it as the “constructor”; can you expound on it?

Q. In what ways does the art object as a collective manifestation of one’s aesthetic constitution suggest that it may be regarded as an automaton?

Q. What are the differential aspects that lie today between sensory inputs and the symbolic in light of your arguments on the interplay between the analogue and digital?

Q. How does Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis help us in explaining the emergence of an aesthetics infused with analogue as well as digital agents?

Q. Can you explain what is the significance of the new kind of machine situated as nature? Is it a naturalized machine (of aesthetic experience) or rather a naturalistic version of the aesthetics of machines (for example, Futurists or cyber art)?

Artifice, or a New Nature

The Constructor

The Object as Automaton

Cognitive Modalities

Integration, Emergence, Auto-Poiesis

A New Sense of Reality: The Machine as a Strategy of Nature

Notes

Aesthetics and Transcoding

Dialogue

Q. The catastrophe of writing and photography recalls Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of the Machine replacing the mute and immediate language of architecture.

Q. If chemistry and physics are the tools of this new form of writing, how would you define in a few words this morphing between the mechanical device of photography grounded upon natural dynamics, and nature’s mechanical devices?

Q. Blurring the traditional distinction subject/object, external/internal, doesn’t photography also blur the Husserlian claim for originary intentionality in any cognitive act?

Q. Do you think that a “logic of the real” is still possible, once it is detached from any logic of perception? What demarcates the “real,” mathematics or logic? In this case, are we back to an Aristotelian ontological universe?

Q. So what is the role of transcoding?

Q. Can you define “evidence,” once that it is independent of any representational value?

Q. How can we rescue “correspondence” (adaequation) if that split between subject/ object is gone, and if the complexity of the systems of representation (Karl Popper) can never be reduced to a simple reference?

The Moving of Photography Into the Realm of the Invisible, or the Historicity of Photonic Records

Correspondence and Verisimilitude of the Photo-Image

What Happens to Photographic Images in the Age of Transcoding?

Notes

Ruins

Dialogue

Q. One of the implications of your analysis of “ruins” in aesthetics is its twofold structure in relation to allegory and spectacle. Yet, can allegory and spectacle evade their mutual annihilation? And if not, what does it say about future aesthetics?

Q. Unlike contemporary critics, such as Rancière and Žižek, you offer an interpretation of art and cinema in particularn not as a political plateau or action but rather as a horizon of memory. Any thoughts?

Q. The use of ruins has a historical origin, associated with modernity. Do you mean to consider the future of this peculiar memento mori as the final destination of modernity?

Q. Considering that metal does not last as stone does, do you think that our future landscapes will be deprived of ruins and will be filled with debris? And what kind of feeling might be associated with that lack of “shaped” past?

Preliminary: “Ruins” vs. “Debris”

Ruins

The Fresco in Fellini’s Roma

Retrieving Laocoön and His Sons

Debris: Miyamoto and Kiefer

Ryuji Miyamoto’s Representation of the 1995 Earthquake in Kobe

Anselm Kiefer’s Exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2008

Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Epiphanies: Salvaging Ruins Into the Twenty-first Century

Twenty-first-century Leonardo

Aesthetics and Ethics of SciFi

Notes

About the “Anything Goes in Art”

Dialogue

Q. Can art, as exceedingly more related to technique, support and affect the artist’s identity?

Q. A pressing question arising from social media and technological mediation in general is whether subjectivity, as related to art’s autonomy, is possible at all . . .

Q. Can you discuss a specific artwork or an artist that approaches such continuous reconfiguration?

Q. How would you relate to the more recent argument made by Rosalind Krauss (that the notion of medium or media of art is no longer sufficient) and suggesting her concept of “technical support” as qualifying art in a contemporary culture that seems to have lost its mediation and autonomy?

Q. Through the examples of art that you bring, how do artists show the increasing aesthetic condition of superimposition of states, fragmentation, and fluidity of identity?

Q. Can you expound a little more on what you mean by operative superimposition?

Q. Fragmentation is often viewed negatively. How can one at present address it through a positive aesthetic perspective?

Q. Does this instability between art, artists, and artworks represent a new paradigm?

Q. Does your perspective imply the “historicity” of art or does it destroy it?

Notes

The Changing Canvas of the City

Dialogue

Q. How do you imagine self-education and self-construction in a conflicted and complex urban setting, which seems to encourage a dynamic, unstable, and nonlinear sense of identity?

Q. Do you see an aesthetics of place and history as an antidote to the Web’s de-localization?

Q. Do you think that what you describe as “self-ethnography” amounts to a new aesthetic mode in approaching the urban-scape?

Q. You are referring to cities’ growing tensions between their internal and international populations; but, to what extents do the resulting cultural manifestations contribute to a new aesthetic sensibility?

Q. Los Angeles in particular has been noted for the “erasure of its history”—to what extent do urban mythology and trends transcend the flux of cultural signs and settle into history?

Q. To what extent do urbanization and digitalization, especially in reference to social networks, fuse and mutate the city’s aesthetic landscape?

Q. The aesthetic aspects that define multiple urban identities are also affected by virtual realities. In what sense do they entail participation?

The Urban Dichotomy

Self-Ethnography

“Homeboy” Histories: a Case Study