The Artist as Inventor: Investigating Media Technology through Art 9781786611321, 9781786611338, 1786611325

Citation preview

The Artist as Inventor

Catricala_9781786611321.indb 1

29-06-2021 15:55:00

The Artist as Inventor Investigating Media Technology through Art

Valentino Catricalà Translated by Arabella Ciampi

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Expanded and reworked translation of Media Art Prospettive delle arti nel XXI secolo. Storie, teorie, preservazione, first published in Italian by Eterotopie (2016) Copyright © 2021 by Valentino Catricalà All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Catricalà, Valentino, author. | Ciampi, Arabella, 1989– translator. Title: The artist as inventor : investigating media technology through art / Valentino Catricalà ; translated by Arabella Ciampi. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | “First published in Italian as Media art prospettive delle arti verso il XXI secolo. Storie, teorie, preservazione by Eterotopie (2016).” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021011230 (print) | LCCN 2021011231 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786611321 (cloth) | ISBN 9781786611338 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: New media art. | Computer art. Classification: LCC NX456.5.N49 C3813 (print) | LCC NX456.5.N49 (ebook) | DDC 709.05/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021011230 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021011231 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Foreword by Ben Vickers

vii

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction “The Artist as Inventor” between the Industrial Revolution and the New Media System “The Artist as Inventor” in the Post World War

1 1 4

1 Reinventing Innovation through Art Beyond Aesthetics Art vs Creativity? Art and Innovation Art and Archive: Beyond “Planned Obsolescence” The Practice of Archive The Artist as Inventor

9 9 13 15 18 21 24

2 The Dawn of a New Media Environment Toward A New Vision At the Intersection between Art, Cinema, and Media Personalized Media A Question of Calculus: Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

35 35 40 43 44

3 Avant-Gardes and Technology: Toward a New Notion of the Medium 57 Inventing the Machine 57 Posthumanism 59 The Artist as Inventor in the Avant-Gardes 64

v

vi

Contents

4 Art and Innovation after the War: Post-War Italy. Fontana, Munari, Gallizio From Arte Programmata to Media Art The Image amidst Videos and Computers Expanded Cinema, Expanded Art E.A.T./LACMA/Bell Labs: The artist as inventor

73 76 80 84 88

5 New Languages of Art 101 Installations Take Control: Video, Robotics, Interactivity 101 The Art of Connectivity 107 Nowadays 109 Postcinema, Postmedia, and Media Art: Concepts and Theories 113 Art and Artificial Intelligence 120 6 For a New Idea of Innovation: Beyond Anthropocene From Humanus to Antropos The Human Being amidst Gaia and Transhumanism Art for a New Mysticism Beyond the “Post” Toward a New Idea of Media Economy

131 132 135 138 141 145

7 “The Artist as Inventor”: Focus The Futurists: The Case of Fortunato Depero (1919–1925) Willi Baumeister’s Mecano (1921) Raoul Hausmann’s Optophone (1922–1934) El Lissitzky’s Electromechanic Vision (1923) Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux: The Medium as Machine Medium as Map. Michael Naimark’s Aspen Movie Map Blind Medium: Art and Society in the Work of Antoni Abad Portable Media Max Bense’s Information Aesthetics TV Workshops: WGBH and TV Lab The Invention of the Synthesizer W. Bradford Paley, TextArc (2002) Device art Tenori On (2005) Joaquin Fargas, The Glaciator

153 153 154 155 157 160 162 164 167 169 170 170 172 172 173 174

Bibliography 179 Index 193 About the Author

199

Foreword

As we travel down the highway of technological development, and the machines and gadgets we use on a daily basis become more impressive and complex, our ability to feel in control of the technology we use can feel further and further out of our grasp. It is often presented to us as a brave, if strange, new world, where users become ever more impotent in the face of technologies they don’t understand and don’t feel they control. Power lies in the hands of the machines, their designers, and the corporations who produce them. It can feel like technologies change the way we interact with the world; art and culture are shaped by the new developments, following in their wake. In this book, Valentino Catricalà suggests that such a view is skewed; rather than the arts being a passive partner to the technologies, art and technology have always had a symbiotic relationship with each other. Not only, Catricalà argues, has art helped guide innovation, but frequently artists themselves have been key to the production of new technological solutions in an under-recognized role: the artist-inventor. By looking at the development of this role throughout history, he interrogates the importance of this figure in changing the direction of our societies. His argument is a powerful and important antidote to contemporary feelings of impotence in the face of a digital revolution. Technology is seen as belonging to the realm of the expert, with users as passive consumers. But a new lens is needed to enable wider access to the discussion around who technology serves. The science fiction author Ursula K Le Guin wrote: Technology is how a society copes with physical reality. . . . [It] is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialized technologies of the past

vii

viii

Foreword

few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word.

When we foreground artists as inventors of technological innovation, we can create a new frame for these developments. The drivers of development need not be solely the consumer market, but can be human needs; in Catricalà’s case, artists for whom current technology isn’t sufficient for realizing their creative vision. Historical examples of this tendency, this need to create new forms and pathways for making their work, are legion. From the earliest days of photography, film, and radio, artists were finding new technical solutions to produce the outcomes their vision needed. But the development of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century pushed forward this role of the artist-inventor. Catricalà’s analysis of their work helps provide a new framework for analyzing and interpreting the avant-garde. Within the avant-garde, artists were challenged by new communication technologies to rethink how the media we use create new subjects, from the speeding car to the visual stimulation of the urban night. But artists, in their symbiotic mode, helped develop such technologies, like the Austrian Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, whose early work developing photomontages developed into new ideas for audio-visual technologies, such as the optophone, a machine that interchangeably transferred visual and auditory inputs and outputs, or the endoscope. Meanwhile, in the techno-utopian fervor of the Russian Revolution, artists like El Lissitzky saw the artist as intrinsic to the victory of the processes of social and technological change and worked in liaison with engineers to produce electronic automata for opera productions. For such artists, technological development was an intrinsic part of artistic creation; their insertion into the discourse of invention redefines the political and ethical discussion around technology use. The current moment is a continuation; those avant-garde visions are not historically limited but have been part of an ongoing process of artists interacting with the world. The same tendencies have emerged and developed throughout the past century. From the 1960s on, E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) helped facilitate collaborations between artists and engineers from Bell Labs to produce visual and performance works which pushed at the edges of current technology, from wireless transmission and new projection technologies through proto-holographic imaging, right up to the world’s first 360o augmented reality live stream in 2017. In the United Kingdom, the Artist Placements Group (APG.), founded in 1965 by the artist Barbara Steveni, helped place artists at the heart of British industry and government at a time when Prime Minister Harold Wilson was claiming that “Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this [technological] revolution,” and the mood of social change was putting the country

Foreword

ix

at the heart of a new pop culture. In this environment, the APG ensured artists like John Latham, Yoko Ono, and David Hall were working closely at the heart of organization like vast nationalized steel producer British Steel, or within the civil service, at the Department of Health and Social Security. The APG moved the idea of the artist from the rarified gallery back into society, at the nexus of the producer and the consumer. That interchange between the governmental, the private, and the public is still evident today. Google’s street view technology can find its roots between a collaboration between artists like Rebecca Allen, technologists, designers, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT.), and the United States Department of Defense agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Together they produced the project Aspen Movie Map, a groundbreaking mapping project which filmed street panoramas of the whole of the city of Aspen in Colorado, combining them with digital 3D models, historical archives, and city information. An early experiment in hypermedia, its role as a precursor to modern digital mapping technologies and services is unmistakable. What all these strands of creative production have in common is their involvement at the very nascency of the technological process. Artists aren’t simply passive consumers using pre-engineered platforms as mediums for their ideas, but have been intrinsic in shaping and pioneering their early development. That fact should color the way we think about wider engagement with technological innovation. As Ursula K Le Guin noted, technology is not a fait accompli, but a process of usage with which we’re all engaged, the active human interface with the material world. The user is not a passive player, but should be at the center of the technical dynamic. Artists help expand the limits of a technology user and as such help redefine the terms for ethical debate and consideration on technology’s implications. That’s a lesson whose value is only increasing today. Ben Vickers

“The Artist as Inventor” An Introduction

“THE ARTIST AS INVENTOR” BETWEEN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE NEW MEDIA SYSTEM “The artist as inventor” is the title of this book. It is a title that has been highly thought out, reasoned, and elaborated. It is not always easy to find an effective and explanatory title, one that can incorporate both the soul and profound meaning of what one is trying to say. It is like a formula, a combination of words, a progression from one word to another in a journey that is short, rather short, yet both auditory and conceptual. A title “signifies” but at the same time “sounds” and is “beautiful.” It is not easy to merge these together: “I like it, but it doesn’t sound right,” “profound concept, but it is not a beautiful phrase,” “sounds good, but it doesn’t mean anything.” The title must “sound” good, musically speaking, be beautiful, aesthetically speaking, and mean something, conceptually speaking. It is very important to begin from words themselves, from their meaning; this is an act that should never be forgotten. Etymology often paves the way to new, important forms of awareness, just like philosophy has done over the years. Thus, looking at the words that comprise the title of this book can perhaps be a good introduction. As mentioned, the book is entitled “the artist as inventor.” If we were to carefully analyze this sentence, we would come to realize that the choice of words is neither banal nor fortuitous. First of all, the subject is the artist. In this case, the artist can be conceived of in the classical sense, in the meaning that emerged during the eighteenth century, as “one who exercises the fine arts,” different from a “craftsman” who was more tied to the mechanical arts, according to Francesco Milizia’s renown distinction from 1797.1 It is 1

2

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction

precisely in this same time-period that a new meaning of the word “artist” emerges, one that is increasingly detached from its previous significance tied to an idea of “craftsman,” one who exercises an art or technique. This new, noble meaning reaches its peak in the romanticism of the nineteenth century and with the birth of the notion of artist as creative genius. Today, the most common notion of artist is very close to the one just described, yet it must be recognized that its role has come to take on different connotations. Consequently, the differences that existed in the past between artist and “creative” are less apparent today. This is not to say that there are no longer differences between the two, in turn this has become a common misconception that often creates professional and terminological difficulties. Let’s take a look at how many times the word “art” is used improperly. A term such as digital art is used to describe an artistic practice and at the same time strange graphics that have been digitally processed. If we want to go even further, entire brands have misappropriated the term “art,” without having anything to do with “art” in the first place—think, for example, of the video games brand “electronic arts.” It is also interesting to note how the new world of Silicon Valley, starting from the 1980s until now, has appropriated the “art” brand, as if to say that new worlds require new imaginaries. Despite the constant terminological inconsistencies, it can still be said that an artist is different from a creative, a designer, or an architect. However, it must be noted that the figure of the artist has changed with respect to the classical notion and image of what it represented. This change was not initiated by the fact that the aforementioned roles converged, for example, that a designer today can also be called an artist, rather the change seems to have been prompted by the second fundamental word in the title of this book: “inventor.” Once again, the term “inventor” was a choice that was very thought-out. One might ask: why not “The Artist as Creator” or “The Artist as Producer,” or something similar? The answer is because the “inventor” is not a “creator” nor is he a “producer.” The etymology of the term “invent” lies in the Latin word inventus, past participle of invenire. Inventiònem and invéntus, that is, to uncover by investigating, to find what is hidden, to shed light on what could remain concealed. Not free creation or orderly production, but invention. An inventor is one who produces something new through a creative process that has a very defined before and after. In the nineteenth century, this term started to take on new meanings, precisely at the same time as the reformulation of what technology and innovation meant. In a very important essay, historian and philosopher of science Leo Marx highlights how the meaning of technology began to change in the first half of

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction

3

the nineteenth century, finally acquiring the meaning we give it today after the Second Industrial Revolution. A semantic turn that resolves a conceptual void due to the sudden changes that took place between the two industrial revolutions, the first around 1760, the second around the second half of the nineteenth century; “Although the confluence of the sciences and the practical arts was well under way by 1847, it was not until the final quarter of the century, with the rise of the electrical and chemical industries, that the large-scale amalgamation of science and industry helped to create the semantic void that would eventually call forth the new concept—technology.”2 Technology became key for interpreting a society increasingly based on complex techniques that were gradually becoming “systems.” The great leap from a technical society to a technological one surely lies in the concept of system; in the moment that technique, understood as Mechanical Art, became technology, a system of interconnected technical automatisms: “During the early phase of industrialization, innovations in the mechanic arts typically had been represented as single, free-standing, more or less self-contained mechanical devices: the spinning jenny, the power loom, the steam engine, the steamboat, the locomotive, the dynamo, or, in a word, machines. By Webster’s time, however, the discrete machine was being replaced, as the typical embodiment of the new power, by a new kind of sociotechnological system.”3 In this technological and cultural context terms widely in use today, such as technology, innovation, progress and media, began to take on new meanings. In terms of media, from the advent of photography until today, the term has increasingly been identified with mass communication technologies and has thus taken its place in the vocabulary of new generations. In this context the “creator,” now definitively freed from a magical and often mystical aura, becomes inventor, an engine of technological innovation, driver of finalized invention. Although there had already been an interest in invention, it is certainly at this point that the inventor takes on his role within society, as the engine of a new mindset based on the idea that experimentation, and therefore constant invention, is an indication of progress and wellbeing. Once again, in Leo Marx’s words, “To be sure, the idea of progress had been closely bound up, from its inception, with the accelerating rate of scientific and mechanical innovation.”4 In this context, new professional figures were born, “in these years the profession of civil engineer, distinct from that of architect and patriarchal millwright, emerges and is institutionalized, while the designer, free creator of repertoires or employed in a particular manufacture, will have to compete with new means and new production methods.”5 Concurrently, a new idea of artist began to emerge, too. In those years, artists embodied the world of nascent innovation, they started working with technicians and engineers, in teams, ideating and

4

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction

experimenting. Their outlook changed and the themes they tackled began to take on critical forms—often critical precisely toward the new world of innovation and nascent progress.6 In criticizing, the artist invents, incorporating new emerging expertise, that of technicians and engineers, and bending technology to his vision. Once again he demonstrates that the purpose of artistic production is not inventing technology, but experimenting and producing new technologies with the aim of proposing new understandings and stimulating new imaginaries. A new idea of innovation: only in this way the goal of progress will not be unconditional and unbridled progress itself, but will be, as we shall see, anchored to what is beneficial for humanity. The first part of the book investigates how in the nineteenth century, conditions were ripe for the emergence of a new technological system (First Industrial Revolution), and media (more or less identified with the birth of photography), which in turn infused a critical sensibility in the artistic output of the time (literature, poetry, theater, etc.). This will bring us to one of the main premises of this text, that is, that it is only since the historical avant-gardes that technology and media started taking form. The “artist as inventor” emerged with the advent of the historical avant-gardes. “THE ARTIST AS INVENTOR” IN THE POST WORLD WAR7 On November 18, 1953, Martin Heidegger gave a lecture at the Maximum auditorium of the Technische Hochschule in Munich entitled The Question Concerning Technology. In light of the critical traditions that had characterized the debate on technology at the end of the nineteenth century—represented by authors such as Simmel, Sombart, and Rathenau8—the German philosopher posed some fundamental questions that would later come to influence the study of philosophy. Heidegger’s thesis is renowned. He considered technology to be neither the mere means to an end, nor the totality of means available to human beings: “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.”9 In these sentences, the critical focus shifts from an understanding of technology as an instrument, a means, to the potentiality of the phenomena “revealed” by it. Technology is no longer seen as merely functional or directed toward a particular goal, but as the instrument of production par excellence: that which brings into being what was not previously present.

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction

5

This formulation greatly influenced the burgeoning philosophy of technology, as evinced by Blumenberg’s compelling theories. He states: “If the spirit realized in the phenomena of technology has always been a matter for the history of technology, then, for a history of the spirit of technology, what seems to remain is only the spirit before and after the technical phenomenon, the spirit of motivation and the spirit of justification, the realm of impulses and that of evaluations, that of anticipations and that of influences.”10 Although this shift is fundamental for understanding the different ways in which to approach technology and its development, it must be recognized that Heidegger’s analysis became increasingly negative and peremptory as he came to terms with the technology of the time. According to Heidegger, who employs the term Gestell to highlight the “enframing” character of contemporary technology, “It remains true, nonetheless, that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve. Accordingly, man’s ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces.”11 This calculability risked compromising the truth that the philosopher was initially referring to. Between calculability of nature and concealed truth, in the renowned conclusion to his essay Heidegger still managed to find a path toward salvation. He claimed that salvation lurked beneath the surface of the etymological meaning of the word techné, since this term concealed art within itself: art as the producer of what is beautiful and true. Hence, in an extremely suggestive ending, Heidegger claims that salvation lies in art and in the etymological root of techné. This brief, albeit limited, summary of Heidegger’s essay, was given so as to emphasize the point of departure for the following question: what kind of art is Heidegger referring to? Despite the fundamental intuitions of the German philosopher, it seems that the art to which he aspired to as a possibility of salvation is romantic poetry, especially Hölderlin’s: “it is clear that Heidegger’s operation consists in projecting history anew in a mythicalcosmological dimension—we could also say symbolical, if you will.”12 Could it be that salvation from “enframing” technology is only to be found in a mythical–cosmological dimension? Could it be that salvation lies in the refuge of poetic romanticism? Let’s look at the dates. Heidegger’s essay was written in 1953. In the same year, while Heidegger thought about and wrote the essay for the conference on the question concerning technology, there were artistic impulses that were being developed that would ultimately change the way we relate to

6

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction

technology. These succeeded in highlighting a new approach to technological change. A different idea of artist was being created: “The Artist as Inventor.” If Heidegger is our point of departure, we could say that, besides Hölderlin’s poems, and even if salvation was not the main goal, a different approach to the issue of technology was being developed in the very same years that he wrote his essay. This is one of the main concerns of this book. The majority of what will be considered follows this course. Think of the experiences of the historical avant-gardes, for example in the history of cinema or photography. Already in 1958 A. P. Rich, a young researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, had programmed a computer to generate geometric shapes automatically.13 This event produced the very first images made entirely by a computer, which later allowed for new artistic phenomena such as computer art and contemporary media art. A few years later, in 1963, Nam June Paik, a young Korean artist, exhibited thirteen distorted TV sets in Wuppertal, Germany, sanctioning the birth of video art. The Television Manifesto of the Spatial Movement (1952), a first attempt at approaching Television Electronic Technology artistically, was signed by Lucio Fontana and his companions. Not to mention the rising age of robotic art, sound art, and so on. These are just some of the instances that could be mentioned as starting points of the artistic phenomena discussed in this book. The road to “The Artist as Inventor” has been set. The artist is now at the intersection between the art world and that of innovation, science, and technology. The artist brings to these worlds an entirely new vision, comprised of ethical, poetic, and philosophical questions. To represent his or her vision, “the artist as inventor” must create new devices that often turn into veritable machines exploited by the market. What happens when an artist invents new machines? Innovation itself is endowed with a new aura and is no longer solely tied to sales and technological development. This is my proposal: that through the looking-glass of “the artist as inventor,” we come to view and understand artists not as mere passive users of technology, but as engines of progress. In turn, this will be associated to a new idea of development, one that is not linear or deterministic, a product of the Second Industrial Revolution, but concerns an idea of innovation that overcomes the cornerstones of today’s economy, such as planned obsolescence, the disparity between old and new media, and the absence of an ethical outlook if not one that is tied to business. As we will see in the last chapter, technological experimentation and the invention of new technologies are issues that impinge on our everyday life. The return of natural elements to technological creation, the interaction with

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction

7

an ecological—holistic—idea of the Earth, the fundamental role of studies on plants and animality; all these perspectives will be presented as they view improvement neither as an addition nor as inherent to the technological enhancement of human beings and nature. The aim is not to show how technology can help us improve but how technology can help us uncover a new relationship with the world. Consequently, this will allow for new definition of terms such as innovation, progress, and technological development. Many companies, research centers, and institutions are already aware of this. What happens when a company organizes artist residencies or when it incorporates artists into the company’s production processes, making them the drivers of innovation? Different worlds merge to create new ones where the artist takes on a central role. These worlds must be investigated; the new ethics and concepts that arise must be understood. The new roles of cultural institutions must be debated, including a discussion on how they can be even more incisive than in the past. New emerging economies and poetics must be identified. “The Artists as Inventor” could be the new formula, a map with which to start discovering this new world.

NOTES 1. See Francesco Milizia, Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno estratto in gran parte dalla Enciclopedia metodica (Bassano, 1797). 2. Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” in Technology and the Rest of Culture, ed. Arien Mack (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 32. Also published in Technology and Culture, 51, No 3: July 2010. See also Benoît Turquety, Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures and Media History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). 3. Leo Marx, “Technology,” 33. 4. Leo Marx, “Technology,” 32. 5. From Enrico Castelnuovo’s Introduction to the Italian edition of Art and the Industrial Revolution (London: Evelyn, Adams and Mackay, 1968), XVII. Own translation. 6. See also Leo Marx: “This critical view of the new industrial arts marks the rise of an adversary culture that would reject the dominant faith in the advance of the mechanical arts as a sufficient, self-justifying, social goal.” 7. Part of this section has already been published in “On the notion of media art” in Media Art. Towards a New Definition of Arts in the Age of Technology, ed. Valentino Catricalà (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2014). 8. See Tecnica e cultura, ed. Tomás Maldonado (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979). 9. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. 1954 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1977), 12.

8

“The Artist as Inventor”: An Introduction

10. Hans Blumeberg, Storia dello spirito della tecnica (Milan: Mimesis, 2006), 36. Own translation. 11. Heidegger, The Question, 21. 12. Massimo Cacciari, “Salvezza che cade: Saggio sulla questione della tecnica in Heidegger” (1982), in Arte, tragedia e tecnica, eds. Massimo Cacciari and Massimo Donà (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2000). Own translation. 13. Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, eds. Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Oakland: University of California, 2012).

Chapter 1

Reinventing Innovation through Art

BEYOND AESTHETICS One of the goals of this book is to demonstrate how art applied to technology does not only add something new to the contemporary art world, but can also be a driving force for social and technological innovation. Recently this claim has been professed ever more frequently, yet a supporting theoretical basis has never been identified in its entirety. Few are the studies that focus on the relationship between art and technological innovation; few the investigations that endeavor to demonstrate how in the twentieth century, and perhaps even before then, art was an agent of technological and social change with direct consequences on the market. In order to do so, we must rid ourselves of some of the more common place theoretical approaches typical of both the art world and that of innovation. On the one hand, we could say that, generally speaking, the development of cultural forms—such as art, cinema, music, and so on—has been analyzed in relation to disciplines external to these fields. History is key for understanding the changes that occurred in artistic styles and languages, as well as the evolutions of specific artists, as it offers a framework that distills from a multitude of different points of view the characterizing events of each progression. Anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis have also been valuable, together with scientific disciplines such as physics, neuroscience, astrophysics, biology and, recently, also botany and ecology. These fields have been extremely important and still are for this text. All of these disciplines are based on a very specific notion that lies at the foundations of art history: the cultural object (artwork, film, musical composition, etc.) is always well defined, as is its context.1 In this view, artistic creation is not finalized for a practical purpose, following the tradition of 9

10

Chapter 1

classical aesthetics.2 It follows that artistic creation is different from the mere production of utensils, as well as from design and architecture—art is a technical and technological development that lies outside the sphere of the market, unless it encompasses explicit references to the art market. By no means is art seen as getting its hands dirty with those branches of the market specialized in the production of objects. If we now shift our gaze from studies on art and cultural forms to studies that analyze technological innovation, the situation we encounter is very similar. In media studies and innovation studies, art is, very simply, not taken into consideration. There is no allusion to or interest in the production of artists. The issue probably lies in the fact that “The presence and value of artistic innovation is however often difficult to establish: while the presence and value of technological innovations can be established by use of relatively clear and objective performance indicators, artistic innovations concern more ambiguous matters, such as style.”3 This ambiguity causes artistic production to be considered unnecessary by society, with no tangible impact on technological development, the market and society itself. It forms a passive image of the artist as someone who has been overpowered by the development of technology. This is apparent also in the analysis of scholars, marketing experts, and art historians who, in describing the relationship between art, the market, and innovation portray artists as passive receivers. This approach can be reduced to the formula: market → technology → society → art. As we can see, this classical approach traces a straight line from the market to the realm of art. In other words, the market creates technological innovation, it invents, designs, and produces new media in order to sell it, and only then others, including artists, have the opportunity to access it. Thus, artists become passive users of technological change; at the very best, partially active users within the architectural structure of media imposed by bigger companies. In some ways, this outlook speaks the truth. It is undoubtedly true that big companies, businesses, and corporations create technological innovation. It is also undoubtedly true, especially nowadays, that the production capacity of these big companies allows for the development of technology in ways that had never been experimented before; driven by teams of engineers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and economists. Seemingly not artists. Yet, at closer inspection, it becomes clear that artists are an integral part of the production process, so much so that—as this book would like to demonstrate—they can be relocated at the beginning of the formula mentioned above. This book would like to demonstrate how, on the one hand, throughout the course of history, artists using technologies have always indirectly left clues, prefigured futures that later took place and stimulated the economic system itself; and, on the other hand, to be even more explicit, invented

Reinventing Innovation through Art

11

actual visual machines that were later placed on the market and hence were promoters of future technologies. In this way, the above-mentioned formula is overturned. It is no longer a case of: market → technology → society → art, but rather, art → market → technology → society, where art becomes the ideational, creative, and operative engine behind technological innovation. This does not imply that artists must take on the role of engineers, since an artist’s main objective is not to make objects to sell on the market, but to experiment with technology as a tool that becomes a process to attain their own poetic vision as the epiphany of the work. Thus, following the entry of technology in the art world, artists began— since the historical avant-gardes, if not even before then—to work with professional figures external to the artistic field, such as technicians, engineers, creatives, etc. “In parallel to their use of existing tools, artists developed their own in order to enable forms of creation that were not possible before or to achieve independence from corporate distribution models.”4 By the nineteenth century, the figure of the solitary artist closed in his atelier taken by the pathos of his own creation was transformed into a more “entrepreneurial” figure open to collaborations with technicians, engineers, and investors, on the search for patents and funding. The notion of perpetual technological experimentation in media is such that none of the inventions introduced on the market are taken for granted, because the media setting in which the artists are integrated is continuously re-energized. Media and technology are in a constant state of flux, they involve processes that are constantly being reactivated. Accordingly, scholars have spoken of the postmedia era in such terms: “every debate, however important and necessary, originates from an incorrect premise: that is, the idea that media still exist. In reality, I believe that today we live in a post-media condition, which has overrun the idea of the presence of media within society, effectively dismissing 19th and 20th centuries media.”5 The histories and archeologies of the relationship between art and technology have always brought to the fore the impossibility of viewing the medium as an interacting singularity, forcing us to reconsider it as something mutable, prone to the constant interchanging of its parts, traditions, and cultural elements. Accordingly, the experiential possibilities of humanity are perpetually renovated, in a temporal syncretism that unites the present with the past and the future. To not take for granted media used by artists means not being dictated by the logics of production and the notions of the market at large, thereby establishing a new practical, poetical, and political approach to technological development. It is precisely due to this dynamic approach that it is possible to uncover an archeology of technological media and its social uses. Artists can lead us to new levels of poetic and political reflection through the themes they tackle and their outlook on the media system.

12

Chapter 1

What has been said up to now is part of a story that is still to be written, one that speaks of the relations that are materializing and establishing themselves today: between artists and engineers, artists and technological companies, artists and scientists. Thus, a new dualism is born whereby the world of art is interconnected with the world of technological innovation and scientific progress. In this regard, Roger A. Malina, director of Leonardo magazine, identifies two claims, a weak one and a strong one: The weak claim instrumentalizes the necessary process of acculturation of new pervasive computer and information technologies affecting our social organization and perceptual and cognitive processes; it is a possible source for innovation. The strong claim for aesthetic computing is that by introducing ideas and methods from the arts to computing science and engineering, new objectives and methodologies can be established to redirect the future development of computing, provoking new developments and inventions that would otherwise have been impossible. A different computer science and engineering may emerge.6

Accordingly, art enables the development of computer science and engineering. Art is the driving force, the trigger of innovation. This approach started forming already in the early 2000s as can be evinced by a 2003 report by the explicit title “Beyond Productivity. Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity,” which brought to the fore the importance of creative work in companies devoted to technology. Indeed the early 2000s are an important transition period, an era of increasingly close integration between art and technology. An interesting aspect of this report is that the authors underline the non-contemporaneity of the trend. They argue that the interrelation between art and innovation is nothing new, but can be traced to 30–40 years prior: “Individual artists and designers have experimented with IT since its earliest incarnations. Artistic exploration of the possibilities of computer graphics, for example, now extends back more than 30 years, and 40 years for computer music.”7 Here there is an explicit reference to computer graphics and computer music, both quite recent fields. According to the report, the most important transition occurred in the 1980s,8 when the involvement of artists in visual communications was becoming ever more frequent. By the beginning of the 2000s, the role of artists in the innovation sector had become even more important, as the report’s incipit states: “Creativity plays a crucial role in culture; creative activities provide personal, social, and educational benefit; and creative inventions (‘better recipes, not just more cooking’) are increasingly recognized as key drivers of economic development. But creativity takes different forms at different times and in different places.”9

Reinventing Innovation through Art

13

This report and Malina’s essay are proof of the growing interest toward the relation between art and innovation; a growing interest that has deep roots, like this text would like to demonstrate, but that has started to become apparent only today. Nevertheless, there is a clarification to be made. Malina’s essay explicitly identified the figure of the artist as an insider to the new economic system albeit also operating in the field of contemporary art; instead, the report is more focused on the figure of the “creative” and “creativity,” hence the artist is only one of the many actors at play. The terms “artist” and “creative” are not synonyms, despite their similarity. ART VS CREATIVITY? Creativity occurs when a person makes a change in a domain, a change that will be transmitted through time. Some individuals are more likely to make such changes, either because of personal qualities or because they have the good fortune to be well positioned with respect to the domain—they have better access to it, or their social circumstances allow them free time to experiment.10

In short, for Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, creativity means “changing an existing domain or transforming an existing domain into a new one.”11 Being creative consists in displacing a particular domain. Until just a few years ago, creativity was studied almost solely in the fields of philosophical aesthetics and art history. Today we can safely say that it is a fully-fledged member of the world of marketing, innovation, and the economy—there is a new professional figure on the market: the “creative.”12 Among other scholars, Teresa Amabile has drawn attention to the importance of creativity in marketing. This is a field that has engendered veritable guides on how to stimulate creativity in working environments. Amabile identifies three distinct components that a company manager should develop in order to guide and stimulate high levels of creativity among his or her employees: expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation. “Can managers influence these components?”13, Teresa Amabile asks, The answer is an emphatic yes—for better and for worse—through workplace practices and conditions. Expertise is, in a word, knowledge—technical, procedural and intellectual. Creative-thinking skills determine how flexibly and imaginatively people approach problems. Do their solutions up-end the status quo? Do they persevere through dry spells? Not all motivation is created equal. An inner passion to solve the problem at hand leads to solutions far more creative than external rewards, such as money. This component—called intrinsic

14

Chapter 1

motivation—is the one that can most immediately be influenced by the work environment.14

This stands to demonstrate how the concept of creativity has evolved in recent years and how far it has come from being a field relegated solely to aesthetics and art history.15 In the last couple of years, the numbers of studies on creative management and creative leadership, “thinking outside the box,” and how this can impact economic development and innovation have grown exponentially.16 Howard Gardner, in his book Five Minds for the Future, draws a parallel between creativity and technological innovation, describing the development of our contemporary economy. In the technological realm, think of the rapid success of the telephone, the automobile, the airplane; and in more recent years, the personal computer, the videogame, the internet, the cell phone, the iPod, the BlackBerry. Think as well of the rise of fast food, the spread of fashion sneakers, the veneration of pop stars Elvis and Madonna, Brad or Angelina (no last names necessary in 2006!). Those corporations that do not embrace innovation will almost inevitably be muscled out by those that do.17

Gardener’s last sentence could easily be read as: “Those corporations that do not embrace creativity will almost inevitably be muscled out by those that do.” Creativity is a driving force for businesses, the economy, and innovation: creativity is innovation; it is change; dynamism; a consistent questioning of reality and a leap toward the future. As a result, the very concept of “future” becomes unpredictable or, inversely, allows us to live in an eternal future. The idea of constant change, of always being on the verge of something new, the feeling of perpetual development and the unpredictability of events, the impossibility of predicting the future: this is creativity today. Another report recently expressed how “The experts that attended the IFTF workshop in March 2017 estimated that around 85% of the jobs that today’s learners will be doing in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. This makes the famous prediction that 65% of grade school kids from 1999 will end up in jobs that haven’t yet been created seem conservative in comparison.”18 This is probably caused by the increase in creative jobs, which have called into question the very concept of “work.” In short, creativity is no longer simply related to art or aesthetics but includes new “creative” jobs characterized by the “creative economy.” It not only includes professionals such as graphic designers, designers, and architects but also those that take on more organizational jobs such as creative directors or contemporary art curators.

Reinventing Innovation through Art

15

This trend increased following the 2008 economic crisis, which instigated a significant reorganization of the classical work fields. In a noteworthy report issued by the non-profit organization NESTA, written by Dr Josh Siepel (SPRU, University of Sussex), Dr Roberto Camerani (SPRU, University of Sussex), Dr Gabriele Pellegrino (SPRU, University of Sussex), and Dr Monica Masucci (Dept. of Business and Management, University of Sussex), the numbers speak very clearly: According to the latest official statistics, the creative economy employed 2.8 million people in 2014, including 1.8 million in creative industries and 0.9 million creative professionals working in other sectors. This was up from 2010, when the creative economy consisted of 2.2 million people, including 1.2 million in creative industries and 0.9 million in other sectors. Further, the GVA generated by the creative economy was £133 billion in 2014, up 25 per cent from 2011”19

ART AND INNOVATION What about art? In this sea of creativity that seems to fuse everything together, what about art? Art as the driving force of imagination—defined by Baudelaire as the “queen of truth” and “ruler of the realm of truth”20—is it still so? The answer is, yes. Today it is still possible to identify certain practices as “artistic”; they are similar and yet different from design, graphic design, and creative marketing. “What has the artist modified in his work to become a designer”21 asked Bruno Munari in 1971 in his book entitled Design as Art, “And what is still artistic in design? In what ways do the two operate? Nowadays this problem concerns not only the amateurs of design and art, I believe that such an investigation will make clear the teaching methods of art schools, which are slowly transforming into design schools.”22 By the early 1970s, we began to see the “arts” merging with “applied arts,” in other words disinterested artistic creation with no specific purpose mixing with interested creation made for a specific function. Despite their coming together during the time of Munari, the differences between these two fields can still be found in the classical distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, individual studio work and group work, creative freedom and functionality, as “the artist works in a subjective way for himself and for the élite, whereas the designer works in groups for the whole community, with the purpose of improving production both in a practical and aesthetic sense.”23

16

Chapter 1

Nowadays, however, such a distinction is not as rigid as it used to be. Artists work in teams, collaborate with designers and other creatives, and are often involved in contexts that are not purely artistic. Artists are professional figures (“marketing” speak), yet they maintain a radical difference from other figures in the creative industry. This difference can be traced back to classical aesthetics; it is a subtle distinction that runs through the entire history of philosophy. Today, the term “artist” has a different use than the more generic “designer” or “creative.” In the aforementioned reports “art” is always differentiated from other domains, in that mare magnum which we, perhaps improperly, have called “creativity.” The fact that art cannot be reduced to the broader sphere of creativity is what makes the technological innovation market interested in involving artists in a company’s production process. Many companies have established artist residencies and made their technologies available to artists, allowing them to work and experiment with technologies that are often new, expensive and not readily accessible. There has been a widespread increase in centers and programs set up in order to accelerate the development of new, structured relationships between art, companies, and scientific departments. It has become a well-established industrial and business model that goes well beyond the sphere of contemporary art. To elucidate on the extent of this phenomenon, here below are a few examples: 1) the Research Artist in Residence set up by Microsoft, a project launched in 2012 as a fully-fledged newly formed department of the American computer giant devoted to artists in residence. The center’s aim is indicative—“(it) brings together artists, scientists and engineers to reflect and create across the vast unexplored possibilities at the intersection of humanity, culture, and technology. This program merges disciplines to powerfully showcase cutting-edge research, convey higher concepts, and expand public perception of computer science.”24 2) The Adobe Creative Residency: unlike in the Microsoft project, once selected, the artists involved in this program are not residents on company premises. They remain in their own studios with the obligation to visit Adobe’s offices in San Francisco once every three months. In exchange, they receive a salary and benefits from the software company, as if they were actual employees, and receive the support of mentors from various scientific departments—“The Adobe Creative Residency empowers talented individuals to spend a year focusing on a personal creative project, while sharing their experience and process with the creative community.”25

Reinventing Innovation through Art

17

3) The artist residencies of Planet Labs, the Earth imaging company that gives artists 1,000 dollars a month and allows them to make use of a space within the company’s San Francisco offices, where they are invited to work at least three days a week for three months, interacting with other employees—“We hold a bedrock belief in the power of the arts to enrich, challenge, and expand our understanding of life on Earth. We bring together art and science to build a culture of creative entrepreneurship and innovation at Planet.”26 4) Google’s 89Plus talent-seeking project devised and coordinated by Simon Castets and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, devoted to artists born after 1989—“89plus is a long-term, international, multi-platform research project co-founded by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist, investigating the generation of innovators born in or after 1989. Without forecasting artistic trends or predicting future creation.”27 5) The Residency Program of the software company Autodesk, which hosts artists from three to six months in their digital manufacturing laboratory, provides them with a salary and finances the materials required for their work—“The Autodesk Technology Centers exist to create a shared vision of the future of making with a community of innovators and thought leaders. The Residency Program is a vital part of bringing that vision to life.”28 6) Arts@Cern is a program curated by Monica Bello at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, known as CERN. Since 2011, artists have been invited to spend their residency in the most famous particle physics laboratory in the world, learning from scientists and inspiring researchers with their artistic approach—“Scientists at the lab employ a broad range of physical experiments and represent models through deeply specialized mathematics. The sense of wonder toward what complex phenomena may be revealed in such an environment is a fascination for many artists who find themselves inevitably drawn to the laboratory.”29 7) S+T+ARTS (Science, Technology & the Arts) is an initiative of the European Commission that aims to support collaborative work between artists, scientists, engineers, and researchers to develop more creative, inclusive, and sustainable technologies. To this end, S+T+ARTS brings together a large heterogeneous community that includes the following: Ars Electronica (Austria), BOZAR and Gluon (Belgium), the French Tech Grande Provence (France), Konrad Wolf Film University (Germany), MADE Group (Greece), and Maker Faire-The European Edition (Italy).30

18

Chapter 1

There are many other projects that could be mentioned. There are many companies that have found marketing potential in the role of the artist. In private companies, the dynamics are very similar to the ones that play out in museums, art foundations, and galleries. Companies give artists the opportunity to participate in artist residencies, awards, and exhibitions; they assist them in the creative process, provide them with materials, involve curators, create new synergies, and allow for new contacts to evolve. In an increasingly weaker contemporary art market, it seems that companies are taking control of a symbolic universe that is extremely important for understanding our contemporary reality. As we will see in the course of this book, what we are discussing here is nothing new; its foundations lie in the past. What is new, however, is that all of this has now become a matter of collective interest and is being materialized through funded programs and concrete infrastructures. However, it is important that we analyze the exchange between art and innovation with an eye on the past, to show how artists working with technology have always been embroiled with innovation. It could be said that this has constantly been the role of art. Art has always interpreted reality, enabling new reflections and offering new perspectives. This was clear since the very beginning, even before the emergence of the concept of “art” as we know it today.31 The constant and daily work of artists engaging with technology reinvents and subverts the linear and deterministic development of technological progress, energizes the media environment and, above all, undermines the very concept of media obsolescence on which our economy is based. In fact, this will be one of the themes of this discussion: an art that questions “planned obsolescence” or “dynamic obsolescence.”32 Found in many economic theories, “planned obsolence” represents the deterministic linearity with which the market conceives of the development of media. Pre-programming the obsolescence of a product is the best way to ensure a continuous turnover from “old” to “new.” ART AND ARCHIVE: BEYOND “PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE” In 1996, American art critic Hal Foster wrote an essay for October magazine entitled “The Archive Without Museums.” This essay laid the groundwork for analyzing twentieth-century art history through the concept of archive. In it the American critic analyzed the link between art and visual culture and the development of information technology. Similarly to André

Reinventing Innovation through Art

19

Malraux in Le Musée Imaginaire, the author asks whether “visual culture [could] rely on techniques of information to transform a wide range of mediums into a system of image-text—a database of digital terms, an archive without museums?.”33 The author then wrote two other significant essays on the same issue. Both analyze the burgeoning concept of archive within those art studies concerned with the advent of information technology. The essays were entitled “Archives of Modern Art” (2002) and “An Archival Impulse” (2004). According to Hal Foster, contemporary art practices have recently witnessed the emergence of an “archival impulse,” as can be denoted from the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean.34 These artists represent the emergence of a new art form: archival art, a practice whose progression spans across the entirety of the twentieth century but is only emerging today as a distinctive form.35 For the American critic, with the advent of digital technologies, “information does often appear as a readymade, as so much data to be reprocessed and sent on, and many artists do ‘inventory,’ ‘sample’ and ‘share’ as ways of working.”36 Here the concept of archive acquires both an aesthetic and a political significance. Previously, Walter Benjamin had underlined the revolutionary power of found archival objects—what he called “shreds” 37—in Surrealist art. [Surrealists]—he states—[were] the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects—can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.38

Hence there is a revolutionary energy behind repurposed materials, or else behind certain uses of said materials. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben stated that “children, humanity’s little scrapdealers, will play with whatever junk comes their way, and that play thereby preserves profane objects and behavior that have ceased to exist. Everything which is old, independent of its sacred origins, is liable to become a toy.”39 In art and cinema, the practice of recycling materials is perfectly situated within this ludic description.

20

Chapter 1

Thinking of the meaning of “archive” in artistic productions means continuously examining the materials being used and allowing them to “speak” for themselves. This stimulates the culture of the image, ensuring that these objects remain “recalcitrantly material, fragmentary rather than fungible, and as such they call out for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing. Although the contents of this art are hardly indiscriminate, they remain indeterminate like the contents of any archive, and often they are presented in this fashion.”40 Artworks accordingly become veritable archives, assemblages of materials from past times that find their raison d’être in the infinite forms and opportunities of their interactions. Concurrently, the presence of these artworks underlines an essential issue in the debate on the archival impulse: the fact that it is intricately related to history, memory, technological innovation, and the way in which image production is conceived of by the market. Memories engendered by images are constantly re-actualized according to the modalities and conditions of the surrounding environment. This reactualization captures a cinematographic and televised memory, which contains that which belongs to the collective imaginary (among many examples, SqueeZangeZaùm by Gianni Toti, 24 hours Psyco by Douglas Gordon or the work of Harun Farocki) as well as to the private imaginary (see Gianikian Ricci Lucchi and Stan Brakhage). In fact, nowadays this “archival” tendency is also increasingly present in cinema, having been introduced by artists such as Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, Raoul Ruiz, Peter Greenaway, Harun Farocki, Peter Tscherkassky, Craig Baldwin, Daniele Puppi, and Matthias Müller. Many of these artists were inspired by the forefathers of video art, namely Nam June Paik, Gianni Toti, Antoni Muntadas, Zbigniew Rybczyński, and Klaus Vom Bruck. All these artists represent the impulse to re-possess and re-use images of mass-culture that in time have come to define our cultural memory as a result of the influence that both cinema and television acquired during the twentieth century. The use of archival material in art—understood in the broadest sense possible—is a contemporary practice that is constantly being reassessed. Artists that make use of archival materials have no prejudices against old or new media, sounds, or images, thereby they continuously revisit the very concept of evolution and question the linearity imposed by “planned obsolescence.” Archival images, also known as recycled images, have permeated artistic and amateur contemporary practices to the point that they have engendered a transversal and multi-faceted universe in its own right, comprising of different disciplinary fields such as cinema, art, television, and amateur videos (the

Reinventing Innovation through Art

21

meme cult for example). This complex recycling practice is characterized by what has been called the “ecology of images”41 and has led to the emergence of a veritable “archival effect” in both art and cinema, going beyond even the most common concept of found footage. According to Christa Blümlinger, from Duchamp onwards, referential, detournement and re-editing practices have been at the heart of the definition of artwork. Faced with new possibilities in terms of archiving and sound and image sampling frequencies, these practices have recently gained central interest. These techniques necessarily constitute the very content of the artwork. We have entered an era of mixing and remixing, variation and reinterpretation.42

An example of this is the practice of using footage as a found object. The term “found footage” comes from the linguistic tradition of cinema when it was still made on film, and is linked to a specific terminology exemplified by words such as “footage,” “frame,” “montage,” and “found.” In one of the founding texts on this topic, William Wees distinguishes between three creative montage practices that characterize found footage: compilation, collage, and appropriation.43 These practices are linked to a creative modality typical of cinematographic montage on film. A real “aesthetic of ruins”—as Catherine Russel defines it—where “its intertextuality is always also an allegory of history, a montage of memory traces, by which the filmmaker engages with the past through recall, retrieval and recycling.”44 Perhaps this is precisely what found footage is: a “montage of memory traces” characterized by “recall, retrieval and recycling.” THE PRACTICE OF ARCHIVE Video art has made extensive use of recycled images as creative practice, and in some ways, the concept of found footage has almost become obsolete. It is argued by some that video art has engendered a new way of repurposing materials, and that this will also influence our digital futures. Indubitably, in the field of video art this adjustment was possible because of the structure of the electronic image—televised, then magnetically supported—which was meticulously explored. Toward the end of the 1970s, a surge in personal recording devices allowed for further possibilities in terms of the manipulation of images. The fact that videos and magnetic tapes could be easily recorded triggered a rise in personal video libraries; in turn this objectified the image and introduced a certain manageability that until then had been inconceivable.45 This manageability, together with the potentiality of working with the images of one’s

22

Chapter 1

own video library, created an increase in practices seemingly close to found footage. But only seemingly, in fact. As previously mentioned, found footage is based on montage: montage in the cinematographic sense of juxtaposition, sequencing, and reversal of the positioning of the—found—frame or footage. Due to its technological nature, the video image completely broke away from this form of montage. The loss of the horizontal plane, typical of cinematographic montage, is what characterized the electronic image even if recorded on magnetic support. With regards to the electronic image, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze argues that, “organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favor of an omni-directional space which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal.”46 Hence in this new manageability the image is characterized by “perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image.”47 For this reason, when one looks at the works of young video artists, there is a feeling of being in unmapped territory. In Takeshi Murata’s Pink Dot (2007), a purple dot generates images borrowed from the movie Rambo (1982). The scene is disassembled and recomposed thanks to a morphing game: a continuous metamorphosis of colors which often culminates in abstraction. In the end, the image returns to the initial purple dot, as if to say that the primary geometrical form of the dot transforms, recreates, mixes, and finally reverts our imaginary, ultimately filled with images from B-movies, vintage movies, action movies, and so on. If we further expand our audiovisual horizon and embrace the world of video installations, vj-ing and Ugc, things get even more complicated. In the realm of video installations, a good example is Experiencing Cinema (2005) by Brazilian artist Rosangela Rennò,48 installed at the Dulcina Theater in Rio de Janeiro in 2005. In a dark room, pictures appear at regular intervals on a smoke screen. The smoke screen, just like the images it accommodates, is intangible, fragile, and untouchable. It would seem that this work is representing the very essence of cinema. However, at closer inspection, we realize that the images are not accidental but taken from family pictures from different historical periods. Thus, the installation becomes a vehicle for reflecting on private memories which, over time, have become collective. The fleeting and ephemeral quality of the smoke, together with its short span of appearance creates pictures that are unstable, difficult to decipher, and barely visible: the illusion of memory linked to the apparent perfection of technological reproduction. Here the image goes beyond the classical use of found footage; its power does not lie in its montage but in the alteration of the receiving support. It is the smoke screen that, in a certain sense, welcomes and relocates the meaning of the object.49

Reinventing Innovation through Art

23

This work is similar to another artwork poised between net art and web installation. The Battle of Algiers, by Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin, a project commissioned by the Whitney Museum’s Internet Portal and Tate Online, platforms which have the possibility of exhibiting artwork online independently of physical exhibition buildings. In this work, all sequences from the movie The Battle of Algiers (1966) directed by Gillo Pontocorvo are placed in a rectangular application that contains all of the frames as if laid out. The rectangle contains the totality of the film’s scenes, which are in constant movement and appear simultaneously while being highlighted in different parts. By moving the mouse on the sequence, it is possible to choose and outline a different section of the work each time. The memory of cinema persists within the archive and retains its own authority. The question we must ask is, how? Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin’s work is useful in answering this question. Cinema, seen as a collective memory of the twentieth century, continues to tell stories about us and our past in the perpetual structural reorganization it is subjected to because of the encounter with different architectures of information. Cinema promotes infinite interpretative routes and multiple analyses: either pre-programmed ones, that can be enlarged or directed on one part instead of the other, or ones that have been chosen and designed by us—consciously or completely accidentally. This logic comes close to that of Software Cinema proposed by Lev Manovich, or Database Narrative endorsed by Sean Cubitt.50 Even in this case, the act of framing is organized in such a way that it is detached from the classical logic of found footage and the logic of conscious contextualization and de-contextualization of a specific scene. Rather, it is made within an incredible variety of possibilities and combinations that have been pre-programmed by software. The object trouvé, or “found footage,” and its mutable meaning loses importance; what is crucial now is the way in which these found images—increasingly easier to find and linked to any artistic medium—are reborn, recreated, and regenerated, even within their own fundamental structure, in a multitude of new and different contexts. Another digital feature, used by many artists in the context of repurposing images, is to allow the image to decompose into its various compositional elements, thus creating an internal modularity that was previously unimaginable. The elements that constitute the image become potentially separable and reusable in other contexts: the image is as if composed by self-sufficient parts within a well-defined internal structure, which can be cut and made to welcome many different possible configurations. “On the screen, each photo can turn into an “image map,” so that each set of pixels, or the entire image, can be linked to other images, texts, sounds, or any other medium.”51 This phenomenon increases exponentially when we move onto the realm of the

24

Chapter 1

World Wide Web. Through sharing and the possibility of “linking” internal elements, the image itself becomes a self-sufficient whole—like a computer language module—for the setting in which it is placed. The fragmentation of the image—which began in the analogue electronic age—is a practice used both in the art world and, for example, in television. What seems to be evident from the examples provided here is a confirmation of the “archival effect”52 in contemporary art and cinema. This effect is not only characterized by the use of archival materials but also by what kind of use said materials are subjected to, starting from the explicit use of archival images in the reinterpretation of cultural memory as a way of deciphering our present. The artworks mentioned here are significant not only because they work with “found footage” but because they repurpose cultural refuse and create a new idea of evolution no longer linked to the deterministic linearity of the development of media. We have said that artists create technological innovation by inventing and physically producing new machines and technologies. Yet, we must also underline how said “innovation” is not seen, in the art world, as on the same level as the market, albeit this form of innovation isn’t mere “technological invention” either, because it pushes the boundaries of what we know. This is where the biggest gap between artist and innovator lies. This is also why it is so important to introduce a new outlook whereby the artist is an inventor of technologies, as well as an innovator; paving the way for a new definition of “innovation.” Through art, technical and technological experiments are made inseparable from the opportunity of deliberating on the fate of humankind and our technological environment. THE ARTIST AS INVENTOR Simon Penny argues that “in the last decade the ground upon which ‘media arts’ is practiced has changed substantially.”53 According to Penny, this change was engendered by the new relationship between art and technological development. Indeed, “the problem for practitioners in the 1990s was usually that the technology they wanted didn’t exist or lacked required capabilities. The task of the artists was often to imagine and then develop the technologies themselves, from relatively raw component. While onerous, this task tended to ensure the synchronization of aesthetic goals with technical form.”54 Penny is an artist, a theorist, and an engineer. His outlook is very similar to that presented in this book, especially his idea of change, the fact, that is, that there has been a change in the way in which artists reinvent media and technological innovation, a “historical transition”: “the task of the artist is

Reinventing Innovation through Art

25

no longer to imagine possible technologies but to decode the assumptions of the designer and to disentangle functionalities from these complex artifacts, or at least to proceed with an awareness of the sediment imbrication of purposing.”55 Penny is one of the few theorists that have drawn links between artists and technological production, although this is not one of the main themes in his book. Until a few years ago, according to Penny, the work of artists had a direct impact on technologies not yet on the market, yet today artists revert to being passive users or at best ones who subvert features of engineering and design. Instead, this “historical transition” should not only be seen in terms of “crystallization of technologies” and “proliferation of highly specialized technological widgets”56 but also in terms of the high specialization of artists. The “crystallization” mentioned by Simon Penny is true for artists who have become increasingly invested in consolidating their relationship with companies in the technological sector. Artists that become involved with research centers and scientific departments gain an active new role in technological production all the while holding on to a fundamental ethical value, the search for truth more than art, which will be discussed several times in this book (particularly in the last chapter). This analysis will bring us beyond concepts such as “planned obsolescence,” “linear evolution of media,” or “old and new media,” typical of certain deterministic approaches that prevail in studies on media economics, media, and so on. At this point, it might be helpful to introduce the concept of Zombie Media conceived of by Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz. The two scholars’ premise is that it is incorrect to portray media as in keeping with the timeworn difference between old and new. Media never dies, it can disappear or become less popular, but it cannot die. Media is perpetually involved in an ongoing process of reworking: it decays, rots, reforms, is remixed and historicized, reinterpreted, and collected. This continuous metamorphosis goes beyond the evolutionary linearity by which the new replaces the old, a common perspective in many media studies. In order to explain this, the two scholars use the concept of “dead media.”57 The authors depart from an analysis of “circuit bending”58 practices, which, if approached from an artistic point of view, leads us to overcome the “planned obsolescence” of our technological devices and pave the way for a new approach to media archeology. For this reason, “in the age of consumer electronics, the artist can also be seen as an archeological circuit bender and hacker, thus creating a link between media archeology and the political agenda of contemporary media production.”59

26

Chapter 1

For the authors, the point lies in turning media archeology practices into artistic practices60 or combining the two trends. Only then a theoretical approach that encompasses a political and economic awareness of our media environment will be possible. Thus, in this context, bending media archeology into an artistic methodology can be seen as a way to tap into the ecosophic potential of such practices as circuit bending, hardware hacking and other ways of reusing and reintroducing dead media into a new cycle of life for such objects. Assembled into new constructions, such materials and ideas become zombies that carry with them histories but are also reminders of the non-human temporalities involved in technical.61

Departing from the practice of recycling images (recycled cinema) and objects (object trouvé), “Zombie Media” is an artistic alternative to the evolution of media and innovation. If this was to be extended even further, a third alternative could be presented, the “artist as inventor.” Rather than reinventing,62 in this case, the artist invents ex novo in a continuous process of assemblage not merely oriented toward the reuse of existing media. It is not about DIY or circuit bending, nor is it about using archival material or found footage, in other words, “poor” practices—following what many researchers have identified as the political and philosophical significance of this operation.63 It is not about the re-use or use of pre-existing industrial materials. This third alternative concerns those artistic practices that actually invent, rather than reinvent, the medium. This new modality is established through the collaboration between artists and engineers. Artists make use of the work done in research centers and universities; all the while benefiting from the opportunity of using “rich” technologies, meaning production materials that are normally less accessible, thanks to the increasing possibilities of collaboration with companies, institutions, and research centers. Hence merely talking about reinvention, re-use, or re-assemblage is incorrect; we must speak of the genuine production of new media and new machines (mechanical in the past, digital and electronic in the present) for artistic purposes, which concurrently have an impact on the market and open up new ways of conceiving the medium. The way in which artists work does not fit with the notion of determinism. Our insistence on abiding by this notion derives from our necessity to underline economic and evolutionary processes that are still being thought of in this way, despite the fact that at closer inspection said notion is decidedly inaccurate. If we consider determinism to be the mechanistic, philosophical notion by which every phenomenon or event is inherently determined by a

Reinventing Innovation through Art

27

phenomenon or event that occurred before it, and if we apply it to the evolution of economics and engineering, it follows that these will be determined by the constant transition from old to new media. Yet this is only seemingly correct. It is the hazy vision of determinism presenting itself under the guise of technological mechanization. The development of technology is neither perfectly linear nor deterministic; it responds to the complex logic of economic, social, political, and philosophical systems.64 One of the most compelling examples is the QWERTY keyboard, the most common system of alphanumeric keyboards. It prevailed in the second half of the nineteenth century by triumphing over much more functional keyboards which allowed for greater agility and speed. The QWERTY keyboard became one of the most prominent examples for the theory of “path dependence,” which argues that the evolution of technology is not based on functionality and better performance. “A path-dependent sequence of economic changes is one of which important influences upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events, including happenings dominated by chance elements rather than systematic forces.”65 Similarly, W. Brian Arthur’s analysis on the success of the VHS in the 1980s video market as opposed to the more defined Betamax shows “how systems become locked-in to certain behavioral patterns.”66 These theories have an interesting philosophical precedent in George Bataille’s notion of dépense.67 According to Christiane Paul e Jack Toolin, “artist-created tools comprise a broad range of categories” that have developed over time. On a very general level, one can distinguish between five major groups of tools—categorized here according to their functionality—some of which have developed over decades: 1. Software and hardware tools for manipulating cinematic and videographic “moving images.” 2. Tools for the creation of drawings and for media production. 3. Interfaces (from musical to display interfaces). 4. Software tools for reconfiguring platforms (browsers or search engines). 5. Hardware and software tools for activism. The above groups cannot always be clearly delineated and occasionally overlap. (For example, one could easily make the argument that a browser is a form of interface.) Since the above classification is based on functionalities, the tools in the respective categories can take various forms, ranging from synthesizers and motion capture software, to reactive objects equipped with sensors and real-time data visualizations.68

28

Chapter 1

Artistic production is the demonstration of this evolutionary complexity. Artists bring the non-linearity of development to its finest potential, overthrow functionality and performance, and pave the way for a new idea of technological innovation. It is for this reason that it is crucial for both art history and media studies to take the relationship between artists and technology seriously. In order to illustrate this, let’s look to the concept used by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in 1973 in his study on cinema, Acinema. This study must be framed in the cultural and political context of the 1970s, characterized by an intolerance toward institutions and “institutionalized” art and cinema. Lyotard’s study is first and foremost a political act against a certain type of cinema. However, what is interesting for is not the criticism toward the institution of “narrative” cinema, which rehashes the dichotomy “narrative cinema” vs ”poetic cinema,”69 but Lyotard’s criticism on the development of cinematographic forms and their economization. “Cinema is the inscription of movement, the writing with movement.”70 His study begins with an etymological analysis of the term “cinematographic”: writing with moving images. He presents cinema a type of writing that includes movement in a consequential, deterministic logic: “every movement put forward sends back to something else, is inscribed as a plus or minus on the ledger book which is the film, is valuable because it returns to something else, because it is thus potential return and profit,”71 and again, “to be valuable the object must move: proceed from other objects (‘production’ in the narrow sense) and disappear, but on the condition that its disappearance makes room for still other objects (consumption).”72 Lyotard goes on to identify cinematographic movement as a capitalist concatenation process; this is what makes his study contemporary and useful for us in interpreting the process of concatenation and technological evolution in today’s market. Artists subvert this functional concatenation as they “enjoy(s) these sterile differences leading nowhere, these uncompensated losses; what the physicist calls the dissipation of energy.”73 Hence we can start to envision a new idea of innovation, one that is more intuitive and doesn’t differentiate between technological experimentation and the propagation of a “vision” or “message”; which sees technology as beyond the distinction between “old” and “new” media. If we look to the past we will see how artists, directly or indirectly, have invented and anticipated not only technologies but also visual and sound machines. In turn these have introduced new ideas to society and new social uses for technology—until then incorporated by the masses and stripped of their visionary content. This is the lesson that artists give us today and for the future.

Reinventing Innovation through Art

29

NOTES 1. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1982). 2. Since the eighteenth century, this was one of the main points of Aesthetics: take as example Alexander Gottlieb Baumgart. Among others, see Luigi Pareyson, Estetica: Teoria della Formatività (Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1954) and Truth and Interpretation (New York: Suny Press, 2014). 3. Nachoem M. Wijnberg and Gerda Gemser, Groups, Experts and Innovation: The Selection System of Modern Visual Art (Groningen: University of Groningen, SOM Research School, 1999), 14. 4. Christiane Paul and Jack Toolin, “Impulses—Tools” in The Emergence of Video Processing Tools, eds. Kathy High, Sherry Miller Hocking and Mona Jimenez (Bristol-Chicago: Intellect), 76. 5. Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale: Media, linguaggi e narrazioni (Brescia: La Scuola, Brescia, 2015), 14. Own translation. 6. Roger A. Molina, “A Forty-Year Perspective on Aesthetic Computing in the Leonardo Journal” in Aesthetic Computing, ed. Paul A. Fiishwick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 50. There are not many other studies on these topics. An interesting book, although rather far from this framework, is J. Anderson, J. Reckhenrich and M. Kupp, eds., The Fine Art of Success: How Learning Great Art Can Create Great Business (New York: Wiley, 2011). A historical point of view can be found in Craig Harris, ed., Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 7. Paul Fishwick, “An Introduction to Aesthetic Computing” in Aesthetic Computing, ed. Paul A. Fishwick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 3. 8. Also refer to the exhibition Reality ‘80, co-curated by me (alongside Mario Piazza, Cristina Quadrio Curzio e Leo Guerra) at the Galleria Gruppo Credito Valtellinese in Milan, where a re-interpretation of the 1980’s took place from the point of view of the relationship between art and visual communication. 9. William J. Mitchell, Alan S. Inouye and Marjory S. Blumenthal, eds., Beyond Productivity. Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity (Washington: The National Academies Press, 2003), 1. 10. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Creative Management and Development (London: Sage, 2006), 3. 11. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 6. 12. The are many studies on the relevance of creativity in business and a full bibliography would be very vast. See the pioneering book Michael L. Ray and Rochelle Myers, Creativity in Business (New York: Doubleday, 1989), Mark Dodgson and David M. Gann, Nelson, The Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014); Leon Mann and Janet Chan, Creativity and Innovation in Business and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2011), as well as Teresa Amabile’s books.

30

Chapter 1

13. Teresa Amabile, “Creative Management and Development” in Creative Management and Development, ed. Jane Henry (London: Sage, 1991), 18. 14. Amabile, “Creative Management,” 18. 15. It would be interesting to compare these more recent studies to those on Aesthetics. For example, compare the Italian philosopher Emilio Garroni’s concept of creativity: “It is here that we find a strictly aesthetic justification (Kant would’ve spoken of “preservation of a state of mind,” meaning “pleasure”) for an aesthetic expertise, in as much as it is already rooted in the needs of a practical-cognitive adaptation” Emilio Garroni, Creatività (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2010), 18. Own translation. 16. The bibliography on this topic is extensive, see, among others, Jean-Alain Heraud, Fiona Kerr and Thierry Burger-Helmchen, Creative Management of Complex Systems (London: ISTE-Wiley, 2019). 17. Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), 78. 18. Report by the Institute for the Future and Dell Technologies, The Next Era of Human Machine Partnerships (Palo Alto: Institute for the Future, 2017), 16. 19. NESTA Report, The Fusion Effect: The Economic Returns To Combining Arts And Science Skills, written by Dr Josh Siepel (SPRU, University of Sussex), Dr Roberto Camerani (SPRU, University of Sussex), Dr Gabriele Pellegrino (SPRU, University of Sussex) and Dr Monica Masucci (Dept. of Business and Management, University of Sussex), 2016. 20. NESTA Report, The Fusion Effect, 5. 21. Bruno Munari, Design as Art, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 11. 22. Munari, Design, 11. 23. Munari, Design, 29. 24. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mic​​rosof​​t​.com​​/arti​​st​-in​​-re​si​​dence​/, accessed on October 19, 2020. 25. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ado​​be​.co​​m​/it/​​about​​-adob​​e​/cre​​ative​​-resi​​​dency​​.html​, accessed on October 19, 2020. 26. https://www​.planet​.com​/company​/art/, accessed on October 19, 2020. 27. https://www​.89plus​.com​/about/, accessed on October 19, 2020. 28. https​:/​/ww​​w​.aut​​odesk​​.com/​​techn​​ology​​-cent​​ers​/r​​​eside​​ncy, accessed on October 19, 2020. 29. https://arts​.cern​/welcome, accessed on October 19, 2020. 30. https://www​.starts​.eu, accessed on October 19, 2020. 31. The figure of the artist-inventor of the 15th century is famous, see Pierre Francastel, Peinture et société. Naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique de la Renaissance au Cubisme (Lyon: Auidin, 1951); Paolo Rossi, I filosofi e le macchine (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962). 32. Bernard London was the first to talk about “planned obsolescence “in his text Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence (1932). This practice could be observed already in the 1920s in the work of Alfred P. Sloan Jr. at General Motors, where new models were made each year to have a bigger turnover. In this sense, the words of socialist revolutionary Paul Lafargue, in his text Le droit a la paresse, were incredibly premonitory. From his text [1883]: “All our products are adulterated to aid

Reinventing Innovation through Art

31

in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the “Age of adulteration” just as the first epochs of humanity received the names of “The Age of Stone,” “The Age of Bronze,” from the character of their production.” Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy, trans. Charles Kerr (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2012), 27. 33. Hal Foster, “The Archive without Museums” in October vol. 77 (Summer 1996): 97–119. 34. According to the author, there could be many more examples, such as Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Gerard Byrne, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Mark Dion and Renee Green. 35. For an analysis of the concept of archive in the artistic practices of twentieth century avant-gardes, see Sven Spieker, The Big Archive (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). 36. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse” in October vol. 110 (Autumn 2004): 3–22. 37. Recall that Didi-Huberman called Benjamin “the archaeologist and ragdealer of memory,” see Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: De Minuit, 2000). 38. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” [1929], trans. Edmund Jephcott in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 208. See also Clément, Chéroux, “L’image comme point d’interrogation ou la valeur d’extase du document surréaliste” in L’image-document. Entre réalité et fiction, ed. Jean-Pierre Criqui (Paris: Le BAL, 2010), 26–47. 39. Foster, “An Archival,” 5. 40. Foster, “An Archival,” 6. Giuseppe Di Giacomo also states that “artists have learned to look at both archive and museum as expressions of an apparatus that restores the very ambiguity of art making, breaking the silence of documents and engendering new integrations,” Giuseppe Di Giacomo, “Lo statuto paradossale del museo tra globalizzazione e apertura all’alterità” in Studi di estetica vol. 45, no. 1 (2012): 7–26. Own translation. 41. See Sunil Manghani, Image Studies: Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013). 42. Christa Blümlinger, “Cultures de remploi—question de cinéma” in Le cinéma de seconde main. Esthétique du remploi dans l’art du film et des nouveaux medias, ed. Christa Blümlinger (Paris: Klincksieck, 2013), 337. Own translation. 43. See William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993). 44. Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 238. 45. In Mario Perniola, Transiti. Come si va dallo stesso allo stesso (Cappelli, Milan, 1985). Perniola identified the electronic image as an “image object.” Gazzano also underlines how the transition from cinema to video is “the transition from an era of the image-mirror to one of the image-object” in Marco Maria Gazzano, “Passaggi teorici dal cinema alla video arte” in Cine ma Tv, ed. Vito Zagarrio (Turin: Lindau, 2004), 207. Own translation. The specifications concerning manageability are, among

32

Chapter 1

many, underlined by Jean-Paul Fargier. See Jean-Paul Fargier, “Gli inseparabili” in Intervalli, tra film, video e televisione, ed. Valentina Valentini (Palermo: Sellerio, 1989) also published in Le storie del video, ed. Valentina Valentini (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003). 46. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II—The Time-Image [1985], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 265. To read this quote in its entirety is quite interesting, as it shows how Deleuze’s book is not only about cinema but also the electronic image and its relationship to art: “The new images [the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being] no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they are internalized in a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable, like a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omnidirectional space which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed ‘data’, information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature. Finally, sound achieving an autonomy which increasingly lends it the status of image, the two images, sound and visual, enter into complex relations with neither subordination nor commensurability, and reach a common limit in so far as each reaches its own limit.” He goes on: “The new automatism is worthless in itself if it is not put to the service of a powerful, obscure, condensed will to art, aspiring to deploy itself through involuntary movements which nonetheless do not restrict it. [. . .] So that electronic images will have to be based on still another will to art, or on as yet unknown aspects of the time-image. The artist is always in the situation of saying simultaneously: I claim new methods and I am afraid that the new methods may invalidate all will to art, or make it into a business, a pornography, a Hitlerism.” 47. Deleuze, “Cinema,” 266. 48. Now part of the permanent collection at Tate. 49. Another work worth mentioning is Julian Palacz’s Algorithmic Search for Love (2010)—an immense archive/database containing all movie scenes from the history of cinema, accessible by simply entering a sentence in the database. The artwork consists of a dark room with a screen and, in front of it, another much smaller screen where one can enter the desired phrase. Once the desired phrase has been entered, a random sequence of movie scenes in which the phrase is pronounced will appear on the larger screen. For example, if one enters “I Love You,” all scenes related to this sentence will appear on the screen. Interestingly, the smaller computer screen also operates and controls the bigger cinema screen. 50. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), and Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

Reinventing Innovation through Art

33

51. Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: WW Norton & Co Inc, 2009), 73. 52. It is interesting to note Errki Huhtamo’s position on an archeological approach to media art, see Errki Huhtamo, “Resurrecting the Technological Past: An Introduction to the Archeology of Media Art,” accessed on July 31, 2019, http:​/​/www​​ .ntti​​cc​.or​​.jp​/p​​ub​/ic​​_mag/​​ic014​​/huht​​amo​/h​​u​htam​​o​_e​.h​​tml. 53. Simon Penny, Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), XXII. 54. Penny, Making, XXII. 55. Penny, Making, XXIV. 56. Penny, Making, XXIV. 57. Expressed, among many others, in Bruce Sterling’s Manifesto “The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal,” http:​/​/www​​.dead​​media​​.org/​​ modes​​t​-pro​​posa​l​​.html​, accessed on July 27, 2019. For some researchers, however, this concept still leads to a separation between old and new media. 58. Circuit Bending “is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low-voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators,” https​:/​/en​​.wiki​​pedia​​.org/​​wiki/​​Circu​​it​_b​e​​nding​, accessed on October 9, 2019. 59. Garnet D. Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method” in Leonardo vol. 45 no. 5 (October 2012): 424–430. 60. “Media archaeology or archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television,” https​:/​/en​​.wiki​​pedia​​.org/​​wiki/​​Media​​_arch​​​aeolo​​gy, accessed on October 9, 2019. See Errki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka, Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011); Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology (London: Polity, 2012); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Mean (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 61. Garnet D. Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method” in Leonardo vol. 45 no. 5 (October 2012): 424–430. 62. See also Rosalind Krauss’ theories on “reinventing the medium,” Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). 63. The debate concerning the power of “poor” images accompanies the entire history of moving images. See Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (New York: Verso Books, 2017). 64. See W. Brian Arthur’s concept of complexity: Steven N. Durlauf, David Lane and W. Brian Arthur, eds., The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II (Westview Press: 1997). 65. Paul A. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY” The American Economic Review 75, no. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1985): 332–337. 66. Francis Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 75. The notion of “locked-in” emerged thanks to W. Brian Adams.

34

Chapter 1

67. George Bataille, The Accursed Share: an Essay on General Economy (New York: Zone Book, 1991). 68. Christiane Paul and Jack Toolin, “Impulse-Tools” in The Emergence of Video Processing Tools, eds. Sherry Miller Hocking, Mona Jimenez and Kathy High (Chicago: Intellect, 2014), 57. 69. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry” in Movies and Methods. Vol. 1., ed. Bill Nichols (Berkley: Univ. California Press, 1974). 70. Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinemas” in Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, eds. Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 33. 71. Lyotard, “Acinemas,” 34. 72. Lyotard, “Acinemas,” 34. 73. Lyotard, “Acinemas,” 35.

Chapter 2

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

TOWARD A NEW VISION The walls fell apart, roofs collapsed; men, women and children rushed out into the streets while large tongues of fire rose above those clusters of rubble, dyeing the entire picture red. Meanwhile, the anarchists continued their destructive work, and scenes succeeded each other at a dizzying speed and without the slightest interruption. It was a kind of cinematography of extraordinary perfection, truly amazing, which depicted with marvelous accuracy the terrible massacre that had been announced by the newspapers just beforehand [. . .] “Extraordinary,” repeated the doctor, as the walls went back to white. “What progress journalism has made in one hundred years! And who knows how many wonders we will still witness. Brandok, have you finished sleeping?”1

A simple newscast is what comes to mind while reading the quotation above. A “kind of cinematography,” projected, depicting the headlines, not very different from those of today. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly odd about this description, apart from Brandok’s amazement and his exclamation in seeing those images projected on the apartment walls. His amazement is immediately justified as soon as we learn that the quote was taken from the novel Le meraviglie del 2000 (The Wonders of 2000), written in 1907 by Italian author Emilio Salgari. Salgari, creator of the Sandokan saga, imagines a journey into the wonders of the twenty-first century through the eyes of two protagonists, awakened after a century of sleep. Replete with flying machines, wireless telegraphs, and overpopulated—there isn’t any place left, not even for animals—Salgari depicts a world where problems and threats, identified with the anarchists, are always mediated by a screen. The twenty-first century will be lethal for the 35

36

Chapter 2

two protagonists, who will not be able to withstand the excessive electricity that clogs the cities of the future.2 Salgari’s twenty-first century is consistent with Albert Robida’s twentieth century portrayed in Le Vingtième Siècle (1892), in a game of temporal references between imagining the future and “presentifying” the past, amidst anxieties and excitement. These novels are the foundations of what has been called “scientific romance” and represent an attempt to systematize the new visual and experiential order that had begun to develop in the nineteenth century,3 well described in the literature of the time. These were new visual experiences that for obvious reasons determined writing in the nineteenth-century, through the adoption of visual metaphors that defined the containers of this new style of writing (many magazines and literary works were entitled panorama, diorama, or “magazzino”), themes and motifs, but above all through the creation of a language that radically changed the form of writing4.

An exemplary case is that of E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was recently redefined as one of the key figures for understanding the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.5 In his novel Master Flea (1822), some spectators witness projected, and scientifically accurate, images of insects and end up escaping, frightened by the monstrous enlargement of these small creatures. The novel anticipates the relationship between science and magic inherent to technology’s physical and experiential structure, and which will be regularly encountered on the journey that will take us from the Lumières to the immersive virtual reality headsets of today.6 The nineteenth century was not only a breeding ground for “visual culture” (cinema, photography, etc.). At the time, humankind was also faced with a new cultural order, one which was not purely visual but characterized by the emergence of a new media system. The second half of the nineteenth century is crucial for understanding the phenomena discussed in this book. It is precisely in the second half of the nineteenth century that we will witness the inception of a wide array of conditions that will determine the course of the twentieth century and the present day. To begin with, classical studies in cinema have always identified this time period with crucial developments in the realm of photography, corroborating its progression and evolution into what is now known as cinematography. On the other hand, history of art has always paid more attention to the changes that occurred within the art forms, and did not consider influences from the realm of technology, which in those years were planting its very first seeds. In light of today’s technological developments, however, it is possible to

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

37

reassess this time period in a new perspective, re-evaluating fundamental events in view of a historical-archeological rewriting of the themes dealt with in this book. This period laid the foundations for the birth of a new, complex “media system” that influenced both art and cinema beyond “visual culture”—and which was artistically explored, as we will see, by the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s. It is essential that we do not see this time period as simply the beginning of the changes in photography that made cinematography possible or the new relationship between cinema and art.7 It is at this time that a new notion of liveness emerged, in other words, the possibility of observing phenomena as they occur, from the telephone to the image; together with the fact that images became transmissible through their subdivision into individual pixels, which in time materialized in what we now call television. It also marks the advent of the first computers and hence the possibility of dividing reality into 1s and 0s, and the emergence of increasingly personalized objects that will lead to the multiple personal devices that permeate today’s world, initiators of a new form of interactivity.8 This multiplicity can be narrowed down to “two exemplary paths that take into account, from a genealogical and evolutionary perspective, the centrality of different types of technological communication: on the one hand the technologies of reproduction and representation, and on the other those of transmission and interactive communication.”9 This setting will create an increasingly medial context, a veritable “media system,” which will be artistically exploited by some of the exponents of the historical avant-gardes from the 1920s onwards. A media system that, as was discussed in the Introduction, developed between two industrial revolutions. Today this complex historical period can be reassessed in light of the developments in mass communication, in light, that is, of the different ways of producing moving images and sounds with technology, and their communicative potential. This analysis compels us to uncover the roots of a reticular, televised, and communicative arena which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, exactly at the same time as film and the proliferation of visual technologies. This proliferation is not only discernible from a technological point of view, but also determined by an intricate temporal relationship that combines the old with the new and moves toward a new vision: amidst futurist and futuristic impulses, imaginaries of the past, technological development, and historical and geographical awareness. The protagonists of the time “did not think in terms of the articulated mass media we know, since these inventions were still experimental and their exact shapes vague in the public and expert mind. They thought in terms of devices doing duty in familiar surroundings:

38

Chapter 2

the telephone, electric light, phonograph, cinema, wireless, and, always in the background, the telegraph.”10 The nineteenth century is the century of industrial societies, urban metropolis, merchandising and advertising, the telegraph and Great Universal Exhibitions, novels and newspapers, “verismo”11 and impressionism, the train and photography. It is when “the city radically changed its appearance. It was no longer an image-less world but full of life: it transformed into the current city-spectacle, full of images, populated by increasingly lonely people, distracted, immersed in their own fantasies or thoughts.”12 This is the century of time–space mutations and the abolition of distance through movement. The physical movement, the “‘annihilation of time and space’ was the topos which the early nineteenth century used to describe the new situation into which the railroad placed natural space after depriving it of its hitherto absolute powers.”13 It is the century of moving pictures, animated photography, and stereoscopy. In 1852, Duboscq, referring to his bioscope, was compelled to assert that it displayed “the impression of relief and movement or the impression of life.”14 During this time, the idea of movement within and between images emerged, embodied by the concept of technological transmission: an idea that as we will see, resulted from the invention of the telephone. This increasingly entangled and complex world was dictated, among other things, by the nascent notion of interactivity, embodied by personalized interactive tools and calculability of the present. Mechanical instruments,15 such as the Phenakistoscope (invented by Joseph Plateau in 1832), the Thaumatrope (attributed to Mark Roget, 1824), the Zoetrope (invented by William George Horner in 1834), the Praxinoscope (invented by CharlesÉmile Reynaud in 1876), and so on, established, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, “notions of perception in which the subject, as a dynamic psychophysical organism, actively constructed the world around it through a layered complex of sensory and cognitive processes, of higher and lower cerebral centers.”16 The issue at stake here is not that of interpreting the evolution of these machines in a linear progression from the camera obscura to the cinematic device, as eminent scholars have argued until recently.17 Before the advent of cinema, the human being was implicated in innumerable instruments of vision whose internal logical settings were certainly not homogeneous: “The circulation and reception of all visual imagery is so closely interrelated by the middle of the [nineteenth] century that any single medium or form of visual representation no longer has a significant autonomous identity.”18 This, according to Jonathan Crary, was determined by the fall of the camera obscura as the predominant model of vision. A static view fixed on a focal point, emblematic of the camera obscura, transitions in the mid-nineteenth

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

39

century to instruments of vision that “refer as much to the functional interaction of body and machine as they do to external objects, no matter how “vivid” the quality of the illusion.”19 These changes also influenced the art world, increasingly involved in this medial whirlwind. Similarly, at the beginning of 2000, Stephen Herbert claimed that it was impossible to conceive of these devices as mere precursors of cinematography and introduced the term “time-based visual media”: To view pre-cinema devices merely as steps towards the cinema, however, would be a very narrow perspective. They were—and in some cases still are— self-contained media with their own particularities, differences, potential, and limitations. Much work still needs to be done to document the histories of these media, histories which in most cases started ‘pre-cinema’ but did not end with the introduction of cinematography. [. . .] In some instances—peepshow boxes, domestic magic lantern shows, the table-top Praxinoscope theatre—there is a closer analogy with television than with cinema. [. . .] Perhaps the most useful way to look at these problems is to recognize that cinema is just one of the many time-based visual media that have existed over a number of centuries.20

In his landmark study on panorama, Erkki Huhtamo wanted to distance himself from the archeological approach of Foucault, Crary, and Kittler and the study of media as a mere discourse within greater unifying themes. He states, While I share with Kittler, Crary, and Foucault their interest in the discursive dimension of culture, my work differs from theirs in that I do not try to posit large-scale cultural formations and ruptures between them. [I am] more concerned with understanding how media spectacles function in and between local circumstances, [give] rise to discursive “transfigurations.”21

In recent years, this new approach to media archeology22 has been established as a form of analysis that concerns the historical study of media. This has allowed Huhtamo to uncover the foundations of the relationship between media spectacles and capitalism. Time-based visual media, which characterize the new media system, exposes the exploitation intrinsic to the imaginary typical of the capitalist system born with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. In fact, economists identify the “first financial globalization” between 1870 and 1914,23 which is also the period of time that will set the course for new media systems in the second half of the nineteenth century. An example is the panorama, which places the viewer in the same position of control as the guard in Jeremy Bentham’s famous Panopticon thus engendering a close relationship between capitalism, entertainment, and forms of control. For Huhtamo, “the panorama’s emergence was intertwined

40

Chapter 2

with the onslaught of capitalism, imperialism, urbanism, and, in the long run, the emerging era of the masses.”24 AT THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN ART, CINEMA, AND MEDIA “We can speak about the televisual in a specific sense with the coming of Bell’s telephone in 1876,”25 says William Uricchio, since “the telephone sparked an anticipatory concern about visual systems that could share the instrument’s ability to link distant locations point-to-point in real time.”26 Thus from 1876 onward, “a well-developed notion of television as a ‘live’ moving-picture medium offered a counterpart to the ‘stored’ moving images seen, for example, with Reynaud’s projecting praxinoscope, Edison’s kinetoscope, and eventually, in 1895, with what we today celebrate as projected moving pictures.”27 The advent of the telephone allowed for a true idea of liveness to enter the transmission of images. This idea paved the way for technological inventions—that were never actually built—such as the telectroscope (conceived by writer Louis Figuier and attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in 1878), the telephonoscope (mentioned in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième siècle in 1890), the electric camera obscura (appeared in the magazine Punch to explain the workings of the telephonoscope in 1878)28 or the Elektrische Teleskop (conceived by Nipkov in 1885). All of these inventions were centered on the possibility of transferring images through the telephone. Evidence of this trend can be found in an interesting testimony of the photographer Nadar: it seems that in 1856 Gazebon, manager of a bistrot in Pau, wrote to the French photographer in Paris to commission a colored portrait; a portrait that, according to Gazebon, should have been taken in Paris and then sent directly to Pau, without either one of them moving from their respective cities.29 An unusual request, but interesting as it speaks of the growing desire to transport images through wireless transmission in accordance with the history of communication. While experiments were being carried out in applying movement to images, alongside studies on the potential of a moving photograph or optical resistance in film, research in the field of electricity began to look at how to divide an image into a finite number of points. This dissectioning allowed for greater control of individual parts and marked the beginning of their potential transmissibility: “if any image can be broken down into a number of small electrical signals, just like black points, transmitted and then reconstructed by a receiver, then the deed is done.”30 Hence concurrent to the tendency in cinema to create movement through the unification of images on a single

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

41

plane, we find the image being divided into different parts. This not only engendered the conceptual framework for electronic panels in television but also for digital images. On closer inspection, however, even before the advent of the telephone, the telegraph had already stimulated the imagination of the most ingenious. Around 1850, we find attempts of transmitting images through the telegraph.31 Giovanni Caselli, a Frenchman of Italian origins, began his research in 1857 and by the end of the 1860s had created the “pantelegraph,” an instrument that made use of the telegraph to transmit images, the first example of images transmitted remotely.32 Alexander Bain, inventor of a machine similar to the telefax, had already grappled with this idea, later improved by Frederick Bakewell33 in the same years in which work was underway for the transatlantic wiring of cables used in telegraphic transmission. To understand the conceptual importance of these creations in the theoretical debate on cinema, art, and media today, we must consider Giuseppe Pagni’s enthusiastic words, which call upon a short list of qualities in relation to Caselli’s pantelegraph: • “ Ability to reproduce writings and drawings of any kind in light blue, red and yellow on white paper. • Ability to receive and transmit multiple messages at the same time. • Length of the latter in proportion to the size of the machines. • Extraordinary transmission speed, which can become much faster with the use of shorthand. • Confidentiality of the correspondence ensured by the possibility of writing in numbers and in conventional characters. • Uninterrupted work, placing the original messages into the transmitter one after the other. • Impossibility of errors dependent on telegraph personnel, etc.”34 In this case, the relation with images is direct and rooted in the very structure of the envisioned machine. An indirect relation, but more influential in terms of the world of art and cinema, can be found in the work of Samuel Morse. Unsuccessful artist and pioneer of photography in the United States, Morse thought that his invention of the telegraph was on the same level as painting and photography—a new form of communication in a Christian view of the world. In fact, the telegraph was immediately “regarded as being almost supernatural, and one of the commonest descriptions of its operation was in terms of lightning. The telegraph was called the ‘lightning line’ and Morse himself ‘Lightning Man’. [. . .] Morse himself described the telegraph system as being like the central nervous system.”35

42

Chapter 2

In this case, the relation between images and communication is less direct but nevertheless existent, as Morse’s telegraph “developed as a result of the failure of his paintings to communicate as he had hoped, [and] was part of the set of dramatic shifts out of which artistic modernism, the avant-garde and current media practice all emerged.36” His failure as a painter, and therefore creator of a form of communication through images, triggered his decision to abandon the art world and focus exclusively on the development of technological forms of communication: a failure that Morse saw—or perceived—as the communicative failure of art understood in the classical sense. At the same time, artists that aspired to break away from the more classical art forms began to experiment with new ways of communication through art. Yet, the expressiveness engendered by photography, and above all the telegraph, were for Morse harbingers of a new universal form of communication, one that was increasingly becoming more interconnected and widespread. The failure to communicate through art moved in parallel with new possibilities in technological communication, and this set the stage for new research paths which were undertaken first by the Impressionists, and later by avant-garde artists, who were able to reach new, previously unimaginable forms of communicative potential. This playing field is different from the one related to cinema and art or cinema and photography. Indeed, it is the telegraph that allowed information to be divided into numbers and it is the nineteenth century that marked the beginning of a new notion of control made possible by the division of reality into numbers, as opposed to an analogue flow. In a significant analysis, Sean Cubitt identifies this time period as the starting point of a new capitalist era based on the interplay between the abstraction of images into numbers, as represented in the first visual technologies, and the market economy. For Cubitt, there are two phases, “first, the object is abstracted, as image, commodity, or numerical value; and second, it is placed into relations of equivalence with all the other abstractions by dint of the formal equality of every cell, frame, or price with every other.”37 The relationship between capitalism and the development of visual technologies will be characterized by the rise of computational media, which uses binary code as a basic language. However, this re-evaluation of events must take into account a germinal phase, the second half of the nineteenth century, which anticipates what we have experienced from the post-war era until today. For Cubitt, again, Enumeration is a pledge against disorder. The counting numbers give us the assurance (as they embody the metaphor) of one-to-one correspondence,

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

43

whether of images in circulation or of moneys to be repaid. But by the end of the nineteenth century, that old assurance was no longer mathematically tenable, so that at the very moment the engineers were hardwiring unit counting into the technical media of the twentieth century, theoretical mathematics was beginning to unpick it.38

Calculating means organizing, controlling disorder, and making a profit. PERSONALIZED MEDIA Since the 1960s, the most prominent feature of electronic technologies of communication has been the fact that they are both within and beyond our reach. They can be acquired, looked at, and are a product to be consumed; at the same time, they have the qualities of something personal, that produces, creates, and brings to action. As a result of this personalization, social practices underwent a genuine revolution. Artistic and cinematographic practices sustained similar changes, and the world we live in today is still controlled by the very same reality. This reality didn’t suddenly come about in the 1960s, its conceptual basis lies in the second half of the nineteenth century, when many trends that will only be established later were starting to emerge. Electronic media such as the radio, the television, the camcorder, the Sony Portapack, and the PC,39 entered people’s everyday lives on different levels, as appliances to be used or interacted with, or receivers to be listened to. We could call them tactile devices with a personal quality with which we act and interact: they are close to us, close to our bodies, and each time our body interacts with them a new form of “interactivity” comes to be, consistent with the internal architecture of each particular device. Since the 1960s, there has been a veritable “euphoria” around terms such as portability, customization, and maneuverability. This “euphoria” was also present in the second half of the nineteenth century: a period that witnessed the emergence of a veritable new world, characterized by the portability of instruments of vision. There are many examples of “portable” technologies from the time. Think of photography and its recreational impact. It was the first technical tool that allowed for the emergence of a class of amateurs—also the first example of a community united by a sort of fetish toward an industrial invention—who, using that particular technological and industrially-determined invention, were able to develop creative and sometimes artistic impulses.40 Photography is certainly the most well-known technological instrument to be used for recreational use. It’s use did not necessarily need to be “artistic,”

44

Chapter 2

because the instrument still allowed for personal creativity.41 Yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been many instruments of vision that require an active, if not an interactive, usage, and that work only and exclusively because of an explicit request by the viewer, making the body the primary actor of these exchanges. As Erkki Huhtamo asserts, referring to the private peep box that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, The possibility to manipulate the device manually by the viewer is important. Its smaller size contributed to its re-definition as a personal “media machine”— it was subordinated to the intentions and the will of the user rather than vice versa. At the same time it invited social interaction among users who more or less shared the same value system. Particularly in the 19th century, instructions for building optical devices and drawing images for them were published in periodicals and manuals for educational parlor entertainments. All this prepared the ground for later media machines used at home, including, much later, the personal computer.42

As many scholars have pointed out, these developments took shape between the playful and the scientific, between knowledge as wonder and the wonder of knowledge. Hence, it comes as no surprise if “the vast number of optical instruments that in the course of the century became widespread in the home, such as family entertainment and in particular educational games for children, are in most cases simplified versions of instruments already in use in scientific labs and demonstration apparatuses of the previous century, such as microscopes, telescopes, spyglasses and darkrooms.”43 Attesting to this is the vast amount of literature from publishing houses in the nineteenth-century; they printed self-made texts that taught how to make these instruments at home: “very rich technical manuals supported the massscale distribution of these instruments, comprehensively teaching many ‘self made’ scientists of any social class and age group.”44 A QUESTION OF CALCULUS: ROBOTICS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE In the beginning was Alchemy. Alchemy as an esoteric science and a mysterious practice for the acquisition of worldly knowledge. In fact, it was alchemy that allowed the first ideas on artificial beings to take form, beings that transcended the will of man. Think of Paracelsus and his Homunculus. At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Paraclesus theorized the possibility of creating a man

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

45

artificially and even gave it an operational description. It is not difficult to create a homunculus, close a man’s seminal fluid in an alembic for forty days; let it rot until it begins to live and move, which will be easy to see. After this time, a form similar to that of man will appear yet transparent and almost without any substance. If this young product is fed everyday with human blood, prudently and accurately, and is kept for forty weeks in a constant heat similar to that of a horse’s womb, this product will become a real living being and child, with all of his limbs, like the one born from a woman, only much smaller. He must be raised with great diligence and care, until he succeeds in manifesting intelligence.45

According to Paracelsus, human seminal fluid would give us the possibility to create artificial beings. This shows how in the Renaissance artificial life was still very much linked to natural conception and thereby not very similar to what we mean today by “automata.” The famous mechanical automata that were all the rage in Europe and elsewhere from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries should also not be seen through the lenses of the present, as that would risk pursuing linear histories that seamlessly combine with the innate desire of human beings to create automata. Although the general idea of giving life to something inanimate can certainly be traced back to the dawn of humanity, it must be considered that such desire takes on different connotations depending on the context it arises in. Creating automata in the eighteenth century is different from creating robots today. Scholars like Horst Bredekamp, Paolo Portoghesi,46 Jessica Riskin and Paolo Rossi47 can testify to this. In The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (1992), Bredekamp shows how this production transitioned from one based on the exchange with antiquity—a “ludic” process that governed machinism until the eighteenth century—to one that is more scientific and progressive. A fundamental shift in the way in which we understand science and technology. Bredekamp affirms that “by the middle of the 18th century, mechanics was conceptually and actually disengaged from the realm of the tradition of antiquity and art”48—exemplified by the dismantling of the Dresden Kunstkammer in 1720. That harmony between mechanical production and acknowledgment of the antique was dissolved; the alliance between art and technique for the creation of “something playful and devoid of any purpose”49 that had characterized the experiments made on “mechanisms with human features,”50 was definitely severed. The automata of the nineteenth century are different; they differentiate between the realm of art, free creation, and technique as an experimental scientific process.

46

Chapter 2

This shift is evinced by many theorists, poets, and philosophers who, starting from the end of the nineteenth century, began to reflect on society during the post-industrial revolution. In this society, technological know-how was no longer simply applied to those machines that held specific functions or had to do with the automation of labor (such as the steam engine, the weaving machine, etc.); but began to conquer the world of the imaginary through the production of large-scale images. What should we call this era?—The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle asked in 1829—The answer is simple, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance.51

Carlyle was a Calvinist, an exponent of the late Scottish Enlightenment, and yet he was influenced by German Romanticism, as can be demonstrated by his translation of Life of Schiller and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. This influence nurtured in him a conflict between love for the machine and fear of what it might generate. It was an internal conflict very common during those years, strongly influenced by both German Romanticism and rampant progressive modernism. This tension has been presented as the debate between “technique and culture.”52 The relationship between progressive modernism and romanticism is not, however, as straightforward and dichotomous as if often depicted. It is not just a matter of distinguishing between two poles and finding the differences between them, especially in a time as complex as the nineteenth century. If we analyze this dichotomy from the point of view of the creation of artificial beings, a practice which became increasingly common in the nineteenth century, some interesting parallelisms emerge. Both tendencies—the “technical” one and the “romantic” one—were fascinated by the possibility of giving life to something inanimate. This desire could be more oriented toward animism or it could be more oriented towards science, but nevertheless for both modernist and romantic aesthetics, then, the birth or coming to life of the machine is not simply the product of a rational, scientific design; it is not simply a matter of construction, of putting parts together, of engineering. Rather, such a machine is necessarily infused with a living spirit, with a soul; it is a “dead” technological object reanimated, given the status of an autonomous

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

47

subject. This bringing to life of technology must obviously, then, take place as much through magical or spiritual means as through science.53

It appears that in the nineteenth century, the union between romanticism and modernism engendered both exaltation and fear (in accordance with a utopian or dystopian approach), at a time when it seemed that the world was increasingly dominated by technology and that technological progress was making a forcefully entry into people’s lives. This attitude is very well-defined by Carlyle’s controversial words, which express both fear and fascination, and by the exalted faith in progress which distinguished many writers and scholars of the time. Carlyle developed a veritable “faith in mechanism” which then permeated the entire ésprit humaine. Here is where the influence of romanticism is ever more apparent, especially when the philosopher talks about “faith” and “loss of belief in the Invisible.”54 However, in contrast to previous times, the nineteenth century did not only prefigure a fundamental shift in the way technological progress was associated with human lifestyle and habits; it also had repercussions on the way in which the human intellect was understood. “Intellect, the power man has of knowing and believing, is now nearly synonymous with Logic, or the mere power of arranging and communicating.”55 Thus, the very concept of automata underwent a transition. It was no longer a question of creating moving machines that could do repetitive actions but creating machines that were both intelligent and calculating. This is the big transition which spills out into today’s age, taking the form of the divergence between robotics and artificial intelligence, automatization and intelligence. Today, the great challenge of engineering is unifying of these two directives, these contrasting poles; and its point of departure, its archeology, can be found precisely in the nineteenth century. In 1836, Edgar Allan Poe wrote the essay/short story Maelzel’s Chess Player. In this short essay, the author analyzed what at the time was known as an “automaton”: a device bearing human, in this case Turkish features—called “The Turk”—who plays chess and answers to the moves of his opponent. The Turk is part of a long tradition of automata that dates back to ancient Greece. Poised between myth and history,56 the desire to create a machine with human features that emulates human behavior has accompanied much of the history of humanity. However, Poe’s chess player is different from the automata that had been envisioned up to that time, and this is not in relation to the fact that the machine is anything but technological: in this case its movements were determined by a dwarf hidden inside it, a trick this is quite banal and frankly of

48

Chapter 2

little interest. What is striking are the considerations that arose in Poe, who, prompted by the confrontation with the automata, is pushed to reason with and address other automatic devices of the time. A few years before Poe’s essay, in 1822 to be exact, Charles Babbage had invented the Difference Engine, the first machine capable of calculating a polynomial function57 and the Analytic Engine, a machine capable of solving any mathematical problem: the first real “computer” in history. But if these machines were ingenious—asks Poe—what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr.Babbage? What shall we think of a engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man? It will perhaps be said, in reply, that a machine such as we have described is altogether above comparison with the Chess-Player of Maelzel. By no means—it is altogether beneath it—that is to say provided we assume (what should never for a moment be assumed) that the Chess-Player is a pure machine, and performs its operations without any immediate human agency.58

What makes the chess player—assuming that it is a “genuine” machine that does not rely on any human intervention—so special? It was different from simple calculating machines based on action-reaction processes, an on-off system which characterized the electrical experiments of the time. Maelzel’s chess-player envisaged an electronic device, a complex system capable of responding to the unpredictable contingencies of human interaction. Arithmetical or algebraic calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determined. [. . .] But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. [. . .] All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players. Now, even granting (what should not be granted) that the movements of the Automaton Chess-Player were in themselves determinate, they would be necessarily interrupted and disarranged by the indeterminate will of his antagonist. There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage; and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.59

In short, the moment the first calculating machine was conceptualized, which in itself is the result of previous research experiences which spanned from

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

49

Leibniz to Nieper, and from Pascal to Jacquard’s loom60—and the desire to free man from the most simple mechanical operations—the author’s imagination propels us into the twentieth century, an era of probability, interactivity and electronics, as well as digital and quantum computers. Poe lives a different time from Bense, thus he is forced to distill everything down to pure imagination, and the justification to his queries can be found in the simplest solution: it is always mankind that is in charge of the machine. However, Poe’s intuitions allow us to embark on a different kind of reasoning. As Hans Blumenberg states: It is wrong to believe that there is any direct or indirect connection between Vuacanson’s famous artificial duck, which Goethe had seen in agony at Beireis, and the internally controlled models of modern-day cybernetics, for example the equally famous tortoise by Shannon. [. . .] The introduction of mathematics into mechanics decreed the end of every metaphorical policy in view of the law of nature and the illusions that derive from it.61

Poe’s insights and Babbage’s calculating machines allow us to enter a domain no longer defined by imitation as a deception of nature but by calculus as the creator of what exists.62 We begin that transition from a type of computer science that serves to provide information to a type of computer science that orients our actions, identified by Éric Sadin as early as 1888 with Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for punched cards, “the moment that inaugurated the desire to better manage certain situations through automated processes.”63 In uncovering the conceptual roots of digital technology, it is also useful to recall Luigi Federico Menabrea’s article from 1842. Menabrea, fascinated by Babbage’s inventions, wrote Notations sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage, the first scientific text on what is known today as computer science—with the exception of Leibniz’s De Progressione Dyadica from 1679 which was never published. The text was reclaimed, expanded, and translated by Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelac, illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron. These are the first “scholars” of what at the time was known as “programmability” and what later became known as “digital.” These scholars were part ingenious inventors, part mathematicians and part logicians. In fact, it was a logician who laid the foundations for the development of the binary code, the primary matrix of digital language. I am referring to George Boole’s algebra, as illustrated in The Mathematical Analysis of Logic from 1847. This is a crucial text for understanding how devices that are changing our behaviors today developed and for understanding the necessity to establish an approach, impossible back then due to technological limitations, geared

50

Chapter 2

toward reduction and the binary calculus of information. “This led Boole to the principle that the algebra of logic was precisely what ordinary algebra would become if it were restricted to the two values 0 and 1.”64 The examples, just like the references that could be given, are many; yet some essential differences must be emphasized. Boole was a logician just like Cantor, Frege, and Hilbert: their primary interest was furthering the field of mathematics and logic, not creating machines; unlike Babbage, Menabrea, and Byron. Unsurprisingly, Boole’s theories were applied by Shannon in 1937, thus demonstrating their validity for computer science65 and uniting the two fields. This had already been predicted by Samuel Butler in Erewhon, a particularly enlightening novel published anonymously in 1872 which was the forerunner of a new form of science fiction. The novels’ protagonist comes into contact with a civilization that for centuries had remained completely isolated from the rest of the world. There he finds the “Book of The Machines,” which effectively banned all machines from said society. At this point, the protagonist is confronted with a new way of conceiving technology: “Who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways?”66 These reflections lead Butler, through the protagonist who is reading “the book of the machines,” to state that “hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction [?]—when [its] language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own [?]”67 From here, we are then plunged into a distant future where machines can reproduce themselves: “Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for re-production? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines?”68 We are at the threshold of a new era, a new technological ecosystem.

NOTES 1. Emilio Salgari, Le meraviglie del Duemila (Florence: Bemporad, 1907), 35. Own translation. 2. This is how Salgari describes the city’s social organization after the fall of Socialism: “During our time they were imposing, very much so! Especially after the organization of the great Socialist party. What happened to Socialism? Everyone predicted a great future for that party.” “It disappeared after a series of experiments that angered everyone and satisfied no one. It was a beautiful utopia but in practice it could not lead to any result, and in the end it turned into a kind of slavery. So we went

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

51

back to the old-fashioned way, and today there are the poor and the rich, the masters and the labourers, as there were thousands of years before, and how it has always been since people started populating the world. Nevertheless some German and Russian communities still exist, old socialists who cultivate the land in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, but no one cares for them nor are they of any importance, indeed they are gradually disappearing.” Salgari, Le Meraviglie, 15. Own translation. 3. Since the second half of the 1990s, the notion of visual culture has become increasingly significant. The debate is extensive, for further reading see Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998); Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith, eds, Visual Culture: What is Visual Culture Studies? (New York: Routledge, 2005); W. J. T. Mitchel, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: Uni. Chicago Press, 2015); Dikovitskaya, Margaret, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 4. Michele Cometa, Archeologie del dispositivo: Regimi scopici della letteratura (Caserta: Luigi Pellegrini Editore, 2016), 39. Own translation. 5. See Michele Cometa, Archeologie, 39. 6. See Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 7. See Jacques Aumont, L’oeil interminable: cinéma et peinture (Paris: Editions Séguier, 1989). 8. This is not the setting for an in-depth analysis of the topics here listed. Please refer to my text, “Fra passati ricostruiti e futuri anticipati. Il concetto di digital nelle teorie del cinema” in Fata Morgana, monograph issue “Teoria,” n. 26, 2014. 9. G. Fiorentino, “Dalla fotografia al cinema” in Storia del cinema mondiale. Volume 5. Teorie, strumenti, memorie, ed. G. Brunetta (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 64. Own translation. 10. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6. 11. Verismo is an Italian literary movement that originated between 1875 and the early 1900s. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents and the authors of a verismo manifesto. 12. Sandro Bernardi, L’avventura del cinematografo (Venezia: Marsilio, 2007), 22. Own translation. 13. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1977), 36. 14. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 239. Original French edition published by Editions Nathan in 1995. 15. For a detailed history of these instruments, see Mannoni, The Great. 16. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 95. 17. Examples include C.W. Ceram, Eine Archäologie des Kinos (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1965), English translation, Archeology of Cinema (London: Thames

52

Chapter 2

and Hudson, 1965); and Laurent Mannoni’s book, cit., or, in the Italian language, Virgilio Tosi, Il cinema prima dei Lumière (Turin: ERI, 1984) and, by the same author, Breve storia tecnologica del cinema (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001). These are the founding texts for a new interpretation of pre-cinematographic instruments of vision. However, since the 1990s, thanks to scholars such as Jonathan Crary, a less linear approach to the subject began to take shape, where specific instruments of vision were no longer seen as the logical anticipation of the cinematographic vision—a change which then allowed us to expand the discourse to the wider art world. 18. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 23. 19. Crary, Techniques, 132. 20. Stephen Herbert, A History of Pre-Cinema, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2000), XI–XII. Own italics. 21. Erkki Huhtamo, Illusion in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 17. 22. For an in-depth analysis see Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (University of California Press, 2011); Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (London: Polity, 2012); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Mean (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas W. Keenan, eds., New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2015). 23. Thomas Pikkety, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the TwentyFirst Century (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 37: “the first globalization is as fascinating as it was inegalitarian. It saw the invention of the electric light as well as the heyday of the ocean liner (the Titanic sailed in 1912), the advent of film and radio, and the rise of the automobile and international investment.” 24. Huhtamo, Illusion, 5. 25. William Uricchio, “There’s More to the Camera’s Obscura than Meets the Eye” in Arrêt sur image et fragmentation du temps / Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time, eds. Francois Albera, Marta Braun and André Gaudreault (Lausanne: Cinema Editions Payot, 2002), 103–120. 26. Uricchio. “There’s More,” 103. 27. William Uricchio, “Television’s First Seventy-Five Years: The Interpretive Flexibility of a Medium in Transition” in The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, ed. R. Kolke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 228. In addition, see Brian Winston, Media, Technology and Society. A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge, 1998). 28. The cartoon was published by British magazine “Punch” to explain the workings of a hypothetical invention by Edison called telephonoscope, capable of transmitting light as well as sound. The term “electric camera obscura” appears in the caption—but what is most interesting is its theoretical stance: “Every evening, before going to bed, Pater and Materfamilias set up an electric camera-obscura over

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

53

their bedroom mantle-piece, and gladen their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through wire.” (George du Maurier, “Edison’s Telephonoscope (Transmits Light as well as Sound)” in Punch Almanack for 1879, December 9, 1878). 29. See Félix Nadar, When I was a Photographer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), originally published in French as Quand j’étais photographe (Paris: Flammarion, 1900); Maria Morris Hambourg, Francoise Heilbrun and Paul Néagu, Nadar (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995). 30. Aldo Grasso, Prima lezione sulla televisione (Bari: Laterza, 2011), 7. Own translation. 31. See Russell W. Burns, Communications: An International History of the Formative Years (London: The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004). 32. It is interesting to note the effects produced by the creation of such an instrument, which allowed for the transmission of images in real time. They are very similar to those that developed after the institutionalization of television—when the term television began to have a precise meaning and refer to a specific type of technology—and the advent of Youtube. 33. See Frederick C. Bakewell, Electric Science: Its History, Phenomena, and Applications (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853). 34. Giuseppe Pagni, Del pantelegrafo caselliano memoria del cav. G. Pagni (Florence: Tipografia di G. Mariani, 1858), 9. Own translation. 35. Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (London: Berg, 2006), 47. Own italics. 36. Gere, “Art,” 51. 37. Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 7. 38. Cubitt, The Practice, 7. 39. The Olivetti Programma 101 (1962–1964) is considered to be the first computer with “personal” attributes. Its advertising brochure read: “an electronic calculator to be kept on the desk, within easy reach, to be used by anyone at any time.” Own translation. 40. The increase in amateur photography also led to the “aesthetic of the mistake,” “by the end of the nineteenth century, with the progression of amateur photography the frequency of mistakes increased, causing a sharp upsurge in blurs, ghosts and splitting of the image, obscured or damaged films” in Clément Chéroux, L’errore fotografico. Una breve storia (Turin: Einaudi, 2009), 15. Own translation. Original French version: Fautographie: petite histoire de l’erreur photographique (Crisnée, Belgium: Yellow Now, 2003). 41. Maurizio Vitta transcribes Arago’s words from a report given to the Paris Academy of Sciences on the 6th of January 1839: “it is specified in the report that Daguerre had refused to patent the invention, aware of the fact that his method had “the benefit of being economic, easy, and could be used anywhere by travelers” and that therefore “once understood, its workings would have been available to anyone”” in Maurizio Vitta, Il rifiuto degli dèi. Teorie delle belle arti industriali (Turin: Einaudi, 2012), 13. Own translation.

54

Chapter 2

42. Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Towards and Archaeology of the Screen” in ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image Vol. 7 (2004): 31–82. 43. Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici, “Sapere scientifico e pratiche spettacolari prima dei Lumière” in Storia del cinema mondiale. Volume 1. Teorie, strumenti, memorie, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 14. Own translation. 44. Ibid, 12. Own translation. 45. See Alessandro Olivieri’s seminal study “L’homunculus di Paracelso” (Paracelsus’s Homunculus), Atti della Reale Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti, Naples n.s. 12 (1931–1932). Own translation; Anthony Grafton and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 46. By Portoghesi see the seminal study Tecnica Curiosa (first edition, 1965: “The idea that science and technique can unite and finally engender the summability of human knowledge which is the bedrock of progress, that human history can become not only a cyclic alternation of personalities and contrasting opinions but a continuous progression, and that the collectivity of scholars and technicians, beyond any hierarchies, are, as such, the protagonists of history, was born in the early seventeenth century, as the crowning of a series of experiences rooted in the leadership function assumed by the bourgeoisie in the world of production.” (Milan: Medusa, 2014), 42. Own translation. 47. In particular see Paolo Rossi, I filosofi e le macchine 1400–1700 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2007). 48. Horst Bredekamp, translation by Allison Brown, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology (Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1995), 86. 49. Bredekamp, The Lure, 86. 50. Bredekamp, The Lure, 86. 51. Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times” in Edinburgh Review Vol. 49, No. 98 (1829): 439–459. 52. Tomás Maldonado, Tecnica e cultura (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979). This debate also involved scholars such as Rathenau, Simmel, Gropius, Bloch and Reuleaux. 53. R. L. Rusky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31. 54. Thomas Carlyle, “The Signs of the Time” in A Carlyle Reader, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 37. 55. Carlyle, “The Signs,” 38. 56. See Jessica Ruskin, The Restless Clock (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2016). 57. A polynomial function is a combination of addition, subtraction and multiplication. 58. Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Vol. III, ed. John H. Ingram (London: A. & C. Black, 1899), 288–289. 59. Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess,” 289–290. 60. On this topic, see Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012). See also, Gerard O’Regan, A Brief

The Dawn of a New Media Environment

55

History of Computing (Berlin: Springer, 2012); Vittorio Marchis, Storia delle macchine (Bari: Laterza, 2010). 61. Hans Blumenberg, Storia dello spirito della tecnica, trans. Raffaele Scolari and Bruno Simona (Milan: Mimesis, 2014), 16. Own translation. Original version, Geistesgeschichte der Technik (Berlin: Shurkamp, 2009). 62. If we go beyond the notion of cinema as the dominating interpretative device of the nineteenth century, we would realize that this time period was also defined by the search for a new media system, one that is plural and definitely not linear. Jonathan Crary defines it as a system of multiple identities: “the circulation and reception of all visual imagery is so closely interrelated by the middle of the [19th] century that any single medium or form of visual representation no longer has a significant autonomous identity.” In Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 23. 63. Éric Sadin, L’ Intelligence artificielle ou l’enjeu du siècle: Anatomie d’un antihumanisme radical (Paris: L’Échappée, 2018), 32. Own translation. 64. Davis, The Universal, 27. 65. Claude E. Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” Transactions American Institute of Electrical Engineers Vol. 57 (1938). 66. Samuel Butler, Erewhon (London: Penguin, 2007), 226. 67. Butler, Erewhon, 231. 68. Butler, Erewhon, 239–240.

Chapter 3

Avant-Gardes and Technology Toward a New Notion of the Medium

INVENTING THE MACHINE In 1986, postmodern scholar and theorist Andreas Huyssen laid the foundations for a novel interpretation of the historical avant-gardes in his acclaimed book After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. In it, he placed the avant-gardes in relation to a notion which at the time was still very ambitious to apply to the artistic field: technology. Huyssen’s declaration is imperative: “I would go further: no other single factor has influenced the emergence of the new avant-garde art as much as technology, which not only fuelled the artists’ imagination (dynamism, machine cult, beauty of technics, constructivist and productivist attitudes), but penetrated to the core of the work itself.”1 As we have seen, by the first half of the twentieth century, technology had already established itself as a conceptual framework; only later did it become the defining characteristic of a generation of artists who adopted it as a source of expressive inspiration and incorporated its creative and material structures. Today, Huyssen’s statement is of great interest, especially if we consider that in the 1980s studies in art history linked the historical avant-gardes to a reversal of the classical languages of contemporary art (mostly in the realm of sculpture and painting) and only later took into account unconventional media such as cinema and photography.2 Unsurprisingly, the first to draw a parallel between avant-gardes and technology was Huyssen, a scholar outside the classical field of art, in a text dedicated to socio-philosophical comparisons between the modern and the postmodern; a study that captured the avant-garde phenomenon from a vantage point outside the field of art history. From this angle, we can now analyze the period between 1910 and 1920 as key for the inauguration of 57

58

Chapter 3

the relationship between art and innovation. At the time, this relationship was enabled by new interpretations which took into consideration the links between art, technology, and science and a new conception of the artist, which was inching closer to “the artist as inventor.” As is widely accepted, the importance of the historical avant-gardes3 lies in the dialectical pair rupture/innovation: a break with the past in view of projects and perspectives for the future. This combination, however, is not removed from a temporal structure that is faithful to an idea of progress, “it is an understanding of how the arts developed that involves the existence of great unifying myths, thereby placing innovations in a teleological perspective.”4 It involved a break with the past and with the technical languages of classical art, the so-called “fine arts,”5 together with a negation of the present in favor of a reconfiguration of the languages that were creating the present itself: “avant-gardism takes the crisis of the present into account the moment it assumes that it will be overcome.”6 This dialectic notably restructured the very language of art and appropriated materials that fell outside the purely artistic realm. A whole new world was created, characterized by “an extended field”—as it will be called by the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960—that made use of the most varied industrial and non-industrial materials, as well as technological instruments and new media that had begun to develop precisely around the end of the nineteenth century (like cinema, the radio, television, and the gramophone). As mentioned, technology is a complex issue that cannot simply be defined by the dualism technology = instrument. This is precisely what was exposed by the historical avant-gardes, and perhaps the entire history of art: it is impossible to reduce the work of artists to a technical display of techniques as “in such cases we do not have a ‘mechanization of art’, but on the contrary an artistic use of machinery; and if this ideal relationship of mechanical instrument to art were universal, there would be no argument.”7 Today we can examine the historical avant-gardes from a renewed perspective, as initiators of an artistic making that enveloped and steered the experiences, inventions, and excitements of the new world of media that had emerged toward the second half of the nineteenth century. In this new perspective, the historical avant-gardes are strengthened by the union between art, science, and technology. Specifically, the avant-gardes faced the growing world of media through the notion of “machine.”8 The machine was seen as a cultural framework to be discovered and re-elaborated, as well as subject and metaphor, “with Futurism and the advent of avant-garde, the ambiguous antagonism that divide/unite Man and Nature finds its expression in the figure of the Machine.”9 Therefore, the “machine” is a conceptual divergence and key for understanding a socio-economic context increasingly dominated by technological

Avant-Gardes and Technology

59

devices. It was a catalyst of new imaginary worlds based on automatons and anticipated automated systems of contemporary technological forms, such as the cyborg. This perspective allows for a much more contemporary reading of the avant-gardes, even though the context they thrived in was very different from that of today, as will be discussed in the last chapter. The historical avant-gardes were among the first to artistically investigate the new expanding world of media of the twentieth century, and even enveloped the expanding technology market which had just shifted from being niche to becoming mass. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, by inventing new machines for artistic production the avant-gardes paved the way for “an important conclusion that can be drawn from the polyvalent and metaphorical use of the term “machine” [. . .] the machine can never be taken for granted. The machine is not given, but it has to be constructed, made, built.”10 The avant-gardes were inspired by the desire to create a new media system in search of a new regime of vision, so as to actively inhabit the renewed and newly born visual environment and chauffeur technological development in opposition to the determinism imposed by capitalism. This is no coincidence, as one of the main characteristics of the avant-gardes is their aim to shake society at its very core, astonishing and instilling a new form of social interaction. This is a key for understanding the relationship between avant-gardes and media, “C’est pourquoi l’avant-garde ne se satisfait pas d’une relégation, d’une marginalisation sociales, comme pouvait le faire la Bohème ou les groupes artistiques de la fin du XIX siècle, comme les Parnassiens.” This is because “(. . .) l’avant-garde est constitutivement en rapport avec l’action publique, les moyens de communications de masse (presse, affiche, plus tard radio, etc.), de la reproduction technique, a priori antithétiques avec un art situé dans la problématique de l’autonomie et des spécificités.”11 To build, modify, and create machines by dynamizing the new media environment and steering the logic of technology capitalism—this is the lesson imparted by the avant-gardes. The artists of the avant-gardes engaged with this new sense of mobility, industrialization, and the rise of a new economic system through novel interpretations based on collaborations with technicians and engineers, as well as teamwork; incorporating and guiding the new logics of the industry through art. From being industrially produced by the market, the “machine” becomes a device to be explored, converted, modified, experimented with, and, as we shall see, invented. POSTHUMANISM “Magnificent railway stations were erected in every city—described, again and again, as ‘modern cathedrals of the industrial age’—and huge swathes

60

Chapter 3

were cut through the fabric of the urban centres to allow for the construction of thoroughfares in and out of town.”12 Following the teleological premise described above of a separation from the past and a crisis of the present, such statements can be attributed to the wonder that the “machine” inspired in artists of the historical avant-gardes, particularly the Futurists. Yet this awe toward constant and progressive technological development can also be found in the emphatic appraisal of the scientific and technological determinism of the late nineteenth century, prior to the advent of the avant-gardes and renowned declarations by Futurist and Russian artists. Writers like Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier and Maxime Du Camp, who was also a photographer, praised the great potential of technology by emphasizing a separation from the gloomy past in favor of an unknown future, all in the name of positive—or positivist—progress. This stance can be discerned in the words of Du Camp, written in 1860, as he affirms that “science produces wonders and industry accomplishes miracles. Yet we remain impassive, indifferent or contemptuous, and go on plucking the strained cords of our lyres [. . .] One discovers the force of steam, and we sing in praise of Venus rising from the foam of the sea. One discovers electricity, and we sing our songs to Bacchus, friend of the ruby grapes. This is absurd! [. . . ] The cult of the old in this country is a lunacy, an illness, an epidemic.”13 The power of these statements—inferred from the explicit distinction between “old” and “new,” and the emphasis placed on science and industry defined as “wonders” and “miracles”—can be immediately associated with many statements made by avant-garde artists, above all the Futurists.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, faith in progress and an emphasis on an evercloser relationship between art and technology was becoming more tangible, yet it is only with the advent of the avant-gardes that this exchange became fully conscious. Thanks to the avant-gardes, the machine was increasingly seen as an overarching theme for the interpretation of reality, not only in reference to technology, but as a notion that could be experimented with: “machine is not a technical category but a social one, and that is a symbolic concept rather than the descriptive term for a concrete class of technical items.”15 Thus, the approach of the historical avant-gardes to the machine is unidirectional: it begins with man and nature, understood in the broadest terms, and ends with the machine; the surest way to evolutionary progress is given by the propensity of “becoming machine.” This is a brand-new insight that, as we shall see, conceals within itself opportunities for further reflection, especially with regards to artistic practice. For the Futurists, this urge was exemplified by the desire to create a “mechanical man,” expressed in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature of 1912: “After the reign of the animal, behold the beginning of

Avant-Gardes and Technology

61

the reign of the machine. Through growing familiarity and friendship with matter, [. . .] we are preparing the creation of the mechanical man with interchangeable parts.”16 According to the Futurists, technology allowed us to go beyond human intelligence, imagination and nature; the mechanical man with interchangeable parts was the culmination of a new humanity. Furthermore, new technologies such as film could even exceed human intelligence: Film offers us the dance of an object that disintegrates and re-composes itself without human intervention. It offers us the backward sweep of a diver whose feet fly out the sea and bounce violently back on the springboard. Finally, it offers us the sight of a man driving at two hundred kilometers per hour. All these represent the movements of matter which are beyond the laws of human intelligence, and hence of an essence which is more significant.17

The mechanical lens of film enabled matter to move without man’s intervention, becoming an intelligent form whose essence was even more significant than that of man: an “artificial intelligence,” as we would call it today, which rendered humans null and void. This idea can also be found in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s essay, Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine, where he envisions the emergence of a new human form, “In order to prepare for the formation of the inhuman and mechanical type of multiplied man, it is necessary to drastically reduce the need for affection, a need which is not yet destructible and which man carries in his veins.”18 No more nature, no more relationship with the Earth. The issue of the relationship between machines and advanced forms of intelligence can be found in late Futurism. In Manifesto per una società di protezione delle macchine (Manifesto for a society for the protection of machines), Fedele Azari argues for the creation of a society “with the purpose of protecting and respecting the life and rhythm of machines, and especially of engines, which are among the most sociable machines,”19 as the Futurists sensed “in these first beings of the next generation not only an undeniable vitality but also an embryo containing life-instinct and mechanical intelligence.”20 These statements did not go unnoticed and were not closed behind doors of small-knit circles of intellectuals; on the contrary, they laid the foundations for an aesthetics of the machine and influenced the arts, design, and applied arts of the twentieth century. The Futurists laid the foundations of a functionalist aesthetics of the Machine Age. The architecture of the Bauhaus would have been unthinkable without it, as would the industrial and interior design of the De Stijl group, or the Constructivists’ principles of tektonika (ideological and formal conception of

62

Chapter 3

the work), faktura (the choice and handling of the material), and konstruktsiya (the process of giving form, structure, unity and organic coherence to it).21

The fields of design, applied arts, architecture, and fashion—characterized by innovation and creativity—developed considerably during this time and were increasingly placed within the field of artistic practices because of the new aesthetics inspired by the avant-gardes. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind the complexities in analyzing such trends. Over the years, the emphasis given to the machine by early Futurism progressively decreased due to the propagation of theories closer to occultism and esotericism, as can be evinced from the tactile art theories of the 1920s. However, Futurism is certainly the avant-garde that most explicitly reflected on the machine, even if the tendency can also be found in many other avantgarde currents, albeit in different ways. Let’s take the Russian example of the counter Manifesto written by the Constructivist group headed by Tatlin—inspirational father of the movement—in response to the accusations made by brothers Naum Gabo and Nikolaus Pevsner. The two brothers, in the Realist Manifesto, accused the movement of excessive interest in technique at the expense of art. These statements arose strong reactions in the accused, who replied: “Down with Art. Long live Technical Science. Religion is a lie. Art is a lie . . . Long live the constructivist technician. Down with art, which masks only the impotence of humanity. The collective art of today is constructive life!.”22 These declarations must be understood within the context of socialist Russia, where the machine and technology were seen as models of revolutionary progress. Another example is Aleksej Gastev’s sense of collective intelligence in the short story Prokliatyi vopros (“The Accursed Question,” 1914): “This beautiful, this marvellous thing can be created by the modern force of mechanism!”23—understood here as the modeling of man upon machine: “Since the rhythm is uniform, since machines are related to each other through their mechanical structure, is it not clear that the proletariat reared by the machine must and will also grow up as a quantity that is in the highest degree not only determined, but levelled, uniform?”24 Russian Cosmism is also of extreme interest. Recently brought back to light by Boris Groys, this movement emerged before the October Revolution and evolved in the 1920s and 1930s under Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. Fodorov had a cosmic idea of life, he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but also to cure death using science and technology. His vision inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists, architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology until the advent of Stalinism.25

Avant-Gardes and Technology

63

Moving now towards Germany, interest in machines and technology as a propelling for a new worldview remains unaffected. In the Manifesto of Presentism against the Dupontism of the Teutonic Soul (also known as PRÉsentismus, 1921), Dadaist Raoul Hausmann refers to Marinetti’s tactilism—conceived of as an “ersatz of the sadism of the duels of Roman gladiators”26—as an attempt to criticize and ultimately surpass it. He asserts: enlargement and conquest of all our senses! [. . .] We must convince ourselves— he claims—that the sense of touch is part of our senses, or rather, that it is a fundamental presupposition of the senses. If we realize that the eccentric emanations of the haptic sense are projected 600 km from the earth’s atmosphere until they reach Sirio and the Pleiades, it is unclear why we should not make a new art out of what is our most important perception. We demand haptism as well as odorism! Let’s broaden the haptic sense and give it a scientific basis, beyond current casualty! Haptic art will endow man with wider knowledge!27

Hausmann is referring to a new sensory hapticity involving all the senses, a new form of art, not merely tactilism—casual and separated from the rest of the senses. It is in the reformulation of Art within Science and Science within Art that the key to a new sensitivity lies: “because human consciousness has completely changed [. . .] because our experience has completely transformed our psychophysical reality.”28 As we can see, the catalyzing energy of science and its relation to art is here seriously examined. As the author states: “science shows us the possibilities in voluntarily releasing the forces inherent to the atom,”29 so as to be able to conceive “the individual as atom.”30 This approach is commonly found in Dadaism, “many concepts, visual precedents, and social forces that helped produce the flowering of cyborgian imagery in Berlin Dada art together formed a significant cultural trajectory focused on reimagining human identity in Germany during the first few decades of the twentieth century.”31 Enlarging, improving, and enabling new perspectives for mankind—in this way technology permeates material and, in some cases, even divine reality, stimulating the imagination of artists and influencing their practice. Technology introduced the great dream of the machine as metaphor for how the world worked. From here on out, art will take possession of the machine and transform it into expressive potential, so as to inspire, modify, and reinvent it. Thus, the machine is not taken for what it is but as inspiration and guide for new prospects of development, not only in art but also in society and in the market more generally speaking.

64

Chapter 3

By making use of complex instruments that began to be part of everyday life, the avant-garde artist imposed a fundamental shift; crucial for understanding the era that we now live in. The artist began to work in teams together with technicians and engineers, taking on the role of investigator of aesthetic forms but also that of innovator; creating, modifying, and directing technological progress. THE ARTIST AS INVENTOR IN THE AVANT-GARDES Reviewing the historical avant-gardes in view of the artistic use of technology enables us to update and revisit more classical interpretations. For ease, the exchanges between the historical avant-gardes and technology will be separated in three different but complementary discursive categories. The first category is the most accepted and encompasses those artistic techniques that have been established by the “fine arts.” The strong critique that existed towards the art of the past was also aimed at reconfiguring the languages and materials of art. The ready made (Marcel Duchamp, in primis), papier-collé (between painting and sculpture: Picasso, Bracque), the collage (Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield, among others), frottage (Max Ernst), controrilievi (installations made of tin, aluminum, copper, zinc, and wood, recalling factory environments: Tatlin), the proun (between painting and architecture: El Lissitzky), the art of noise (Luigi Russolo), “words-infreedom” (Futurism’s parole in libertà), but also the sound experiments of Kandinskij and Schoenberg, the light experiments of Moholy-Nagy (see, among others, the Light-Space-Modulator) and Schwitters’ Merzbau (composed of objects accumulated by the artist); all of these are examples of new approaches in the languages and materials of art, in search of a new figuration—see cubist or abstract art—and, more generally, an opening toward a new artistic “visibility.” This approach is well defined in Umberto Boccioni’s 1912 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, where he affirms the need to “reject the idea that one material must be used exclusively in the construction of a sculptural whole. Insist that even twenty different types of material can be used in a single work of art in order to achieve its plastic feeling. To mention a few examples: glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement, hair, leather, cloth, mirrors, electric lights, and so on.”32 Electric light is mentioned last, and it is precisely that “and so on” which suggests the possibility of adding mechanical technology to the list. Thus, this brings us to the second category of analysis. Here we find the exchange established by the historical avant-gardes with the existing technologies of the time. An intuition—from the Futurist experience onward—that primarily materialized in “media”33 such as cinema, photography, the gramophone, and

Avant-Gardes and Technology

65

the radio. This creative and experimental approach made use of the technologies already available on the market, often remodeled and modified by the artists themselves. These undertakings did not become known as real organic trends but rather intuitions of individual artists who, embodying the poetics of the movement to which they belonged, ventured into unknown and more technologically complex territories. These experiments lived their heyday between the end of the 1910s and the end of the 1920s: a time gap that by force of circumstance is dislocated from the accepted golden age of the avantgardes, generally identified between the first years of the twentieth century and the end of the 1910s.34 To exemplify this second category,35 in the realm of photography we find Man Ray’s “rayographs” and, among others, the experiments of the Dadaists Christian Schad and László Moholy-Nagy. In regards to the radio, in 1932, there are Bertold Brecht’s important insights, for whom “the radio would thus have to abandon its status as supplier and see to it that the hearer assume this status,”36 and, the following year, the Futurist Radio Manifesto (signed by Marinetti and Masnata, more commonly known as La Radia,) or Khlebnikov’s ideas concerning the radio of the future.37 Cinema, on the other hand, is the only media for which a more complex and substantial discourse has been developed, to the point where it is almost possible to speak of a trend with its own identity, commonly known as “avant-garde cinema.” This is not an exhaustive category, but certainly a real trend. The examples that could be given are many, even though this is not the place for an exhaustive summary of issues concerning this topic: recall Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra’s essay Musica Cromatica (1910–12), Futurist theoretical insights exemplified in the Manifesto of Futurist Cinema38 (1916), as well as Kandinskij, Survage, Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann, Graeff and Hirschfeld-Mack, Moholy-Nagy, Van Doesburg, Fischinger, Man Ray, Duchamp, René Calir, Picabia, Dali and Bunuel, Artaud, Leger, and Dulac among many others. Part of this category are also the experiments made on the cinematic device, as well as the expansion and detailed study of its creative possibilities: for example, the device used to cut wax in very thin sheets in order to obtain new visual effects or Fischinger’s film screenings using five projectors; others, such as MoholyNagy or Abel Gange, aspired and dreamt of going beyond the screen. The third category is probably the most complex to frame, both for the lack of information and the difficulty in interpreting this phenomenon. It comprises of that jagged universe of artists that, in isolation and independently, attempted to create and invent new visual machines, new instruments of vision through the collaboration between artists and engineers—often combining, recreating, and finding connections between the available media of the time. From this “enlarged” perspective, we can see how the avantgardes guided the impulses of the nineteenth century in a newly remodeled

66

Chapter 3

artistic context. Indeed, we can assert that “the artists of the early twentieth century lived in a completely new and unknown media ecology, and the avant-garde was the first to formulate a program that attempted to inhabit, irritate, and shape this environment.”39 Arndt Niebisch, taking up on Michel Serres, identified this with the concept of “parasite.” In an attempt to overcome Kittler’s technological determinism (media determines our living conditions by overshadowing man, seen as “agent”) and endeavoring not to take a revised humanist stance, Niebisch identified the role played by the avant-gardes in the development of new media in the concept of “parasite.” For Niebisch, The parasite liquefies media determinism by implementing the avant-garde artists as noise that is able to infuse minimal irregularities into communication channels. These contaminations can lead to transformations, because—although they do not overwrite the hegemonic media discourses—they create minimal shifts that in the long run have a potential to impact the emergence of new media practices.40

Artistically speaking, the historical avant-gardes were the first to unambiguously and self-consciously exploit the “new media system” that had emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century. From the 1960s onward, this will increasingly impose itself as a well-defined and consolidated artistic phenomenon and is a precious source of foresight and innovation in light of contemporary reinterpretations of artistic progress. As already mentioned, this is a universe that is yet to be discovered, the references are few and far between, the information fragmented. This third category encompasses works by renowned artists who have been extensively studied and also works by artists who are less well-known, but who nonetheless belonged for the most part to prominent avant-garde groups. It includes individual experiments often left to the imagination or abandoned due to lack of funding or because accused of being too “avant-garde,” almost always carried out outside of the avant-garde fields to which they belonged. These are works that often fall outside the classical field of art as they did not envision the use of already existing media (cinema, radio, and photography) but instead created new ones; inhabiting and experimenting with new artistic, social, and human environments. Among many others, Willi Baumeister’s Mecano41 (1921), Oskar Schlemmer’s “robotic” scenography of the mid1920s, some of Alexander Laszlo’s technological inventions regarding the relation between sound and image, Hirschfeld-Mach, Kurt Schwerdteger, and Thomas Wilfred’s noteworthy Clavilux.42 Also of particular interest are Raoul Hausman’s Optophone and El Lissitzky’s “electromechanical vision” (see Focus).

Avant-Gardes and Technology

67

This category allows us to modify the basic premises used in many inquiries on the relations between art and technology. In fact, in most studies in art history the artist is depicted as a figure who adopts a passive stance toward technological development: in other words, the artist embraces technology only after it has been commercialized in the marketplace. There are many examples, such as Malte Hagener and her acclaimed study on the relationship between avant-gardes and cinema. She is certainly right in affirming that film, radio, the gramophone, illustrated press and sound film all opened up new spaces and public spheres that the avant-garde attempted to claim and occupy. It is on this playing field, shaped by a media-savvy public, a jagged landscape of technology, and new media with new techniques that the man oeuvres and negotiations, the attacks and withdrawals of a dynamic avant-garde were taking place.43

Hence “novel technological developments like photography and film not only add new formats to the existing ensemble of the arts, but these reproductive media have far-reaching influences in the reconfiguring of the field at every level.”44 These noteworthy affirmations nevertheless overlook a crucial issue: once again, it is technology that influences the artist, who remains passive to technological change. Instead, this third category aims to uncover how the approach of the avant-gardes was not merely a passive one. The exchange was not simply unidirectional, as is generally highlighted, whereby the technology market influenced the works of artists—“these reproductive media have far-reaching influences in the reconfiguring of the field at every level.”45 Hagener’s basic premise, as in the majority of history of art studies, is tied to an interpretative approach by which the imagination and practice of artists is stimulated by the industrial sector, already highly developed at the time in terms of media such as cinema, photography, radio, and so on. A one-way exchange that travels from industrial production to the works of artists. Similarly, Andreas Broeckmann’s seminal study presents the concept of “machine art” as divided into five categories, “works of machine art encourage us to not take the apparatuses for granted, but to problematize them by making the sibling ties between subject and machine visible, or feelable—in the modes of comfort, pain, or humor.”46 Five categories, namely: the associative reference to the social meaning of technology, often to make provocative claim against the assumptions of artistic ingenuity; the symbolic reference to mechanics as a way to describe aspects of human culture and psychology; the formalist appraisal of the beauty of the functional forms; the play with kinetic functions as a way to broaden the expressive potentials of sculpture;

68

Chapter 3

and the automatic operation of machine that underpins their functional independence and their existential strangeness.47

As it cannot be reduced to one of the five mentioned above, another category should be added: the third discursive category outlined in this discussion. In saying so, we do not wish to criticize the profoundness of the above mentioned studies but rather uncover the underlying premises that these studies are based on, from which a more organic understanding of the exchanges between artists and the media that they use may emerge. Consequently, this third category wants to demonstrate how the exchange with the industrial sector, and society more generally speaking, was much more complex than previously acknowledged. It proves that artists were not just creators of aesthetic forms but social innovators; that they were part of the development and growth of technology, steering its path and creating new stimuli. It testifies that when art incorporates technology, it incorporates new sectors that are impossible to restrict to the purely artistic sphere, thus becoming an engine for the future of society. This is increasingly evident today, as we can see by the rise in the number of artists working with businesses in the technology sector. This approach takes us to a new level of analysis, one that does not simply rely on the history of art or the history of cinema, the study of media or the innovations it engendered. It travels transversally between all these fields, continuously re-assessing them. The foundations are, as always, in the historical avant-gardes, albeit examined from a different point of view. A new theoretical approach can derive from these examples. Although these artists produced contents for the art world by using new media, their work and experiments led them to invent completely new technologies, applications, and devices which were often subsequently placed on the market. Collaborations between artists, engineers, and technicians are increasingly common today, but at the time they represented the emergence of a new way of conceiving art, science, and technology. It is in these experiments that we find the foundations for the advent of technology in the arts. They are harbingers of the expanded vision that will characterize the artistic and cinematographic practices of the neo-avantgardes from the 1960s onward. As Hal Foster states, “as the first neo-avantgarde recovers the historical avant-garde, dada in particular, it does so often literally, through a reprise of its basic devices, the effect of which is less to transform the institution of art than to transform the avant-garde into an institution.”48 This will be the starting point—“a continual process of pretension and retention, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts”49—for the emerging concepts that will attempt to frame the new forms of expression from the 1960s onward.

Avant-Gardes and Technology

69

NOTES 1. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 9. The relation between avant-gardes and technology had already been highlighted by Renato Poggioli in 1962 in a noteworthy book entitled Teoria dell’Arte d’Avanguardia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1962). Translated in English as The Theory of the Avant-garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 2. In fact, Carlo Giulio Argan highlighted the lack of interest in both cinema and photography with regards to Futurism. See Argan’s introduction in Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo Futurista (Turin: Einaudi, 1970). 3. The art critic Théodore Duret first made use of the term “avant-garde” in 1885 in a collection of essays entitled Critique d’Avant Garde, eradicating it from its military context and applying it to the artistic field. The author primarily referred to Impressionist works, which were proliferating in those years. From then on, “avantgarde” became one of the main concepts in art. 4. Denys Riout, Qu’est Ce Que L Art Moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); italian translation, L’arte del XX Secolo (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 7. Own translation. See also, David Cottington, The Avant-Garde: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and the classic Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota, 1984). 5. As has been observed by many art historians, it is interesting to note the linguistic transition from the notion of “fine arts” to “plastic arts” during this time. 6. Riout, Qu’est Ce Que, 7. Own translation. 7. Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 66. 8. See, Katia Pizzi, Italian Futurism and the Machine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 9. Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-garde (California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 141. 10. Andreas Broeckmann, Machine Art in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 27. 11. François Albera, L’Avant-garde au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 17. 12. Gunther Berghaus “Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst” in Futurism and the Technological Imagination, ed. Gunther Berghaus (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2009), 2–3. Also note the angst in the words of Baudelaire: “My friend, you know my terror of horses and vehicles. Well, just now as I was crossing the boulevard in a great hurry, splashing through the mud in the midst of a seething chaos, and with death galloping at me from every side, I gave a sudden start and my halo slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam. I was far too frightened to pick it up.” Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1947), 94. 13. Maxime Du Camp, as quoted in Gunther Berghaus “Futurism and the Technological,” 15. 14. Roberto Tessari declared: “Faced with a world of technological and economic phenomena that undermine the traditional sphere of artistic practice, the poet reacts

70

Chapter 3

with an agonistic impulse projected towards reclaiming a mythical metamorphosis of certain industrial realities, [. . .] an elaborate appeal to the soul of modern man to arouse certain obscure behavioral tendencies. Thus art reacts to the onslaught of the machine, substituting itself for the myth.” Roberto Tessari, Il mito della macchina (Milan: Ugo Mursia Editore, 1973), 15. Own translation. 15. Andreas Broeckman, Machine Art, 29. 16. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” in Futurism: An Anthology, eds. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 124–125. 17. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto,” 122–123. 18. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine” in Futurism: An Anthology, eds. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 91. 19. Fedele Azari, “Manifesto per una società di protezione per le macchine” in Dizionario del Futurismo, ed. Claudia Salaris (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1996). Own Translation. 20. Azari, “Manifesto.” 21. Berghaus, “Futurism,” 25. 22. “Program of the Productivist Group” (1920), in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York: Viking, 1974), 18–20. 23. As quoted in Julia Vaingurt, Wonderlands of the Avant- Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 37. 24. Vaingurt, “Wonderlands,” 37. 25. Bois Groys, ed., Russian Cosmism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 26. Raoul Hausmann, “Manifesto of PREsentism” (1920), in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Marie Ann Caws (Univ. of Nebraska, 2001), 168. Own translation. 27. Hausmann, “Manifesto,” 168. Own translation. 28. Hausmann, “Manifesto,” 168. Own translation. 29. Hausmann, “Manifesto,” 168. Own translation. 30. Hausmann, “Manifesto,” 168. Own translation. 31. Matthew Biro, Dada cyborg (Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009), 9. 32. Umberto Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” in Futurism: An Anthology, eds. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 118. 33. Although at the time the word “media” was not commonly used. 34. Gianni Rondolino also identifies the culmination of the experiments in avantgarde cinema with the end of the Twenties, as discussed in his Conference at La Sarraz: “the Conference, emphasizing in an absolute and apodictic manner the “practical and spiritual” difference between independent cinema and commercial cinema, in fact condemned the former to die of starvation and gave the latter total primacy” in Gianni Rondolino, “La fine dell’avanguardia” in Cinema d’avanguardia in Europa. Dalle origini al 1945, eds. Paolo Bertetto and Sergio Toffetti (Milan: Il Castoro, 1996), 133. Own translation.

Avant-Gardes and Technology

71

35. Thereby what forms is a mode of employing existing media “to which the avant-gardes programmatically introduced, from a “minor” social and cultural standpoint, alternative theories and operational guidelines to those present in contemporary artistic and media practices.” Cosetta G. Saba, “In luogo di introduzione. Coesistenze, intersezioni, interferenze tra forme mediali e forme artistiche” in Tecnologie e avanguardia in Italia dal Futurismo alla Net​.art​, ed. Cosetta G. Saba (Bologna: Clueb, 2006), 23. Own translation. 36. Bertolt Brecht “Radio als Kommunikationsmedium” in Schriften zu Literatur und Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). See also Walter Benjamin’s important insights highlighted in his text from 1929, “Reflections on Radio”: “The crucial failing of this institution has been to perpetuate the fundamental separation between practitioners and the public, a separation that is at odds with its technological basis.” These reflections echo in a text from 1934, “The Author as Producer.” Both texts can be found in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland and others (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). 37. See Vaigurt, Wonderlands. 38. Signed by Balla, Chiti, Corra, Ginna, Marinetti and Settimelli. 39. Arndt Niebisch, Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012), 2. 40. Niebisch, Media Parasites, 13. 41. There is very little information concerning this topic. See Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath, Film als Film, 1910 bis heute (Stockholm: Hatje Cantz, 1977)— catalogue of the exhibition Film as film: formal experiment in film, 1910–1975 held at the Hayward Gallery, London, between May 3 and June 17, 1979; Slavko Kacunko, Closed Circuit Videoinstallationen (GRIN: 2008). In the Italian language, see the introduction in Paolo Bertetto, Il cinema d’avanguardia: 1919–1930 (Venice: Marsilio, 1997); and my book, Media Art. Prospettive delle arti verso il XXI Secolo (Milan: Mimesis, 2016). 42. In relation to the technological experiments regarding sound/image and color/ music, see Kenneth Peacock “Instruments to Perform Color-Music: Two Centuries of Technological Experimentation” in Leonardo Vol. 21, No. 4 (1988): 397–406. 43. Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2007), 17. 44. Hagener, Moving, 17. 45. The industrial production of these technologies (film, radio, gramophone, photography, etc.) had already begun by the end of the nineteenth century. The aforementioned media were already structured from an industrial point of view. Companies produced cameras, films, radios, etc. Therefore, the margin of freedom for modification of these medias was very limited for artists. This approach indicates a uni-directionality of analysis, where artists are stimulated by media and therefore the industry. 46. Andreas Broeckmann, Machine Art in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 30.

72

Chapter 3

47. Broeckmann, Machine Art, 65. 48. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 21. 49. Foster, The Return, 29.

Chapter 4

Art and Innovation after the War Post-War Italy. Fontana, Munari, Gallizio

It might seem unusual, but I would like to begin the journey that will lead us to a new conception of the artist from Italy, not only because it is my country but also because in Italy there are precursors to a different understanding of art history, technological innovation, and media culture. Even more unusual, the protagonists of this chapter will not be those artists that one would expect to be included in the category suggested by the title: art and innovation. Let us begin with Lucio Fontana, famous for establishing the art movement known as Spatialism and who, like the lacerations in his canvases, characterized an irrevocable split in the international history of art. Analyzing Fontana’s oeuvre from the stance presented in this book allows us to view his work as a link between the art world and the new industrial and technological production models that were becoming increasingly conspicuous after the war. Italy and Europe were increasingly enveloped by a “technological mood,” characterized by artists’ interest in matters related to machines and industrial production. The art world seized and embraced this scenario. In reading Lucio Fontana’s first Manifesto, we can see how much attention was given to technology in the second half of the 1940s, to the point that we can affirm that “the birth of Fontana’s cuts must be placed in relation to the emergence of new technologies.”1 The Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo [First Manifesto of Spatialism] of 1947,2 not only considered general concepts such as the unification of art and science3 but also examined tangible technologies such as the radio and television, media which at the time represented technological innovation par excellence: “neither the radio nor the television can emerge in the spirit of man without an urgency that travels from science to art.”4 73

74

Chapter 4

This statement is crucial not only because it highlights Fontana’s role as one of the first artists to theorize the integration of new media with artistic practices but because such integration denies the deterministic approach evinced by the market in the development of technology. The signers of the Manifesto do not claim that artists must use these tools because they are newer, more functional, or more advanced. Rather, they were looking to art for a justification of new media through a temporal crisis and a relationship of exchange between the past and the present which is fundamentally reticular and non-linear. It will not be possible to adapt to these new needs images that are already fixed in the needs of the past. We are convinced that, after this, nothing of the past will be destroyed, neither its means nor its ends, we are convinced that we will continue to paint and sculpt the subjects of the past, but we are equally convinced that, after this, these subjects will be addressed and looked at with different hands and different eyes and will be imbued with more refined sensibilities.5

The backdrop of Fontana and his companions is fundamentally that of a postwar setting. Nevertheless, the Spatialists were successful in instilling new approaches with regard to the market, innovation, and the industrialization of a nation (Italy, and by extension Europe), going beyond the more conventional discourses surrounding the languages of art. It is the artists that will impose a new vision on art, society, and the economy. This drive to diverge from the pre-established tracks of contemporary art is even more apparent in the Secondo Manifesto dello Spazialismo [Second Manifesto of Spatialism] of 1948. This Manifesto is an eulogy to a new way of conceiving the exchange between art and technology: A tal fine, con le risorse della tecnica moderna, faremo apparire nel cielo: forme artificiali, arcobaleni di meraviglia, scritte luminose. Trasmetteremo, per radiotelevisione, espressioni artistiche di nuovo modello. Se, dapprima, chiuso nelle sue torri, l’artista rappresentò se stesso e il suo stupore e il paesaggio lo vide attraverso i vetri, e poi, disceso dai castelli nelle città, abbattendo le mura e mescolandosi agli altri uomini vide da vicino gli alberi e gli oggetti, oggi, noi, artisti spaziali, siamo evasi dalle nostre città, abbiamo spezzato il nostro involucro, la nostra corteccia fisica e ci siamo guardati dall’alto, fotografando la terra dai razzi in volo. Con ciò non esaltiamo il primato della nostra mente su questo mondo, ma vogliamo ricuperare il nostro vero volto, la nostra vera immagine: un mutamento atteso da tutta la creazione, ansiosamente. Lo spirito diffonda la sua luce, nella libertà che ci è stata data.6

Art and Innovation after the War

75

This laid the groundwork for an open relationship with technology, free of prejudices and at times naive; an instinctive exchange where technology, removed from the clutches of the market and the industry, can become an instrument of poetic creation. Here there is a difference between the model of industrial production and the artistic model, between a form of creation that is finalized and one which is free; enforcement versus freedom. Accordingly, on May 7, 1952, Fontana7 shot a television show on film at RAI studios, two years before the start of television broadcasting in Italy.8 In the same year, Fontana signed the Manifesto del movimento spaziale per la televisione [Manifesto of Spatial Movement for Television] together with nineteen other artists. This Manifesto attested to the role of art in the new technological era. “We Spatialists feel to be the artists of today, since the achievements of technology are by now at the service of the art we profess.”9 In those years, a new idea concerning the relationship with the machine began to emerge in Italy. A new context emerged, dictated by the use of technological mechanisms and a poetic exchange between classical arts and industrialization, painting and machinism. This laid the foundations for the start of a new relationship with the industry and the progression of technological innovation. These are years of rebirth for Italian art, years in which many other artists were also confronted by the machine, for example, Bruno Munari and his Manifesto del macchinismo [Manifesto of Machinism].10 This Manifesto impelled artists to know “the new language of the machine and understand its nature, distract them by making them work irregularly, create works of art with those same machines, by using their very own means.”11 There is much to say about Munari and his arrhythmic, useless machines: the way he tacked the subject of the machine and his enquiries on the relationship between human beings and technology require in-depth analysis. Testaments to the same trend can also be found in Pinot Gallizio’s “industrial paintings,” which resulted in the Manifesto della pittura industriale [Manifesto of Industrial Painting]. Gallizio was a painter, he did not experiment with technology, yet his paintings and his poetics continuously embraced reflections on the notion of the machine and the changes inherent to industrial production, somehow approaching, and anticipating, American examples such as Andy Warhol. His thinking was directed toward an attempt to understand and act in a world increasingly dominated by technology, “Today man is a part of the machine he has created and which negates him and by which he is dominated. We must invert this non-sense or there will be no more creation; we must dominate the machine, force it to make the unique gesture—useless, anti-economic, artistic—in order to create a new anti-economic society, one that is poetic, magical, artistic.”12 According to Gallizio, art must take control of society and its economy. Artists shape innovation, leading and unleashing its poetics. The role of the artist is no longer confined to the artistic sphere alone, nor, as was very

76

Chapter 4

common in those days, to the social sphere more generally speaking. For Gallizio, the artist is the one who can drive technological innovation. Gallizio’s stance can be discerned from his continuous confrontation with industrial production and technological development: For all those things and men who are already powerful: sooner or later you will give us machines to play with or we will fashion them ourselves to occupy that leisure time which you, with demented voracity, look forward to passing in Banality and in making minds progressively into mush. We will use these machines to draw the highways, to make the most fantastical and unique fabrics in which for a single instant the joyous throngs will dress themselves with an artistic sense.”13

Machines are not only made by the industry—“you will give us the machines to play with”—but are invented and recreated by artists—“we will build them to engage.” Gallizio’s theories will have practical implications for industrial painting and The Cavern of Antimatter, exhibited for the first time between 1958 and 1959 at the Drouin Gallery in Paris. For this work, Gallizio covered the gallery walls and the body of a model with rolls of paint. The Cavern comprised not only of a visual but an olfactory—the smell was strong—and auditory experience.14 The link between the Cavern and industrial painting lies in the sales method: the works were sold by the meter. Just like in an industrial assembly line, art, like the film strip, here became part of the new process of production for the cultural industry.15 Later on, other artists such as the Nuclearists will become interested in the same thematics and in 1952 will express the desire to “reinvent painting. The forms disintegrate: the new forms of man are those of the atomic universe, the forces are electronic charges.”16 However, if Pinot Galizio is an artist who should be reconsidered in the perspective here outlined, the Nuclearists, despite their compelling declarations, never broke away from the two-dimensional plane and never really incorporated new technologies, unlike the Spatialists. Nevertheless, a veritable critical interest in the relation between art and technology emerged in Italy after the successes of Kinetic Art and Arte Programmata, in particular due to the writings of Umberto Eco17 and Carlo Giulio Argan18—in addition to those by Gillo Dorfles,19 Maurizio Calvesi, and Enrico Crispolti.20 Only then did the debates on the relationship between artists and industry truly begin to take form. FROM ARTE PROGRAMMATA TO MEDIA ART The distinction between Kinetic Art and Arte Programmata highlights some interesting points. The advent of Arte Programmata is officially linked to one

Art and Innovation after the War

77

of the most important Italian industries of the time: Olivetti. In 1962, Olivetti financed the first major traveling exhibition of “Arte Programmata” organized—the term “curate” was not in use at the time—by Bruno Munari and Giorgio Soavi. The exhibition showcased artists mainly affiliated with the T and N Groups and took place in the Olivetti Shop in Milan and subsequently in their Piazza San Marco store. Behind this endorsement was the intention to finance a cultural event, but also the wish to show how art operating with technologies could be a new research method and producer of creative possibilities, also applicable to technological development. “When art is alive it changes its means of expression in order to perpetually adapt to the modified sensitivity of man,” thus begins the official video of the exhibition. The video was made by the Studio of Monte Olimpino, founded by Bruno Munari and Marcello Piccardo with the intent to introduce new research to the field of cinema: again, art and cinema at a junction. In this context, the relationship between art and industry, which was viewed suspiciously at the time, should not be underestimated. To begin with, unlike in “classical” Kinetic Art, a company like Olivetti allowed the use of complex technologies, thus detaching itself from “homemade” objects and allowing for the development of creative possibilities: programmed artworks consequently aligned with the electronic developments of the time and were not simply kinetic. Subsequently, on a productive level, this exchange crucially anticipated what at a later date, and today rather inconspicuously, became the interactive exchange between art, technology, and companies of the sector. Companies have become increasingly involved in the production of artworks, often incorporating the creative mechanisms of art into the production process itself. The foundations of this approach can be found in the Philips Pavilion, designed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with Yannis Xenakis21 for the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958: It is one thing to make a copy of a photograph by hand, even a thousand samples (what Benjamin envisaged in his famous and highly auspicious essay, concerned with the fate of artworks rather than with that of the art system). It is another to work with or for an enterprise to formulate a new aesthetic model based on the multiplication of the work by thousands, millions. In this way, the artists of Arte Programmata become for Olivetti veritable “suppliers” of ideas—and artifacts—while also attempting to count their material costs and hypothesize a sort of royalty, a copyright for their ideas.22

In analysing these experiences as initiators of the relationship between art and technology, and not only as a part of the archeology of contemporary art, Arte Programmata can be reviewed as a fruitful intersection between the world of contemporary art and that of technological innovation.

78

Chapter 4

Olivetti was certainly an enlightened entrepreneur who realized how important artists were not only for the art world but also in terms of innovation and the creation of new economic processes. Here we are entering a new regime: again, the artist is no longer the one who manipulates the media on the market, nor the lonely artist in the studio who invents by doing. Here the artist enters a much more complex production process as a new professional figure within an ever-changing economic system. The artist inventor, driver of technological innovation, bearer of new ethical and social concerns. With the help of Olivetti, artists demonstrated that “images were produced by programs before the computer came along, just as interactive and virtual relationships existed between works of kinetic and op art and their viewers. It is there—and not with the availability of the computer as technical interface—that the history of interactive and virtual art begins.”23 A specific location unites the two artistic movements of Arte Programmata and what at the time was known as computer art. That place is the city of Zagreb and the setting is Nove Tendencije. The experiences of Nove Tendencije24 in Zagreb, former Yugoslavia (now Croatia) have been reevaluated only in the last couple years; they comprised of five exhibitions that have come to symbolize the break between the world of art and media art. The first edition of Nove Tendencije took place in 1961. It included many international artists working in the field of kinetic art and many who subsequently took part in the exhibition “Arte Programmata.” Among these were Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker of the ZERO Group, Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani; Piero Dorazio, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, Joël Stein of GRAV; and among the participants of the future exhibition financed by Olivetti, the Groups T and N. These affiliations were strengthened in the second edition of Nove Tendencije of 1963: as is known, those were years of great splendor for kinetic art.25 “Although it was Max Bense who initially introduced the term “programming” to the art world, its influential presence in Nova Tendencije from 1963 onward was clearly an effect of the itinerant exhibition Arte Programmata”26 affirms Margit Rosen, testifying to the importance of this exhibition. A very important development for our discussion on Nove Tendencije occurred between 1965 and 1968, between the fourth and fifth editions. In those two years the organizers decided to shift their focus from mechanical and programmed art and the aforementioned artists to the use of electronics in the first computers. From the mechanics of kineticism, to the first “programmed” electronics, to the most complex electronic computers: a transition that is both important and unique, given that nowhere else in the world did the fame of kineticism lead to the same succession. Avoiding a purely

Art and Innovation after the War

79

research-based approach—which had been possible only in a country that still lacked a structured art market such as former Yugoslavia—Italy, and more generally Europe and the United States, were still living in the almost uncontested “victory” of Pop Art.27 However, it must be said that many of the kinetic and “programmed” artists did not pursue the “technological” course. Owing to the influence of important theorists like Abraham A. Moles and Max Bense,28 who were among the first to theorize on “information aesthetics” and are yet to be studied and historicized, the curators at Nove Tendencije chose to strengthen the research on artistic language and introduce the computer to the art world. This new era was inaugurated in 1968 with the conference Kompjuteri i vizuelna istraživanja (Computer and Visual Research), in which Abraham A. Moles took part and which paved the way for an ever greater awareness of art applied to technology. During the same days as Nove Tendencije in 1968, another important exhibition took place: Cibernetic Serendipity, organized by Jasia Reichardt at the ICA–Institute for Contemporary Art in London.29 This exhibition was one of the first attempts to display a new vision that involved the work of many artists that until that moment had been considered distant from each other. Here these artists were united by the relationship between art and technology. Coincidentally, Reichardt had met Max Bense sometime before, and he in turn had organized a pioneering exhibition in Stuttgart in 1965, showcasing the first examples of computer art that had emerged from the so-called “Stuttgart School.”30 In Cybernetic Serendipity we find musicians like John Cage or Iannis Xenakis alongside “kinetic” artists like Jean Tinguely, Wen Yin-Tsai, Nicolas Schöffer and a drawing by Gianni Colombo; literary artists like Nanni Balestrini, Edwin Morgan, and Alison Knowels alongside artists working in the burgeoning field of video art like Nam June Paik, who exhibited his Robot K-456, and John Witney (expanded cinema). Many engineers and computer scientists from outside of the artistic sphere were also included. Although we cannot speak of a veritable attempt to demonstrate and attest to the revolution that the computer was engendering in the art world,31 the presence of seemingly distant artistic practices testifies to the desire of stepping beyond the classical field of contemporary art and uncover new tools and languages of artistic creation. A greater awareness of this progression is perhaps more discernible in the exhibition The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age, organized by K. G. Pontus Hultén at the MoMA in New York in November 1968.32 It is interesting to note how the initial idea of organizing an exhibition centered upon kinetic art had shifted to a broader exhibition project that embraced the concept of the machine: another demonstration of how, in 1968,

80

Chapter 4

it was increasingly difficult to analyze just the field of kinetic art alone. Even more interestingly, Hultén decided to structure the exhibition along the historical foundations of the relationship between art and technology. In 1997, Hultén himself stated that: MoMA had asked me to put together an exhibition on kinetic art. I told Alfred Barr that the subject was too vast, and instead proposed a more critical and thematic exhibit on the machine. The machine was central to much of the art of the ‘60s, and at the same time, it was obvious that the mechanical age was coming to an end, that the world was about to enter a new phase.33

Cybernetic Serendipity and The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age are part of an effort to capture the phenomena of art in association with technology in its entirety, without focusing on a single medium. From this point of view, they are very similar and also diverge from other, perhaps more specific events which took place in those years such as those related to video art, like TV as a creative Medium (Howard Wise Gallery, New York 1969, organized by Ira Shneider) or Gennaio ‘70 (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna 1970, organized by Renato Barilli). The 1960s ended with two important exhibitions. The first, Software— Information Technology—It’s New Meaning for Art, organized by Jack Burnham, took place at the Jewish Museum in Brooklyn and the Smithsonian Institution in New York. It was one of the first exhibitions to focus on the concept of “software” and, indicatively, the technical sponsor was the American Motors Corporation. The second took place within the “golden” frame of the Venice Biennale, where an entire section was dedicated to computer art: an event which seemed to explicitly recognize the important role of technology in the arts.34 The 1960s ended in favor of the dyad “art and technology”; there was an enthusiasm for this new phenomenon accompanied by an interest in technology and its development. Yet, this enthusiasm would not last for very long. THE IMAGE AMIDST VIDEOS AND COMPUTERS In 1958 A. P. Rich, a young researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, programmed a computer to automatically generate geometric shapes. This event, together with the pioneering and more elaborate work of Michael Noll, marks the beginning of the image as entirely programmable by electronic computers: in other words, the birth of computer art. However, this is the generative act of a process situated on the boundary between cinema, art and media, reaching far beyond the field of computer

Art and Innovation after the War

81

art. In fact, A. P. Rich was not an artist but a researcher, an engineer: those images are the starting point for what will become known as computer graphics, computer animation, computer art, digital art, digital design, and so on, which today have changed not only cinema but the entire world of images and audiovisuals. If we look at them today, the first computer-based images seem quite simple. In the 1950s and 1960s, the use of electronic devices for the creation of moving images was mainly directed toward video and television: media which at the time allowed for more ample creative possibilities. Michael Noll, Bela Jelesz, and John Pierce gleaned little interest and for the most part remained unknown, although all experimented with the first computers, while John and James Withney,35 Stan VanDerBeek,36 and Nam June Paik37 gained more traction. This is because the latter were closer to the cinematographic and artistic sphere, while the former’s position was aggravated by the fact that they worked in completely different fields. Almost all of those who make up the history of these first experiences were in first instance engineers or technicians. This is one of the main issues in the historicaltheoretical efforts undertaken here: the fact that those responsible for this new visual art form were not artists at all, but technologists—and, even more discordantly, these creators were employed by the United States military. This was not exactly an ideal birthplace for the newest of visual art media.38

Coming from the sphere of computer art, Michael Noll, Edward E. Zajac, Kenneth C. Knowlton, Frank W. Sinden of Bell Labs, Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr of the Stuttgart School; and other artists like Charles Csuri, John Whitney, Edward Ihnatowicz, and Tom Shannon, remained largely unknown in the fields of cinema and contemporary art. However, computer art did not initially garner much support and was rediscovered solely following the advent of digital technology. On the other hand, video art, born in those same years, certainly had better luck. This is most likely because video technology had greater expressive potential than the first computers, which were very expensive and still very basic. As we have seen, interest in video and the technology of television, already popular in the 1950s, was expressed in 1952 by Lucio Fontana and the signatories of the Manifesto spaziale per la televione [Television Manifesto of the Spatial Movement]:39 the first document that didn’t simply present television as “mass media”—as it was thought of at the time and from which negative interpretations arose—but as artistic potential. The debate on the birthright of video art is still ongoing, contended between Lucio Fontana (1952), Wolf Vostel40 (1958), Nam June Paik41 (1963), and the

82

Chapter 4

sculptor César Baldaccini42 (1962), who subsequently did not continue down the path of video art. Instead, the first use of the Portapack is contended between Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik. In fact, the actors involved in the “before” and “after” of video art could be even more, including: Isidore Isou43 (1962), Karl Gerstner44 (1962–’63), and Günther Uecker45 (1963). These are birthright disputes, however, which Foucault would have described as “harmless enough amusements for historians that refuse to grow up.”46 The history of video art is renowned and it is not my intention to summarize it here. Nevertheless, the way in which complex media such as the ones discussed above enlarged, and at the same time undermined, the established categories of contemporary art and cinema should be emphasized. Those years were defined by media acting as a catalyst in different fields that were approaching a single directive, albeit still unclear and insufficiently nuanced. Thus, the image entered the practice of technology. Here the concept of “expanded cinema” made famous by Gene Youngblood, can be useful if read in the light of the arguments presented above, so as to understand the “expansion” that art was undergoing at the time. Youngblood did not coin the term “expanded cinema,” rather, it came from American experimental cinema and, more precisely, from artist and filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. In 1966, VanDerBeek used the word for the first time in the text/manifesto Culture Intercom. A Proposal and Manifesto,47 explicitly in reference to the historical avant-gardes. This is emphasized by the propositional style of the artistic proclamation: a proposal and Manifesto, reads the subtitle. In the experimental cinema of the 1960s, the attempt to broaden the visual possibilities of cinema raged with real avant-garde zeal. Indeed, VanDerBeek’s text was published in the magazine Film Culture, which had been created by two of the main exponents of the experimental scene in New York: brothers Jonas and Adolfas Mekas. A sense of disruptive change, expressed in tones which clearly recall those of the historical avant-gardes, is apparent in the text: “we are on the verge of a new world/new-technology/a new art. [. . .] All this is about to happen. And it is not a second too soon. We are on the verge of a new world new technologies new arts “CULTURE: INTERCOM” AND EXPANDED CINEMA”48

This is a founding text for the artistic interpretation of new technologies. The enthusiasm which ensued, embracing the potential of art applied to media, must have seemed sacrilegious at the time as the humanitarian

Art and Innovation after the War

83

tradition still held art and technology in completely different fields of action. Nevertheless, this approach had been anticipated by the historical avantgardes, and was now becoming conscious and unanimous: a manifesto for future generations. In the same text, VanDerBeek presented his project, “Movie-Dromes.” Following in the footsteps of the great Moholy-Nagy, he describes a spherical dome, [where] simultaneous images of all sorts would be projected on the entire dome-screen . . . the audience lies down at the outer edge of the dome with their feet towards the center, thus almost the complete field of view is the dome-screen. Thousands of images would be projected on this screen . . . this image-flow could be compared to the “collage” form of the newspaper, or the three ring circus . . . (both of which suffice the audience with a collision of facts and data) . . . the audience takes what it can or wants from the presentation . . . and makes its won conclusions . . . each member of the audience will build his own references from the image-flow.49

These words reveal a new idea of cinema and art. The text constituted an attempt to broaden the possibilities of vision, bringing together practices that from Moholy Nagy50 and Abel Gange, among others, encompassed Buckminster Fuller’s experiments and René Barjavel’s notion of “total cinema”;51 an attempt to pursue the growth of the potential of the imaginary in both cinema and art. In order to definitely attest to the notion of “expanded cinema,” toward the end of 1966—a few months after the publication of VanDerBeek’s text—a debate was published in a special issue of Film Culture between Ken Dewey, Henry Geldzahler, John Gruen, Stan VanDerBeek, and Robert Whitman, precisely on the topic of “expanded cinema.” Many ideas emerged from this debate, not only in relation to cinema. What is most interesting is, first of all, the mere publication of this debate and, secondly, the increasing push to break free from classically institutionalized boundaries in cinema (in relation to technology: the film and the camera; in relation to society: the room and all contextual practices; and in terms of creativity: a film of predetermined duration). Another important publication appeared in the same special issue: the Expanded Art Diagram by Fluxus artist Georges Maciunas, published a few months earlier in the magazine Fluxufest Sale. More than an essay, this text is a diagram, a grid where the arts, in their different forms, intertwine in a spider web-like graphic. A reticular vision, where every art form makes sense solely and exclusively in relation to the others. Hence, not only cinema expanded, but the entire artistic field; a field that engaged cinema in the creation of an increasingly interrelated universe.

84

Chapter 4

EXPANDED CINEMA, EXPANDED ART The special issue of Film Culture became the unifying trope for a new way of thinking: the point of convergence between art, cinema, theater, music, and so on—where each art form was viewed as a single entity in relation to the others. Despite its experimental nature, by its very name—Film Culture—the magazine was closer to a “culture of film.” It accordingly laid the foundations for a conceptual reversal of this approach by shifting the focus away from “film” and toward a broader understanding of “cinema,” certainly a more general notion that nonetheless gave a better understanding of the phenomenon of moving images as a whole, following the European model. This notion, beyond the specificities of the supports and devices used, seized the etymological foundations of “writing with moving images” that had delineated cinema since its very inception. However, it should be noted that despite these elucidations and publications, the world of American experimental cinema, albeit a few exceptions, remained much closer to “film culture” than the world of moving images allowed for through the use of new electronic technologies. A missed, or nearly missed, opportunity for dialogue between “film culture” and “the culture of expanded cinema.” Apart from its position in the Expanded Art Diagram, cinema—expanded cinema—included an element of extreme interest for this discussion: technology. Upon closer inspection, Youngblood’s book—but also VanDerBeek’s manifesto and debate—did not simply introduce new experimental trends in relation to moving images made with electronic technologies, such as video or television art. They also analyzed the lesser known practices of computer art and artistic endeavors in producing special effects for the Hollywood industry, as well as new forms of oleographic cinema. Hence it would seem that it is through cinema that technology was introduced to the arts. Poised at the intersection of all art forms—as demonstrated by Maciunas—cinema hails technology as its bedrock, as the possibility of its very existence. The technological art par excellence, an integral part of the very essence of cinema is the impossibility of settling on one single technique. As argued by René Barjavel, “it is the only art whose sole destiny is strictly dependant on technique” and, because of this, “since its inception, cinema has been in constant evolution.”52 What changes in this new approach to cinema are not only the forms of film, as in other cases with the experiments of the “nouvelle vague”; breaching the boundaries of film also engendered experiments in new formal and narrative methods. The real changes now lay in the technologies that until then had made a certain type of cinema possible, in the development of new structural bases that guaranteed the emergence of new particular forms of moving images.

Art and Innovation after the War

85

The impact of Marshall McLuhan’s theories on the artistic milieu in America in those years, particularly on the Fluxus movement and on artists like Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, and George Maciunas, are yet to be unveiled and certainly remain very important. They also strongly influenced another Fluxus artist: Dick Higgins. In 1963, Higgins founded the publishing house “Something Else Press” in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood and in 1966—obviously a very important year—launched the magazine Something Else Newsletter. From Daniel Spoerri to George Brecht, from Gertude Stein to Wolf Vostell, by way of artists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenburg, and Ray Johnson, the publishing house established itself as one of the most important independent cultural realities of the United States. Among its many publications is a particularly interesting one from 1967: the book Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations by McLuhan, who at the time was still unknown. This publication is of great significance as “by publishing VerbiVoco-Visual Explorations, Higgins clearly placed McLuhan within the realm of avant-garde artists of the period.”53 It is against this backdrop that in 1966 Dick Higgins wrote and published the essay Intermedia in Something Else Press magazine. This term is not an invention of the Fluxus artist, but comes from the nineteenth-century poet Coleridge,54 who used it to describe narrative peculiarities in allegories. In light of what has been said, it couldn’t have failed to impress Higgins, as the word is composed of both “inter” and “media” and joins in a single term the connectivity typical of Fluxus philosophy and McLuhan’s interest in the medium. For Higgins, “intermedia” most accurately explained the new status of the arts, where “much of the best work being produced today seem to fall between media.”55 This “between” becomes, for Higgins, a fluid—continuous—new “vision” of the world: “I would like to suggest that the use of intermedia is more or less universal throughout the fine arts, since continuity rather than categorization is the hallmark of our new mentality.”56 With Intermedia, Higgins laid the foundations for a different notion of art, cinema, and artistic practice. Following the historical avant-gardes, Youngblood, VanDerBeek, and other notions of “cinema” alongside Maciunas’s notion of “art” and Higgins’s emphasis on “media,” the coordinates were set for a new way of perceiving the cultural environment, allowing for the emergence of an artistic and conscious use of technology. Here technology entered as a new expressive method in the context of a reticular vision of the arts, in the abolition of technological prejudice and the desire to overcome hierarchies. It entered a world in transition, not only between art forms but between different roles of the artist. Here the artist is multiplied and becomes a transversal persona, intersecting different techniques and areas of interest.

86

Chapter 4

The question remains of how to classify the work of consolidated artists hailing from different fields, such as—among others—John Cage’s musical experiments with the computer; the recent discoveries on Andy Warhol’s use of the computer;57 the videos of Joseph Beyus, Vito Acconci, Aldo Tambellini, Gino De Dominicis, and Gianni Colombo; the 1961 experiments with the computer for the poetry of Nanni Balestrini, Alison Knowles; or Poem Field and VanDerBeek’s moviedrome. When a new medium imposes itself within established contexts, it generates what had already been wisely identified in 1963 by John Cage, one of this saga’s most important protagonists: “Are we an audience for computer art? The answer’s not No; it’s Yes. What we need is a computer that isn’t labor-saving but which increases the work for us to do, that puns (this is McLuhan’s idea) as well as Joyce revealing bridges (this is Brown’s idea) where we thought there weren’t any, turn us (my idea) not “on” but into artists.”58 Keeping this in mind, it is particularly interesting to consider Jack Burnham’s book Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, published in 1968. In it, the author discusses how scientific and technological development have undermined the classical notion of art, and offers a reevaluation of the very concept of “sculpture.” He argues that “while retaining vestiges of a humanistic or nontechnical ethos, they have become systematically undermined and subsumed. Religion, literary imagery, craft, technique, drama, architecture, painting—all the forces which have touched sculpture in the past—have not escaped the technological demiurge.”59 Even art, according to Burnham, cannot escape the technological demiurge. Unlike some of the other texts that have been analyzed in this book, Burnham is not interested in analyzing video art but rather in providing a new interpretation of the notion of sculpture, which at the time also included what today are known as “installations.” Burnham argued that sculpture shifted from being “object” to being “system” and from forging static relations to forging dynamic ones. “The object denotes Sculpture in its traditional physical form, whereas the system (an interacting assembly of varying complexity) is the means by which sculpture gradually departs from its object state and assumes some measure of lifelike activity.”60 Burnham’s thesis is important as he laid the foundations for a completely new perspective in the history of art. His is a very detailed perspective which does not stop at theoretical knowledge, as is the case with Eco, and is enriched by a very accurate analysis of artists and artworks. The author identifies an array of artistic tendencies which at the time were in the process of becoming “objects.” Concurrently, under the “systems”

Art and Innovation after the War

87

heading, he gave space to many artistic trends which were completely unknown at the time—and partly still are—related to an artistic use of technology, drawing an explicit division between three macro-categories: kineticism, light art, and robot and cyborg art. Burhnam mentions many artworks of extreme interest that have often either been ignored by the history of art or considered by art historians as simple technological play. The only exception would be kineticism, which at the time was in the process of establishing itself. The three macro categories mentioned above must be understood as interlinked, to the point that robot and cyborg art could be identified as post-kinetic art. Burhnam goes even further and introduces the topic of artificial intelligence, very relevant in today’s world: “Thus, sculpture seeks its own obliteration by moving toward integration with the intelligent life forms it has always imitated.”61 This intuition was very much guided by the interest in cybernetics at the time. In short, the foundations of a new order were slowly being established; the foundations for what evolved from the 1980s until today. Among the many examples provided by Burnham, we find CYSP I by Nicholas Schöffer, which essentially consists in a control mechanism. Sponsored by Philips, it reacts to sound impulses and is mentioned by the author as an example of cyborg art. Burnham identified post-kinetic art as the technological progression of the burgeoning relationship between artists and increasingly complex technologies, which required the collaboration with technological companies. It is precisely during these years that a new relationship between artists and technology was forged, and of which Italy, as we will see, will be a forerunner. The book mentioned artists who were very well known but who did not work solely with technology, as it nonetheless appeared in their work from time to time. Examples include Yves Klein’s Double Sided Wall of Fire, Gunther Uecker’s Moving Light (1960), and Hans Haacke’s Weather Cube (1965). It also included the kinetic experiences of various kinetic collectives such as Gruppo T and N, GRAV-Group for Research in the Visual Arts, Equipo 57, and individual artists like Yaacov Agam, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Martha Boto, Bruno Munari, Piero Dorazio, Luis Tomasello, Gregorio Vardanega, Pol Bury, Karl Gerstner, Diter Rot, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Christian Megert, Uli Pol, and Yayoi Kusama. Particular attention was given to Jean Tinguely and his kinetic artworks. Burhnam also identified new directions that developed after World War II. These include Otto Piene’s Light Ballet (1961), whose structure was modified several times and consists in a mechanized light ballet with several machines operating at the same time, Corona Borealis (1965), and Francois Morellet’s Successive Illuminations (1963).

88

Chapter 4

As stated, the author went so far as mentioning robotics and artificial intelligence including artworks such as Enrique Castro-Cid’s Anthropomorphicals I and II (1964), veritable robots, and his “cybernetic games”; and the work of filmmakers and video artists like Nam June Paik’s Robot-K456 with 20-Channel Radio Control and l0-Channel Data Recorder (1965) and Robert Breer’s lesser known installations, mobile polystyrene sculptures. This brief summary of Burnham’s book has been given in order to provide an idea of how varied the panorama of artistic tendencies in relation to technology was, even in the 1960s. However, the examples presented in Burhnam’s book must be understood from an “expanded” point of view, made of connections between different artistic fields and the interweaving of languages. There was trepidation for this new world full of discoveries and great artistic experimentation, a world in which art could play a crucial role for both politics and society. E.A.T./LACMA/BELL LABS: THE ARTIST AS INVENTOR This enlarged perspective of the arts made contact with the world of technology and intercepted the fields of technological and scientific innovation. We are at the dawn of a new technological era centered, as argued by Éric Sadin, on a shift in information technology “destined, rather than providing information, to direct human actions”:62 rather than us extracting useful data from it, it began to behave like an advisor, showing us how to act in the world. According to Sadin, the first signs of this transition can be identified with Herman Hollerith’s nineteenth century tabulating machine for punched cards (see Chapter 2), yet it is only in the 1960s that this process became a business strategy, thanks to the introduction of “expert systems, devices designed to deduce, in a rapid and theoretically reliable manner, certain facts from a basic set of information.”63 Interpretative machines that evolved until our present day and the advent of artificial intelligence. Sadin argued that the first expert systems debuted at the beginning of the 1960s with the aid of programs such as Dendral and Mycin. As we have seen, this setting allowed artists to foster collaborations with new fields of research, businesses, and universities, which in turn generated the pairing “art/technology” and, for the purpose of this conversation, a new relation to the world of innovation. In this context, in 1972, Jonathan Benthall published Science and Technology in Art Today, where he argued that “the time has come in the ‘art and technology’ or ‘science in art’ movement for some hard thinking.”64 This phrase is interesting on two counts: the first is that, already in 1972, it was possible to identify a wide sphere of belonging in relation to the field of “art and technology” or, indeed, “science in art”;

Art and Innovation after the War

89

the second is the importance of “hard thinking,” that is, the need to seriously consider the new perspectives engendered by this outlook. Given these assumptions, Benthall identified two types of artists: those who produced “one off”65 works, meaning that their research did not concentrate solely on technology, and those who made science and media the focus of their work. Benthall argued that the latter demonstrated the existence of a new field in need of some new, hard thinking. From this point onward, artists began to necessitate professional figures specialized in engineering and scientific knowledge. In short, we could say that this was the start of a process that “incorporated” new media and advanced forms of expertise and knowledge. Artists started working with increasingly complex technologies, benefiting from high-profile and specialized expertise as well as scientific and technical consulting. They accessed labs and research centers equipped with cutting-edge instruments and were able to experiment with media that had not been conceived for artistic production. They infiltrated these territories with the aim of conducting their own research in unexplored sectors. In turn, these territories were made fertile by artists who invented and produced new devices and meanings. A new figure emerged: the Artist as Inventor. A new notion of the artist, who, far from being the out-of-this-world bohemian artist enclosed in his study, operated from within the processes of technological and scientific innovation. All of this is revealed if we examine “technological” artworks for their innovative potential and not exclusively for their poetic or aesthetic characteristics (see Chapter 7). We must remember that at the time all of this was still in its infancy, hence there are only individual, often artisanal, examples of the burgeoning hybrid practice66 that was lurking just around the corner. It cannot be seen as a structured organization divided in departments and funded projects. For the most part, it encompassed isolated cases, valuable nonetheless in assessing a field in the process of expanding and consolidating itself. At the time, not many labs and research centers were interested in the partnership between art and innovation, and only few thought artists were crucial for activating new ideational and conceptual processes. Nevertheless, these years saw the emergence of three models that continue to form the theoretical backdrop upon which artworks that relate to the fields of innovation and science are situated. 1) The first model was developed during the historical avant-gardes and concerns the collaborative actions of artists and engineers. It concerns single partnerships between artists and engineers (or technicians, or scientists), who join forces and lay the groundwork for the invention of veritable new machines and applications.

90

Chapter 4

2) The second model is more structured and its inception can be traced back to when technological companies decided to open their doors to artists. Artists entered a new playing field, where they made use of advanced machinery and benefitted from high-profile expertise. In turn, companies profited from new, radical thinking, useful in orienting their organizational and ideational plans in any one direction. 3) The third model, which remains the least explored even today, came to be when cultural institutions opened their doors to other companies, thus becoming themselves promoters of a new synergy between art and innovation. Artists remained within the cultural sector but were allowed to interact with new and innovative fields. The foundations of these three models can be found in the 1960s and 1970s. They will be briefly explored here via three examples: E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology); the lesser known “Art and Technology Program” of the LACMA-Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated (or simply, Bell Labs), the research and development laboratories of the AT&T Corporation, founded by Alexander Graham Bell in 1885, hence the name, and the Western Electric Company. In October 1966, at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, four engineers and ten renowned artists worked together on the project 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering. It consisted in a series of performances that took place between the 13 and 23 of October and involved important artists like John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman. The idea of bringing artists and engineers together had come one year prior to Billy Klüver, a physicist in laser research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, who had already worked with artists for several years to solve technical problems. He was interested in artists and engineers working together at the beginning of the creative process as he wanted to understand how the available technology played a role in developing an artist’s ideas from its very early stages. As Klüver himself stated, it became “evident in the development of contemporary art over the last few years that many artists are extensively involved with the new materials and processes that have emerged through developments in science and technology. Even more, the artists of today want to create within the technological world to satisfy the traditional involvement of the artist with the relevant forces that shape society.”67 Such thinking gave birth to Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), “established to provide an active intermediary between the artist and the new technology located in industry.”68 As these statements show, E.A.T. was not only interested in bringing technology to art, it wanted to create exchanges between artists and new technologies from within the industry. The word “industry” is key here

Art and Innovation after the War

91

as it opened a new dimension in the relation between art and innovation: artists were not only seen as creators of content for the world of art but also as drivers of the technological sector which was undergoing rapid development at the time (keeping in mind that the artist’s intent is to pursue his vision, not to produce new technologies). Once understood that the road they had embarked on in 9 Evenings had been productive, a meeting was organized in New York to verify the feasibility of a collaboration between artists, engineers, and the “industry.” More than 300 people attended. Thus E.A.T. was born, Billy Klüver became president and artist Robert Rauschenberg, vice-president: a perfect combination, bridging art and technological innovation even in the legal structure of the company. Membership was open to all artists and engineers and reached more than 4,000 members. E.A.T. became a veritable “wedding agency”: “when an artist encounters a technical problem or wants to carry out a very complex technological project, it puts him in contact with an engineer who responds to his needs and is ready to help.”69 It operated on various levels: 1) Production of technologically advanced artworks in a laboratory setting through the exchange between artists and engineers. Among those involved we find Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Dupuy, who, together with engineer Ralph Martel, created Heart Beats Dust (1968); Lucy J. Young who, together with engineer Niels O. Young created Fakir in ¾ Time (1968); and Wen-Ying Tsai who, together with Frank T. Turner created Cybernetic Sculpture (1968). 2) Promotion of produced artworks in prestigious contexts. The presence of artworks from E.A.T. in the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of Mechanical Age held at MoMA in 1968 is paradigmatic, among these the artworks mentioned in point 1. Crucial was also their participation in the exhibition Some More Beginnings, held at the Brooklyn Museum between November 1968 and January 1969. 3) Publication of two magazines for the promotion of the activities of E.A.T.: Operations and Information and TECHNE. Noteworthy is the collaboration between E.A.T and Pepsi for the ideation and production of the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ‘70. The history of this collaboration is very elaborate and well-documented in the essay “World Without Boundaries”?70, thus it will only be mentioned here. It was an unprecedented collaboration (one question beats all others: how did Sony come to contact E.A.T.?), which begun by chance (Robert Breer was the neighbor of the president of PepsiCo Japan71) and progressed through ups and downs, love stories and disagreements. The collaboration allowed for the creation of a dome in which a laboratory was set up, not only for the over seventy-five

92

Chapter 4

artists and engineers that had worked on the project but also for the visitors of Expo ’70. Visitors were able to immerse themselves in an experience—an artwork—as active participants and not remain passive observers, thus exposing themselves and their senses to new kinds of working relationships and stimuli. Many of the artists and scientists involved came together very early on in the project, often collaborating across continents. Parallel to the birth of E.A.T. there came to be another project, less renown but which nevertheless amounts to another step in the journey of the artist as inventor. As W. Patrick McCray stated, “LACMA’s Art and Technology Program and the Pepsi Pavilion project stand as high points of the art-andtechnology movement of the long 1960s. Both efforts happened in the midst of increased scrutiny of the art world’s connections to corporate sponsorship, debates about artists’ ownership of their work, and criticism about the lack of diversity among the artists included in major exhibitions.”72 E.A.T. belonged to the model identified in point 1, namely a self-organized exchange between artists and engineers, whereas LACMA’s (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Technology Program (1967–1971) belonged to the third model, namely a cultural institution that actively structured a program whose primary objective was the insertion of artists in companies that worked in the technological sector. The project was born from a brilliant intuition of Maurice Tuchman, the museum’s curator at the time. He states in an important report: “At a certain point—it is difficult to reconstruct the precise way in which this notion finally emerged consciously—I became intrigued by the thought of having artists brought into these industries to make works of art, moving about in them as they might in their own studios. In the beginning, as I was considering this idea as just an abstract concept.”73 What is most interesting is that this approach arose from a reassessment of the historical avant-gardes. He reflected that back then, “no intensive effort was made directly to approach industrial firms in order to harness corporate machinery or technology, or systematically to expose artists to their research capabilities. Still, the impulse to do this is well documented. A need to reform commercial industrial products, to create public monuments for a new society, to express fresh artistic ideas with the materials that only industry could provide—such were the concerns of these schools of artists, and they were announced in words and in works.”74 It is particularly stimulating to read Maurice Tuchman’s report today. Written in 1971, it is still useful for its many suggestions on how to systematize a disorganized field still under construction. The report includes a meticulous methodological description of the policies and forms of interaction between companies and artists. The program was explicitly aimed at allowing artists to work in local companies, ranging from those involved in heavy industry (Kaiser Steel) to computer companies (Hewlett-Packard) and,

Art and Innovation after the War

93

especially, aerospace companies. The intention was for these companies to act as incubators for the design and production of artworks which could then be displayed in an exhibition at LACMA. The artists involved in the project were well-known at the time. For example, among the fourteen artists who exhibited works at LACMA in 1971 there was Öyvind Fahlström, R.B. Kitaj, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. What does it mean to bring art and technological companies together? How to do it? How to avoid artists being swallowed by the industry? And how to avoid the biases of art with regard to industry and vice versa? These kinds of questions spurred Tuchman to develop a veritable ethical methodology: “Corporations are asked to participate in one of five categories: 1. A Patron Sponsor Corporation takes an artist into twelve-week residence within one of its corporate facilities to work in a specific area with the corporation’s personnel and materials. A Patron Sponsor Corporation also contributes $7,000 to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to help defray the extraordinary expenses of the project. As noted above. Patron Sponsor Corporations have the option to receive a work of art issuing from the collaboration. 2. A Sponsor Corporation is a manufacturer who arranges to have an artist work within its plant, using specified personnel and materials, but makes a smaller contribution to the Museum’s special fund for the project. 3. Contributing Sponsors donate materials and/or services to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for this project but do not take an artist into residence. 4. Service Corporations provide specialized services, such as transportation, housing facilities for visiting artists, and technical consultation. 5. Benefactors are non-technical, non-manufacturing firms who donate $7,000 to the Museum’s special fund for “Art and Technology.”75 This is just a taster of what can still be garnered from a detailed reading of the report, useful for both research and curatorial methodology. The experience of Bell Labs is also fundamental and belongs to the aforementioned second model through which the relation between art and innovation developed. The two examples mentioned previously are evidence of a “cultural” opening—E.A.T. was organized by artists and engineers, LACMA is a public institution—on the other hand, Bell Labs represents the birth of a newfound interest in art by technological companies: actors from beyond the confines of the art world. We know today of the experience of Bell Labs because of the history of computer art, elaborated in important studies and dedicated research.76 In

94

Chapter 4

fact, the exchange between artists and Bell Labs began with the first computers, inaugurating an opening toward external, “creative” individuals. The labs had already been active for many years, but it was not until the 1960s that the exchange with artists took tangible form, more precisely between 1962 and 1968, as identified by A. Michael Noll. In this time frame, the relationship between artists and the world of innovation began to change, an indication of how a new outlook was developing, one geared toward the arts which allowed artists to access expensive machines and technical know-how, all the while steering them toward the world of business and the possibility of new contents. “The digital art at Bell Labs was both a result of research in computer graphics and a stimulus for that research. As an R&D organization, Bell Labs was keenly interested in the display of scientific data and also in computer graphics as a form of human-machine communication.”77 At the time, not many people knew about computers, they were expensive, and impossible to acquire for private citizens. Becoming part of a lab was the only way to use those high-end machines and discover the new possibilities of image creation: the first truly synthetic images. Looking at them today in all their graphic simplicity means understanding that they represent the dawn of a new era for the image, later expanded in many creative ways from computer art to computer graphics. The dawn of a new era for the image, and the dawn of a new era for artists as well.78

NOTES 1. Enrico Crispolti, ed., Fontana: Catalogo generale (Milano: Electa, 1986), 12. Own translation. Fontana’s bibliography is substantial, on these topics see, Sarah Whitfield, Lucio Fontana (Barkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Iria Candela, ed., Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019); Germano Celant, Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali: Architecture, Art, Environments (Milan: Skira, 2012); Stephen Petersen, Space-age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-garde (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). 2. Signed by Fontana, Joppolo, Kaisserlain and Milani. 3. The Manifesto reads, “We refuse to think of science and art as two distinct realities, that is, that the gestures made by one of the two activities may not also belong to the other. Artists anticipate scientific gestures and scientific gestures always engender artistic gestures.” Own translation. 4. Crispolti, Fontana, 86. Own translation. 5. Crispolti, Fontana, 88. Own translation. 6. The “Secondo Manifesto dello Spazialismo” was republished in Luciano Caramel, ed., Arte in Italia, 1945–1960 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1994), 131. Own

Art and Innovation after the War

95

translation: “To this end, with the resources of modern techniques, we will make the sky replete with: artificial forms, rainbows of wonder, luminous writings. We will transmit, for radiotelevision, artistic expressions of the new model. If, at first, enclosed in his towers, the artist represented himself and his astonishment and looked at the landscape through his windows, and then he descended from the castles into the cities, knocking down walls and mingling with other men seeing the trees and objects up close, today, we, space artists, have escaped from our cities, we have broken our casings, our physical cortex, and we have seen ourselves from above, photographed the earth from flying rockets. With this we do not exalt the primacy of our mind over this world, but want to recover our true face, our true image: a change eagerly awaited by all creation. May the spirit spread its light, in the freedom that has been given to us.” 7. For Anthony White, Fontana’s notion of television was anachronistic, “My central contention is that Fontana’s notion of television was anachronistic—how else to describe incandescent light projected through an easel painting onto an architectural wall? Furthermore, if the photograph in Spazio are an accurate representation of Fontana’s television project, then the work’s conceptualization of television was very different from the way television has generally been conceptualized from 1952.” Anthony White “TV and not TV: Lucio Fontana’s Luminous Images in Movement” Grey Room No. 34 (Winter 2009): 8. 8. Sivlia Bordini describes Fontana’s experiment: “It’s a work designed for television. There are forms programed to interact with light that are not only animated but also additionally spatialized by the transmitter’s technical system. On the screen the square with holes, which constitutes the original matrix, is transformed into event; the work becomes dynamic and no longer presents itself as a finished process but one that is ongoing, and which identifies with the ephemeral duration of transmission by dematerializing. For this reason it is inextricably linked to the determining characteristics of the medium, entrusted with the expansion of aspirations and unlimited virtual messages in space and time—yet available only in spatial and temporal conditions determined by the medium itself.” Silvia Bordini, Videoart & Arte: Tracce per una storia (Roma: Lithos, 1995). Own translation. 9. Germano Celant, Offmedia (Bari: Dedalo, 1977), 11. Own translation. 10. Bruno Munari will also pen the Manifesto dell’Arte Totale [Manifesto of Total Art], the Manifesto del Disintegrismo [Manifesto of Disitegrism], and the Manifesto dell’Arte Organica [Manifesto of Organic Art]. In this regard, Gillo Dorfles makes an interesting statement: “As I’ve already said on other occasions (I’m the only one to say it, but I think I can say it) these “art manifestos” are an absolute joke. Munari expressly made them to mock the seriousness of the various nuclear, space manifestos, etc. Not because of enmity, but because of his somewhat goliardic and irreverent spirit. He personally made the posters as a joke. Then, obviously, as always happens, there are those who take them a little too seriously and build upon them hypotheses that have no plausibility” interview to Dorfles in G. Maffei, MAC. Movimento Arte Concreta. Opera Editoriale (Sylvestre Bonnard, 2004). Own translation. 11. The Manifesto is published in Modern Art Criticism (London: Gale Research Inc, 1994). Munari approached the machine differently from the Futurists. Although

96

Chapter 4

he was close to many Futurists, there are in him no traces of praise or unreserved strive towards machinism. The machine is seen as a companion to be understood and poeticized, beyond the fetishism of the Futurists. 12. Pinot Gallizio, “Manifesto on Industrial Painting for a Unitary Applicable Art” in Pino Gallizio—The laboratory of writing, eds. Giorgina Bertolino, Francesca Comisso and Maria Teresa Roberto (Roma: Charta, 2005). 13. Gallizio, “Manifesto.” 14. It appears that Gallizio’s son, Giorgio, helped him to assemble specific sounds for this installation, a sort of forerunner of sound art. See G. Bartolozzi, C. Cucci, V. Marchiafava, S. Masi, M. Picollo, E. Grifoni, S. Legnaioli, G. Lorenzetti, S. Pagnotta, V. Palleschi, F. Di Girolamo, J. La Nasa, F. Modugno and M.P. Colombini, La caverna dell’antimateria (1958–1959) di Pinot Gallizio, VIII Congresso Nazionale di ArCheometria Scienze e Beni Culturali: stato dell’arte e prospettive, Bologna 5–7 February 2014. 15. See Theodo W. Adorno and Max Horkeimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002). 16. Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo, Manifesto della pittura nucleare [Manifesto of Nuclear Painting], written in Brussels during the Baj and Dangelo exhibition at the Apollo Gallery, organized by Paul Delevoy. Own translation. See, among others, Luciano Caramel, ed., Arte in Italia, 1945–1960 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1994). 17. See the catalogue of the exhibition Arte programmata, which took place at the Olivetti store in 1962, and Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002). 18. Argan gave many statements regarding the Biennale that he organized himself, “Oltre l’informale” (Beyond Informal Painting), where he, together with Apollonio, Pierre Restany and Giuseppe Gatt were also jurors. See Carlo Giulio Argan, “Forma e Formazione” in Il Messaggero, September 10, 1963. 19. See, among others, Gillo Dorfles, Simbolo, comunicazione, consumo (Turin: Einaudi, 1962) and Il divenire delle arti (Milan: Bompiani, 1959). 20. See Enrico Crispolti, Extra Media: Esperienze attuali di comunicazione estetica (Turin: Studio forma, 1978). 21. See Bruno Zevi, “Le Corbusier elettronico” in Cronache di architettura, Vol. III (Bari: Laterza, 1971) and Alessandra Capanna, Le Corbusier: Il Padiglione Philips a Bruxelles (Turin: Testo & Immagine, 2000). 22. Meneguzzo, Arte Programmata, 50. Own translation. 23. Peter Weibel “It Is Forbidden Not to Touch: Some Remarks on the (Forgotten Parts of the) History of Interactivity and Virtuality” in Media Art Histories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 39. 24. In particular, see the work by ZKM for the exhibition Bit international. [Nove] tendencije, Computer und visuelle Forschung. Zagreb 1961–1973, organized by Margit Rosen. See Margit Rosen, A Little-Know Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International (Karlshruhe/Cambridge, MA: ZKM/MIT Press, 2011). 25. The exhibition The Responsive Eye held in 1965 at the MOMA in New York deserves a special mention, as it certainly represented the peak of notoriety for this form of art.

Art and Innovation after the War

97

26. Margit Rosen, The Art of Programming, 26. 27. Paradigmatic is the example of the Venice Biennale of 1964. Despite the strong presence of kinetic artists such as Alviani, Castellani and Mari, and the strong support they received from art critics, Rauschenberg and Zoltan Kemeny won the final award and Arnaldo Pomodoro and Andrea Cascella won the Italian award. 28. By Abraham A. Moles, see: Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1958) and Art et ordinateur (Paris: Casterman, 1971); by Max Bense, see: Aesthetica (4 volumes 1954–1970) (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974) and the opening text of the first exhibition on computer art, curated by Bense himself, The Projects of Generative Aesthetics (Projekte Generativer Ästhetik), 1965. 29. Jasia Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity the Computer and the Arts (London: Studio International Special Issue, 1968). 30. See Christoph Klütsch “Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, eds. Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 31. “However, this was in many ways an understated and measured cultural exercise, an experiment intended to test the premise of computer’s potential in art, rather than present the thesis of a computer-driven aesthetic revolution as a fait accompli” in Valentina Ravaglia “On Cybernetic Serendipity. Nove Tendencije and the Myth of “Computer Art” in Valentino Catricalà, ed., Media Art. Towards a New Definition of Arts in the Age of Technology (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2014). 32. See Karl G. Pontus Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the end of the Mechanical Age (New York: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1968). 33. Hultén interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, “The Hang of It” ArtForum International Vol. 35, No. 8 (April 1997). 34. See Francesco Franco, “The First Computer Art Show at the 1970 Venice Biennale: An Experiment or Product of the Bourgeois Culture?” in Relive: Media Art Histories, eds. Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 35. Many consider the Whitney brothers to be part of those who initiated the era of experimentation with computers, see John Whitney, Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art (Peterborough: N.H. Byte, 1980); Youngblood, Expanded; and in the Italian language, Alessandro Amaducci, Computer grafica: Mondi sintetici e realtà disegnate (Turin: Kaplan, 2010). 36. Stan VanDerBeek experimented with computers between 1964 and 1967 and created the series Poem Field, composed of 8 computer-generated animations. 37. Nam June Paik started experimenting with computers in the mid-1960s during his residence at Bell Labs. In particular, refer to his work Confuse Rain of 1967. 38. Grant Taylor, “The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism, of Early Computer Art” in Mainframes. 17. From the same author, see also When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 39. The signatories were Ambrosiani, Burri, Crippa, Deluigi, De Toffoli, Dova, Donati, Fontana, Giancarozzi, Guidi, Joppolo, La Regina, Milena, Dilani, Morucchio, Peverelli, Tancredi, and Vinello.

98

Chapter 4

40. In particular, refer to the 1958 installation entitled Zyklus Schwarzes Zimmer. 41. Naturally, his work Thirteen Distorted Tv Sets, exhibited at Gallerie Parnasse in Wuppertal for his solo show by the indicative title Exposition of Music—Electronic television. 42. See Télévision. 43. See La télévision dechiquetée ou l’anti-crétinisation (Jagged Television or Anti-Cretinization), exhibited in Paris in 1963, where Isou affixed a cut-out template on a monitor. The result was that the television program appeared fragmented. 44. See Auto-Vision, experiments on the video signal which began in 1962, displayed for the first time in 1964 for the exhibition Crazy Berlin at the Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin. 45. In particular TV 1963, an installation with a TV covered in nails. 46. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). English translation, The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 144. 47. Stan VanDerBeek, “Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto” Film Culture No. 40 (Spring 1966): 15–18; published in Gregory Battcock, ed., The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1967), 173–179. See also Adams P. Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000) and Gloria Sutton, The Experience Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 48. Gregory Battcock, ed., The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1967), 173. 49. Battcock, ed., The New, 175. 50. See Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photograpy, Film [1925], trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969). 51. See René Barjavel, Cinéma Total (Paris: Donoël, 1944). 52. Barjavel, Cinéma. 86. Own translation. Also refer to Teige’s pioneering insights in Karel Teige, The Aesthetics of Film and Cinegraphie [1924] in Cinema All the Time. An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908–1939, eds. Jaroslav Anděl and Petr Szczepanik (Prague: National Film Archive; Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2008). 53. Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 127. 54. See Samuel T. Coleridge, Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). For further reading, see, cfr., J. E. Müller, “Intermediality Revisited: Some Reflections about Basic Principles of this Axe de pertinence” in Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 55. Dick Higgins “Intermedia” Something Else Newsletter n.1 (February 1966); Dick Higgins will republish this essay in 1981, adding the Intermedia Chart which explains his idea of intermedia, see Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). 56. Ibid. 57. The artist Cory Arcangel recently discovered that Andy Warhol had made computer images with an Amiga 1000.

Art and Innovation after the War

99

58. John Cage, A Year From Monday (Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1963), 51. 59. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 2. 60. Burnham, “Beyond Modern Sculpture,” 10. 61. Burnham, “Beyond Modern Sculpture,” 333. 62. Éric Sadin, L’Intelligence artificielle ou l’enjeu du siècle: Anatomie d’un antihumanisme radical (Paris: L’Échappée, 2018), 31. Own translation. 63. Éric Sadin, L’Intelligence artificielle ou l’enjeu du siècle, 35. Own translation. 64. Jonathan Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 11–12. 65. Jonathan Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today, 14. 66. Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, eds. David Cateforis, Steven Duval and Shep Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). In this book the authors emphasized the link between the political context of the time and hybrid practices: “Hybrid practice in the long 1960s is unthinkable without the backdrop of the cold war and hence is inseparable from the rhetoric of democracy, which accompanied the period’s Manichaean view of a world divided between good and evil,” 2. 67. Billy Klüver, “Experiments in Art and Technology” Members Newsletter (Museum of Modern Art), Jan.–Feb., 1969, No. 3 (Jan.–Feb., 1969): 4. 68. Billy Klüver, “Experiments,” 4. 69. Denys Riout, L’arte del ventesimo Secolo, 311. Own translation. 70. Hiroko Ikegam, ““World without Boundaries”? E.A.T. and the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo 70, Osaka” in Review of Japanese Culture and Society Vol. 23 (December 2011): 174–190. See also W. Patrick McCray, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 71. Hiroko Ikegam, “World Without Boundaries”? 72. W. Patrick McCray, Making Art Work. 73. Maurice Tuchman, A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967–1971 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971), 9. 74. Maurice Tuchman, A Report, 9. 75. Maurice Tuchman, A Report, 11. 76. For further reference, Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, ed. Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Grant D. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Christiane Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). 77. A. Micheal Noll, “Early Digital Computer Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated” Leonardo Vol. 49 (2016): 55. 78. Zabet Patterson, Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Francesca Franco, The Algorithmic Dimension (London: Springer, 2018); Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American (Penguin: London, 2013).

Chapter 5

New Languages of Art

INSTALLATIONS TAKE CONTROL: VIDEO, ROBOTICS, INTERACTIVITY “The large emphasis placed in the Sixties on the duet ‘art and technology’ by key figures such as Jasia Reichardt, Roy Ascott, Billy Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, Pontus Hultén, Jack Burnham and many others, declined in the following decades, leaving very faint traces in the official artistic historiography.”1 There could be many reasons for this. Those identified by Domenico Quaranta are of a dual nature: political, due to the militant nature of this duet, and ideological, due to a prevailing “anti-computer” stance in the contemporary art world and the fear that the computer could overshadow the Renaissanceinspired idea of the artist as Creator. This way of thinking still persists today. Despite the feelings of distrust and fear that orbited around media art, it must be recognized that by the end of the 1970s the phenomenon began to be structured and systematized and be recognized for exactly what it was. These years mark the establishment of the first media art centers, university professorships, festivals, and exhibitions. An example is the Media Study at Buffalo, New York, active between 1973 and 1985.2 Founded by Gerard O’Grady at the Department of Media Studies of the State University of New York in Buffalo, the center hosted and gave artists like Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, James Blue, Woody and Steina Vasulka, and Peter Weibel the opportunity to establish themselves. In 1971, the art historian René Berger attempted to set up a course entitled “Aesthetics and Mass Media” at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. It aimed to analyze the state of the arts in evolution with new technologies, but was immediately frowned upon within the 101

102

Chapter 5

university and the course was suspended. However, the following year Berger curated the exhibition Le musée d’art en question(s) at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne—directed by Berger himself—where the museum, as an institution, was asked to reflect upon its position in the late modern era as juxtaposed to new technologies. In 1979, the Ars Electronica Festival, today among the most important art and technology festivals in the world, was born in Linz, Austria. Initially thought of as a single event/exhibition, the municipality of Linz subsequently decided to make it an annual event. In addition, during this time we also have the first events that made use of the term Media Art: for example, the Media Art Biennale, organized by the Wro Art Center, took place in the city of Wroclaw in Poland in 1989. The strengthening of the bond between “art and technology” also led to the emergence and consolidation of different artistic practices, which today have been divided into many different designations, such as new media art, electronic art, digital art, and media art, among many others.3 In time, all these artistic experiences converged and joined together to form a unified framework made up of different trends. Video art was certainly the trend which saw the greatest artistic and commercial development between the 1970s and 1980s, characterized by an increasingly visible alliance between art and innovation: “The work of these pioneers is important because in addition to exploring the potential of video as a means of creative expression, they developed a range of relatively accessible and inexpensive image manipulation devices specifically for ‘alternative’ video practice.”4 Between the 1960s and 1970s, video art had undergone an experimental phase that set the foundations for a new video-artistic language, but it was the 1980s and 1990s that saw the consolidation of said language. This allowed for the creation of long duration works, often monumental ones, that made use of conscious electronic assemblages, such as chroma key,5 alongside notions of narrative composition. Thus, video art inched closer to cinema, a progression which today allows us to reflect on the role of moving images: poised between cinema, video, and video art. Consider, for example, complex and layered works that investigate the role of memory and image in the twentieth century such as SqueeZangeZaùm (1988) by Gianni Toti, Art of Memory (1987) by Woody Vasulka and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) by Jean-Luc Godard. These are monumental works, works on the memory of cinema and memory through cinema, works that investigate our past through the use of archival images thereby restructuring the very role of the image—the role of cinema in the age of video, the role of video in the age of media, and last but not least the role of the preservation of memory in the age of information.6

New Languages of Art

103

The history of “the artist-inventor” is multi-faceted and linked to other “histories,” such as art history, economic history, and the history of technology. An example of this can be seen in the development of the relationship between artists and television, which represented the growth of a new video market and artists-led communication strategies. In the 1980s, many video artists were financed by television networks, in other words by an industry external to the art market, and at times also became producers of television content themselves, video clips in primis. Zbigniew Rybczynski is certainly the most conspicuous example, as is John Sambon, Robert Cahen, Bill Viola, Steven Partridge, and Tony Ousler. For many artists, it became common practice to work for television networks, and this gave them the possibility to engage with emerging forms of communication, such as the videoclip or Hollywood’s budding industry of special electronic effects. This is an area of interest that has not been adequately studied. These years witnessed the consolidation of the relationship between art and technological innovation, as well as that between art and the industrial sector. Artists began developing a media system that was in constant expansion, becoming themselves active players. By the 1980s, portable video cameras had become widespread and affordable, video recorders allowed images to be recorded, and the possibilities for post-production work had been greatly enhanced. Post-production synthesizers were also on the market. In 1971, Nam June Paik and engineer Shuya Abe invented the Paik-Abe Synthesizer, and shortly after, in 1972, engineer Steve Rutt and filmmaker Bill Etra invented the Rutt/Etra Synthesizer in collaboration with the Vasulkas (see Chapter 9). These inventions made the manipulation of the electronic video image accessible to all interested parties, rapidly expanding the possibilities of creation in video art. In the 1980s, the dichotomy between art and technology seemed to shift toward the latter with works installed in fixed-duration environments. Dan Graham, Peter Campus, Peter D’Agostino, Frank Gillette, and Antoni Muntadas all used video as a form of installation in their works. At the same time, the subtrends of media art, such as robotic art, were witnessing the birth of works as veritable installations. The very first examples of robotic art date back to the 1960s and can be identified in works such as Robot K-456 (1964) by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, Squat (1966) by Tom Shannon, and The Senster (1969–70) by Edward Ihnatowicz. These paved the way for a new idea of the exchange between human beings and the machine and represent an explicitly new way of thinking about the role of art and the artist in society. Robotics in art is one of the most prominent examples of collaboration between artists, engineers, and companies of the technological sector. Robotics is a very complex, multifaceted field that has been defined in various ways. It is a field in constant evolution, both in engineering and philosophical

104

Chapter 5

terms. The subtleties present in robotics today are different from those that defined the trend in the 1950s or 1970s. Consider The Senster, for example, displayed between 1970 and 1974 and funded by Philips—already accustomed to this kind of funding, see the work of Le Corbusier for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Expo in 1958—for the permanent exhibition Evoluon in Eindhoven. The installation was four meters in length and, at most, four meters in height: a huge structure that moved and reacted to the sounds and noises of the environment thanks to sensors placed on its head. The Senster followed the movements of the spectators and is one of the first interactive works in the history of media art.7 However, it is only with the advancements of the 1980s that the discipline of robotics began to materialize and take on more specific forms. In the 1980s and 1990s, we find noteworthy works such as Norman White’s open project The Helpless Robot (1985), designed to build robot communities, and James Seawright’s interactive robots of House Plants (1984), as well as, in the 1990s, the use of networks and remote controls like in TeleGarden (1995) by Ken Goldberg, and the works of artists Joseph Santarromana, George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris, Carl Sutter, and Jeff Wiegley. TeleGarden allowed anyone to plant and water a garden via the Web by way of a mechanical arm.8 A distinctive feature of these works was interactivity, which will subsequently become one of the pervasive characteristics of the 1980s and develop into one of the main modes of expressions—despite its philosophical complexity—for describing works of art made with the use of technology. Katja Kwastek situates the first use of the term “interactivity” in 1969, in relation to the work Glowflow, exhibited at the Union Main Gallery of the University of Wisconsin. The scholar examines how this work highlighted the transition from “cybernetic art,” very popular in the 1960s thanks to Norbert Wiener’s9 theories, to “interactive art.” Although the subtitle of the work read, “A computer-controlled, light sound viewer responsive environment”—placing it close to cybernetics—the exhibition’s flyer read: “Glowflow is not an exhibit in the traditional sense, but a continuous experimentation in interactive art.”10 Despite these pioneering examples, only from the 1980s and 1990s onward will interactivity become one of the distinctive features of media art installations. Interaction is one of the main features in, for example, The Legible City (1988–1991) by Jeffrey Shaw. In this work, visitors are seated on a bicycle and invited to bike through their city while remaining still. In front of them is a screen that depicts the city that hosted the installation (Manhattan, Amsterdam, Karlsruhe, etc.), but the original architectural layout has been replaced with words, thus making the city readable and open to multiple narratives assembled by the visitor while moving. In

New Languages of Art

105

this case, the interaction provided by technology becomes the subject of the work, creating a further level of analysis that encompasses our ever closer relationship with images and our increasingly corporeal exchange with them.11 The development of the concept of interaction is closely tied to the emergence of a specific art form: installation art. Interaction coupled with the language of installations seems to be the trait d’union of many media art trends; an essential feature in many exhibitions and, more generally speaking, in the contemporary art world. The strength of installation art is that it is situated “in a liminal space between the exhibition and the production of art, and are determined by a formal but also semantic overexposure of the work, its being made and the act of exhibiting it.”12 Media art will mainly take shape through video and technological installations, transforming technology into something temporary and in close contact with the surrounding environment. Massimiliano Gioni states that More recently the practice of installation art has created immersive environments that pulverize any sense of unity. Still, in its interconnected openness, multiplicity of references and chaotic embrace of commodities and objects of desire, installation art creates experiences imbued with the same grandiosity associated with monumental sculpture. It is not incidental that the triumph of installation art has run parallel to that of an economy of spectacles and short attention spans. Installation art reflects the bombardment of data that shapes the mature phase of the information society. It describes the ecstasy of communication, the sublime realization of being just a knot in an ever-expanding flux of instant connections scattered around the globe.13

This same logic could be applied to the exponential rise of performance art, an art form that is also of predetermined duration. In fact, museums and art institutions have increasingly welcomed works and artistic operations of a predetermined duration, thus making their cultural offer more dynamic and multifaceted. From the historical avant-gardes onward, installation art has become increasingly present in the art world. In the 1980s and 1990s, the success of installation art was characterized by a strong presence of technology, video in primis. Media art has played a leading role in this context since, just like technology, it is based on a temporal structure: open to change and ephemeral. Sound art, video art, computer art, robotic art, and interactive art, to name a few, welcome the passage of time as they welcome the temporary passage of the viewer. Time is also intricately linked to the setting as every installation is in close relation to the environment that hosts it. Different settings activate different synergies, even if the components of the installation remain the same.

106

Chapter 5

The presence of technology in the arts runs parallel to and is connected to the cultural industry. In those very same years, the cultural industry was opening its doors to art, thus weakening the very prominent separation between art and entertainment. The involvement of the cultural industry enabled greater awareness and the emergence of a “digital mentality,”14 for example through the making of big cinematic works for the general public such as Star Wars (1979, George Lucas), Tron (1983, Steven Lisberger), or The Adventures of André and Wally B (1984, John Lassater), the first short movie made entirely by using digital technology. These works often involved the same people who had been experimenting with digital technologies in the world of contemporary art. Although in the 1980s and 1990s the technology and software needed for the creation of digital works was generally not available to the general public, the idea of making it accessible forcefully emerged in the 1980s and was radicalized in the 1990s. Together with more personal technologies, it was then that the first friendly interfaces were born, which allowed for greater interactivity with users. Moreover, comparing the exponential increase in media art and the digitalization of the cultural industry with the circumstances of the art market in the 1980s and 1990s, it is increasingly apparent that the development of installation art ran parallel to wider changes that took place in the art world. “Between the end of 1986 and 1987, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys died. At the end of 1990, having reached its speculative peak, the art market collapsed. In 3 years seventy galleries were closed in Manhattan alone. Famous painters like Schnabel embarked on the path to cinema. The historical group of artists of Leo Castelli changed dealer.”15 Many claim that these changes led to an increased “compliance with the financial market,” an undifferentiated “power of the galleries,” the end of “critical” and “alternative” projects, and “full integration with other levels of the cultural and luxury industry,”16 but it should also be noted that viable alternatives and more effective criticisms, external to the galleries and the art market, were also arising from those using technology in artistic ways. In this context, new art practices emerged that reflected on technology, its progression and our relationship with it; new practices that were looking for common ground for a comparison with the aforementioned causes. In the 1980s and 1990s, these practices also advanced thanks to an important development in the field of media art: the communication between terminals, the start of the Internet. Thus by the mid-1980s it was possible to buy equipment to connect small personal computers to the Internet. The growth of LAN at universities and other large organizations would produce an explosion of Internet connections. While

New Languages of Art

107

a little over 200 computers had been connected to the Internet in August 1981, within 2 years that figure had more than doubled, and within 4 years the number of connections had increased nine-fold.17

THE ART OF CONNECTIVITY In those years, artists explored the possibility of remote interaction, first by use of satellite and then, with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, the Web. The cornerstone of these enquiries can be found in the notion of networking and the desire to build interactive communities. Again, artists anticipated new ways of communicating by experimenting with existing communication technologies. Artists had been working with engineers on the concept of an interconnected world since the 1960s and 1970s. Examples are many, like Nam June Paik, Douglas Davis, Vera Frenkel, and Roy Ascott. In Italy, it includes Pietro Grossi, a pioneer of electronic music, who in 1970 invented “telematic music” with an IBM 360 computer, sharing sounds between the CNUCE (CNR) in Pisa and an IBM stand inside the First International Biennial of Global Design Methodology in Rimini.18 A lesser known example is that of Filippo Panseca, a pioneer of Italian computer art together with artists like Ida Gerosa or Studio Azzurro, who already in 1975 had thought about producing works that could be transmitted simultaneously in every part of the world via satellite and had experimented it in Milan with the art critic Pierre Restany at Rank Xerox.19 All of these examples point to the desire of creating interactive communities where the audience from spectator becomes a truly active agent, a fundamental tassel in the creation of the work, thus giving everyone the production tools and the ability to create: “freeing the media,” in the words of 1970s New York based magazine Radical Software. This had also been one of the characteristics of mail-art and the participatory videos of the 1960s.20 These impulses were strengthened by the introduction of the satellite in the 1980s. An interesting example is Hole in Space (1980) by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, which followed Satellite Art Project (1977), a previous experiment by the same artists. Two screens, one at the Lincoln Center in New York and the other at The Broadway store in Los Angeles, were installed and connected with the intention of joining the two coastal regions of the United States via satellite images of people from each side. The threeday event was a great public success. It was the first time people could see what was happening on the other side of the continent and communicate with each other in real time, becoming the main actors of the event. For the two artists, this project led to the creation of the Electronic Café International, a place for experiments in collaborative art.

108

Chapter 5

However, the main exponents of satellite art are Bill Bartlett, Roy Ascott, and Robert Adrian. In particular, La plissure du texte by Roy Ascott (1983) is an interesting example of the art of connectivity. Theorist Frank Popper asked Ascott to propose a work for the exhibition Electra. Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the XX Century, which anticipated the acclaimed Les immatériax21 curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput at the Center Pompidou in Paris by 2 years. Ascott connected eleven artists or groups of artists in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia by asking each one of them to depict a different fairy tale character. What emerged was a collaborative tale, and this made the artist a catalyst of energies, the creator of the platform that had made such exchanges possible. The Internet is an extremely important element for this discussion, to the point that we can affirm that “to be able to correctly categorize the many artistic practices of media art over the last twenty years, it becomes fundamental to reconstruct the concept of networking.”22 Together with the advent of the Web, the aforementioned examples laid the groundwork for what in the 1990s became known as net​.ar​t.23, 24 No manifesto was ever written for this form of media art, but there are some common ethical and political assumptions that can be traced back to several artists; these include 1100101110101101.ORG, the duo set up in 1998 by Eva Mattes (Brescia, 1976) and Franco Mattes (Chiari, 1976), Heath Bunting (London, 1966), Vuk Ćosić, the Jodi collective set up in the mid-1990s by Joan Heemskerk (Kaatsheuvel, Netherlands, 1968) and Dirk Paesmans (Brussels, Belgium, 1965), Olia Lialina (Moscow, 1971), and Alexei Shulgin (Mosca, 1963). Their principles can be summarized as follows: a work of art is no longer identified as a physical artistic object; critique of the art market through the break-up of the relationship between the maker of the work and the buyer; critique of the traditional concept of authorship. Net​.a​rt works cannot be identified as objects. They are processes which took shape in the new channels of communication: the works are websites, online performances, browsers, and software. They were overtly critical of the art system and large corporations which, during the 1990s, were taking over this new environment, the free space which even then was referred to as the Internet. It was a new space to be inhabited, a space where one could free oneself from the toxic and outdated industrial economy which, at the time, represented 90% of the world economy, a space for a culture of collectivity, free, equal, and creative. The utopia of net​.a​rt went hand-in-hand with many theories on media, for example those of Derrick de Kerckhove, Pierre Lévy, David Lyon, Mario Perniola, Kevin Robins and the later work of René Berger. These authors recognized that the Internet was not just a new tool but also a place open to new social and anthropological perspectives.

New Languages of Art

109

This transition not only took shape through a technological shift but also a conceptual, and what appears to be an institutional, shift. It is a ten-year transition, and can be identified with the Venice Biennale of 1986 and Documenta X of 1997. At the 1986 Biennale, directors Maurizio Calvesi, Roy Ascott, Tom Sherman, and Don Foresta organized Ubiqua, a workshop where participants could interact with the different media of the time, including the Slow-Scan Television and the fax. At Documenta X, instead, we find the illusory substantiation of the art of connectivity in the world of contemporary art under the consolidation of a unitary concept: net​.ar​t. The work presented was that of Vuc Ćosić, considered one of the fathers of net​.ar​t. “For the opening, a website was launched which was set to overcome the showcase model and stimulate the shared participation of the public, following the intentions of the curators.”25 “Illusory” because the ascending parable from the Biennale to Documenta did not bring net​.ar​t, or media art for that matter, to the golden palace of contemporary art but instead relegated it to dedicated events, although some were of great importance, such as Ars Electronica. Even with the birth of a clear and unified concept such as net​.ar​t, that certainly represented the emerging trends in media art in the 1990s, the entry of technology in the arts, although undeniable and gaining in strength, did not initially lead to any real exchanges with the world of contemporary art. NOWADAYS Net​.ar​t, software art, sound art, interactive art, video art, computer art, digital art, robotic art, as well as the more contemporary bio art and molecular art; together with postdigital, postinternet, new aesthetics, postcinema, digital cinema, and archival cinema are all expressions that have either merged with the field of media art or are related to it by similarities and analogies. From 2000 onward, the exchanges between art and technology began to weave together all the trends analyzed thus far—alongside others—in an attempt to create a unitary concept initially centered around the term “new media.” Michael Rush was among the first to confirm this transition with the book, published in 1999, New Media in Late 20th Century Art and, subsequently, New Media in Art.26 In 2006 Mark Tribe, Reena Jana, and Uta Grosenick made the definitive transformation of “new media in art” into a noun: New Media Art.27 As is often the case, however, just as this phenomenon was starting to take shape and be recognized as its own movement with its own identity, thus establishing its own process of stabilization and growth, there began a process of expansion and hybridization that continually threatened to undermine the apparent unity that had just been achieved. Today “art and

110

Chapter 5

technology” means many things, precisely for this reason, because it is prone to continuous encroachments. An example can be taken from within the field of contemporary art itself: at many important events, such as at the Venice Biennale or Documenta, the increased presence of “technological” artworks can be easily spotted. Another instance is film festivals, which progressively feature more examples of video art or video installations. Think about the cultural industry, video clips, public video installations, and wall mappings for parties and events. Perhaps this is precisely where the strength of media art lies, in its capacity to engage with processes of hybridization and interchange. The fact is that today technology is so pervasive that it seems obvious to speak of the association between art and technology. This pervasiveness seems to reflect a new social phenomenon, present even in the art sphere, which is the result of a postmedia condition marked by the impossibility of identifying where a medium (i.e., a means of mass communication) or a technological apparatus begin and end, or of circumscribing them: “the media have been completely absorbed into increasingly cohesive technological apparatuses to the extent that the question of where technology in general ends and where media technology begins no longer has any meaning.”28 Where does the medium in contemporary art begin and end? How can a work that uses technology be distinguished from one that does not? Which examples can be linked to the specific field of “art and technology” and which, instead, cannot? These issues are evident in many fields, such as in robotic art. Born, as we have seen, in the 1960s, today robotic art is a hybrid form in dialogue with theater, performance, and cinema. Robotic art underwent a similar institutionalization process: “at the same time that robotics has matured into an art form since its introduction in the 1960s, it has been quickly appropriated and incorporated into other forms, such as performances, installation, dance, earthworks, theater and telepresence pieces.”29 Today robotics is everywhere, always more integrated with artificial intelligence. Artists today play a crucial role not only because they narrate the future but because they invent it. Consider the almost too spectacular example of Neil Harbisson, the first person to be legally recognized as a cyborg. Since childhood, Harbisson has been affected by a disease called achromatopsia, or the inability to perceive colors, and can only see the world in black and white. A webcam has been implanted and connected to his brain, capturing light frequencies and transforming them into audio frequencies, allowing him to transform colors into sounds. Harbisson has developed artistic projects centered on the transformation of images into sounds. They are certainly of considerable interest even if, despite their significance in technological terms, we must wait in order to analyze their impact from an aesthetic point of view.

New Languages of Art

111

An example of the relationship between robotic art, performance art, and sound art is Inferno, a work born of the collaboration between Bill Vorn, one of the leading artists in the use of robots in art, and Louis-Philippe Demers. It consists in a participatory project where the audience is invited to wear dancing exoskeletons and forced to follow their mechanical movements. A punishment inflicted on the audience inspired by the different types of Inferno’s found in literature. The artist Paul Tresset also works with robotics, as we can see from his latest work 5 Robots named Paul. In a setting reminiscent of a drawing class, the spectator is invited to sit in front of five school desks equipped with drawing paper and a mechanical arm with a video camera and a pen attached to its sides. The robots make a drawing of the spectator sitting in front of the class: a drawing that is always different, imprecise, and often lacking. In addition, the sounds of the robot’s motors create an improvised soundtrack. Obviously the term “digital” plays a main role in this enlarged field of media art. Think about the world of moving images today. From special effects in Hollywood movies, such as The Matrix (Id., 1999, Lerry and Andy Wachowski), Avatar (Id., 2009, James Cameron), and Sucker Punch (Id., 2011, Zack Snyder), to small video cameras—always smaller in the world of today and which make use of increasingly complex processors, such as those found in tablets or smartphones—used in the making of movies such as In This World (2002); to the experiments linked to both portable digital video cameras and “special” effects, such as the French movie Kinshasa Kids (Id., 2013, Marc-Henri Wajnberg); the burgeoning of documentaries and the phenomenon of Ugc; amidst the experiments in digital art by Karl Sims, Bernd Lintermann, and Charlotte Davies, among others. “Digital” has become an important term of comparison, to such extent that it is now considered one of the keys for deciphering the age we live in. In fact, the role of the image seems to be one of the most interesting issues in the field of media art. In Chen Shaoxiong’s work Visible and Invisible, Known and Unknown (2007), different media interact with each other. Two parallel rails are placed above the spectator’s head: on one a small train is attached to a video camera, on the other hang sheets of paper with drawings by the artist depicting common objects from everyday life. The moving train records the drawings and instantly projects them on a screen in the same room. The effect is that of when we are on a train and look outside the window at the passing world. Through the combination of movement (train) and filming (video camera)— a combination which marked the birth of cinema—the artist is able to show us objects we would normally pay no attention to in an apparently casual succession. Artists interacting with new technologies are now closer than ever to the field of scientific engineering. In this context, their works are attributed to

112

Chapter 5

profound personal technological knowledge or well-established teams of technicians and engineers. Many media artists are themselves engineers or hail from a humanist and scientific background. The last 15 years have seen a strong development in this field from the Japanese front, also thanks to the institutionalization of important festivals, such as the Japan Media Art Festival. Toshio Iwai, Kazuhiko Hachiya, Maywa Denki, and, from the younger generation, Nelo Akamatsu, are certainly among the most interesting Japanese artists in this field. Toshio Iwai, for example, invented a music production tool called Tenori-on: a musical instrument composed of an interface of 16×16 switches that create sound combinations and sound effects. The instrument was made together with Yu Nishibori of the Music and Human Interface Group at the Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology and was presented for the first time at SIGGRAPH in 2005. Since then, performances with this instrument have been hosted at important festivals, such as Sónar in Barcelona or Futuresonic in Manchester in 2006 (see Focus). Nelo Akamatsu was the winner of the Golden Nica for the Digital Music & Sound Art section of the Ars Electronica Festival in 2015. His work, entitled Chijikinkutsu, is a combination of two Japanese words: “chijiki” (geomagnetism) and “suikinkutsu” (a sound installation in traditional Japanese gardens). It comprises of glasses filled with water in different quantities, needles and copper. The needles, previously magnetized, float on the water in the glasses. When electricity is supplied to the coil, it creates a temporary magnetic field that attracts the needle to the coil and strikes the glass generating a tinkling sound that varies according to the quantity of water in the glass. Together, all the glasses form an orchestra guided by the force of geomagnetism. An interesting crossover between bioart, cinema, and sound art is the artwork The Symbiosity of Creation by Polish artist Elvin Flamingo (also known as Jarosław Czarnecki). Bioart refers to the use of tissues, bacteria, and living organisms in art and can be traced back to Eduardo Kac and his 1997 work Time Capsule. Flamingo’s work is an interesting development in the aforementioned process of hybridization of different “genres” in media art. Flamingo’s work began in 2012 and is expected to continue until 2034. The artist’s intent is to create a film “about which no spectator, upon exiting the ‘cinema’, could say, ‘That was a great film, but life goes on. It was just a film’.” The intent was to create a ‘film’ that lives its own life, participating, interactive and symbiotic with me” says the artist. The highly scenic work is composed of five large display cases filled with ants. The ant’s movements are picked up by sensors and then amplified in the surrounding environment, while projected on the walls around the display cases are close-ups of the animals. This creates a sound and visual environment in which life itself, exhibited from a scientific point of view, takes over. Until 2034, the work

New Languages of Art

113

will live a life of its own, without being reduced to the time constraints of exhibitions. In this example, the artist himself is the creator of something that lives beyond his own intentions. Instead, in terms of the use of mobile technology and the development of net​.a​rt we find Spanish artist Antoni Abad and his project megafone​.ne​t, known today as blind​.wik​i. Abad, who emerged as a video artist and was invited by Harald Szeeman to participate in the Venice Biennale of 1999, began experimenting with net​.a​rt with the z.exe project. Roc Parés explains, Z was a project based on the conceptualization, design and development of a computer program called z.exe that worked on any personal computer it was installed on. Z was a piece of art software which is still conceptually valid today: it works with a tailor-made program that manifests itself visually and socially as a fly [. . .] But Abad’s fly was more than just a “gimmick” designed to subvert the interactivity of the computer; anyone who had installed the fly would get access to a communication channel by connecting to another z.exe user, finding himself involved in a community.30

Abad’s new project, Blind.Wiki, creates a “sensory public cartography.” It consists of an interactive map open to all who wish to discover it and participate in its construction, be they blind or sighted individuals. A public cartography which Abad observes from the outside: the great demiurge who provided the creative impulse for the entire operation (see Focus). Only a few examples have been presented, but there could be many more. The aim here was to provide a sense of the vastness of media art and show its social and artistic potential, in accordance with the ability of art to allow us reflect on the very tools which make it possible and which will lead us to a new understanding of what it means to be human. POSTCINEMA, POSTMEDIA, AND MEDIA ART: CONCEPTS AND THEORIES The entry of technology into the arts is by now a consolidated phenomenon. The foundations have been set for the development of video-making, video installations, urban screens, sound art, and so on, increasingly present in our homes, museums, squares, stations, cinemas, and even our pockets. This growth progressed throughout the 1980s and 1990s and was strengthened by the advent of digital technology—a veritable digital revolution that, as Tom Gunning stated in relation to photography, “will change how photographs are made, who makes them, and how they are used—but they will still be photographs.”31

114

Chapter 5

The current geography is certainly very complex. The technological development that from the 1960s until today determined the setting in which we live in has also allowed for the emergence of new artistic and audiovisual forms. Theories concerning art, cinema, and media have become inextricably linked to one another. These circumstances may be analyzed from within the contextual shift in Visual Studies put forward by W. J. T. Mitchell in the 1990s, the pictorial turn. Born as an attempt to expand and somehow dissociate itself from previous theories on the pervasiveness of the image within our cultural and living conditions—for example Debord’s society of the spectacle32 or Debray’s videosphere,33—the pictorial turn is a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or “visual literacy” might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality.34

It is within this visual context, increasingly present in cultural studies, that a multifaceted and complex mapping of our terrain must be outlined. If the bases for conceiving of this universe can be found in an increase of creative possibilities within technology, then it is also true that today this increase has grown exponentially. Thus, we must draw a very large map, where the concepts of art, cinema, audiovisual, and media struggle to find a precise location and with it their ability to position themselves in either specific or overarching terms. Departing from this “cartographic” point of view, there have been many theories that from the late 1990s to the present day have attempted to “map” this extended field of practices, concepts, impulses, and creations. Speaking about the advent of digital technology, in the 1990s there was a pervasive, almost apocalyptic vision—for better or for worse—which identified these technologies as the primary source of rupture with the past in the face of changes that impelled the most audacious anthropological and social mutations. In recent years, however, a more subtle outlook has taken hold, moving toward a less apocalyptic future and a more reconciled past. In the 1990s, theorists like Pierre Levy,35 Derrick de Kerckove,36 Mario Perniola,37 David Lyon,38 Kevin Robins,39 and René Berger40 (his later writings), found new social and anthropological possibilities in technological development, possibilities which consisted in previously unimaginable changes tied to communication and our own bodies.

New Languages of Art

115

This was a time which saw the advancement of theories on hybrid bodies, virtual societies, fluid societies, and mixed societies: a time which also witnessed the rise of new expressions, such as “cyber society,” “postorganic” and the renown, “postmodern.” In this transitional phase, between forward-thinking leaps and backwardlooking references, Lev Manovich stated with enthusiasm: contemporary human–computer interfaces offer radical new possibilities for art and communication. Virtual reality allows us to travel through non-existent three-dimensional spaces. A computer monitor connected to a network becomes a window through which we can be present in a place thousands of miles away. Finally, with the help of a mouse or a video camera, a computer is transformed into an intelligent being capable of engaging us in a dialogue.41

In Manovich’s fervour, there is an attempt to find a connection with the past—an attempt to find a connection with previous artistic and empirical experiences. Bolter and Grusin were certainly one of the firsts to accentuate this connection. They highlighted not only the disparity that existed with previous experiences but also the elements that had advanced and endured from the past—analog media—into the present/future—digital media. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan’s famous formula, “no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media,”42 Bolter and Grusin proposed the theory of “remediation,” according to which—as is known—every medium does not exist alone but continuously “appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real.”43 These theories are attempts to explain increasingly complex and intricate phenomena; phenomena born and developed in the name of interchange and multiplication, of “composition and recomposition, of assemblage not so much as a mode of composition but as part of an interminable action related to the knowledge/construction of the world.”44 It must be said that the concepts used to describe these phenomena vary quickly. In fact, Peppino Ortoleva asks, “who still speaks of the ‘virtual,’ a term which seemed absolutely essential for understanding the contemporary world a decade ago? To what degree is a word like ‘multimedia’ accepted today, even if of ubiquitous use until a few years ago? And how many would know how to promptly motivate its replacement with ‘crossmedia’ or ‘transmedia’?”45 It is no coincidence that in this context a very particular concept, usually associated with philosophy, has come back to the fore in theories on art and cinema: experience. Due to the flexible boundaries between device and media and the impossibility of detecting specificities and therefore differences in the

116

Chapter 5

supports used, now increasingly mobile and less stable, experience—despite its more general overtones—is the most stable concept used to define new configurations determined by the increasingly overwhelming presence of installation art and temporal works. These works call into question the very concept of “film” which hails from studies on cinema. Thus, it is necessary to bring out the specificity of cinema not only in the device which supports it, but also in the aesthetic forms it engages in, the senses it activates, and the functions it performs. [. . .] In other words, these all refer to what we call filmic experience—an experience that is such inasmuch as it is “incarnated” in a body (sensoriality), “included” in a culture (the aesthetic forms, but more generally the discursive forms) and “oriented” by necessity (needs).46

This theoretical perspective was posited by Miriam Hansen as an interpretative key for analyzing the viewer’s experience in the early days of cinema, but it also may be useful in contemporary theories of art. Experience is a condition which must be understood “as that which mediates individual perception with social meaning, conscious with unconscious processes, loss of self with self-reflexivity; experience as the capacity to see connections and relations (Zusammenhang); experience as the matrix of conflicting temporalities, of memory and hope, including the historical loss of these dimensions.”47 The appearance of the concept of experience is not entirely recent. During the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of phenomena like video installations and temporal works did not lend itself to a structuralist, formalist, or psychoanalytic analysis. Only the experience triggered when the viewer came into contact with the work was able to provide a—albeit small—basis for analysis. It is precisely this relationship with the audience, the experience activated between work and public, the space inbetween, that establishes the conceptual framework for analysing this type of work. It is no coincidence that in 1969, in one of the first exhibitions dedicated to the creative use of electronic technology—in this case television—TV As a Creative Medium, Frank Gillette, talking about his video installation Wipe Circle, shifted the interpretative analysis of the work on the relationship with the viewer, on the experience that the technological image activated with the participating public. He enthusiastically described the reaction of the spectators by stating “the public was mystified. They saw themselves on the same television monitor as other images taken from television programs: they were both shocked and amused.”48 Today, these types of experiences are increasingly associated to studies in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience. Today, the notion of experience in these types of artistic operations emerges even more forcefully than it did in the past. It has become progressively common to no longer think of the device—or support—as the final

New Languages of Art

117

level of interpretation of an artwork; it is no longer “necessary to recognize it as an artistic subject because art lies in the effect that is produced. Experience now covers the role of the work.”49 Statements such as these pave the way for issues related to relocation,50 increasingly discussed in the realm of postcinema and postmedia.51 In the words of Peter Weibel, we could say that “this state of current art practice is best referred to as the post-media condition, because no single medium is dominant any longer; instead, all of the different media influence and determine each other. The set of all media forms a universal self-contained medium. This is the post-media condition of the world of the media in the practice of the arts today.”52 The postmedia condition defined by Weibel differs from Rosalind Krauss’s renowned theories on the “post-medium condition.”53 Among the various “posts” that have recently been identified, there is also what is known as “postinternet.” Born from notions such as postdigital and New Aesthetics, postinternet is an interesting artistic development of net​.a​rt that witnesses a return to the white cube gallery through the materialization of artistic objects created on the net.54 There is also “postdigital.” There is a very heated debate concerning postdigital that seeks to detach itself from dematerialization theories and the diversification between old and new media, which had been part of the discussion in the early years of digital.55 Moreover, in this expanded context of the arts, we find, once again, an attempt at maintaining the principle of form mobility in contrast to the notion of experience, in the footsteps of Dick Higgins: the concept of “intermediality.” Also used in studies concerning the sociology of media,56 intermediality proved to be the best key of interpretation for a world where different media and devices were being accumulated: an accumulation which, by force of circumstance, easily turned into a form of dialogue and exchange.57 Media art can certainly help us to better understand the role of the arts, the audiovisual, and media in the world of today. The last ten years have seen the emergence of many theories and structured movements that seek to capture this phenomenon in its historical and theoretical dimension. Among the most conspicuous ones is the international movement known as Media Art Histories,58 composed of artists, curators, university professors, and industry experts. The movement mainly operates through the international conference by the same name59 and relative publication of the proceedings, as well as indepth courses and seminars held at universities all over the world. Understandably, it has been difficult to establish one single classification for all the differing experiences related to the exchanges between art and media. In fact, this is one of the issues analyzed in this book. Today technological artistic endeavors span across a wide variety of sectors, from video

118

Chapter 5

art and audiovisual works to what Peter Weibel recently described in his book as “molecular aesthetics”60 (from molecular technology to nanotechnology). These are fields that are very distant from one another and that, as we have seen, highlight the very issues which lie at the heart of the concept of medium. In order to solve this problem of classification and find common ground for all these diverse practices, Media Art Histories decided to focus—as the name says—on the historical analysis of the phenomena: analyzing the routes, point of departures, and plurality of trends that have become part of this sector, in the attempt—as Oliver Grau, one of the representatives of the movement, states—to “explore[s] and summarize[s] the mutual influences and the interactions of art, science, and technology and assesses the status of digital art within the art of our times.”61 In this context, the very concept of media art is key for understanding the artistic and cinematographic developments and experiences of the past, so as to find new forms of interpretation and exchange. Alongside Grau, another main proponent of this approach is Sean Cubitt. In a recent and noteworthy essay, written together with Paul Thomas, Cubitt, and Thomas focus on the importance of returning to materialism in Media Art studies. They argue that a media art scholar should no longer be afraid of mathematics. Similar to the artists whose work we describe, media art historians have to have some knowledge of engineering, simply to see what the works are made of. We need an art historical but also media historical and cultural historical backgrounds to follow any references that might be made: by Grahame Weinbren to the works of Goethe and Freud, for example. We need to open our minds to other cultures and hasten translations from other languages, and we need to understand the place of our media arts in relation to the greater world in which they sit. Today more than ever, as Internet protocol and HTML are being rewritten, the politicization of fundamental digital techniques can no longer be hidden any more than growing ecological awareness will allow us to build installations without at least considering the cost to the environment.62

For Cubitt and Thomas, a return to materialism may help us analyse the concept of medium, similarly to how for Andreas Broeckmann the “sublime” helps us analyse the concept of the “machine.” Accordingly, he sees the “machine” as “technological apparatuses, but as any kind of productive assemblages of forces, be they technical, biological, social, semiotic, or other.”63 For Broekman, the romantic discomfort that we feel in relation to nature, characteristic of the sublime, is similar to the discomfort we feel in relation to technology today. This is why media art imposes an “aesthetic of

New Languages of Art

119

the machine,” useful to “describe an aesthetic experience that we can have not only in the face of an autonomously operating technical system, but also in the face of an artwork that enforces a logic of experience which surpasses our subjective control.”64 Today there are many theorists and concepts that analyze and define this trend. Examples include “device art” developed in Japan by theorists and artists under the guidance of Machiko Kusahara,65 or Chris Salter’s Alien Agency,66 which, following Bruno Latour, identifies the use of technology in art as something that is beyond subjective intention. In addition to these, there are many scholars to be mentioned: Edward A. Shanken, Dieter Daniels, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Christiane Paul, Lev Manovich, Douglas Khan, Paul Thomas, and Sarah Cook. The process of historicizing media art, to which this book is also a contribution, is not based on a linear approach but, rather, on what is generally called an archeological perspective: an archeology of media art. In fact, Media Archeology is another discourse that has been very in vogue in recent years and ought to be added to this discussion. Media Archeology and Media Art Histories move in parallel and are often discussed at the same conferences and academic events.67 As Sobchack states, Media Archeology attempts to create “a historicality that spans the division of past, present, and future, not only revealing the past as in some way always present but also revealing the present and future as in some way already past.”68 The main representatives of this movement are Erkki Huhtamo,69 Jussi Parikka,70 Siegfried Zielinskli,71 Jonathan Sterne,72 Lisa Gitelman,73 and above all, Friedrich Kittler.74 There is a tendency in all theories on media, those that examine the relationship between art and media and those related to an expanded vision of the audiovisual, to combine the past, the present, and the future in a non-linear approach. Combining, as was attempted here, an archeological perspective with a historical study. Archeology becomes the dominant stylistic code, and history is rearranged in a network of lines where the past becomes the prerequisite of any future perspective and the future is determined as the primary matrix for interpreting the past. These new disciplines pave the way for a game of cross-referencing and interactions that allow the conversation on preservation and conservation to take shape—practices that more than any other maintain a link between past, present, and future. The science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling, who was curiously called to open an important conference on the problems of preserving artworks that make use of technology at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, stated in March 2001: “curators, conservators, and archivists are much closer to the future than most of us mortals. That’s because they store, catalog and preserve—they physically touch—the objects of the past and present that people in the future will see.”75

120

Chapter 5

All of these experiences can help us in understanding theories of media and the development of media through the arts, as well as one of the biggest issues (or dilemmas) of our time: artificial intelligence. ART AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Although there is no accepted definition of artificial intelligence (AI), it has become a key concept for interpreting human anxieties, enthusiasms, and fears. When we speak of AI, we are not referring to something clearly defined or definable in simple terms. Most attempts to define it have revolved around extremely general statements of such as: “There are many proposed definition of artificial intelligence (AI), each with its own slant, but most are roughly aligned around the concept of creating computer programs or machines capable of behaviour we would regard as intelligent if exhibited by humans.”76 It is interesting to note that this definition is not very different from that of robotics. As mentioned, robotics is a very complex and multifaceted field that has been defined in many different ways throughout its history. Some assumptions are very similar. Prominent robotics manuals still speak of a “relatively young field with highly ambitious goals, the ultimate one being the creation of machines that can behave and think like humans,”77 and “at its basic level a robot consists of rigid bodies connected by joints, with the joints driven by actuators.”78 This definition, albeit its simplicity, conceals an irrefutable connection to engineering, discernible in the way robotics and its developments are conceived of. Yet there is a contradiction in the two statements. If robotics is the discipline whose intention is to create machines that behave and think like humans, it will be difficult to achieve this through robots made of “rigid bodies connected by joints, with the joints driven by actuators.” Another interesting element to extrapolate from this definition is the link between action and thought, which marks a big difference between robotics and artificial intelligence, the latter still not of great interest in the field of robotics.79 This discourse is inevitably linked to ontological questions about what we really mean by robotics and artificial intelligence. Artists working in these fields can help us untangle the related issues by investigating specific aspects of robotics or artificial intelligence, while also tackling even more complex issues such as superintelligence, singularity, “artificial life,” and so on. These are topics often discussed in today’s world, and they all lead to what in this chapter has been identified as the attempt to re-define the very concept of Human Being. If we open a book, a newspaper, or a magazine, even ones that don’t necessarily pertain to the arts, we breathe in a strong sense of anxiety for the future,

New Languages of Art

121

particularly in relation to the advent of artificial intelligence and its ensuing “futuristic” interpretations. It is increasingly common, even in national newspapers, to read statements such as: “I think that what we are seeing today will probably have a greater evolutionary impact than the invention of agriculture or farming, because the current revolution in artificial intelligence and biotechnology offers us the possibility to change humanity itself, not just our economy, together with what we eat, society and politics.”80 Once again, there is talk of a veritable revolution, something that will essentially change the very notion of Human Being. Artificial intelligence is a complex concept which has not been thoroughly explored. It is used in many engineering and scientific theories—although these remain more theoretical rather than practical and belong to a future that is yet to be achieved. Superintelligence is one of these “futuristic” concepts that have been scientifically justified and most worries people that come across it. Nick Bostrom, one of the greatest scholars in the field of artificial intelligence, argues that “the term ‘superintelligence’ [refers] to intellects that greatly outperform the best current human minds across many very general cognitive domains. This is still quite vague.”81 The vagueness of this definition is not only due to the fact that “rather disparate performance attributes could qualify as superintelligences under this definition”82 but that the very terms that have been used to describe it are themselves vague and full of contradictions. What is the “intelligence” in superintelligence? What do we mean by intellect? And by cognitive domain? What about creativity, is it also part of intelligence? Those that work in the field of artificial intelligence are unwavering. Generally, they speak “not of rationality or reason, but of intelligence. By ‘intelligence’ we here mean something like skill at prediction, planning, and means-reasoning in general.”83 Or, like the physicist Max Tegmark, we could use a very broad definition of “intelligence = ability to achieve complex goals,”84 differentiating between “a narrow and broad intelligence.”85 A computer that plays chess is a “narrow intelligence,” while IAG-Artificial Intelligence is “able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.”86 These are all definitions that move within the conceptual coordinates of logic. They are very conclusive definitions of concepts that cannot be easily grasped and this, by force of circumstance, paves the way toward a world of oppositions—man vs machine, human intelligence vs artificial intelligence vs superintelligence, etc. If we are sure about what intelligence is—and what artificial is—we are also sure about what they are not, and this dictates our actions and our creations. From this perspective, it is impossible to escape catastrophic or anxious feelings about the future, which then leads us to imagine futures progressively further away in time. It is no coincidence that in Tegmark’s book there are many chapters that imagine society in the

122

Chapter 5

next 10,000 years, even in the next million years, where machines dominate the surroundings . . . it seems that science fiction has taken over scientific reasoning. As Lev Manovich argues, if, “therefore, in one sense, AI is now everywhere” why “are some intelligent tasks that computers can accomplish seen as ‘real’ AI, and others are not?” Observers and historians of artificial intelligence talk about an “AI effect.” This means that “when we know how a machine does something ‘intelligent,’ it ceases to be regarded as intelligent.”87 However, it is also interesting to note how concepts such as superintelligence, IAG, or singularity have so far only been imagined and, despite the statistics, will perhaps never be achieved. This is not due to science (will technology be advanced enough to get there?), but to the very meanings we ascribe to the words used in describing this phenomena. The meaning of the basic concepts on which these definitions rely on—such as “intellect,” “cognition,” “best current human mind”—vary according to the cultural contexts in which they arise. Even though early Arabs were among the first inventors of machines and automata,88 they would not understand the definitions of cognition, intelligence, etc., mentioned above. We can say the same about our own concepts and how they have morphed over the centuries. Our idea of intelligence has changed over the years because of innumerable factors, including changes in our relationship with technological development and the machine itself. Even on an academic level, anthropologists, sociologists, estheticians, engineers, physicists, philosophers—all have different interpretations of what intelligence means, such as the Howard Gardner’s “five minds”:89 “If this is true, then human and artificial agents belong to different worlds and one may expect them not only to have different skills but also to make different sorts of mistakes.”90 If we throw into the mix even more terms and concepts such as creativity, for example, things could get more complicated. It seems that today the greatest challenge for artificial intelligence is achieving creativity, to the point of becoming art.91 Yet creativity is a complex concept which risks undermining the aforementioned definitions: “Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naïve at the same time. Low intelligence can undermine creativity. But being intellectually brilliant can also be detrimental to creativity.”92 The questions to be asked should rather be concerned with: How will our concept of intelligence change with the development of artificial intelligence? How will we conceive of intelligent human beings in a future surrounded by intelligent machines? Are we really entering a new era? As James Lovelock suggested with the concept of Novacene, “evolution will still guide the process, but in new ways. It was the market worthiness and practicality—both favourable evolutionary attributes—of Newcomen’s engine that started the

New Languages of Art

123

Anthropocene. We are about to enter the Novacene in a comparable way. Some AI device will soon be invented that will finally and fully start the new age.”93 By now we are well aware that there are machines that can beat us at chess and many other games on a “mathematical” basis (try to make a robot play football, he will surely lose!), that they possess very fast calculation tools and have a strong capacity of resolution for logical problems. Yet “tasking a computer to discern the better of two chocolate cakes is a far more challenging task than playing chess.”94 Perhaps artificial intelligence will give us a better, non-logical, definition of human intelligence. We should shift our debate on how AI will achieve human skills—either controlling or helping us—and superintelligence, to a discussion on how these trends will help us redefine human beings, our conceptualizations and outlooks. Seeing this transition in such a way could help us mitigate the anxieties that surround the advent of superintelligence and the incessant progression of artificial intelligence. Artists will lead us in this direction, paving the way toward new possibilities of understanding and, as indicated in this text, propelling us toward the future through the notion of artist as inventor.95 Perhaps it is time to focus on ourselves and our own surroundings, of which technology is also a part of, rather than giving continuous technological forecasts and indications. As stated by the young philosopher Federico Campagna, “Perhaps unwittingly, the horror with which we often look at dystopic scenarios in which machines are emancipated might derive from our own bad consciousness when we look at ourself.”96 NOTES 1. Domenico Quaranta, Beyond New Media Art (Brescia: Link Center 2013), 37. 2. See Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel, Buffalo Head: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–199 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 3. See my book, Valentino Catricalà, Media Art: Prospettive delle arti verso il XXI secolo (Milano: Mimesis, 2016). 4. Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art (London: Bloomsbury 2013), 134. Alessandro Amaducci writes, “If the Sixties and Seventies were when an electronic audiovisual language was established, for the majority of video artists who crossed this phase, or for those born immediately afterwards, something changed at the dawn of the Eighties: the need to use this language to develop themes that were not exclusively relegated to the metalinguistic topic par excellence, in other words television and its imagery, or the discovery of technology,” in Videoarte: Storia, autori, linguaggi (Torino: Kaplan, 2014), 112. Own translation. 5. In video art, chroma key is one of the techniques used to achieve post-production effects.

124

Chapter 5

6. For an analysis on these works, in relation to Woody Vasulka e Gianni Toti see Raymond Bellour “Art of Memory” in Between the Images (Zurich: JRP, 2007); in relation to Godard see P. Dubois “Il video pensa quello che il cinema crea. Annotazioni sulle opere video e televisive di Jean-Luc Godard” in Video d’autore 1986–1995, ed. V. Valentini (Rome: Gangemi, 1995). See also the Catalogue Steina & Woody Vasulka: Video, media e nuove immagini nell’arte contemporanea (Rome: Farenheit 451, 1995). Sandra Lischi and Silvia Moretti, eds., Gianni Toti o della poetronica (Pisa: Ets, 2012). 7. For further reading on robotic art see, Damith Herath, Christian Kroos and Stelarc, eds., Robots and Art: Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis (Berlin: Springer, 2016); the pioneering work of Eduardo Kac, Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); see also the catalogue of the exhibition “Artists and Robots” held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2018. 8. For more information, see my interview with Ken Goldberg, “What Can A Robot Do?,” available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.ner​​oedit​​ions.​​com​/w​​hat​-c​​an​-a-​​​robot​​-do/,​ accessed May 9, 2021. 9. Norbert Weiner, father of Cybernetics, defined it in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” See Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948). 10. Katja Kwastek, “Interactivity—A World in Process” in The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design, eds. C. Sommerer, L. C. Jain and L. Mignonneau (Heidelberg: Springer, 2008), 19. See also Katja Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 11. On interactive art see, among others, Jennifer Seevinck, Emergence in Interactive Art (Zurich: Springer, 2017); Nathaniel Stern, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (London: Gylphi, 2013). 12. Marina Pugliese, “Un medium in evoluzione: Storia e critica delle installazioni” in Monumenti effimeri: Storia e conservazione delle installazioni, ed. Marina Pugliese (Milan: Electa, 2009), 23. Own translation. 13. Massimiliano Gioni “Ask the dust” catalogue of the exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 65. 14. See Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (New York: Sage, 1998). 15. Alessandro Del Puppo, L’arte contemporanea (Turin: Einaudi, 2013), 127. Own translation. 16. Del Puppo, L’arte, 128. Own translation. 17. Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion Books), 73. 18. See Albert Meyr, ed., Pietro Grossi: Avventure con suono e segno (Florence: Associazione Pietro Grossi, 2011). 19. See Filippo Panseca’s monography, L’arte segna il tempo-Il tempo segna l’arte (Milan: Peruzzo, 2015). 20. See, E-J Milne, Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange, eds., Handbook of Participatory Video (New York: AltaMira Press 2012); Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera (London: WallFlower, 2009).

New Languages of Art

125

21. See Andreas Broeckmann, Yuk Hui, 30 Years After Les Immatériaux (Meson Press eG, 2015). 22. Tatiana Bazzichielli, Networking: The Net as Artwork (Digital Aesthetics Research Center, 2008), 26. 23. Other important examples include Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984) by Nam June Paik, Telematic Dreaming (1993) by Paul Sermon, and The Tunnel Under the Atlantic (1995) by Maurice Benayoun; in Italy, they include the concept of Hacker Art by Tommaso Tozzi23 and the experiments, among many others, of Giacomo Verde and Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici. 24. http://www​.hackerart​.org/. 25. Giuseppe Marano and Marco Deseris, Net Art: L’arte delle connessione (Milan: ShaKe, 2008), 75. Own translation. For further reading on net​.a​rt see Michael Connor, Aria Dean and Dragan Espenschied, eds., The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology (New York: Rhizome, 2019); Jay E. Mattos, Introduction to Net Art (Createspace Independent Pub, 2015). 26. Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th Century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999) and New Media in Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005). 27. Reena Jana, Mark Tribe, New Media Art (Koln: Taschen, 2006). 28. Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale (Milan: La Scuola, 2015). 29. Edward Kac, “Foundation and Development of Robotic Art” Art Journal Vol. 56, No. 3 (1997): 67. 30. Roc Parés, megafone​.net​/2​004–2014 (Turner: Barcelona, 2014). See also Roc Parés’s own work, in particular the performance Deriva: http://deriva​.tv/. 31. Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of An Index” NORDICOM Review 1/2, vol. 5 (September 2004): 48. Here Gunning develops the concept of truth claim. 32. Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967). English translation, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red Press, 1970). 33. Regis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image: Une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). 34. W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16. See also Antonio Somaini, “The Concept of Visual Culture and the Historicity of the Eye” in The Cinematic Experience. Film, Contemporary Art, Museum, ed. Alice Auteliano (Udine: Campanotto, 2010). See also David N. Rodowick’s notion of the “figural” in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke University, 2001); from the same author see also The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 35. The most important works by Pierre Levy are L’intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace (Paris: La Découverte, 1994), English translation. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (Plenum Trade, 1997) and Qu’est-ce que le virtuel? (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), English translation, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (Plenum Trade, 1998). 36. See Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (Utrecht: Bosch & Keuning, 1991). 37. See Mario Perniola, Il sex-appeal dell’inorganico (Turin: Einaudi, 1994).

126

Chapter 5

38. David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 39. Kevin Robins, Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision (New York: Routledge, 1996). 40. The last part of the intellectual journey of this multifaceted author—who should certainly be re-assessed today—is centered on the increasingly close relationship between the body and technology. To these “ultra-human” possibilities, Berger adds a research practice which he terms “beyond disciplinary,” see Téléovision, le nouveau Golem (Lausanne: Iderive, 1991). 41. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 42. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 43. Jay D. Bolter, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 44. Peppino Ortoleva, “Youtube e l’iconosfera on line” in Estetica dei media e della comunicazione, eds. Roberto Diodato and Antonio Somaini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 310. Own translation. 45. Ortoleva, Youtube, 297. Own translation. 46. Francesco Casetti, “I media nella condizione post-mediale” in Estetica dei media e della comunicazione, ed. R. Diodato, A. Somaini (Il Mulino: Bologna, 2011), 322. Own translation. By the same author, see “Filmic Experience” in Screen, no. 1 (2009); “L’esperienza filmica e la rilocazione del cinema” Fata Morgana 4 (2008); “Ritorno alla madrepatria. La sala cinematografica in un’epoca post-mediatica” Fata Morgana 8 (2009). Close to the notion of experience are the studies on the analysis of emotions in cinema, see Giorgio De Vincenti and Enrico Carocci, eds., Le emozioni e il cinema: Estetica, espressione, esperienza (Rome: Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo, 2012) and Enrico Carocci, Attraverso le immagini: Tre saggi sull’emozione cinematografica (Rome: Bulzoni, 2012). For further reference see also Ruggero Eugeni, Semiotica dei media: Le forme dell’esperienza (Rome: Carocci, 2010) and Alice Autelitano, Veronica Innocenti and Valentina Re, I cinque sensi del cinema, Atti dell’XI Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul Cinema, Udine-Gorizia, 15–18 March 2004, Forum, Udine 2005. 47. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). By the same author, see also Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 48. Michael Rush, Video Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 19. 49. Yves Michaud, L’Art à l’état gazeux: essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique (Paris: Stock, 2003). Own translation. Among the many that have spoken of experience with regards to video installations, see Anne-Marie Duguet, Vidéo, la mémoire au poing (Paris: Hachette, 1981) and, by the same author, “Dispositifs” Communication No. 48 (1988); see also Edmond Couchot, Image. De l’optique au numérique (Paris: Hermes, 1988).

New Languages of Art

127

50. René Berger applied the notions of “dislocation” and “relocation” in relation to the turnaround and subsequent opening that video art—and video installations— provided for cinema and television, see René Berger, L’art vidéo ou le défi de la création électronique (Paris, 1982) and “La problématique de la vidéo dans le monde contemporaine” in L’art vidéo 2980–1999: Vingt ans du VideArt Festival, Locarno, ed. Vittorio Fagone (Milan: Mazzotta, 1999). Today this term has made a comeback thanks to Francesco Casetti, in particular see “Ritorno alla madrepatria. La sala cinematografica in un’epoca post-mediatica” Fata Morgana Vol. 8 (2009). 51. For a re-assessment of the theories concerning postcinema see, Miriam De Rosa, Cinema e Postmedia: I territori del filmico nel contemporaneo (Milan: Postmediabook, 2013) and, from the same author, “Oltre i media, oltre il visibile. Per una fondazione teorica e metodologica dei Postcinema Studies” in “Bianco e Nero,” Tendenze della ricerca sul cinema in Italia 573 (2012). See also, Philippe Dubois, Frédéric Monvoisin and Elena Biserna, eds., Extended Cinema (Pasian di Prato, Udine: Campanotto, 2010) and Giulia Carluccio and Federica Villa, eds., La postanalisi: intorno e oltre l’analisi del film (Turin: Kaplan, 2005). 52. Peter Weibel, Postmedia Condition, in AAVV. Postmedia Condition, catalogue of the exhibition (Madrid: Centro Cultural Conde Duque, 2006). 53. See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of PostMedium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). 54. See the review by Domenico Quaranta, “Post Internet” in Catricalà, Media Art. 55. See Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music” Computer Music Journal Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 2000): 12–18; Maurice Benayoun, The Dump, 207 Hypotheses for Committing Art (France: Fyp éditions, July 2011); David M. Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 56. In this context, intermediality is used to explain the phenomenon of connection and dialogue between media, often confusing it with terms such as multimediality or crossmediality. 57. Marco M. Gazzano “Il cinema sulle tracce del cinema” in Gazzano, Kinema, 208. Own translation. 58. The leading countries in this movement are Germany, England, the United States and, although not on the same level of importance, France. 59. Media Art History. See www​.mediaarthistory​.org. 60. See Peter Weibel and Ljiljiana Fruk, Molecular Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 61. Oliver Grau, Media Art Histories, 1. See also Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, eds., Relieve: Relive: Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 62. Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, “Introduction: The New Materialism in Media Art History” in Cubitt, Thomas, Relive. This essay was also republished in Catricalà, Media Art. 63. Andreas Broeckmann “Image, Process, Performance, Machine: Aspects of an Aesthetics of the Machinic” in Grau, Media Art Histories, 203. From the same author,

128

Chapter 5

see also Bandbreite—Medien zwischen Kunst und Politik (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2015). 64. Broeckmann, “Image, Process,” 205. 65. See Machiko Kusahara, “Device Art: a New Approach in Understanding Japanese Contemporary Art” in Grau, Media Art Histories, 277–308. 66. Chris Salter, Alien Agency (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). By the same author, see also Entangled. Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 67. In the 2013 edition of Media Art Histories (held in Riga, Latvia) an entire section was dedicated to Media Archeology, and Erkki Huhtamo himself opened the conference. 68. Vivian Sobchack, “Media Archeaology and Re-Presencing the Past” in Media Archeaology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkely: University of California Press, 2011), 325. 69. See Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: Toward an Archaeology of Electronic Gaming” in Handbook of Computer Games Studies, eds. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1–21; and Erkki Huhtamo, “Twin-Touch-Test-Redux: Media Archaeological Approach to Art, Interactivity, and Tactility” in Grau, Media Art Histories; and Huhtmo, Parikka, Media Archaeology. 70. See Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 71. See Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); and Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 72. See Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 73. See Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 74. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Friedrich A. Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 75. Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito and Caitlin Jones, eds., Permanence through Change: The Variable Media Approach (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2003), 11. Proceedings of the Conference Preserving the Immaterial held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in March 2001, organized by the Guggenheim Museum Fondation and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art and Science for the project Variable Media Network. 76. Jerry Kaplan, Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 7.

New Languages of Art

129

77. Kevin M. Lynch and Frank C. Park, Modern Robotics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1. 78. Lynch, Modern Robotics, 2. 79. The difference between the two may be so defined: “The study of robotics often includes artificial intelligence and computer perception, but an essential feature of any robot is that it moves in the physical world” in Lynch, Modern Robotics, 1. 80. Yuval Noah Harari interviewed by Italian writer Roberto Saviano in “Robinson,” La Repubblica, 27/07/2019. Own translation. 81. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 63. 82. Bostrom, Superintelligence, 63. 83. Bostrom, Superintelligence, 130. 84. Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Knopf, 2017), 114. 85. Tegmark, Life 3.0, 118. 86. Tegmark, Life 3.0, 119. 87. Lev Manovich, AI Aesthetics (Moscow: Strelka Press 2019) 12. 88. Think of Al-Jazari who lived between 1136 and 1206, and who invented many machines and automata. “The word, ‘ilm’ that is most commonly used to denote ‘knowledge’ in Arabic, Hill reminds us, included a wide range of fields as astronomy, mechanics, theology, philosophy, logic and metaphysics. This practice of not differentiating between seemingly separate fields is best understood in the context of the Islamic view of the interconnectedness of all things that exist and wherein the quest for knowledge is a contemplation on and discovery of this essential unity of things,” in Nadarajan, Gunalan (2007), ‘Islamic Automation: A Reading of Al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206)’, in Grau, Media Art Histories, 165. Also refer to Alhazen, scientist and father of modern optics, as well as inventor of the camera obscura. See Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at the Harvard University Press, 2011). 89. Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2009). 90. Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 138. 91. There are many articles pertaining to this topic, published both in journals of the artistic field as well as others external to it. As we are speaking in general terms, rather than referring to specific texts, we suggest a thorough research through a search engine. 92. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 6. 93. James Lovelock, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2019), 78. 94. Simon Penny, Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 7.

130

Chapter 5

95. Bertrand Russel, “The Triumph of Stupidity” in Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell’s American Essays, 1931–1935 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 28. 96. Federico Campagna, “A Sermon for the Parents of Young Machine” in Acts of the Conference eds. Kenric McDowell and Ben Vickers, Belief in AI: Designing Tomorrow’s Intelligence, 13-11-2018/17-11/2018, Dubai Design Week. Available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.fed​​erico​​campa​​gna​.e​​u​/sin​​gle​-p​​ost​/2​​018​/1​​1​/19/​​A​-ser​​mon​-f​​or​-th​​e​-par​​​ents-​​ of​-yo​​ung​-m​​achin​​es, accessed October 10, 2019.

Chapter 6

For a New Idea of Innovation Beyond Anthropocene

“I spent these last two days in concentrated introspection” said the robot, “and the results have been most interesting. I began at the one sure assumption I felt permitted to make. I, myself, exist, because I think.”1 It was 1941 when Isaac Asimov wrote these words, inspired by Cartesian theories. They are pronounced by a robot, protagonist of the short story Reason.2 Those were years of fundamental development for some of the fields now connected to our contemporaneity, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics, and surgical medicine. These fields might seem distant from one another but they conceal a common foundation: they question our idea of the “human species” and in so doing reformulate the paradigms on which we have based our idea of humanity. Amidst thinking machines, prosthetic technology, and genetic modification, our imaginary has been submerged by scenarios linked to the technological enhancement of our corporeal abilities and intellectual capabilities. All these scenarios have been crucial in developing the idea of human beings as “Deus”—to borrow Harari’s expression.3 However, this does not consider the issue in its entirety.4 Viewing the machine as a “better entity,” as more efficient and more logical, is the distorted image created by technology in the process of defining itself. Its narrative is that of scientific determinism, long adopted by Western thought, but it must be said that, generally speaking, technological development wouldn’t have been possible without it. Human beings, in the description provided by Western society, are on the verge of an imminent crisis, an anthropological shift. This basic assumption pushes many theorists to address the problem of the future of humanity: a post-human, transhuman, post-anthropocentric age, an era dominated by the prefix “post”—an era of crisis. 131

132

Chapter 6

Although often used as synonyms, crisis does not necessarily entail catastrophe. We are on the threshold: between an Order that has, albeit problematically, held together our communal living until now and is unequivocally failing, and a new Order that for the time being is most discernible through vague indications or ambiguous omens. In psychoanalysis a feeling of crisis is almost always associated with the perception of the arrival of a catastrophe. It seems that this is the mood in which we live in today, increasingly oriented toward finding a balance between crisis and catastrophe. Numerous studies have taken this precarious balance as key for understanding our contemporaneity. Climate change, rising CO2 emissions, deforestation, the increase in artificial islands created by our own waste,5 environmental change—all run parallel to images of technological modifications in humans, as well as advancements in the field of genetics and artificial intelligence, cyborgs and machines. The two trends are often entwined and enclose various sub tendencies; they encourage studies to imagine the human being as racing toward a liminal space, a boundary that if crossed will incite a new idea of what it means to be human. This boundary has also been defined by another term that has come forward in recent years and is used today as a gateway for interpretation: “anthropocentrism.” The two macro trends mentioned above are concerned with overcoming, on the one hand, “humans”—the material body—and, on the other hand, the Anthropocene—a human-centric understanding of the world. Today, we can divide the existing theories on the possible futures of humanity in two different categories. The first see technological development as an enhancement of the body’s capabilities. Since the 1970s, this approach has been promoter of terms such as cyborg, “postorganic,” and transhumanism. The second has been increasingly defined in recent years, and seeks a new humanity not centered upon enhancement but reduction, the development of new sensitive parts of our pre-rational beings and a reconciliation with the earth. The second trend embraces concepts such as “animality,6” posthuman, and post-anthropocentrism. Both movements foretell a change in human nature but from two different points of view. As we will see, artists will propose a third course, which in turn will help us view these trends in a new light and vehicle new ways of interpretation. FROM HUMANUS TO ANTROPOS In the end, there was Antropos. Right at the very end, the last link of a humanist, geological, and ecological chain. Human beings, seen as evil, had become the first source of depletion of the home that had made their own lives possible; Earth was treated with no respect.

For a New Idea of Innovation

133

In the beginning, however, there was the Holocene. According to research, it began around 11,7007 years ago and is the geological epoch we still live in today. It is the second epoch of the Quaternary Period, part of the Cenozoic Era and the Phanerozoic Eon. “Eon” is the largest geochronological unit and refers to billions of years; “era,” on the other hand, refers to hundreds of millions of years, and so forth in a decreasing scale, until we reach “period” (tens of a million years), “epoch” (millions of years) and, finally, “age” (thousands of years). Geologists divided the stages of the Earth according to these temporal dimensions and placed the birth of human beings in the Holocene “epoch.” In geological terms, human beings are only one of the many events of this epoch—one of the very last, in fact—not the characterizing incident. We are part of a terrestrial succession, wherein the actions of humans are not of the primary degree of importance. The temporal development of the Holocene is undisturbed by human behavior: the birth of human beings is part of this phase in as much as it is included in a temporal timeline and a much larger geological context, in which humans can only be passive actors because the real undisputed protagonist is Earth. From within these discourses, the Anthropocene came into play. As a concept, it was consolidated by Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry,8 during the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP)9 in Cuernavaca (Mexico) in 2000 when he famously exclaimed: “We are not in the Holocene any more. We are in the Anthropocene!”10 With his exclamation, Crutzen meant to reiterate an idea that is now quite common: the fact that it is no longer possible to think of human beings as a passive entity, but as active agents of climate change and other changes that have affected the Earth over the last 300 years. Hence, human beings came into play as one of the main protagonists of this anthropocentric view and as antagonists of the Earth—downgraded to the role of co-protagonist. We witnessed a shift from Geocentrism (here understood as meaning Earth at the center of the theoretical debate not at the center of the universe) to Anthropocentrism, and, in turn, from Anthropocentrism to Post-Anthropocentrism: almost as if to say that to successfully overcome this anthropocentric view, we must first place human beings at the center once again. Yet, as we know, it is often a question of timing and how a certain phenomenon is perceived. As Lewis and Maslin state, “These are not abstract concerns: the story we choose to tell matters. At one extreme, if the Antropocene began when people first began using fire or farming crops, environmental change is merely part of the human condition. At the other extreme, if human activity transformed Earth only in recent decades, we need to question the role of technology and the development of consumer capitalism. [. . .] This is

134

Chapter 6

because the release of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use has already pushed Earth outside the 10,000 year period of relatively stable climate.”11 Hence, either it concerned human beings since their very inception and is somehow intrinsic to their own essence or it is a cultural phenomenon, determined by the development and progression of humans. Obviously, those who advocate for Anthropocene-based theories lean toward the second option and provide different temporal interpretations. Time is, in fact, of the utmost importance. Indeed the Anthropocene is not only an encroachment of disciplines but also of temporal states, and, by extension, existential states. “The Anthropocene names an encroachment of human history on deep time of geology.”12 Human beings rise—or regress—from a historical entity to a geological one, thus entering a new temporal scale; a scale that is not conceivable in “human” terms but in “anthropocentric” terms. The anthropos breaks away from the humanus, crystallizing the rupture between prehuman time and human time, “The deep time conception originating in the later eighteenth century definitively separate prehuman from human time.”13 Humanus belongs to historical time, anthropos to geological time. If the history of human beings is generally oriented toward the past, the antropos enters the realm of geological deep time and is therefore on a temporal scale that is much larger than what had previously been imagined. The antropos is projected toward the causes of imminent catastrophes. This catastrophic futurology is what causes the impossibility of predicting phenomena, the main element in that relationship between balance and crisis described above. If the humanus looks at the past, the antropos is projected toward the future. Despite this entry into geological deep time, another historical analysis of the Anthropocene usually traces its birth—or commencement, in the words of Foucault—back to the Second Industrial Revolution, or as Lewis and Maslin claim, just before: “The 1610 Orbis Spike marks the beginning of today’s globally interconnected economy and ecology, which set Earth on a new evolutionary trajectory.”14 The Orbis Spike implies that colonialism, global trade, and the use of coal have triggered global socio-economic processes that are difficult to predict and control. These effects were engendered by the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent evolution up to our present day, and were also decisive for the overall increase in CO2 emissions. We can therefore assume that the Anthropocene was born in an increasingly complex, interlinked, and technological society. This means that the theories on climate change and the future of the Earth are closely linked to technological development, media studies, artificial intelligence, the philosophy of information,15 and the post-human—fields that are much more interconnected than we might initially think.

For a New Idea of Innovation

135

In order to properly understand this transition, it is necessary to combine two of the aforementioned fields—climate change and technological development—and to relocate the issue of the Anthropocene. “[It] is not so much in the ways in which changes in nature are increasingly caused by human activities, but in the ways in which virtually everything that physically makes up our world is of our making.”16 In other words, technology, poised between us and the ecosystem in which we are the mediators, can to a certain degree avert our gaze away from nature and focus our attention to the notion of experience: “a shift must be made from theorizing nature to experiencing nature.”17 This shift can possibly be enacted through the arts. Today art can still have the same revealing function that it acquired over the centuries through the notion of “experiencing differently.” At this point, we can choose between two possible routes: either we return to a “sacred” vision of the Earth where the Earth is seen as a superior spiritual entity, and thereby reintroduce the same nature–technique, Earth–technology, man–nature dichotomies and risk falling back into an anthropocentric view, or we can push ourselves further and try to understand what kind of human being is living today and what kind will live in the future. What kind of alliance, rather than difference, is there between technology and the natural elements, between human beings and the external world? This is a post-anthropocentric view, a way to reconfigure human beings in their new, natural, technological, and techno-natural environment. This is the real challenge of the twenty-first century, which will not only determine the ethical and philosophical connotations of future technologies but also their development, innovation at large, and the market. This is the challenge that could answer the question posed by Paul Shepard in his seminal study Nature and Madness: “why do men persist in destroying their habitat?”18 In a world undergoing a crisis in resources, climate change, and an increase in CO2 emissions, the transition to a post-anthropocentric vision is also a transition to a posthuman condition, or, perhaps, to a final renunciation of the prefix “post,” which only creates further dualisms. In this way, anthropos and humanus meet again in a new idea of evolutionary transformation.19 THE HUMAN BEING AMIDST GAIA AND TRANSHUMANISM A robotic arm moves inside a small circular garden. At first glance what is happening is unclear, it seems that the arm is manifesting the movements of a gardener: it sows, waters and monitors plant growth. Yet, it is also taking advantage of its technological nature which is linked to the production of a visual image of the garden. The robotic arm does not move independently

136

Chapter 6

but is moved through telepresence by potentially infinite users connected via a website. This is Ken Goldberg’s famous Telegarden, created in 1994 and exhibited in 1995 at the University of Southern California, described by the artist as a “living model of small-planet social interactions.” In this case, technology regulates the small, circular planet, which is concurrently controlled remotely by users—many users—who interact at a distance and create yet another planet of remote social connections, something which back then was just starting to emerge. Through this installation, the garden becomes a collective and the world a living organism to be cared for. We must listen to Gaia and to do so, technology may be used as a tool. Examined today, Telegarden is almost a warning to the Anthropocene. Ken Goldberg’s work directly links to James Lovelock and Lynn Margukis’s “Gaia hypothesis,” advanced for the first time in 1969. In those years, humanity was pushing for the conquest of Space and the discovery of new planets. The famous moon landing took place in 1969 and in those very years a group of visionary scientists founded the Seti, or Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence Institute. In this context, in the early 1960s atmospheric chemist James Lovelock was called by NASA to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to be part of a team of experts whose task was to study the scientific possibilities of sending a spacecraft to Mars. After Earth and the Moon, the new object of desire was Mars.20 In order to study the atmosphere on Mars, Lovelock began from the Earth and made a thorough analysis of the energy absorbed and dispersed by terrestrial organisms. Over the course of his years at NASA, this approach led him to focus increasingly on the processes of organization and self-balance which were characteristic of system Earth. It should be noted that Lovelock’s theories were influenced by other theories on systems and feedback hailing from the field of cybernetics,21 a science that will also influence Maturana and Varela’s theory on living organisms and the physics of Ilia Prigogine, among others.22 At the time, Lovelock’s conclusions were ground-breaking and paved the way for a new understanding of system Earth: “Consider Gaia theory as an alternative to the conventional wisdom that sees the Earth as a dead planet made of inanimate rocks, ocean and atmosphere, and merely inhabited by life. Consider it as a real system, comprising all of life and all of its environment tightly coupled so as to form a self-regulating entity.”23 Viewing the Earth as Gaia, a self-regulating system kept in balance by the relations between all living creatures, also marks the beginning of a new way of conceptualizing human beings. They were no longer seen as rational and intentional entities but as part of a system where they played the role of extras

For a New Idea of Innovation

137

and were but a single element among the many elements needed to maintain the balance. Rather than a holistic stance, this could be defined as a new ecophilosophical24 perspective. Perhaps here is precisely where the concept of Anthropocene comes into play. The Gaia hypothesis runs parallel to the emergence of another trend that will introduce a somewhat contrasting view of human beings. Rather than a holistic or ecological concept of humans in their terrestrial environment, this second trend focuses on the strengthening of individual rational, physical, and intellectual faculties: transhumanism. Transhumanism “traces its roots within the Enlightenment and does not reject the humanistic tradition; on the contrary, transhumanism focuses specifically on human enhancement, which explains its symbol ‘H+’ as an acronym for ‘Humanity Plus’. The main keys to access such a goal are identified in science and technology, in their existing, emerging and speculative frames. In the progressive timeline of the transhuman, the future bears unique potentials: some humans may transcend their actual outfit in such radical ways as to become posthuman.”25 It is only in the 1980s that this trend started to make headlines and gained popularity.26 It’s stance derives from a perceived deficiency. With the development of increasingly complex technologies, the biological body is seen as defective, no longer able to face the great challenges of the twenty-first century. This deficiency is eliminated through a technological enhancement of the organism, which goes from being “organic” to being increasingly “postorganic”. Transhumanism views the body as an organism that is unfit for technological advancement. It follows that in order for it to be efficient, it needs to be “hybridized” with technology.27 Although extremely interesting, this theory conceals a deterministic approach, where what is missing in the body is seen as an element to be calculated. The need for enhancement is primarily directed toward the enhancement of single subjects and toward the creation of a “super-ego,” thus perpetuating an anthropocentric vision of the cosmos. Nick Bostrom defines transhumanism in these terms: “a cultural, intellectual and scientific movement that affirms the moral duty to enhance human physical and cognitive capacities, and to apply new technologies to man to eliminate undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as: suffering, disease, aging and even the mortal condition.”28 Thus, we can overcome what it means to be “human” in two different ways, one through addition and enhancement (transhumanism), the other through disempowerment (following in the footsteps of the Gaia hypothesis). Art will show us a third way.

138

Chapter 6

ART FOR A NEW MYSTICISM As we enter a dark room, we are absorbed by sounds and images projected onto the walls. Large display cases occupy the exhibition space. As we approach, we see that inside the display cases are ants; moving, eating, and living in an artificial habitat. The ants generate an all-enveloping sound due to their presence and movement, which microphones capture and diffuse in the surrounding space. Their physical details are projected onto the walls, creating a setting that unites us with the animal life form. It is a Symbiosity of Creation, defined in the title by the artist himself, Elvin Flamingo (also known as Jarosław Czarnecki), a work which accompanies the entire life cycle of ants: began in 2012, it is expected to continue until 2034. The artwork described above is a perfect example of the increasingly apparent crossover between cinema, art, and sound. The author’s intention was to create a film “about which no spectator, upon exiting the ‘cinema’, could say, ‘That was a great film, but life goes on. It was just a film.’ The intent was to create a ‘film’ that lives its own life, participatory, interactive and symbiotic with me.”29 (See Chapter 5) As we have seen, cinema had already ushered in the debate on the relationship between the mechanics of the eye, video cameras, and the act of recording, together with the dual nature of human beings as producers and users of images. Flamingo’s work seems to push the debate even further. In fact, what we are presented with is a “film” in the very act of its unfolding; life as it is being staged. Upon entering the room, we are immersed in the sounds and atmosphere of the surrounding environment. As we approach the cases, on the one side, we see the “real” life of the ants on show through the display opening, and, on the other side, the projected representation of the ants life; precisely in that moment, the body discovers an ancestral feeling that, rather than uniting us with the “post” of posthuman, seems to associate us with the “pre” of pre-human. This is not an obvious transition, yet it defines many theories and artistic practices of our time, aimed at rediscovering a new philosophy of reconciliation with a world that we feel as ever more distant. This work can also be seen as a way of uncovering a new mysticism, a new form of exchange. Eugene Thacker identified three possible ways of thinking about the relationship between human beings and their surrounding environment. The first one is the “world-for-us”—a world from the point of view of humans, shaped and envisioned, signified and imagined. We are completely immersed in this world, and yet we constantly also experience something else that escapes us. It is here that Thacker introduces the second type of interaction, the “world-in-itself,” which cannot be reduced to human classifications or significations. For the author, this second world

For a New Idea of Innovation

139

is a paradox: “the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us.”30 Usually we become aware of its presence when there are impending natural disasters, when the Earth reminds us of its existence beyond our human-centric vision. The time we live in is a constant reminder of the existence of this world. This condition led to the hypothesis of a third type of interaction which the author calls “world-without-us.” The constant presence of the “world-in-itself” has caused an increase in catastrophic predictions regarding the possibility of extinction for humans, which in turn has made ever more real the possibility of a world without the presence of humans. In said case, we are faced with the limits that define us as human beings, “in a sense, the world-without-us allows us to think the world-in-itself, without getting caught up in a vicious circle of logical paradox.”31 We are faced with a world that cannot be experienced but is imaginable, “the world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.”32 According to Thacker, this is the starting point for a new mysticism, one that is no longer theological but rather non-human and therefore “meteorological,” which answers the question: how do we fathom a world without us? A “mysticism of the world-in-itself” concerns “the impossibility of experience, it would be about that which in shadows withdraws from any possible experience, and yet still makes its presence felt, through the periodic upheavals of weather, land, and matter.”33 Going beyond ecological theories, which belong to the paradigm of the “world-in-itself,” Thacker endeavors to think of a new philosophy of the non-human, thus relinquishing the terminologies that define the “world-for-us,” such as post-human, transhuman, post-anthropocentrism, etc. Today, this trend is increasingly emerging under various forms. In the Gaia hypothesis, we were still dictated by dualisms concerning man– world, Earth–living beings, good–bad, which also define many posthumanist theories. For example, Rosi Braidotti’s theories on the non-human power of the posthuman and the generative power of life, which she calls Zoé: “the transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains. Zoe-centered egalitarianism is, for me, the core of the post-anthropocentric turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism.”34 However, we should be concerned with how the “self and [the] world come to be regarded not only as groundless, but, in an enigmatic way, as indistinct as well.”35 Returning to what is of interest for us here, artists are pushing the boundaries, abandoning dualistic frames such as anthropocentrism and post-anthropocentrism, human, non-human, etc. and moving towards a unification of theory and practice, as well as the consolidation between technological experimentation and poetic vision. Art can show us the links between our technological

140

Chapter 6

condition, characterized by an increasingly techno-centric stance, and the search for a new mysticism and philosophy. The Aerocene project of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno started to take form in 2004. The project was born from confrontations between the artist and a community of scientists from prestigious institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), Braunschweig University of Technology, the Institute of Architecture-related Art (IAK), TBA21 Academy, and Red Cross Red Crescent; later integrated by other universities, research centers, cultural institutions, and museums from all over the world. This multidisciplinary project is poised halfway between scientific research and artistic research and aims to uncover a new way of understanding our environment, the atmosphere that surrounds us, and a new relationship with the Earth. In order to do so, the Argentine artist conceived of a project—it is difficult to call it an “artwork”—that involves a large, potentially infinite community of people that produce aerial “sculptures,” which rise from the ground and travel without the use of technological devices but by using sunlight and infrared radiation. Aerocene involves a potentially infinite community of people, scientists, and experts; it was born in a scientific department but its objective is to “rethink modes of being and of co-existence with the planet and all those our species shares it with.”36 An artistic, philosophical and, at the same time, political project against the excessive use of polluting fossil capital. The project was created by an artist and stimulated the imagination of scientists. To do so, the artist did not begin from the earth, but from the sky, conceived as a place of union and the connection between humans and nonhumans, earth and universe, beings and things. This engendered sustainable flying sculptures, as “Aerocene flies without fossil fuels, batteries, lithium, solar panels, helium, hydrogen and carbon emissions,”37 and, at the same time, a new philosophy of anthropocentrism, where human beings are neither good nor bad, neither opposed to nature or one of its many constituting elements. The Aerocene, as emblematic of the many examples that could’ve been presented here, thus becomes a way to rethink the Anthropocene, making us aware of our actions and guiding them. “Aerocene is a project about friendship, about the relationship between air, universe, humans, sun, animals, plants, planets. It is a project showing how shared enthusiasm becomes the common ground to shared dreams. Where time becomes different, where energy and inspiration are endless resources. I can only hope that this family will grow even bigger.”38 Projects like this allow us to stretch even further, toward a new understanding of the concept of “nature,” surmounting the dualisms mentioned above. These dualisms reiterate the time-worn differences between those that take

For a New Idea of Innovation

141

refuge in the ideal concept of nature and those that instead allow for a more active role of human beings—thus either protecting or shaping. BEYOND THE “POST” German artist Hito Steyerl chose a very interesting name for her installation at the Serpentine Galleries in London: Power Plants. In today’s world, the concept of “power” is generally linked to technology; technology is seen as having the control and the strength to make things happen. Technology is increasingly assigned the power of being in charge, in contrast with everything that is uncontrollable and is reminiscent of more ephemeral or magical forms. Yet, now is the time to re-assess the relationship between “technic” and “magic,” as emphasized by Federico Campagna in his new, significant book.39 In this respect, Steyerl’s installation questioned the classical concept of “power” so as to broaden and enhance it. “Beginning from the premise that ‘power is the necessary condition for any digital technology’, the artist considers the multiple meanings of the word, including electrical currents, the ecological powers of plants or natural elements, and the complex networks of authority that shape our environments.”40 Steyerl’s installation was made of six videos, which were generated through neural network mechanisms that ran on computer systems modeled on the human brain and nervous system, programmed to predict the future by calculating the next frame in the video. Thinking of plants as a reticular and decentralized system, as discussed by scholars such as Stefano Mancuso,41 became the pretext to understand how our brains and bodies worked. Plants thus become the metaphor for the relationship between human beings and their surrounding environment. In 1997, Steina Vasulka was asked to represent the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This is a very significant event, as it consolidated, after Nam June Paik’s victory of the Leone D’Oro in 1993 and Bill Viola’s work for the American Pavilion in 1995, the presence of the artistic use of technology in the glossy world of contemporary art, via another of its major representatives. Unlike Paik and Viola, Steina Vasulka’s installation Orka, a Multiscreen Nature Installation, centered on a theme that was still unexplored at the time. Orka is an Icelandic word that means “energy,” “strength,” and “power.” In this case, the power of Nature was represented by Iceland’s peculiarity: its many surface eruptions, due to its close contact to the Earth’s core. Steina Vasulka filmed and recorded this Earth, where natural elements have a greater explosive power than any civilization could ever have.

142

Chapter 6

To be immersed in the installation of the Icelandic artist meant traveling to a new world, one in contrast to the one in which technology was being conceived. In the late 1990s, many artworks were characterized by an ostentation of technology, and yet in this case technological display was ousted by a novel exchange with a new form of power: plants and nature. Video technology has brought us face-to-face with this new exchange, “I think I have a duty to show what can’t be seen, like water flowing uphill or sideways and an upside-down sea. By putting people in a mental world where they have never lived, you can hypnotize them.”42 Yes, we can theorize about these conditions, but today we can even see them drawing ever closer. They are characteristic of the pre-modern condition, not the posthuman or the postanthropocentric one. Rather than focusing on the + of “post,” we should focus on the - of “pre.” As argued by Bruno Latour, modernity is represented by the birth of humanist culture, which spearheaded the separation between human beings and animals, and, hence, between human and non-human, politics and religion, mysticism and rationality, technique and nature. These contrasts have allowed for the emergence of modern culture and society. Yet, what about other cultures? The ones encountered on the path to modernity? “How could the other cultures-natures have resisted? They became premodern by contrast.”43 Wording here is of the utmost importance. The “other cultures,” named and branded as deficient and far away from the interests of modern society were viewed as having to be, in fact, modernized. To consider the “pre,” while still remaining aware of the “post” could entail revealing the non-humanity of humans and animals, alongside the relations between things, such as the reticularity of plants. Thus, animality becomes a practice and not a theory that reverts back to the “pre,” or the “pre-I.” Going beyond the I, the anthropocentric Subject, the idea of “becoming animal” means opening up to vital possibilities completely unthinkable until [now], an intermingling that transcends corporeal boundaries, and the formation of fluxes which no longer distinguish between those who act and those who endure, subject and object, humans and non-humans. Becoming animal is a double process of “deterritorialization,” which is a process that opens borders, confuses territories, and, indeed, of “territorialization,” where new territories, new alliances, and new fluxes are born.44

Going beyond our body and becoming animal is not about the strengthening of a single body, it means thinking of corporeality as a continuous pre-subjective flow in which the body is multiplied and determined by the constant relation among other bodies: it is the bee becoming orchid and the orchid becoming the bee the moment one is placed on top of the other. It is

For a New Idea of Innovation

143

about bodies and their potential (not potency): the opportunity to be at the same time one and all forms. This is a post-humanist idea that is based on reducing the power of the I-subject and allows us to conceive of our bodies as presubjective, prerational, and pre-I, living and surviving this whirlwind in a timeless space. Here too the work of artists is fundamental. As always, they are some who show us the course to follow. Let’s take the work of Italian artist Daniele Puppi, for example. In the work Naked, inspired by the movie An American Werewolf in London, a man transforms into a wolf and is tortured as he loses all previous categories and rational, social and traditional intermediations, thus becoming a naked animal body. Think of the oceans in Joan Jonas’s Moving off the Land, imaginary oceans populated by creatures, and the figure of the shaman, common in the videos of the American artist, which is key to the exchange between nature and culture. Donna Haraway’s acclaimed book also, unsurprisingly, relinquishes the various “post’s” and prefers a different route of analysis. Going beyond the Antropocene and the Capitalocene, Haraway introduces the “Cthulucene,” harbinger of a new, tentacular thought. With this term, she suggests not to look up or forward, but down at the Earth, “To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet.”45 According to Haraway, human beings have progressed through different stages, different “worlds,” such as the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene, and the Capitalocene. The point is that to really transcend these stages, it is not enough to simply change a prefix, we need a whole new name: “we need a name for the dynamic on-going symchthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake.[. . .] I am calling all this the Chtulucene.”46 Here we are above and beyond. There are no longer differences between animals, plants, and human beings. Humans are in a continuous relation of attributes (genetic, physical, biological, and so on). It is a new way of looking at the world which impels us to re-examine many of the themes discussed above. It is a vision that corresponds to that of many artists who make use of technology. Artists are becoming the messengers of this new approach in research centers and companies in the technological sector. Think of Neri Oxman, who is opposed to the idea of modern design and talks about the existence of two opposite cultures of design, “Since the industrial revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the realm of manufacture and mass production.

144

Chapter 6

Assemble line has dictated a world made of parts framing the imagination of designer and architecture who have been trained to think about the object as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions. But you don’t find homogenous materialist assemblies in nature.”47 Oxman introduced a type of design that is inspired by the evolutionary processes of nature, genetics, and biological processes. In the exhibition Broken Nature, held in 2019 at the Triennale di Milano, Paola Antonelli, Chief curator at MOMA, emphasized the concept of “restorative design.” Art, design, and architecture were presented side by side for a thorough investigation on the bonds that unite human beings to their natural environments, drawing on the concept of “restorative design.”48 “What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human only histories?”49 asks Donna Haraway. “Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!”50 Ian Cheng, together with the company he founded, Metis Suns, pushed the boundaries of CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) through automated learning. The characters in his works lead independent lives and develop their own identities during the time they are displayed. The artist creates the software that gives them life. Cheng’s characters operate in a post-ecological world, and, through technological innovation (the software created by the artist), they open up new reflections on our relationship with the Earth. Cheng has called this new artistic modality Worlding: the continuous reworking of the world we live in.51 In an age of prosthetic technology, super-egos, and transhumanist frenzies, the examples mentioned above seem to usher in a new perspective: a new existential condition, one that is not rooted in addition, the deterministic enhancement of the body, the strengthening of the machine, or the creation and development of a stronger I. Rather, it is grounded in reduction and reciprocal exchange, not empowerment but knowledge of ourselves and our deepest levels of understanding. As Bridle said, “Those of us who have been early adopters and cheerleaders of new technologies, who have experienced their manifold pleasures and benefited from their opportunities, and who have consequently argued, often naively, for their wider implementation, are in no less danger from their uncritical deployment.”52 Perhaps, seeing the “artist as inventor” may help us understand that artists may be one of the driving forces of society, other

For a New Idea of Innovation

145

than for the world of art, helping us decipher our dark age in new ways, as theorized by James Bridle. TOWARD A NEW IDEA OF MEDIA ECONOMY As we have seen, the work of artists can provide valuable interpretations and help us understand the era we live in. But artists, as we have also seen, do not only help us reflect, they also create and invent. That is how artists show us the ways of progress. We must look to them if we want to uncover a new understanding of our economy and technological development. We have seen how at the beginning of the 1980s, theories on transhumanism and posthumanism revolved around the newly instituted idea of the “end of humanity.” They did not take into consideration the notion of environment, or, even more radical, that of Gaia, as indicated in the previous sub-chapters. This kind of approach went hand-in-hand with advances in other disciplinary fields, such as medicine and engineering, plastic surgery, molecular and clinical genetics and prosthetic medicine; together with the development of increasingly powerful computers, computational imaging techniques, control techniques and, above all, machine learning and artificial intelligence. What was being outlined was a very precise and increasingly popular notion of technological development: that it followed a secure, deterministic progression that was logically superior to that of humans. This is not the approach we find in Goldberg’s Telegarden, or in the work of Ian Cheng, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and many others. How can we weave their insights together with a new idea of innovation? How do we merge Thacker’s new mysticism, Haraway’s philosophical understandings, and technological progress? Nicklas Bergman argues that we are now entering a sixth technological wave characterized by the advent of a new GPT, or General Purpose Technology. According to Lipsey, Carlaw, and Bekar,53 an entire epoch can be defined within a GPT, as “in general terms, a GPT is a single generic technology that develops over time but can still be recognized as the same technology over its lifetime.”54 Hence GPT is the technology of reference for any given epoch, which can be transformed but remains fundamentally unaltered in its components. In the past, it was the wheel, more recently, think of the microprocessor, which, since the start of the 1970s, characterized the emergence of a new society based on information and communication. The new technological wave we are entering is distinguished by the advent of nanotechnology. The question here is not whether it is true that nanotechnology is generating or will generate drastic changes, the point is that we are entering a new epoch that undermines a naïve and positivist approach to

146

Chapter 6

technological innovation. This approach embraces a new concept of the environment—in fact, it cannot be removed from the notion of environment—and of technological development: “humanity is realizing the need for not only innovation in new technology but also environmentally sound approaches addressing the shortages facing our planet.”55 A new form of ecology and technological development, two seemingly distant issues, are here presented together. Thinking differently about innovation means thinking about the environment in which we live in from a different point of view, and vice versa. This means that a new type of ethics, which brings together technological experimentation and the vision of the aforementioned artists, can emerge. Our economy can no longer accept technological development as an end in itself. This is why the development of a new mysticism, and a new language, is crucial. As artists have shown us, there is no technological progress without new content, without a new philosophy. It is no coincidence that companies today are looking for artists, and for this reason, the role of the artist today is fundamental not only for art but for society in general. This approach can also be observed in new economic theories and the ways in which they refer to the concept of information. When we speak of “information theory,” we immediately think of Shannon and Wevers’s theory formulated in 1949, which explains how a given signal travels from source A to receiver B. The two scholars were the first to give an engineering definition of “information,” displacing it from its content and significance. César Hidalgo built his economic theory on these foundations. Hidalgo argues that information exists beyond ourselves, it is all around us, and that it is the constitutive element of the entire Universe. Information can be found in plants, in trees, and in the stars, “for billions of years information has continued to grow in our planet: first in its chemistry, then in simple life-forms, more recently in us. In a universe characterized mostly by empty space, our planet is an oasis where information, knowledge and knowhow continue to increase, powered by the sun but also by the self-reinforcing mechanisms that we know as life.”56 Hidalgo’s economic theory leans toward the Gaia hypothesis, the sixth technological wave of innovation, and a new idea of human being: an idea that is ecological and sustainable and that goes beyond the transhumanist theories of the 1980s. It would seem that ecology, technological innovation, and economic development are at this point indistinguishable: “ultimately, the economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow.”57 Thus, information becomes the main relational element for all terrestrial forms; it materializes through energy and is structured through solid forms. This is where this theory clashes with transhumanism, as for the latter it is

For a New Idea of Innovation

147

impossible to transcend an anthropocentric view. Hidalgo’s economic theory is already post-anthropocentric, or, better yet, it is completely uninterested in all designations made up of “post’s.” Nature, the Earth, and the Universe are the computational motors that allow for the expansion of matter; they make up part of a circular system of which we are also a part of but solely as one element among many. It is a holistic, or rather, ecological, understanding of the economy. Accordingly, the economy is based on dynamic information that is continuously in use and can be calculated. Nature becomes a universal calculator: “bacteria, plants, and you and I are all, technically, computers. Our cells are constantly processing information in ways that we poorly understand. As we saw earlier, the ability of matter to compute is a precondition for life to emerge. It also signifies an important point of departure in our universe’s ability to beget information. As matter learns to compute, it becomes selective about the information it accumulates and the structures it replicates. Ultimately, it is the computational capacities of matter that allow information to experience explosive growth.”58 By now philosophy, technological innovation, and economic development are inseparable. Here is where art comes in as the final element of this circular system. The work of artists is not solely oriented toward technological production or the construction of machines and machinery. Technology is not the end product. Technology is the symbolic and designated apparatus required to reach a higher level of knowledge. Conceived in this way, artistic research detaches itself from more formal research carried out by companies, research centers, and universities. Thus, research and innovation in technology can be seen under a new light. Innovation catalyzed by art is enclosed within a new modality, where the continuous experimentation with materials is finalized toward an understanding of complex concepts. Ethics, poetry, philosophy, and technological innovation are inseparable for artists. Combining the economics of innovation with art theory can be useful for both fields: it offers a new outlook on the world of contemporary art and a different notion of technological innovation, both in practice and in theory. It anticipates the themes, fears, and perspectives that in time will become those of the majority. “I think therefore I am,” said Asimov’s robot at the beginning of this chapter. Having established this, we need to understand where this statement will bring us. Perhaps, we can stop for a moment and attempt to see this as an important opportunity to reflect upon our future. The artists that have been mentioned aspire to do exactly this, allowing us to reflect and consider, once again, a fundamental question. It is the same question that is asked by a robot, an artificial intelligence, in Chabot’s

148

Chapter 6

philosophical drama, ChatBot le Robot. He asks the human philosopher Barnabooth: “What is the purpose of being human?” Barnabooth smiled. “To cultivate the mystery of existence. Reduce violence. Experiment with new forms of happiness. And you, do you have any idea?” “I’m terribly sorry, I do not. You are a philosopher with thirty years of experience. Do not reverse our roles.”59

NOTES 1. Isaac Asimov, “Reason” in I, Robot (New York: Bantam Books, 2004), 50–51. The short story Reason was written in 1941 and in 1950 the collection of short stories I, Robot, was published. 2. In the story, the human protagonists define the robot as “crazy.” 3. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Random House, 2016). 4. Said mentality has a beginning: 1983. This is the year that human beings thought that their limitations could be overcome. It is the same year in which “Time” magazine, in its usual selection of Man of the Year, did not use the image of a person but that of a computer, a machine. This was the year “mankind publicly denounced its defeat due to the complexity of its history, and the machine, made by man, was preparing to eclipse its own creator,” in Paolo Benanti, Postumano, troppo postumano: Neurotecnologie e human enhancement (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2017). Own translation. 5. The most striking example is the Pacific Trash Vortex in the Pacific Ocean. 6. See the pioneering study of Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) and Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). These books are the foundation of Animal Studies. 7. See, Britt Bousman and Bradley J. Vierra, eds., From the Pleistocene to the Holocene (Texas Univ. Press, 2012). 8. Paul Crutzen was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry together with Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina for their work on atmospheric chemistry. 9. The IGBP formed in 1987 to coordinate international research on global change. 10. The term has been used before by scholars such as Eugene Stoermer and Andrew Revkin. See Andrew Revkin, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992). 11. Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created The Anthropocene (Gretna: Pelican, 2017), 34. According to Amelia Moore, “For

For a New Idea of Innovation

149

some of the authors the Anthropocene is a complex time period of accelerated, human-dominated global change, for others it is a specific narrative framing of contemporary life and futures” in “The Anthropocene: A Critical Exploration” in Environment and Society: Advances in Research Vol. 6, No.1 (September 2015): 1–3. 12. Noah Heringman, “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene” Representations Vol. 129, No. 1 (February 2015): 56–85. The text also analyzes how the concept of deep time has been used in Siegfried Zielinski’s research on media studies. 13. Heringman, “Deep Time,” 56–85. 14. Lewis and Maslin, The Human Planet, 57. 15. See Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 16. Arne Joahan Vetlesen, The Denial of Nature: Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2015), 149. 17. Vetlesen, The Denial of Nature, 149. 18. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1982), 1. 19. See Leonardo Caffo, Fragile Umanità (Turin: Einaudi, 2017). 20. Interestingly, Mars is still considered enticing for both scientists and the public, as testified by the significant amount of fundings that a hypothetical expedition has received. 21. Born at the end of the 1940s, cybernetics boasts a wide interdisciplinary research programme, geared towards the unitary mathematical study of living organisms and, more generally speaking, natural and artificial modes of living. 22. See Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (New York: Anchor, 1997). 23. James Lovelock, Healing Gaia (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), 12. 24. Capra has successfully analyzed the difference between these two notions. He argues that the holistic stance lies in a static vision of totality, while an ecological stance is characterized by a more dynamic approach. See Capra, The Web of Life. 25. Jussi Parikka, “Transhumanism” in Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 439. 26. It is interesting to note Russian Cosmin, a trend that proposed an optimistic view of the boundless potential of human beings. The most prominent representatives of this trend were Nikolaj Fëdorov and Svetlana Semёnova. See, George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Boris Gorys, ed., Russian Cosmism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 27. Many artists have tried to overcome the transhumanist perspective. One of these is Stelarc, who claims that “it is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed, and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment.” Stelarc, “From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-Human Entities” in Virtual Futures:

150

Chapter 6

Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism, eds. Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassisy (London: Routledge, 1998), 117. 28. Nick Bostrom “A History of Transhumanist Thought” Journal of Evolution and Technology Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2005): 1–25. 29. Jarosław Czarnecki (Elvin Flamingo), Symbiotyczno !” tworzenia (Gdańsk: Akademia Sztuk Pi, 2014), 3. See also Ryszard Kluszczyński, Visual Revolutions: From the Electronic to Living Imagery, presented at The Fourth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections of Art, Science and Culture. 30. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 5. 31. Thacker, In the Dust, 5. 32. Thacker, In the Dust, 6. 33. Thacker, In the Dust, 158. 34. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 60. 35. Thacker, In the Dust, 158. 36. “Aerocene Manifesto. Aeronauts unite!,” https​:/​/ga​​ragem​​ca​.or​​g​/en/​​exhib​​ition​​ /tom-​​s​-sar​​aceno​​/mate​​rials​​/mani​​fest-​​aerot​​sena-​​aeron​​avty-​​soedi​​nyayt​​es​-ae​​rocen​​e​-man​​​ ifest​​o​-aer​​onaut​​s​-uni​​te, accessed on November 1, 2020. 37. “Aerocene,” https​:/​/ae​​rocen​​e​.org​​/page​​/2/​?f​​bclid​​=IwAR​​29Dm3​​z​_xVk​​ahhm2​​ F8pQt​​kyOh2​​tdeER​​twyX1​​feTnq​​Z​iuJE​​Rx2K3​​47fph​​GM, accessed on November 1, 2020. 38. Tomás Saraceno, “The Aerocene Community,” https://aerocene​.org​/contributors/, accessed on November 1, 2020. 39. Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (London: Bloomsburry, 2018). Not long ago Umberto Eco made a strict distinction between science, technology and magic. He argued that we needed to relinquish magic: “after centuries of enlightenment, we are still like Isidore: the newspapers will talk of our scientific conferences, but the image that emerges is doomed to be magical,” Umberto Eco, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, trans. by Alastair McEwen (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2007), 110. 40. In Hito Steyerl’s exhibition booklet, Power Plants. Exhibition held at the Serpentine Galleries, London from April 11, 2019 to May 6, 2019. 41. See Stefano Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior (New York: Atria Book, 2018). 42. Steina Vasulka, in a text by Auður Ólafsdóttir in the Catalogue of the Island Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale, 3. 43. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 38. 44. Felice Cimatti, Filosofia dell’animalità (Bari: Laterza, 2013), 150. Own translation. 45. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 55. 46. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 101.

For a New Idea of Innovation

151

47. Neri Oxman, “Design at the Intersection of Technology and Biology,” filmed March 2015 at TED2015, video, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ted​​.com/​​talks​​/neri​​_oxma​​n​_des​​ign​_a​​ t​_the​​_inte​​rsect​​ion​_o​​f​_tec​​hn​olo​​gy​_an​​d​_bio​​logy.​ 48. Restorative Design is a contemporary approach in interior design that focuses on the search for a new balance between material bodies and nature. The use of natural techniques and materials linked to traditional construction—such as wood, clay and lime—are combined with an aesthetic sensitivity oriented towards the development of harmony and inner peace. 49. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 29. 50. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 29. 51. See Ian Cheng: Emissaries Guide to Worlding (Walther Konig, 2018). 52. James Bridle, The New Dark Age (London: Verso Book, 2018), 10. 53. Richard G. Lipsey, Kenneth I. Carlaw and Cliford T. Bekar, Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-Term Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 54. Nicklas Bergman, Navigating the Tech Storm: The Business Impact of Technology Beyond the Hype (London: LID, 2018), 59. 55. Bergman, Navigating, 70. 56. César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 20. 57. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows, 101. 58. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows, 226. 59. Pascal Chabot, ChatBot le Robot (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016), 42. Own translation.

Chapter 7

“The Artist as Inventor” Focus

THE FUTURISTS: THE CASE OF FORTUNATO DEPERO (1919–1925) Futurism was immediately interested in using the tools and media that lay outside the classical languages of art, including incorporating technological media. In addition to the reknown manifestos La Radia1 (1933), which pursued the artistic possibilities of radio, and Manifesto of Futurist Cinema2 (1916), consider the words of Marinetti on “total theater,” which comprised of simultaneous actions that required the collective collaboration of “cinema, radio, the telephone, electric lights, neon, aeropainting, aeropoetry, tacticism, humorism and perfume.”3 Much remains to be analyzed from the point of view of Futurism, yet for our purposes the most fitting example is that of pioneer Fortunato Depero and his Complessi plastici mobili, created between 1919 and 1925. Conceived as theatrical works, Depero’s Complessi plastici mobili were an attempt to move beyond theater and painting. In such theatrical experiments, there are, in surprising anticipation with respects to other successive manifestations of this kind, spring-loaded devices taken from toys, as well as chemical and electrical mechanisms; but above all what should be noted is Depero’s manual talent. Through the use of wood, cardboard, steel plates and wires, he succeeds in giving life to these mobile plastic constructions in which the ludicspectacular component stands out. Depero also foresees the inclusion of records cut with human voices and films, thus integrating these various components in an extremely contemporary way.4

153

154

Chapter 7

These kinetic mechanical instruments envisaged the integration of film and electrical technologies; as such they constitute the first examples of technological synthesis between different artistic languages. The Complessi plastici viventi of 1918, also known as Quadri in moto, should also be included. Among those that were actually built there are Fiera and Panoramagico. Beyond being simple theatrical set designs, these artworks represent a new, dynamic artistic universe in its own right. In the words of Depero himself: The backstage rotating rainbow-ing on itself, the backdrop swiveling around iridescent multi-pivots, the furniture escaping and having a fist fight with each other or ganging up on the tenants to throw them out; the lamps and lanterns bombardedly clashing or foxtroting on the backdrop and the vortexes of the crowd; the sensational news and dramatic situations creating typographical scenarios, like luminous advertising walls, reverberating soundly in all the timbres of the megaphones of the heart and soul.5

WILLI BAUMEISTER’S MECANO (1921) The Mecano is a most fascinating invention that has been shrouded in mystery. Devised by Willi Baumeister, it consisted of a machine that created forms in time and space alongside sound: a machine that today would be defined as inbetween visual installation, theatrical set design, and sculpture. Given the lack of evidence—just a few notes and writings are what is left—it is difficult to understand what the Mecano truly was. For this reason, it is preferable to refer to those few lines written by Baumeister himself in 1921, which contain illuminating insights that are still of great interest today. In Baumeister’s own words: Mecano is a composition with time. It has no practical purpose as a machine. Its actual purpose is as an artistic development of energy in our time. The materials must be in harmony with the movements, which must be in harmony with themselves. Climaxes, fortissimi in the movements etc, pauses, noises, tonal series, total and symbolic illumination (light sources) are composed in a sequence which produces tension. To be distinguished are: e.g. cyclic movements, parallel movements, contrasting, eccentric and combined movements. In one sort of movement the mechanism is concealed; in another, a working machine itself produces the desired effect. Starting with color relief, a mecano was produced with a rearward conclusion, a canvas rolling across two vertical rollers, in front of which moving bodies and surfaces performed distinct actions. In a certain sense further development is a mecano starting from circular plastics with multilateral movements. The modern ‘play’ would be a mecano of greater size and

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

155

duration, real, plastic, dynamic, in contrast to abstract film. Experimental models of the most simple kind with changeable moving parts and easily regulated time measures are necessary, as two-dimensional sketches can be deceptive.6

The Mecano was a veritable attempt to go beyond the dynamism of forms, something not even abstract film was able to provide. Baumeister’s art represented a digression from the classical field of art and cinematic projections, edging toward a “truly plastic” dynamism of forms. This moved in parallel with the search for new possibilities of vision, which today is closely tied to the enquiries that are being carried out in terms of video installations and video environments. RAOUL HAUSMANN’S OPTOPHONE (1922–1934) It is the 1960s: 1960 to be exact. Hausmann is in Limoges, France, where he has been living in exile since the war. He does not own a television and has never been invited to a television show, yet he writes one. Fascinated by the electronic technology in television, which was just beginning to establish itself in those years, the German artist attempts to engage with it by writing A la recherche de Jean Arp a la teleconcretisation. Let’s take the description of this experience from Ina Blom, the first scholar to have critically revisited these documents: On the screen (one imagines the flickering and grainy black-and-white image of early television), Arp explains his point of view on the nature of art, which turns out to be one on the nature of nature, since as an artist Arp was famous for his refusal to recognize any distinction between natural and artificial objects. He saw such distinctions as simply the residue of a philosophical tradition that separates the material body from the “sparks of the spirit,” so that the material body is understood to be essentially passive, a “soma in coma,” without “étincelles,”or flickering. In the electronic realm of étincelles, however, the material body cannot be separated from the flickering sparks of electricity and ultimately of light itself. Arp’s body and Arp’s work are at one with an electronic nature.7

The main factor that inspired Hausmann since the beginning of his artistic career was the question of the relationship, or presence (PREsentismus), of the human in technology and vice versa. As the title indicated, Arp’s “concretions” become “teleconcretions”: “by this strange concept, Hausmann indicated the spatio-temporal dimension of such a process of self-differentiation, in which the presence of a singular being is multiplied: if presence is

156

Chapter 7

multiplied, it evokes times and spaces beyond the most immediate reach and touch of the concrete body.”8 It is right in the midst of these circumstances, from the famous photomontages of 1918,9 to the first posters in which gave space to the role of technology, and to the television program, that the theory of the Optophone came into being. Theorized by Hausmann in 1922, a model was constructed with engineer Broido in 1927 and finally patented in England (with patent no. 446.338) in 1934. The Optophone must be thought of as an entity in the making, not a completed one. Hausmann in fact changed the physical and conceptual structure of the object several times.10 These changes materialized over the course of three predominant stages. The first relates to the initial theorization of 1922—published in the first issue of Lissitzky and Ehrenbourg’s journal Vesc-Gegenstand-Objet—for which “using a selenium cell, the Optophone transforms induced light phenomena into sounds with the aid of a telephone switched into the current. With the appropriate technical equipment the Optophone can give every optical phenomenon its sound equivalent.”11 The telephone, a medium generally used for communicating, here becomes the vehicle for new imaginative possibilities. The second stage consists in the construction of the model after the encounter with Russian engineer Daniel Broido. At the time Broido was working on the construction of a “photoelectric calculator machine” for the AEG Society in Berlin. This meeting inspired Hausmann to make the Optophone a variant of the “photoelectric calculator machine.” The advent of Nazism would ultimately thwart this relationship together with the construction project. The third stage dates back to 1934, the year the patent was filed. The patent was requested for a “Device to transform numbers on photoelectric basis”:12 an instrument that resembled a computer or, at the very least, what was then called a calculator. Despite the correlations between the Optophone and various other research enquiries on the relationship between sound and images—Hausmann in particular will refer to those of Thomas Wilfred—the German artist had gone even further: “what Hausmann meant with optofonetism corresponds to the capacity of digital technology to convert text, fixed and moving images and sound into one universal code.”13 He had envisaged a device that transmuted and at the same time apprehended as a single entity sounds and images, forms and noises, the eye and the ear, and that attempted to find that point of convergence between two universes: a universal language constructed by interweaving technologies considered separate at the time. Hausmann advocated for sensory involvement vis-à-vis a new sensitive relation between human beings and technology. In an effort to develop a new

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

157

human sensoriality, he endeavored to make certain instruments available to art, the first of their kind, that would succeed in capturing the energy of new technological possibilities thus paving the way for those forms that would later emerge in the second half of the twentieth century: the television and the computer and their ensuing artistic interactions. Anticipating by a few years the interaction between artists and electronic technologies, Hausmann proposed a sensorial reconfiguration of the human sphere: a new sensoriality, divided between haptic and optic, modeled through our relationship with media. As he writes in 1921 in PREsentismus: “We demand electric, scientific painting!!! Sound waves, light waves and electric waves differ only in their length and breadth. [. . .] Thanks to electricity, we are able to transform our haptic emanations into mobile colors, sounds and a new music.”14 Hausmann’s insights and practices are an ideal setting for inquiries on the relationship between art, electronic technologies, and media. From the second half of the twentieth century to today—from Lucio Fontana to video art, from television art to media art, from “expanded cinema” to computer art—these never stopped conveying the movements and alterations in our sensoriality. EL LISSITZKY’S ELECTROMECHANIC VISION (1923) Since the very beginning, Lissitzky, famous for his aesthetic interpretation of space, saw in the interplay between art, technique, and technology new possibilities of creation, in an attempt to overcome the notion of “art” that had developed in the nineteenth century. For the Russian artist, space was where painting, architecture, theater, and engineering converged. Lissitzky himself explained his relationship with technology as a daily experience, stating: “My life is accompanied by never-before experienced sensations. When barely five years old the rubber tubes from an Edison phonograph are stuck in my ears. Aged eight, I am running after the first tramcar in Smolensk. All the farm horses bolt out of town to escape this work of the devil.”15 He will succeed in bringing these sensations to his artistic practice: “To counteract these bacilli from the age of the ichthyosaurs we have set our vaccine from the age of radio.”16 Summa of his conception of art was the proun (derived from the term ProUnovis, which means “for a new art”). Prouns were artistic environments, spaces of convergence between painting and architecture created for different settings and contexts: theaters, museums,17 town squares, or as containers for paintings.

158

Chapter 7

The combination between space and technique in the 1920s will transform into the union between space and new media, but also space and technology. This is demonstrated by a curious ten-point script on the idea of a​​ “new typography,” entitled The Typography Of Typography (1923), in which Lissitsky coined the term “electro-library.” It contained some interesting affirmations: point four, “The design of the book-space, set according to the constraints of printing mechanics, must correspond to the tensions and pressures of content”; or point seven, “The new book demands the new writer. Inkpot and quill-pen are dead”; and point eight, “The printed surface transcends space and time. The printed surface, the infinity of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.”18 Here the word “electro” enters Lissitzky’s vocabulary. It is precisely at this time that he starts deliberating on a “electromechanical vision.” It must be acknowledged that in those years many experiments and inquiries were being carried out in view of introducing theater to new expressive and technological forms. Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht included film sequences in their theatrical performances, so as to present a more educational and political theater. In the 1930s, Piscator wondered why in the development of theatrical technique should we not introduce the same courage and impetus necessary for the technical renewal of cinema when it leaped from silent cinema to one with sound, for broadcasting and television to be placed at the service of art or for a rocket to launch with a human crew?19

Statements such as these led up to the idea of Total Theater, conceived together with Walter Gropius, which in turn paved the way toward the establishment of new media in theatrical performances. The same can be said about Svodoba’s and, in Russia, Čiurlionis’s attempts to create light and musical effects—in the footsteps of Kandinsky—and, above all, Skrjabin’s Prometheus (1910). These were all attempts at introducing new expressive possibilities to theatrical performance thanks to the use of new techniques and technologies. In Russia, these were years of great creative turmoil, especially in relation to the spread of new media. In addition to the known cinematic experiments of Ejzenštejn and Pudovkin, and Vertov’s disconnected approach to images20 (1927), it also included poets and writers, such as Khlebnikov, who, in 1921, stated: “if formally radio has been the world’s ear, it is now become the world’s eyes for which there are no bounds.”21 In the midst of these experiments, Lissitzky had gone even further. What he imagined was not an extension of theatrical performance with the use of new media, nor did he envision new creative uses for single media, what he did was move beyond the theater walls, calling for an immersion into a new

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

159

technological environment. This encompassed an interplay of technologies that were placed in active environments—toward a new “electromechanical vision.” Such an experiment fell outside the parameters of the time and was a forerunner of video installations and video environments that from the 1960s onward will influence the entire history of art and cinema. The description of this project will be left to Lissitzky himself. In a written text from 1923, he explains: In an open square accessible from all sides, we build an armor: here is the mechanism of the show. This armor offers the figurines all possibilities of movement. Hence its single parts must be able to slide, revolve, extend, etc. The different heights must be able to change rapidly in succession. As a whole it is a skeleton construction, so as not to cover the game of moving figurines. The figurines themselves change disposition according to need and will. They slip, roll, rise high, go here and there crossing the armor. All parts of the armor and all the figurines are set in motion by means of electromechanical forces and devices and the central control unit is in the hands of one person. He is the director of the show. His place is in the center of the armor, by the control panel of all the energies. He directs all movement, sound and light. At the flick of a switch the sound system is turned on and the whole place may suddenly reverberate with the din of a railroad station, or the roar of the Niagara falls, or the pounding of a steel-rolling mill. The director gives the show objects a voice by speaking into a microphone connected to an arc-lamp, or other devices that transform his voice according to the character of the individual objects. A series of electric bulbs switch on and off. Light rays, diffused by prisms and reflectors, follow the movements of the figurines in the play. [. . .] The development of radio in recent years, that of the loudspeaker, film technique and lighting, together with some inventions that I myself have made in the meantime, all this makes the realization of these ideas much easier than what I had in mind in the 1920s.22

As Lissitzky asserts, the excerpt above describes a work conceived in Moscow between 1920 and 1921, inspired by the theater piece Victory Over the Sun by Kručënych. What is most interesting is that a pre-existing theatrical text, written and designed for classical theater, is used by Lissitzky as a non-binding pretext: the “electromechanical show”—as he calls it—has different uses and can be applied to various forms and artistic configurations. In an almost disinterested fashion, Lissitzky claims that the potentials of this new formation are endless: “I leave to others the further elaboration and application of the ideas and forms here exposed, and will move on to my next works.”23 In this apparent lack of interest lies a new artistic “format”: the invention of a new creative modality that will be “institutionalized” starting from the

160

Chapter 7

1960s onward in the form of video installations, immersive environments, video environments, and so on; technological installations become immersive live events in an attempt to uncover new ways to develop our visual and audiovisual possibilities. These are declarations that broaden the insights of the 1920s and precede the unfolding of events in St. Petersburg. Furthermore, these declarations developed parallel to Hausmann’s theory—recall that Hausmann’s theory of the Optophone was published in Lissitzky and Ehrenbourg’s journal, VescGegenstand-Objet—which is evoked in Lissitzky’s idea to connect a telephone to an arc lamp in the attempt to seek a new technological sensoriality, as expressed in Hausmann’s text. These efforts will permeate the entirety of the twentieth century and will continue to impose themselves in our current “enlarged” artistic universe— they constitute the backdrop to our every attempt to interpret our present. THOMAS WILFRED’S CLAVILUX: THE MEDIUM AS MACHINE By the beginning of the twentieth century, the machine was not only a characteristic feature of industrial technological development, as it had been by the end of the nineteenth century, but a characterizing element of artistic experimentation. It was precisely the machine and its “cinetic,” “functional,” and “automatic” properties that characterized the Clavilux ideated by Richard Lǿvestrǿm, also known as Thomas Wilfred. Wilfred was a Danish naturalized American citizen, who spent most of his life focusing on a very specific idea: the desire to create a new art of light. This idea came to Wilfred in 1905 at the start of his pictorial studies in Copenhagen, while carrying out the first experiments that involved a different notion of the use of electric light, symbol of the positivist progress of the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. Wilfred saw such progress as the possibility of creating what he called “Lumia”: a new art of light. There is a very self-explanatory image that can be used to explain Wilfred’s concept of “Lumia.” The artist is sitting on a chair on stage while playing the piano. At first glance, the image seems to be nothing more than an ordinary picture of a concert hall. At closer inspection, however, we can see that the instrument played by Wilfred is not a typical piano: the piano in the picture emits rays of light that travel and whose form is inscribed on a canvas placed on the opposite side of the stage. In reality, what we are looking at is the Clavilux, an instrument invented by Wilfred for real-time light concerts, a device essential for the production of Lumia.

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

161

Created between 1919 and 1921, the Clavilux’s first official debut took place in New York in 1922 and garnered great success. This gave Wilfred the opportunity to begin an actual tour in theaters across the United States and Europe. The Clavilux wasn’t merely a new medium for Wilfred, rather it was the fundamental instrument for the establishment of a new art—the eighth art, after cinema—which he called Lumia. For the artist-inventor, Lumia was a fully-fledged aesthetic concept that developed through instruments, machines, and methodologies. It was divided into two main theoretical aspects: Aesthetic Concept: the use of light as an independent art medium through the silent visual treatment of form, color, and motion in dark space with the object of conveying an aesthetic experience to a spectator. Physical concept: the composition, recording, and performance of a silent visual sequence inform, color, and motion, projected in a flat wide screen by means of a light-generating instrument controlled from a keyboard.24 This is a fundamental division in order to understand the almost platonic difference Wilfred made between the physical object of the Clavilux and the concept of “Lumia.” For Wilfred, reinventing the medium didn’t simply mean adding or modifying already existing mediums25 nor was it the act of technological experimentation. Rather than “re-inventing,” Wilfred was interested in “inventing,” or “creating from scratch”; taken from the Latin word inventiònem, invéntus, which means to find while investigating, to discover what is hidden or to uncover what could remain hidden. Thus, he employed art as an investigative tool into the mediums that mediate between us and what we conceive as “reality,” so as to understand the relationship between these three elements. Jean-François Lyotard spoke very clearly about this in 1975. Machinism, he argued, is “a trap, a device making it possible to reverse relations of force. The machine is therefore neither an instrument not a weapon, but a contrivance, which is and is not coupled to nature. It is because it does not operate without receiving and exploiting natural forces; and it is not, because it plays a trick on these forces.”26 Wilfred invented a medium, a machine—considering the fact that the technology he used was mechanical—in order to create a new artistic universe governed by light, an element that is captured and projected in real time. In an era of recorded cinematographic images, this becomes the pretext for a reflection on what the concept of medium means today, a time when the audiovisual is increasingly conceived as performance in real time—think of wall mapping, vjeing, projections during musical concerts, and so on.

162

Chapter 7

There is another image of Wilfred’s Clavilux that is particularly evocative for our discourse. It is 1930 and the artist-inventor is seated in front of a wooden box containing a TV screen. Also in this case, the set up looks just like an ordinary TV screen being kept, as was customary at the time, in a cupboard. However, the image shows Wilfred sitting with a keyboard—very similar to the one of modern-day computers—on his lap, and through the keyboard he is modifying the abstract forms visible on the screen. This is a portable Clavilux, the Lumia Box. After having developed the Clavilux for public performances, in the years of the spread and popularity of portable and domestic audiovisual devices, Wilfred’s interest turned toward the possibility of constructing entirely interactive and modifiable personal images. Although disconnected from the experimentalism of the avant-gardes of the 1920s, the machine is here viewed as creative potential, as an opening toward horizons which, in light of current interpretations, paved the way toward new historical and critical re-interpretations of the audiovisual and art. Surveying the medium as machine and machinism thus became one of the first instances of re-examination in the field of media; changing the components of the machine, the only way to introduce new experiential perspectives. MEDIUM AS MAP. MICHAEL NAIMARK’S ASPEN MOVIE MAP An interactive map, which can be navigated by touch screen—that sounds like Google Street View, but it is actually media artwork from the 1970s. Long before the internet was used and Google was founded, Michael Naimark, who was then studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), filmed the streets of Aspen, Colorado with a camera attached to a car, and processed the picture material into the first interactive map in history.27

Thus, Oliver Grau describes one of the most noteworthy examples, which still remains relatively unknown, of invention and creation of the medium through an artistic use to technology. In this case, the approach led to then unknown experiential dimensions, bearers of new social behaviors. Toward the end of the 1970s, a research team at MIT led by scientist Andrew Lippman, began a research project on the interactions between man and machine, aimed at experimenting with new forms of interactive map representations. The project took shape as the Aspen Movie Map, a mapping of the city of Aspen. The initial idea involved Micheal Naimark, at the time an artist-engineer, and two students and researchers, Peter Clay and Bob Mohl. It was an idea at the crossroads between art, science, and engineering, and it is important that we reconsider it for the purpose of this discussion. It relied

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

163

on teamwork, transversally intersecting the more common narratives of art and the audiovisual, bringing together “external” figures such as technicians and engineers. The above-mentioned persons of the MIT team, in fact, still remain largely unknown: almost all those involved in the history of these early experiments were first and foremost engineers or technicians. This is one of the main difficulties in the historical-theoretical framework that has been attempted here, the fact that “those responsible for this new visual art form were not artists at all, but technologists—and, even more discordantly, these creators were employed by the United States military. This was not exactly an ideal birthplace for the newest of visual art media.”28 The Aspen Movie Map team could definitely be considered within this narrative and in the attempt to devise a new experiential perspective through the re-modeling of the most prominent mediums of the time. It was a cultural approach closely interconnected with technological know-how. When the MIT team conceived of the idea of producing an interactive film map that gave users the possibility of moving within it, the only way for them to do it was to film the streets of the city and store the information on a support known as the videodisc, a technology that was replaced very quickly and that only few will remember. As Naimark recalls, The optical videodisc was a revolutionary technology then. Remember, if you can, 1978: 16mm film was the primary medium for all television news gathering; video editing was barely computerized; and storing moving pictures in computer memory was ten years away. The optical videodisc was capable of storing a half-hour of analog video (54,000 frames) and two-channel audio, with instant access to all the material via computer control. In early 1978, “ArcMac” received one of the first twenty-five prototype videodisc players from the MCA Corporation, and with it a contract to master three disks of its own.29

16mm film was used as a stop-frame camera, a motion picture camera that shot one frame after the other at regular intervals, every ten steps. In order to move, the camera had to be placed on top of a car, just like a camera car. Filming was done from ten in the morning to two in the afternoon, so as to minimize the changes in light. The MIT laboratory then processed all of the acquired materials. In this way, apparently distant and incompatible technologies, such as 16mm film, the videodisc and the first interactive interfaces, were repurposed for different uses. The relation between these technologies opened up unexpected possibilities: the combination of 16mm film, used at the time in low-budget films or for explicitly aesthetic cinematographic uses, and the first electronic video and computer technologies became the basis for a different geographical experience of the city.

164

Chapter 7

There is a substantial difference between the Aspen Movie Map and modern geolocation systems used for interactive maps such as Google Street View, but for a user in 1978 who for the first time could see a filmed and interactive version of their city it was all completely new. This marked the beginning of a new art poised somewhere in-between pure aesthetics and technological innovation with a large social impact, a different way of conceiving media. Today examples such as these require a more comprehensive analysis. BLIND MEDIUM: ART AND SOCIETY IN THE WORK OF ANTONI ABAD Since the 1970s, maps have been one of the characterizing features of our daily lives. The map presented here, however is different from Naimark’s, it is connected and geolocated. Maps are probably one of the elements that most define our time: they have become audiovisual and interactive, and allow us to be in the world in a different way. In everyday use, maps are functional, they help us reach places and find faster routes. They are useful, they work. Catalan artist Antoni Abad envisioned maps differently in his latest project Blind.Wiki and in the one that preceded it, megaphone​.ne​t. These are projects that thanks to the collaboration of technicians and engineers developed a specific application that incorporated the concept of inclusion and gave marginalized people the opportunity to express themselves. As the artist claims, BlindWiki is a location-based audio network where citizens who are blind or partially sighted use smartphones to share their findings by posting sound recordings. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen.30

The peculiarity of Abad’s project lies in its stratification. Blind​.wi​ki is a layered project, it is composed of ruins, archeological technologies of civilizations that in trying to adapt to the development of media believe themselves to be more or less civilized according to the stories created by the reinterpretations of their past. Yet it is not possible to fully understand Blind​.wi​ki if we do not analyze it in concomitance with the project that preceded it, megaphone​.ne​t. Like megafone​.ne​t, Blind​.wi​ki is not a singular work, but a “process.” The notion of “process,” as is well-known, has been a typifying aspect of both contemporary art and net​.ar​t. The novelty in Abad’s work lies in having structured not a single process, as the more classical works that dealt with

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

165

interactive communities, but a multitude of processes, which, stratified, created a network of “processes.” Blind​.wi​ki gives blind people the tools to navigate their environment in a different way. Participants post the obstacles they encounter every day on a pre-configured platform, the artist has no control of the operation, and this gives participants the freedom to structure the maps voluntarily based on their actions. Once the project is over, participants continue to use the application. It remains useful, it is possible to add one’s voice or one’s thoughts every day, based on the needs of that very moment. This is how participants keep the creation of an autonomous and self-generating universe alive. The artist can then move on to create another universe in another location: a new Blind​ .wi​ki project, separate but at the same time linked to the previous one. Over the years, Blind​.wik​i, like megaphone​.ne​t, will create a stratification of parallel universes, technologies, thoughts, narratives, and sensory and non-sensory experiences; intertwining universes, which are connected by the comprehensive map accessible via their website. What we are witnessing is a stratification of “processes”: technologies age, communities grow, and the map of the world changes perspective. A collective pattern emerges, showing us a different geography: the geography of those we do not see, of those who are too often ignored. Maps are imaginary environments, which preserve the way we represent our world and our homes. Today these representations are becoming increasingly present and technological. Walking, instead, as De Certau31 explains, is the action through time which makes us aware of maps. Walking is the act that connects the “imaginary” place of the map with the “physical” place of the body and the environment around us. Maps involve power, as has often been argued. Seen from this point of view, Blind​.wi​ki is an act of resistance that allows blind people to draw their own map through their own narrations, an act which we—the sighted people—are also part of. Thus, our imagination is encouraged to fight the geographical imaginary created by the predominant mappings. Let’s take a look at some of the keywords that emerge from the projects’ description, written by Abad himself. Here below are a few sentences: • “BlindWiki is a location-based audio network where citizens who are blind or partially sighted use smartphones to share their findings by posting sound recordings.” • “The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen.” • “The mobile app allows contributors to record site-specific audio and immediately post it to the BlindWiki platform.”

166

Chapter 7

• “BlindWiki offers an international platform where participants have the opportunity to share, analyse, discuss and compare the accessibility of their home towns, and to lobby for more or improved way-finding facilities. The project aims to raise social awareness about the urban landscape as perceived by people with vision impairment or loss.”32 The most significant phrases and words that immediately catch our attention are: “location-based audio network,” “smartphones,” “share their findings,” “repository for experiences,” “creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen,” “immediately,” “site-specific audio,” “international platform,” and “raise social awareness.” To fully understand these, as they may seem distant from one another, it is important to explain what the work/process involves. First of all, Blind​.wi​ki departs from the human body. The artist organizes workshops where participants learn how to use the application, get to know each other and start creating a community. These communities, Abad claims, are not only virtual but primarily created through the interrelationship between physical and virtual contact. The artist engages with future participants, he is in contact with them, talks to them, and understands their difficulties; he gets his hands dirty. Beyond the Net, the art and work of Abad is centered on people, understanding their flaws and the unexpected consequences of their exchanges: he teaches and learns together with them. Ideally, after this first act of involvement, participants have incorporated the tools they need and start posting their own content through their “cellular phones” directly on the platform created by the artist with the help of computer specialists. The platform also has a map, which structures the geography of the contents posted. The artist adapted the classic Google Maps to a particular design with a predominance of black and yellow. From Google’s white imagery to Abad’s black, the map is presented as the photographic negative of the classical geography that we see every day when we open Google Maps: a negative representation of what exists, the unseen acts as a backdrop to what is seen and looked at every day. Thence a power vacuum is created. The tools are in the hands of the blind, they have the power of redesigning the world from their point of view through “instant publication and sharing” of the obstacles encountered throughout their cities. A genuine “interactive community” is created, operating between the physical and the virtual. The application is specifically designed for the blind, who can upload content through “geolocated audio recordings.” The totality of sounds, words, and street noises create audio documents structured in a non-linear “narrative”: a rhizomatic narrative open to a thousand connections and listening possibilities. This “archive” of stories is frozen in the act of

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

167

registration: anyone can freely navigate around thoughts, ideas, and stories and discover a world normally hidden from view. This is the “sensory public cartography” that emerges from this project: a map open to all those, sighted and not sighted, who want to discover it and participate in building it. A public cartography that the artist observes from the outside, as the great demiurge who gave the starting input to the entire process. Abad is another important tassel among the many that could have been mentioned in the process of re-examination of the medium and its functions, as he steers the discussion to new considerations concerning aesthetics, philosophy, and sociality. Today the medium is continuously being re-examined from new perspectives. This is the lesson we can learn from artists that constantly interact with technology. Their work does not only take on aesthetic characteristics and is not only valuable in terms of art history; it seizes and directs the formation of new interdisciplinary networks that embrace studies on cinema, media, innovation, and technology, continuously revisiting them from a completely new perspective. Media art is precisely this: a new discipline that aids in looking at phenomena from a new perspective, one that intertwines the past with the present with a look to the future, investigating the basic concepts of what we are today. Revisiting the medium from this standpoint also helps in understanding new emerging economies, such as the increasingly close alliance between companies in the technological sector and artists, as well as new philosophies and social developments, confronting us with the great questions of our time. PORTABLE MEDIA It was a time of technological development and futuristic projections. Between 1962 and 1964, under the direction of engineer Perotto, Olivetti developed “Programma 101,” the first real portable computer. Its advertising brochure described it as a “desk-top computer [. . .] that can be kept at hand on a desk, accessible to anyone at any time.”33 The success it received in New York in 1965 paved the way for an idea of the computer as available to everyone and the notion of technology as mundane and interactive, affecting us and our bodies. At the time “portable” was a very common term. Television, just like the radio beforehand, was becoming increasingly popular in private homes and progressively influential in the public sphere. In order to “see,” it was necessary to buy—own—a television set. A few years later, in 1967, Sony

168

Chapter 7

presented the first Portapack:34 a video camera with a recorder that—unlike 16 and 8 mm film—allowed for the recording and real-time viewing of moving images on a magnetic strip. A much more unstable medium, yet one easier to manage. The progression of technology led to diverging theoretical analyses, famously summarized by Umberto Eco as “apocalyptic and integrated.”35 Jurgen Habermass’s36 (1961) and Richard Sennett’s37 (1977) theories on how new mass media increasingly oppressed the critical function of the public sphere are renown; as is Martin Heidegger’s theory38 (1953) of enframing (Gestell) and Blumenberg’s less “apocalyptic” theory39 (1966–1967). In particular, however, it was Marshall McLuhan40 that introduced “medium” as a key term in the analysis of the contemporary world, and within a few years it had started being used in academic and institutional settings. All the theories mentioned conceal a unidirectional view of the relationship between market, technology, and utility. The practices and theories of artists and scholars who in those very same years saw technology as an artistic and creative potential, not an oppressor, have been less examined. In these, the axis shifts from the medium as predetermined functional structure to the medium as openness toward plausible alterity. In addition to Abraham Moles and Max Bense, and alongside the Italians Gillo Dorfles, Umberto Eco, and even Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti,41 we could add René Berger and his hypothesis of a decade later, which combined theories on information aesthetics with notions of the body. Going beyond sociological issues, Berger argued that the media not only produced “new content for the notions of education, democratization, permanent training and information, but implemented creativity itself, for which culture ceases to be perceived and becomes a participatory action, an action that is created.”42 In fact, in those years, media art was becoming an unmistakably conspicuous phenomenon. This is validated by the fact that artists who remained outside of the technological realm became interested in joining the conversation. Take as an example Robert Rauschenberg, who, together with Robert Whitman and engineer Billy Klüver, founded “Experiments in Art and Technology” (EAT) in 1966. This organization, as Klüver wrote, operated as a “wedding agency”: “when an artist encounters a technical problem or wants to carry out a very complex technological project, it puts him in contact with an engineer who responds to his needs and is ready to help.”43 (See Chapter 4) The transition from contemporary art to media art is increasingly evident if we focus on the role of the artist. Artists progressively became associated with technological know-how. A growing number of artists, engineers, technicians, and more precisely, artist-engineers will, intentionally or not, become part of the history of art.

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

169

MAX BENSE’S INFORMATION AESTHETICS New forms demand new theories. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, this recurred in most aesthetic and film theories that engaged with the possibilities offered by the computer. In those years, many scholars were proposing new theories in an attempt to explain the new complex universe experienced by humans.44 Among these, the lesser known “information aesthetics” of German philosopher Max Bense—as well as that of French theorist Abraham Moles—is of great interest. Bense brought together mathematics, Shannon’s theory of communication, Wiener’s cybernetics, and Peirce’s semiotic theory. All these scholars hailed from the most disparate fields, external—even in this case—to what would’ve seemingly been more suited to the aesthetics of art and cinema. A noteworthy point of reference for Bense was George David Birkhoff, a “pure” mathematician who was curiously interested in mathematical aesthetics, and in 1933 had written Aesthetic Measure.45 This work—which today may seem quite naïve—influenced those theorists who in the 1960s laid the foundations for what will later be called “information aesthetics”: an aesthetic formed amidst the exchanges between artists and technicians in an attempt to forge a cultural environment where these experiences could be understood, also through the organization of exhibitions and events.46 Birkhoff’s idea was quite simple. He argued that “aesthetic measure” could be calculated mathematically, suffice to divide it by the other two elements that make up a work of art: order and complexity. This is one of the first examples of aesthetics being applied to what Birkhoff himself called the digital process, which can be described and measured statistically and mathematically. These insights aroused the interests of philosopher Max Bense, who, rather than appropriating the formula, was more fascinated by the idea that an artwork could be calculated mathematically. This fascination came from the awareness that new technologies, in particular computers, could engender new theories with a scientific basis. In Projects of Generative Aesthetics (Projekte Generativer Ästhetik) Bense writes: Any generative aesthetics, which leads to an aesthetic synthesis, must be preceded by analytical aesthetics. This process is responsible for the preparation of aesthetic structures based on the aesthetic information found in given works of art. In order to be projected and realized in a concrete number of material elements, the prepared aesthetic information must be described in abstract (mathematical) terms.47

At the time, most theories concerned with new electronic technologies focused on the idea of flow and the continuous changes in video and television.

170

Chapter 7

Instead, Max Bense saw in the automatization of the “mathematization of the world”—and not in its mechanization, as for Sigfried Giedion48—a new system which could truly represent contemporary civilization. A system which encompassed a new digital sensibility and rationality, the starting point for a new kind of aesthetics. TV WORKSHOPS: WGBH AND TV LAB In 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation donated $150,000 for the creation of a new center called TV Lab. A couple of years earlier, WGBH had begun to involve artists in the production of television programs, which later evolved into artistic residencies, in a program launched by producer Fred Barzyk. On the surface, these might simply appear as other experiences in the production of audiovisual programs at a time when television was developing rapidly, especially in the United States. In fact, back then the birth of smaller television broadcasters signified an attempt to free the market from the monopoly of leading broadcasters. This was above all an economic monopoly, as the budget for making television programs was very high. The experiences at WGBH and TV Lab were themselves part of this context, but in a completely different way. The particularity of these two networks did not just derive from the fact that they introduced an alternative to the cultural offer of mainstream television but that they involved artists in the conception and production of these programs. Even more interestingly, artists, like in artist residencies, had the opportunity to experiment with very expensive and hard to find technologies. Two of the most renown instances that emerged from this context were two synthesizers: the Paik/Abe Synthesizer made by Nam June Paik and engineer Shuya Abe, financed by WHGB, and the Rutt/Etra Synthesizer, financed by TV LAB. Artist residents included Ed Emshwiller, Douglas Davis, Dimitri Devyatkin, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Aldo Tambellini, Otto Piene, and many others. THE INVENTION OF THE SYNTHESIZER The synthesizer is one of the greatest examples of the interrelationship between art and technological innovation. It is the meeting point between artistry and engineering, teamwork and entrepreneurship, creativity and technical practicality.

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

171

The Paik/Abe Synthesizer was one of the first examples of this interrelation. Conceived by Korean artist Nam June Paik and engineer Shuya Abe between 1969 and 1971, its creation was financed by WGBH, in turn financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.49 Back in 1968, Paik was looking for a more direct way to control his effects, rather than relaying instructions to WGBH staff. According to David Atwood, a television director at WGBH, an early version of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer (1969) used a conglomeration of devices that included modified television sets, oscilloscopes and low-end cameras. In 1970, Paik and Abe returned from Japan with what became the studio version of the synthesizer.50

Nam June Paik wrote notes on the poetic use of his invention: “This will enable us to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.”51 The Paik/Abe synthesizer is certainly the most famous example of synthesizer to have originated from the collaboration with artists, but it is not the only one. The Beck Direct Video Synthesizer, conceived by engineer Steve Beck between 1970 and 1971, also allowed for real-time manipulation of colored images and sounds. What differentiated the Beck Synthesizer from other synthesizers was that it allowed the modification and creation of sounds even without the input of external images, “The visual design aesthetic model of the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer is constructivist in nature, not distortionist. Based on my personal visions it differed significantly from other video image processors and video synthesizers of the era, which were mostly based on colorizing or distorting images originating from TV cameras, rather than constructing it only from electrons.”52 Just like Paik, Beck didn’t simply want to invent a new machine, he envisaged a new poetic form, the “Absolute Television”: “My dream was to create an “absolute television” where the images came from within the technology, but were composed with artistic intentions, to try to “make something beautiful with television”—whatever that might mean. Perhaps I was exploring a corner of Videospace.”53 Another fundamental invention was the Rutt/Etra Synthesizer, conceived by two artist engineers, Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, which began with a $3,000 funding from TV LAB. Following in the footsteps of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer, the two artists improved the synthesizer’s technical possibilities, including the possibility of zooming in and allowing for greater possibilities in retouching the image. This invention was notably used by Steina and Woody Vasulka.

172

Chapter 7

W. BRADFORD PALEY, TEXTARC (2002) W. Bradford Paley is a hybrid character. He could be defined as an artist, a creative, and an interaction designer. His works have always occupied that liminal space between art, design, and graphic work—and his hybrid characteristics are very close to those of contemporary artists. This can be clearly demonstrated by the contexts in which his works have been displayed in Bradford Paley’s works have been exhibited in prestigious settings, such as the MOMA-Museum of Modern Art,54 but at the same time they have also been commissioned by companies working on Wall Street, and therefore outside the artistic field. It is from this perspective that we must consider his work TextArc from 2002. Bradford Paley aimed to create a device that could display an entire text on a single page. Thus, novels, essays, and short stories could be displayed and “read” at a single glance thanks to a single visual structure. The words were distributed in the text like a concentrical spiral, the ones that were most used were brighter and positioned toward the center. When a single word was touched, thin lines appeared that connected it to other words distributed on the screen, forming continuously new relationships. TextArc is a work that lies between design and contemporary art, between computer creation and art. It may be one of the first attempts to tackle the issue of big data, which was expanding at the time, in relation to the amount of information in written texts. It signaled a new path for data visualization and conceived of a new way to represent what is generally a linear narrative form. Just like the Tangible Video Browser (2002/3), a tactile interface for viewing digital videos created by Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media group at MIT, TextArc comprised of “instances of interfaces that function as media tools for enabling new forms of ‘reading’ text and video. In addition to these visually oriented projects, a broad range of (software and hardware) media tools functions as musical instruments, taking forms as diverse as sensor-equipped objects or Web-based interfaces for composing.”55 DEVICE ART In 2004 Machiko Kusahara, professor at Waseda University (Tokyo), launched the Device Art Project funded by the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) of ​​ the Japan Science and Technology Agency. The Device Art Project has three main characteristics: 1. The Device itself is content. The mechanism represents the theme of the piece. Content and tool are no longer separable.

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

173

2. Artworks are often playful and can sometimes be commercialized into devices or gadgets for use in everyday life. 3. Refined design and playful features are traced back to the Japanese tradition of appreciating tools and materials.56 Interestingly, the concept of Device Art is deeply rooted in Japanese culture, and it is no coincidence that Kusahara was inspired by the latest trends in Japanese media art, personified by Toshio Iwai, Nobumichi Tosa (Maywa Denki), and Kazuhiko Hachiya. Kusahara states that this approach “is actually a natural part of Japanese art. A long history of visual culture that developed independently from Western paradigms of art plays an important role in the Japanese art scene, offering artists wider possibilities for bringing their concepts outside of the context of museums and galleries.”57 Device Art sees the medium as an influencer of artistic practice, to such a degree that often hardware becomes the very content of the artwork. Experimenting on the medium and the creation of new devices becomes part of the fundamental characteristics of the artist’s creation. In Device Art, there is no difference between art, entertainment, and design: “What we call device art is a form of media art that integrates art and technology as well as design, entertainment, and popular culture. Instead of regarding technology as a mere tool serving the art, as it is commonly seen, we propose a model in which technology is at the core of artworks.”58 TENORI ON (2005) Tenori On is the most striking example of Device Art. At SIGGRAPH 2005, Japanese artist Toshio Iwai presented his new invention: a musical instrument consisting of a hand-held screen59 interface of 16×16 matrix LED switches embedded within a magnesium plastic frame, which created sound combinations and sound effects. The switches could be activated in any number of different ways to create sound. Two built-in speakers were located on top of the frame, as well as a dial and buttons that controlled the type of sound and beats per minute produced. It is important to note that Tenori On was built with the support of the Yamaha Corporation which, through artistic creation, acquired a new technological device to sell on the market. In 2011, they even made a software version for Apple iOS Devices, updated in 2013. At the same time, the artist created a new device for making electronic music and had the opportunity to work together with other artists and engineers, in particular Yu Nishibori. The Tenori On was used by Toshio Iwai in several prestigious artistic contexts, such as Ars Electronica, Sónar in

174

Chapter 7

Barcelona (2006), and Futursonica in Manchester (2006). Many other artists have used Tenori On, among these, Bill Bailey, Björk,60 film composer Hans Zimmer61 and Luis Delgado. Previously, Iwai had made steps in a similar direction when working at Nintendo for the creation of an interactive video game called Electroplankton. The game allowed players to interact with animated plankton and create music through one of ten different plankton themed interfaces. Tenori On is an excellent example of the interrelation between art and innovation, artists and technological development. JOAQUIN FARGAS, THE GLACIATOR As we have seen, today many artists help us reflect on a changing world and tackle the relationship between humans and their environment by addressing environmental, ecological, and climate-related issues. Yet we are not only interested in artists who “help us reflect” but also in those who invent new devices by experimenting with technologies and use novel ways to interpret the contemporary. This is the case of Glaciator, a work made by Argentine artist Joaquin Fargas. Fargas departs from the assumption, evinced by recent studies, that the melting of the polar ice caps caused by global warming could lead to much more devastating consequences than the increase in sea level. Melting ice also causes the re-emergence of ancient viruses that had long remained frozen. The Argentine artist responds to these two trends—the increase in sea level and awakening of ancient viruses—with a poetic action that aims to raise people’s awareness. Together with a team of experts, Fargas created a robot that compresses snow. Glaciator “works as an antivirus that compress the snow as it steps on it. Glaciator is a “Firn-Maker,” firn is an intermediate state between snow and glacier ice. This process contributes to accelerate the formation of the glacier. In addition, Glaciator is a virus-free robot: its computer system is protected itself by a strong antivirus.”62 Fargas is aware that his robot will never succeed in compacting all the snow of the polar ice caps, yet he argues that the work should be seen as a desperate, poetic action that tries to remedy the damage human beings have caused through technology. The image of Glaciator at work in the middle of nowhere in Antarctica is the image of us as humans who, like Sisyphus, are destined to repetitive actions for having sinned of arrogance and cunning. NOTES 1. Published in the Gazzetta del Popolo in 1933 and signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Pino Masnata.

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

175

2. Signed by Marinetti, Balla, Corra, Ginna, Chiti and Settimelli. 3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Il teatro totale per le masse” (1933) in Teoria e invenzione futurista. Manifesti. Scritti politici. Romanzi. Parole in libertà, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1968). Own translation. 4. Bruno Passamani, ed., Depero e la scena: Da “Colori” alla scena mobile. 1916–1930 (Turin: Mastano, 1970), 54. Own translation. For a new analysis of Depero’s work, see, Anthony White, Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 2019). For a general overview of Depero, see, Futurist Depero (Fundación Juan March, 2015). 5. Fortunato Depero, Libro imbullonato (Milan: Dinamo Azari, 1927). Own translation. 6. Catalogue of the exhibition Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910– 1975 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), 27. The exhibition took place at the Hayward Gallery in London between the 3rd of May and the 17th of June, 1979. For more information see Slavko Kacunko, Closed Circuit Videoinstallationen: Ein Leitfaden zur Geschichte und Theorie der Medienkunst (GRIN Verlag, 2008); and, in the Italian language, Paolo Bertetto, “Introduzione” in Il cinema d’avanguardia: 1919–1930 (Venice: Marsilio, 1997); and my book, Media Art. Prospettive delle Arti verso il XXI Secolo (Milano: Mimesis, 2016). 7. Ina Blom “The Touch through Time: Raoul Hausmann, Nam June Paik and the Transmission Technologies of the Avant-Garde” Leonardo Vol. 3, No. 34 (June 2001): 209. Blom presents an interesting comparison between Raoul Hausmann’s work and the work of Nam June Paik. 8. Blom, “The Touch,” 210. 9. “Almost in all the homes on this island—the island of Usedom, on the Baltic Sea, where Hausmann was on holiday in 1918—there was a colored lithograph hanging on the wall, depicting the image of a grenadier with barracks in the backdrop. To make this kind of military memory more effective and personal, in many homes the original face of the grenadier had been replaced with the photograph of a family member who had been or was a soldier. This is what prompted Hausmann to compose “paintings” made entirely out of clipped photographs. Back in Berlin he set about his work, using photos in print and film, and shared this discovery with his Dadaist friends in the capital. But this is Hausmann’s version,” Mario De Micheli, Le avanguardie artistiche del Novecento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988), 164. John Heartfield had already made photomontages in 1914. 10. Moholy-Nagy will compare Hausmann’s theory to that of Walter Brinkmann. According to Moholy-Nagy, the latter, stimulated by Hausmann’s theories, will attempt to construct a similar machine on a scientific basis, cf. László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), 20. 11. Statement made by Hausmann, quoted in Marcella Lista, “Raoul Hausmann’s optophone: universal language and the intermedia” in The Dada seminars, eds. Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2005). 12. The patent, along with other precious documents, was republished in Jacques Donguy, “Machine Head: Raoul Hausmann and the Optophone” Leonardo Vol. 34, No. 3 (2001): 217–220.

176

Chapter 7

13. Donguy, “Machine Haed,” 220. 14. Raoul Hausmann, “Manifesto of PREsentism” (1920), in Manifesto. A Century of Isms, ed. Marie Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 168. 15. El Lissitzky, “The Film of El’s Life” in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), 324–325. 16. Lissitzky, “The Film.” 17. Worthy of note is the proun, extremely avant-garde for its time, designed by Lissitzky for the new Hannover Museum, conceived by Alexander Dorner. For a discussion on Dorner’s work, see Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond “Art” (New York: New York City Press, 1958). 18. First published in Merz, edited and founded by Kurt Schwitterz, July 4, 1923. Republished in El Lissitzky, “The Typography of Typography” in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), 355. Compare these statements with those made by Ejzenštejn in 1929 concerning The Spherical Book, as reported by Giorgio De Vincenti in his essay “Il testo a-specifico e l’agire” (2007), in Dentro L’analisi Giulia Carluccio and Federica Villa, eds. (Turin: Kaplan, 2008). 19. Quoted in Anna Maria Monteverdi “Il laboratorio teatrale delle avanguardie” in Le arti multimediali digitali, eds. Andrea Balzola and Anna Maria Monteverdi (Milan: Garzanti, 2004), 83. Own translation. 20. See Dziga Vertov, “Kinopravda e Radiopravda” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, eds. Kevin O’Brien and Annette Michelson (Barkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985). 21. Bulat M. Galayev, “The Fire of “Prometheus”: Music-Kinetic Art Experiments in the USSR” Leonardo Vol. 21, No.4 (1988): 384. 22. El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 87. 23. Lissitzky, Russia, 137. 24. Thomas Wilfred, “Light and the Artist” [1947] in, Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux, ed. Michael Betancourt (Borgo Press, 2006), 16. 25. On “reinventing the medium” see Rosalind Krauss “Reinventing the Medium” Critical Inquiry Vol. 25 No. 2 (Winter 1999), 289–305. 26. Jean-François Lyotard, “Considerations on Certain Partition-Walls as the Potentially Bachelor Elements of a Few Simple Machines” in Le Macchine Celibi— The Bachelor Machine, ed. Marc Le Bot (Venice: Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, 1975), 98. 27. Oliver Grau, “Our Digital Culture threatened by Loss” The World Financial Review (2014): 42. 28. Grant Taylor, “The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism, of Early Computer Art” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, eds. di H. B. Higgins and D. Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 17. From the same author, When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 29. Micheal Naimark “Aspen the Verb: Musings on Heritage and Virtuality” in Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, special issue on Virtual Heritage (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 46. 30. www​.blind​.wiki, accessed on 31 July 2019.

“The Artist as Inventor”: Focus

177

31. Michel De Certau, The Practice of Everyday Life [1980] trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 32. “Blind​.wi​ki,” https://blind​.wiki/, accessed on October 8, 2019. 33. Vittorio Marchis, Storia delle macchine (Bari: Laterza, 2010), 297. Own translation. 34. In fact, it seems that in 1965 the first Portapack was not yet truly portable, as it did not run on batteries and was so large that it required transportation. Only in 1967 did the Portapack become truly portable, thus questioning the myth by which Nam June Paik was the first to use the Portapack in 1965. See, Tom Sherman, The Premature Birth of Video Art, available on http:​/​/www​​.expe​​rimen​​taltv​​cente​​r​.org​​/site​​s​ /def​​ault/​​files​​/hist​​ory​/p​​df​/Sh​​erman​​ThePr​​ematu​​reBir​​thof​V​​ideoA​​rt​_25​​61​.pd​​f, accessed on May 15, 2019. 35. See Umberto Eco, Apocalypse Postponed: Essays by Umberto Eco, ed. Robert Lumley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 36. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 37. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 38. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: New Garland Publishing, 1977). 39. See Hans Blumenberg, Geistesgeschichte der Technik (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 2009). 40. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964); René Berger, La mutation des signes (Paris: Denoël, 1972); and Jean Cazeneuve, L’homme téléspectateur (Paris: Denoël, 1974). 41. Carlo L. Ragghianti, “La televisione come fatto artistico” in Mercurio, n. 8, 1955, republished in Carlo L. Ragghianti, Arti della visione. I. Cinema (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). 42. René Berger, La téléfission, alerte à la télévision (Paris: Casterman, 1976). Own translation. 43. Denys Riout, L’arte del ventesimo Secolo, 311. Own translation. Among the various events organized by this organization, perhaps the most significant is Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering, which was held from the 13th to the 23rd of October 1966 in the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory building. Such event was an opportunity for artists and engineers to meet and organize performative events. 44. To mention just a few: Youngblood’s notion of the Noosphere in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970); or the theories of René Berger as expressed in René Berger, La mutation des signes (Paris: Denoel, 1972) and Art et Communication (Paris: Casterman, 1972); as well as Abraham Moles’s theories in Art et Ordinateur (Paris: Casterman, 1970). 45. See George David Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933). 46. Among the most renowned events, Cybernetic Serendipity in London (1968), Tendencije 4 in Zagreb (1969), and the computer art section at the 1979 Venice Biennale.

178

Chapter 7

47. Max Bense as cited in Christoph Klütsch, “Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School” in Higgins and Kahn (eds.), Mainframe, 71. 48. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). 49. The Rockefeller Foundation financed many artistic projects and played a very important role in the history of video art of the 1960s and 1970s. 50. Mona Jimenez “Electronic Video Instruments and Public Sector Funding” in The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, eds., Kathy High, Sherry Miller Hocking and Mona Jimenez (Bristol: Intellect, 2014), 117. 51. Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 2010), 152. 52. Stephen Beck, “Beck Direct Video Synthesizer,” National Center for Experiments in Television Exhibition, September 14–November 15, 2000 at the Berkeley Art Museum. http:​/​/peo​​ple​.w​​csu​.e​​du​/mc​​carne​​yh​/fv​​a​/B​/B​​eckDi​​re​ctV​​ideo.​​ html, accessed on October 14, 2019. 53. Beck, Beck Direct Video Synthesizer. 54. His works were part of the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, curated by Paola Antonelli. 55. Christiane Paul and Jack Toolin, “Impulse-Tools” in The Emergence of Video Processing Tools, eds., Sherry Miller Hocking, Mona Jimenez and Kathy High (Chicago: Intellect 2014), 76. 56. Hiroo Iwata, What is Device Art? in http://www​ .deviceart​ .org/, accessed October 14, 2019. 57. Machiko Kusahara, “Device Art: A New Form of Media Art from a Japanese Perspective,” Intelligent Agent Vol. 6, No. 2 (2006): 2. See also Sarah M. Schlachetzki, Fusing Lab and Gallery: Device Art in Japan and International Nano Art (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012). 58. Kusahara, “Device Art,” 3. 59. Bill Bailey used this instrument in his live performances including his 2009– 2010 world tour. 60. Björk used the Tenori On for her live performance of the song “Who Is It” during her Voltaic tour. 61. Used at the premier of The Dark Knight. 62. Joaquin Fargas, Glaciator. https​:/​/ww​​w​.joa​​quinf​​argas​​.com/​​en​/ob​​ra​/gl​​​aciat​​or/, accessed on October 14, 2019.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkeimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002. Albera, Francois, Marta Braun and André Gaudreault, eds. Arrêt sur image et fragmentation du temps / Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time. Lausanne: Éditions Payot Lausanne, collection “Cinéma,” 2002: 351. Amaducci, Alessandro. Computer grafica: Mondi sintetici e realtà disegnate. Turin: Kaplan, 2010. Arcagni, Simone. L’occhio del Novecento. Turin: Einaudi, 2016. Aumont, Jacques. L’oeil interminable: cinéma et peinture. Paris: Editions Séguier, 1989. Balzola, Andrea and Anna Maria Monteverdi. Le arti multimediali digitali. Milan: Garzanti, 2002. Bann, Stephen, ed. The Tradition of Constructivism. New York: Viking, 1974: 18–20. Barjavel, René. Cinéma Total. Paris: Donoël, 1944. Battcock, Gregory, ed. The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology. New York: Dutton, 1967. Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1947. Bazzichielli, Tatiana. Networking: The Net as Artwork. Digital Aesthetics Research Center, 2008. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. San Francisco: University of California Press, 1982. Bellour, Raymond. “Art of Memory,” Between the Images. Zurich: JRP, 2007. Belting, Hans. Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science. Belknap Press, 2011. Benanti, Paolo. Postumano, troppo postumano: Neurotecnologie e human enhancement. Rome: Castelvecchi, 2017. Benayoun, Maurice. The Dump, 207 Hypotheses for Committing Art. France: Fyp éditions, July 2011.

179

180

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland and others. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Bense, Max. Aesthetica. 4 Volumes 1954–1970. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974. Bense, Max. The Projects of Generative Aesthetics. Projekte Generativer Ästhetik, 1965. Berger, René. Art et Communication. Paris: Casterman, 1972. Berger, René. “La problématique de la vidéo dans le monde contemporaine,” L’art vidéo 2980–1999: Vingt ans du VideArt Festival, Locarno, Vittorio Fagone, ed. Milan: Mazzotta, 1999. Berger, René. La téléfission, alerte à la télévision. Paris: Casterman, 1976. Berger, René. Téléovision, le nouveau Golem. Lausanne: Iderive, 1991. Berghaus, Gunther. “Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst,” Futurism and the Technological Imagination, Gunther Berghaus ed. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2009. Bergman, Niklas. Navigating the Tech Storm: The Business Impact of Technology beyond the Hype. London: LID, 2018: 59. Bernardi, Sandro. L’ avventura del cinematografo: Storia di un’arte e di un linguaggio. Venice: Marsilio, 2007. Berry, David M. Critical Theory and the Digital. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Bertetto, Paolo. Il cinema d’avanguardia. Venice: Marsilio, 1983. Bertetto, Paolo and Sergio Toffetti, eds. Cinema d’avanguardia in Europa: Dalle origini al 1945. Milan: Il Castoro, 1996. Birkhoff, George David. Aesthetic Measure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Biro, Matthew. Dada Cyborg. Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009. Bittanti, Matteo. Giochi video: Performance, Spettacolo, Streaming. Milan: Mimesis, 2017. Bittanti, Matteo and Quaranta, Domenico. Gamescenes: Art in the Age of Videogames. Monza: Johan & Levi, 2009. Blom, Ina. “The Touch through Time: Raoul Hausmann, Nam June Paik and the Transmission Technologies of the Avant-Garde,” Leonardo Vol. 3, No. 34 (June 2001): 209. Blumenberg, Hans. Geistesgeschichte der Technik. Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 2009. Blumenberg, Hans. Storia dello spirito della tecnica. Translated by Raffaele Scolari and Bruno Simona. Milan: Mimesis, 2014: 16. Bolter, Jay D. Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bostrom, Nick. “A History of Transhumanist Thought,” Journal of Evolution and Technology Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2005): 1–25. Bousman, Britt and Bradley J. Vierra, eds. From the Pleistocene to the Holocene. Texas Univ. Press, 2012.

Bibliography

181

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013: 60. Bridle, James. The New Dark Age. London: Verso Book, 2018. Broeckmann, Andreas. Bandbreite—Medien zwischen Kunst und Politik. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2015. Broeckmann, Andreas. Machine Art in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Broeckmann, Andreas and Yuk Hui. 30 Years After Les Immatériaux. Meson Press eG, 2015. Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota, 1984. Burns, Russell W. Communications: An International History of the Formative Years. London: The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004. Caffo, Leonardo. Fragile Umanità. Turin: Einaudi, 2017. Cage, John. A Year from Monday. Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1963: 51. Campagna, Federico. Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. London: Bloomsburry, 2018. Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor, 1997. Carluccio, Giulia and Federica Villa, eds. La post-analisi: intorno e oltre l’analisi del film. Turin: Kaplan, 2005. Carlyle, Thomas. “The Signes of the Time,” A Carlyle Reader, G. B. Tennyson ed. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984: 37. Carocci, Enrico. Attraverso le immagini: Tre saggi sull’emozione cinematografica. Rome: Bulzoni, 2012. Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 2000): 12–18. Casetti, Francesco. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. Columbia University, 2015. Catanese, Rossella, ed. Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-Garde Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press. Cateforis, Duval, Steiner, eds. Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration With Science and Technology in the Long 1960s. Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2008. Catricalà, Valentino. Media Art: Prospettive delle arti verso il XXI secolo. Milano: Mimesis, 2016. Catricalà, Valentino, ed. Media Art: Towards a New Definition of Arts in the Age of Technology. Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2014. Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Cazeneuve, Jean. L’homme téléspectateur. Paris: Denoël, 1974. Celant, Germano. Offmedia. Bari: Dedalo, 1977. Chabot, Pascal. ChatBot le Robot. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016: 42. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong and Thomas W. Keenan, eds. New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2015. Cimatti, Felice. Filosofia dell’animalità. Bari: Laterza, 2013: 150. Connor, Michael, Aria Dean and Dragan Espenschied, eds. The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology. New York: Rhizome, 2019.

182

Bibliography

Cottington, David. The Avant-Garde: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Couchot, Edmond. Image: De l’optique au numérique. Paris: Hermes, 1988. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Crispolti, Enrico. Extra Media: Esperienze attuali di comunicazione estetica. Turin: Studio forma, 1978. Crispolti, Enrico, ed. Fontana: Catalogo generale. Milan: Electa, 1986. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Applications of Flow in Human Development and Education: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014 Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály. Creative Management and Development. London: Sage, 2006. Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Cubitt, Sean. Digital Aesthetics. New York: Sage, 1998. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Cubitt, Sean. The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Cubitt, Sean and Paul Thomas, eds. Relieve: Relive: Media Art Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Czarnecki, Jarosław. (Elvin Flamingo), Symbiotyczno !” tworzenia. Gdańsk: Akademia Sztuk Pi, 2014: 3. David, Paul A. “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY” The American Economic Review 75 no. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1985): 332–337. Davis, Martin. The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012. De Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. de Kerckhove, Derrick. Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business. Utrecht: Bosch & Keuning, 1991. De Maria, Luciano, ed. Teoria e invenzione futurista. Manifesti. Scritti politici. Romanzi. Parole in libertà. Milan: Mondadori, 1968. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Fredy Perlman. Detroit: Black & Red Press, 1970. Debray, Regis. Vie et mort de l’image: Une histoire du regard en Occident. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Depocas, Alain, Jon Ippolito and Caitlin Jones, eds. Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2003: Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Bibliography

183

Dikovitskaya, Margaret. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Dodgson, Mark, Gann, David M. and Nelson Phillips. The Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014. Dorfles, Gillo. Il divenire delle arti. Milan: Bompiani, 1959. Dorfles, Gillo. Simbolo, comunicazione, consumo. Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Dorner, Alexander. The Way Beyond “Art.” New York: New York City Press, 1958. Dubois, Philippe. “Il video pensa quello che il cinema crea. Annotazioni sulle opere video e televisive di Jean-Luc Godard,” Video d’autore 1986–1995, V. Valentini, ed. Rome: Gangemi, 1995. Dubois, Philippe, Frédéric Monvoisin and Elena Biserna, eds. Extended Cinema. Pasian di Prato, Udine: Campanotto, 2010. Duguet, Anne-Marie. “Dispositifs,” Communication No. 48 (1988) Duguet, Anne-Marie. Vidéo, la mémoire au poing. Paris: Hachette, 1981. Durlauf, Steven N., David Lane and W. Brian Arthur, eds. The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II. Westview Press, 1997. Eugeni, Ruggero. La condizione postmediale: Media, linguaggi e narrazioni. Brescia: La Scuola, Brescia, 2015. Eugeni, Ruggero. Semiotica dei media: Le forme dell’esperienza. Rome: Carocci, 2010. Eugeni, Ruggero and D’Aloia, Adriano, eds. Teorie del cinema: Il dibattito contemporaneo. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2017. Fishwick, Paul. “An Introduction to Aesthetic Computing,” Aesthetic Computing, Paul A. Fishwick, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Floridi, Luciano. The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford Univ. Press, 2014: 138. Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Francastel, Pierre. Peinture et société: Naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique de la Renaissance au Cubisme. Lyon: Auidin, 1951. Frederick C. Bakewell. Electric Science: Its History, Phenomena, and Applications. London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853. Galayev, Bulat M. “The Fire of “Prometheus”: Music-Kinetic Art Experiments in the USSR,” Leonardo Vol. 21, No.4 (1988). Gallizio, Pinot. “Manifesto on Industrial Painting for a Unitary Applicable Art,” Pinot Gallizio—The Laboratory of Writing, Giorgina Bertolino, Francesca Comisso and Maria Teresa Roberto, eds. Roma: Charta, 2005. Gardner. Howard. Five Minds for the Future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006. Gardner, Howard. Five Minds for the Future. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2009. Gardner, Howard. Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Garroni, Emilio. Creatività. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2010. Garroni, Emilio. Immagine, linguaggio, figura: Osservazioni e ipotesi. Roma: Laterza, 2006.

184

Bibliography

Gazzano, Marco M. Kinema: Il cinema sulle tracce del cinema. Roma: Exorma, 2014. Gazzano, Marco Maria. Steina & Woody Vasulka: Video, media e nuove immagini nell’arte contemporanea. Rome: Farenheit 451, 1995. Gere, Charlie. Art, Time and Technology. London: Berg, 2006. Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Grasso, Aldo. Prima lezione sulla televisione. Bari: Laterza, 2011. Grau, Oliver. Media Art Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Groys, Boris, ed. Russian Cosmism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Hagener, Malte. Moving Forward, Looking Back. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2007. Halsall, Francis. Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon. Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Random House, 2016. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016: 55. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Harris, Craig. The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Hausmann, Raoul. “Manifesto of PREsentism” (1920), Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Marie Ann Caws, ed. Univ. of Nebraska, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: New Garland Publishing, 1977. Hein, Birgit and W. Herzogenrath. Film als Film, 1910 bis heute, Hatje Cantz, Stockholm 1977; Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910–1975 exhibition catalogue at the Hayward Gallery, Londra, May–June 2017, 1979. Henry, Jane, ed. Creative Management and Development. London: Sage, 1991. Herath, Damith and Christian Kroos, Stelarc, eds., Robots and Art: Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis. Berlin: Springer, 2016. Heraud, Jean-Alain, Fiona Kerr and Thierry Burger-Helmchen. Creative Management of Complex Systems. London: ISTE-Wiley, 2019. Herbert, Stephen. A History of Pre-Cinema. Volume 1. London: Routledge, 2000.

Bibliography

185

Heringman, Noah. “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” Representations Vol. 129, No. 1 (February 2015): 56–85. Hertz, Garnet D. and Jussi Parikka. “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” Leonardo Vol. 45, No.5 (October 2012): 424–430. Hewitt, Andrew. Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-garde. California: Stanford University Press, 1993. Hidalgo, César. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. New York: Basic Books, 2015: 20. Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. High, Kathy, Miller Hocking, Sherry and Jimenez, Mona, eds., The Emergence of Video Processing Tools. Chicago: Intellect, 2014. Huhtamo, Erkki. “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: Toward an Archaeology of Electronic Gaming,” Handbook of Computer Games Studies, Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005: 1–21. Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusion in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Huhtamo, Errki and Jussi Parikka. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Hultén, Pontus. The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. New York: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1968. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jana, Reena. Mark Tribe. New Media Art. Koln: Taschen, 2006. Kac, Eduardo. Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Kac, Edward. “Foundation and Development of Robotic Art,” Art Journal Vol. 56, No. 3 (1997): 67. Kahn, Douglas, ed. Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Kaplan, Jerry. Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016: 7. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Kittler, Friedrich A. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997. Kittler, Friedrich A. Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Kluszczyński, Ryszard. Visual Revolutions: From the Electronic to Living Imagery. Presented at The Fourth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections of Art, 2017. Kolke, Robert, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Krauss, Rosalind. A Voyage on the North Sea. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.

186

Bibliography

Krauss, Rosalind. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Kwastek, Katja. Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Lafargue, Paul. The Right To Be Lazy. Translated by Charles Kerr. Auckland: The Floating Press, 2012. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993: 38. Leuzzi, Laura and Partridge, Steve. Rewind Italia. John Libbey Publishing, 2015. Leuzzi, Laura, Shemilt, Elaine and Partridge, Stephen. EWVA: European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s. John Libbey Publishing, 2019. Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A. Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created The Anthropocene. Gretna: Pelican, 2017. Lipsey, Richard G., Kenneth I. Carlaw and Cliford T. Bekar. Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-Term Economic Growth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lischi, Sandra and Silvia Moretti, ed. Gianni Toti o della poetronica. Pisa: Ets, 2012. Lissitzky, El. “The film of El’s Life,” El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968. Lovelock, James. Healing Gaia. New York: Harmony Books, 1991: 12. Lumley, Robert, ed. Apocalypse Postponed: Essays by Umberto Eco. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Lynch, Kevin M. and Frank C. Park. Modern Robotics. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017. Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Acinemas,” Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Maldonado, Tomás. Tecnica e cultura. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. Mancuso, Marco. Arte, tecnologia e scienza: Le art industries e i nuovi paradigmi di produzione nella new media art contemporanea. Milan: Mimesis, 2018. Mancuso, Stefano. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior. New York: Atria Book, 2018. Mann, Leon and Janet Chan. Creativity and Innovation in Business and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 2011. Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archeology of the Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. Manovich, Lev. AI Aesthetics. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019. Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Mattos, Jay E. Introduction to Net Art. Createspace Independent Pub, 2015. McCray, W. Patrick. Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.

Bibliography

187

McDowell, Kenric and Ben Vickers, eds. Belief in AI: Designing Tomorrow’s Intelligence. Acto of conference, Dubai Design Week. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Meigh-Andrews Chris. A History of Video Art. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Meneguzzo, Marco. Arte programmata cinquant’anni dopo. Monza: Johan & Levi, 2012: 45. Menna, Filiberto. “Attualità e utopia dell’arte programmata,” Film Selezione No.15– 16 (January–March 1963). Meyr, Albert, ed. Pietro Grossi: Avventure con suono e segno. Florence: Associazione Pietro Grossi, 2011. Michaud, Yves. L’Art à l’état gazeux: essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique. Paris: Stock, 2003. Milne, E-J, Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange, eds. Handbook of Participatory Video. New York: AltaMira Press, 2012. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 1998. Mitchell, W. J. T. Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: Uni. Chicago Press, 2015. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994: 16. Mitchell, William J., Inouye, Alan S. and Blumenthal, Marjory S. eds. Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity. Washington: The National Academies Press, 2003. Moholy-Nagy, László. Painting, Photography, Film. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019: 20. Moles, Abraham A. Art et ordinateur. Paris: Casterman, 1971. Moles, Abraham A. Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique. Paris: Flammarion, 1958. Molina, Roger A. “A Forty-Year Perspective on Aesthetic Computing in the Leonardo Journal,” Aesthetic Computing, Paul A. Fishwick, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Montani, Pietro. Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva. Milano: Cortina, 2014. Montani, Pietro. Tre forme di creatività: tecnica, arte, politica. Napoli: Cronopio, 2018. Morra, Joanne and Marquard Smith, eds. Visual Culture: What is visual culture studies?. New York: Routledge, 2005. Munari, Bruno. Design as Art. Translated by Patrick Creagh. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Nadar, Félix. When I was a Photographer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. NESTA, “The Fusion Effect: The Economic Returns To Combining Arts And Science Skills,” Last modified June 14, 2016. Niebisch, Arndt. Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde. New York: Palgrave MaCMillian, 2012.

188

Bibliography

O’Brien, Kevin and Annette Michelson, eds. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Barkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985. O’Pray, Michael. Avant-garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions. London: WallFlower, 2003. O’Regan, Gerard. A Brief History of Computing. Berlin: Springer, 2012. Pareyson, Luigi. Estetica: Teoria della Formatività. Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1954. Pareyson, Luigi. Truth and Interpretation. New York: Suny Press, 2014. Parikka, Jussi. “Transhumanism,” Posthuman Glossary, Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, eds., New York: Bloomsbury, 2018: 439. Parikka, Jussi. What is Media Archaeology. London: Polity, 2012. Parikka, Jussi, What is Media Archaeology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Paul, Christiane. A Companion to Digital Art. Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Peacock, Kenneth. “Instruments to Perform Color-Music: Two Centuries of Technological Experimentation,” Leonardo Vol. 21, No. 4. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Penny, Simon. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Perniola, Mario. Il sex-appeal dell’inorganico. Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Petersen, Stephen. Space-age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-garde. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Pizzi, Katia. Italian Futurism and the Machine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Pugliese, Marina. Monumenti effimeri: Storia e conservazione delle installazioni. Milan: Electa, 2009. Quaranta, Domenico. Beyond New Media Art. Brescia: Link Center, 2013. Rabbito, Andrea. L’onda mediale: Le nuove immagini nell’epoca della società visuale. Milan: Mimesis, 2015. Ragghianti, Carlo L. Arti della visione: I. Cinema. Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera. London: WallFlower, 2009. Ray, Michael L. and Myers, Rochelle. Creativity in Business. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Reichardt, Jasia. Cybernetic Serendipity the Computer and the Arts. London: Studio International Special Issue, 1968. Revkin, Andrew. Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. New York: Abbeville Press, 1992. Riout, Denys. Qu’est Ce Que L Art Moderne. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2009. Robins, Kevin. Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision. New York: Routledge, 1996. Rodowick, David Norman. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham: Duke University, 2001.

Bibliography

189

Rodowick, David Norman. The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007. Rosen, Margit. A Little-Know Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International. Karlshruhe/ Cambridge, MA: ZKM/MIT Press, 2011. Rossi, Paolo. I filosofi e le macchine. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Rush, Michael. New Media in Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Rush, Michael. New Media in Late 20th Century Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Ruskin, Jessica. The Restless Clock. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2016). Rusky, R. L. High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Ryan, Johnny. A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. London: Reaktion Books. Saba, Cosetta G., ed. Tecnologie e avanguardia in Italia dal Futurismo alla Net​.art​ . Bologna: Clueb, 2006. Sadin, Éric. L’Intelligence artificielle ou l’enjeu du siècle: Anatomie d’un antihumanisme radical, Paris: L’Échappée, 2018. Salter, Chris. Alien Agency. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Salter, Chris. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. University of California Press, 1977. Seevinck, Jennifer. Emergence in Interactive Art. Zurich: Springer, 2017. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Shannon, Claude E. “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” Transactions American Institute of Electrical Engineers Vol. 57 (1938). Shepard, Paul. Nature and Madness. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1982: 1. Sitney, Adams P. ed. Film Culture Reader. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. Somaini. Antonio. “The Concept of Visual Culture and the Historicity of the Eye,” The Cinematic Experience: Film, Contemporary Art, Museum, A. Auteliano, ed. Udine: Campanotto, 2010. Sommerer, Christa, Lakhmi C. Jain and Laurent Mignonneau, eds. The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design. Heidelberg: Springer, 2008. Stelarc, “From Psycho-body to Cyber-systems: Images as Post-Human Entities,” Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism, Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassisy, eds. London: Routledge, 1998: 117. Sterling, Bruce. “Manifesto: The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal,” http:​/​/www​​.dead​​media​​.org/​​modes​​t​-pro​​posa​l​​.html​, accessed July 27, 2019. Stern, Nathaniel. Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance. London: Gylphi, 2013. Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

190

Bibliography

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Steyerl, Hito. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. New York: Verso Books, 2017. Sutton, Gloria. The Experience Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Taylor, Grant. When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1. Winchester: Zero Books, 2010: 5. Tuchman, Maurice. A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967–1971. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971. Vaingurt, Julia. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Valentini, Valentina. New Theater in Italy. New York: Routledge, 2017. VanDerBeek, Stan. “Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto,” Film Culture No. 40 (Spring 1966): 15–18; in The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock, ed. New York: Dutton, 1967: 173–179. Vasulka, Woody and Peter Weibel. Buffalo Head: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Vergine, Lea. Arte programmata e cinetica, 1953–1963: L’ultima avanguardia. Milan: Mazzotta, 1983. Vetlesen, Arne Joahan. The Denial of Nature: Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Global Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2015: 149. Weibel, Peter. “Postmedia Condition,” Postmedia Condition, A.A.V.V., catalogue of the exhibition, Madrid: Centro Cultural Conde Duque, 2006. Weibel, Peter and Ljiljiana Fruk. Molecular Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Weiner, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948. White, Anthony. Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism. New York: Routledge, 2019. White, Anthony. “TV and Not TV: Lucio Fontana’s Luminous Images in Movement,” Grey Room No. 34 (Winter 2009): 6–27. Whitney, John. Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art. Peterborough: N.H. Byte, 1980. Wijnberg, Nachoem M. and Gemser, Gerda. Groups, Experts and Innovation: The Selection System of Modern Visual Art. Groningen: University of Groningen, SOM Research School, 1999. Wind, Edgar. Art and Anarchy. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Winston, Brian, Media, Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge, 1998. Young, George M. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1970.

Bibliography

191

Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Mean. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Index

Abad, Antoni, 113, 164–67 Adobe Creative Residency. See artist residencies Agamben, Giorgio, 19 Akamatsu, Nelo, 112 Amabile, Teresa, 13 animality, 7, 132, 142 Anthropocene, 123, 132–38, 140, 143–44 anthropocentrism, 133, 139–40 applied arts, 15 archival: art, 19. See also art and archive; effect, 21, 24; impulse, 19–20 art and archive, 18–21 Arte Programmata, 76–78 artificial: beings, 44–46; intelligence, 47, 61, 87–88, 110, 120–23, 131–32, 134, 145, 147 artist as inventor, vii–viii, 1, 6–7, 26, 58, 89, 92, 103, 123, 144 artistic: creation, viii, 9–10, 15, 79, 173; experimentation, 88, 160; practice, 26, 43, 60, 62, 74, 102, 138, 173; production, 4, 10, 20, 28, 59; research, 140, 147 artist residencies, 7, 16–18, 170 artists: collaborations with, 16, 59, 68, 88; notion of, 1–2, 89, 123

Arts@Cern. See artist residencies Autodesk Residency Program. See artist residencies automata, viii, 45, 47–48, 122 avant-garde: advent of, 4, 11; cinema, 82, 85; development, viii, 37, 62, 64–68, 89; experiences, 6, 42, 105; history, 57–59, 92; and machines, 60, 162 Azari, Fedele, 61 Babbage, Charles, 48–50 Barjavel, René, 83–84 The Battle of Algiers, 23 Baumeister, Willi, 66, 154–55 Bell Labs. See Bell Telephone Laboratories Bell Telephone Laboratories, viii, 81, 90, 93–94 Benjamin, Walter, 19 Bense, Max, 78–79, 168–70 Benthall, Jonathan, 88–89 Berger, René, 101–2, 108, 114, 168 bioart, 112 Boccioni, Umberto, 64 Boole, George, 49–50 Bradford Paley, W., 172 Braidotti, Rosi, 139 Broeckmann, Andreas, 67, 118

193

194

Index

Burnham, Jack, 80, 86–88, 101 Butler, Samuel, 50 Cage, John, 79, 85–86, 90 capitalism, 39–40, 133, 139; and technology, 42, 59 Carlyle, Thomas, 46–47 cinema: and archive, 20–24, 109; as a cultural form, 9, 77, 102, 112, 115– 16, 138; history, 6–7, 36–38, 41–42, 57–58, 64–68, 80–85, 110–11, 114, 158–59; and movement, 28, 40, 111; recycled, 19, 26. See also archival; cinema; cinematography; expanded cinema; postcinema cinematography, 35–37, 39 companies in the technological sector. See technological, companies computational: imaging, 145; media, 42 computer: art, 6, 78–81, 84, 86, 93, 105, 107, 109, 157; graphic (s), 12, 94; images, 6, 78, 81, 94; music, 12; science, 12, 16, 49–50. See also Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory constructivist, 57, 61–62, 171 contemporary art, 9, 13, 24, 57, 74, 81–82, 101, 105–6, 109, 147, 164, 168; archeology, 77; curators, 14; market, 18; medium, 110; practices, 19 cosmism, 62 Crary, Jonathan, 38–39 creative, 2, 11, 13, 16, 57, 94, 108, 172; approach, 65; economy, 14–15; industry, 16; modality, 159; possibilities, 77, 81, 114; potential, 162; process, 18, 90; production, ix; use, 116, 158; vision, viii; work, 12 creativity, 12–16, 44, 62, 121–22, 168, 170 Cubitt, Sean, 23, 42, 118 cultural: industry, 76, 106, 110; institutions, 7, 90, 92, 140; memory, 20, 24

cybernetic art, 104. See also cybernetics cybernetics, 49, 87, 104, 136, 169 cyborg, 59, 110, 132; art, 87 Dadaism, 63. See also Hausmann, Raoul; Moholy-Nagy Deleuze, Gilles, 22 Depero, Fortunato, 153–54 device art, 119, 172–73 digital, 23, 26, 49, 111, 117, 169–70; art, 2, 81, 94, 102, 109, 111, 118; media, 115; technology, 19, 49, 81, 106, 113–14, 141, 156. See also postdigital electromechanical vision, 66, 158–59 expanded cinema, 79, 82–84, 157 experience, 115–17, 119 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), viii, 90–93, 168 Fargas, Joaquin, 174 Flamingo, Elvin, 112, 138 Fluxus, 83, 85 Fontana, Lucio, 6, 73–75, 81, 157 Foster, Hal, 18–19, 68 found footage, 21–24, 26 futurism, 64, 153; and the machine, 58, 61–62 futurist, 60–61, 65, 153 futuristic, 121, 167 Gaia, 136–37, 139, 145–46. See also Lovelock, James Gallizio, Pinot, 75–76 General Purpose Technology, 145 genetics, 131–32, 144–45 Gillette, Frank, 103, 116 Goldberg, Ken, 104, 136, 145 Google 89Plus. See artist residencies Grau, Oliver, 118, 162 Hagener, Malte, 67 Haraway, Donna, 143–45 Harbisson, Neil, 110

Index

Hausmann, Raoul, viii, 63–64, 66, 155–57, 160 Heidegger, Martin, 4–6, 168 Herbert, Stephen, 39 Hertz, Garnet. See Zombie Media Hidalgo, César, 146–47 Higgins, Dick, 85, 117 Hollerith, Herman, 49, 88 Huhtamo, Erkki, 39, 44, 119 Hultén, K.G. Pontus, 79–80, 101 Huyssen, Andreas, 57 industrialization, 3, 59, 74–75 industrial production, 67, 73, 75–76 industrial revolution, 3, 37, 143, 160; first, 4, 39; second, 3, 6, 134 industry, viii, 3, 59–60, 75–77, 84, 90–93, 103, 117. See also creative, industry information, 145–47, 168; aesthetics, 79, 169; age of, 102; philosophy of, 134; society, 105; technology, 12, 18–19, 80, 88; theory, 146 installation, 86, 103–5; art, 105–6, 116. See also sound installation; video installation; web installation institute for contemporary art, 79 interactive: art, 78, 104–5, 109, 116; communities, 107, 165–66 interactivity, 37–38, 43, 49, 104, 106, 113 intermedia. See Higgins, Dick Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 6, 80 kinetic: art, 76–78, 80, 87; artists, 79 Kwastek, Katja, 104 LACMA Art and Technology Program, 90, 92–93 Lafia, Marc. See The Battle of Algiers Lin, Fang-Yu. See The Battle of Algiers Lissitzky, El, viii, 64, 66, 156–60 liveness, 37, 40

195

Lovelock, James, 122, 136 Lyotard, Jean-François, 28, 108, 161 machine: art, 67; and the avant-gardes, 58–62 Maciunas, Georges, 83–85 Malina, Roger, 12–13 Manovich, Lev, 23, 115, 119, 122 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 61, 63, 65, 153 Marx, Leo, 2–3 mass communication, 3, 37, 110 McLuhan, Marshall, 85–86, 115, 168 mechanical, 26, 104, 111, 161; age, 46, 79–80, 91; art, 1, 3, 78; automata, 45; innovation, 3; instrument, 38, 58, 154; intelligence, 61; man, 60–61; production, 45; technology, 64 media: archeology of, 11, 25–26, 39, 119; art, 6, 24, 78, 101–6, 108–13, 117–19, 157, 167–68, 173; art histories, 117–18; development of, 18, 24, 164; studies, 10, 28, 101, 134; system, 11, 36–39, 59, 103. See also computational, media; digital, media; Higgins, Dick; new media; postmedia; time-based visual media; Zombie Media medium, 11, 19, 26, 38, 80, 85–86, 110, 115–18, 161–64, 168, 173; artistic, 23 Mekas brothers, 82 Microsoft Research Artist in Residence. See artist residencies Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 64–65, 83 Moles, Abraham A., 79, 168–69 Morse, Samuel, 41–42 Munari, Bruno, 15, 75, 77, 87 Murata, Takeshi, 22 nanotechnology, 145 Neimark, Michael, 162–64 net​.ar​t, 108–9, 113, 117, 164 new media: art, 102, 109; system, 36– 37, 39, 59, 66

196

Index

Niebisch, Arndt, 66 Noll, A. Michael, 80–81, 94 Nove Tendencije, 78–79 nuclearists, 76 Olivetti, 77–78; Programma, 53, 101, 167 Paik, Nam June, 6, 20, 79, 81–82, 85, 88, 103, 107, 141, 170–71 Paik-Abe Synthesizer. See synthesizer panopticon, 39 pantelegraph, 41 paracelsus, 44–45 Parikka, Jussi. See Zombie Media Paul, Christiane, 27, 119 Penny, Simon, 24–25 Pepsi Pavilion, 91–92 performance art, 105, 111 personal device, 21, 37, 43. See also Olivetti, Programma Philips Pavilion, 77, 104 photography, viii, 3–4, 6, 36–38, 41–43, 57, 64–67, 113 pictorial turn, 114 Planet Labs. See artist residencies planned obsolescence, 6, 18, 20, 25 Poe, Edgar Allan, 47–49 Portapack, 43, 82, 168 post-anthropocentric (sm), 131–33, 135, 139, 142, 147 postcinema, 109, 117 postdigital, 109, 117 posthuman, 131–32, 134–35, 138–39, 142 posthumanism, 59, 145 postinternet, 109, 117 postmedia, 11, 110, 117 postorganic, 115, 132, 137 programmed art. See Arte Programmata programming, 78 radio, 43, 58, 65–66, 73, 153, 157–59, 167 Rennò, Rosangela, 22

restorative design, 144 Robida, Albert, 36, 40 robotic art, 6, 103, 105, 109–11 robotics, 47, 88, 103–4, 110–11, 120 Rosen, Margit, 78 Rutt-Etra Synthesizer. See synthesizer Sadin, Éric, 49, 88 Salgari, Emilio, 35–36 Saraceno, Tomás, 140 satellite art, 108 Satellite Art Project, 107 Shaw, Jeffrey, 104 singularity, 120, 122 software art, 109 software cinema, 23 sound art, 6, 105, 109, 111–13 sound installation, 112 Spatialism, 73–74. See also Spatialists Spatialists, 74–76. See also Spatialism S+T+ARTS. See artist residencies Steyerl, Hito, 141 superintelligence, 120–21, 123 synthesizer, 103, 170–71 technological: age, 5; art, 84; artworks, 89, 91, 110; communication, 37, 42; companies, 25, 87, 90, 93, 103, 143, 167; creation, 6; determinism, 60, 66; development, vii, 6–7, 10–11, 36–37, 59, 67, 76–77, 86, 114, 122, 131–32, 134–35, 145–46, 160, 167, 174; device, 25, 140; enhancement, 137; experimentation, 6, 11, 24, 28, 139, 146, 161; industry, 92; innovation, viii, 3, 9–12, 14, 16, 20, 24, 28, 73, 76–78, 88–89, 91, 103, 144, 146–47, 164, 170; installations, 105, 160; instrument, 58; invention, 40, 43, 66; knowledge, 112; mechanism, 75; mechanization, 27; production, 25, 147; progress, 18, 47, 64, 145–46; system, 3–4, 50; transmission, 38 telegraph, 35, 38, 41–42 telematic music, 107

Index

telephone, 14, 37–38, 40–41, 153, 156, 160 television, 20, 24, 37, 39–41, 43, 58, 73, 75, 81, 103, 109, 116, 155–58, 163, 167, 170–71; art, 84 Tenori On, 112, 173–74 Thacker, Eugene, 138–39, 145 time-based visual media, 39 Toolin, Jack, 27 total cinema, 83 total theater, 153, 158 transhuman, 131–32, 137, 139 transhumanism, 137, 145–46 TV LAB, 170–71

Vasulka, Woody, 102, 103, 171 video: environments, 155, 159–60; installation, 22, 110, 113, 116, 155, 159–60 video art, 20–21, 79–80, 86, 102–3, 105, 109–10, 157; birth of, 6, 81–82 visual culture, 18–19, 36–37, 173 web installation, 23 Wees, William. See art and archive Weibel, Peter, 101, 117–18 WGBH, 170–71 Wilfred, Thomas, 66, 156, 160–62 Youngblood, Gene, 82, 84

Vanderbeek, Stan, 81–84, 86 Vasulka, Steina, 101, 103, 141, 171

197

Zombie Media, 25–26

About the Author

Valentino Catricalà (PhD) is curator of SODA Gallery in Manchester and lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. A scholar and contemporary art curator who specializes in analysis of the relationship of artists with new technologies and media, he is director of the Art Section of the Maker Faire— The European Edition, the biggest fair on creativity and innovation in Europe, as well as an art consultant at Paris Sony CS Lab. He was previously artistic director of the Rome Media Art Festival (MAXXI Museum) and art project coordinator at Fondazione Mondo Digitale. Catricalà has curated exhibitions in museums and private galleries including the Hermitage, Minnesota Street Project, New York Media Center, Stelline, MAXXI Museum, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Ca’ Foscari, and the New Dheli Italian Cultural Institute. He is the author of several essays and books including Media Art: Prospettive delle arti verso il XXI secolo: Storie, teorie, preservazione and Art and Technology in the Third Millennium: Scenarios and Protagonists.

199