When the term software art surfaced some years ago it quickly gained an enormous
popularity in the digital art community. Even though, such a thing as art made
by software had exististed since the 60s, many viewed it as the next big thing
after net art and thus it opened a new field of aesthetic discussions enriched
by a large number of works, articles, and festivals like Read_me. From the very
beginning this field has been somewhat divided: On the one side are those artists
and critics who emphasize the literary and mathematical sources of software
art and argue in favor of aesthetics centered around the formal, linguistic,
and expressive qualities of programming (languages) and code; and on the other
side are those who inspired by disciplines such as media studies, critical philosophy,
cognitive science, social, and political theory turn towards aesthetics that
focuses on software art’s conceptual, and discursive involvement with
the culture of software. The jury statement of the first Read_me festival in
Moscow, which unofficially stands as the original definition of software art
(after net art), anticipates this division: ”We consider software art
to be art whose material is algorithmic instruction code and/or which addresses
cultural concepts of software.” Although the “/” in the middle
symbolically seeks to bridge any categorical differences between these two views
on software art, it often acts as a dividing line. Software art is either treated
as an art of formalism or of culturalism, to use a deliberately polemical distinction
by Florian Cramer. Of course, the formal and cultural aspects of software art
overlap to a great extent (Cramer who is both a literary scholar and a free
software activist is a clear example), but as a tendency in the aesthetic discourse
surrounding software the distinction is nevertheless an issue.
Of the two views, the former seems to predominate current theoretical discussions,
criticism, and curatorial practices, as the “CODeDOC” exhibition
at the Withney in 2002 and last year’s Ars Electronica show. Certainly,
this predominantly formalistic view prompts reflections, which are highly important
for the understanding and analysis of the technological specificities of software
as an aesthetic potential. With some reason, it can even be argued that this
view marks a more genuine and clear-cut form of software art. Nevertheless,
I believe, that the so-called cultural view accentuates equally important and
so far rarely treated aspects of software art, aspects that grasp software art
not in itself, but as part of wider contexts, historically as well as theoretically.
Concep/textual art: If you are in, you’re out there
Software art is often treated as a digitally updated version of the conceptual
art that emerged in the mid 60s. Generally, the connection is founded in the
apprehension that software art continues “the de-materialization of art”
that conceptual art began, to cite the title of Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s
seminal text from 1967. Through this so-called dematerialization, conceptual
art initiated aesthetics of text, language, reading/writing, and interpretation;
aesthetics based on the perceptual and cognitive challenges of processes, systems,
and structures, instead of on the specific media, i.e. a physical defintion
of art, and the visually convincing art-object that modernism had championed.
However, the dematerialization that Lippard and Chandler detected did not designate
a literal dematerialization, but a conceptually charged approach to aesthetics
and the making of art. The aesthetics of dematerialization was involved with
objective, non-individual, forms of recording, documentation, mapping, and organizing
different material (sic!), and not with the subjectivity of the artist in a
psychological or mythological sense; and it anticipated the more or less direct
participation of the viewer as an integrated part of the work of art. In this
way, the advent of conceptual art marked a significant aesthetic turn, which
coined a broad spectrum of different artistic trends ranging from minimalistic
sketch-like drawings and elaborate installations of text files over experiments
with video and photography to physical performances and political activities
in the public space.
Connecting software art to conceptual art is thus not an unequivocal task, and
it seems that the division I mentioned before to some extent arises from how
conceptual art is interpreted and which of these trends are understood as the
forerunners of software art. To make this important aspect clear I would like
to briefly sketch a number of different trends in conceptual art. I should mention
though, that the various trends that I mention in the following are to a great
extent overlapping, and the distinction I make between them here is more a matter
of different perspectives pointing towards software art than of opposing aesthetics.
The current aesthetics of code and programming (languages) is often related
to two different, but parallel trends of conceptual art. The leading figures
of the first trend, referred to by Alexander Alberro as “linguistic conceptualism”,
were mainly Joseph Kosuth, Sol Le Witt, and members of the Art & Language
group. These artists and writers were engaged in ontological, genealogical,
and epistemological reflections on the nature of “art as idea”,
as a self-defined and self-reflexive logistic system composed by writing (instructions,
definitions, informative texts, etc.) and ideas, and as a language in which
form and content tended to merge. The second trend, represented for instance
by John Cage and La Monte Young’s conceptual takes on compositional music,
comprehended the work of art as a set of instructions and art in general as
a purely mental, non-physical, phenomenon. These two trends of conceptual art
are unquestionably relevant for the understanding as well as the development
of the complex formal dimensions of software art as the basis of all computer
art.
Nevertheless, when it comes to the cultural dimension of software art two other
trends of conceptual art seem to be more relevant: One is represented for instance
by Hans Haacke, Dan Graham, Victor Burgin, and Gordon Matta-Clark, which was
political in an interventive and analytical sense; while another is represented
by artists like Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and Chris Burden, which was involved
with performativity and stagings. These groups of artists saw conceptual art
as a contextual activity that dismantled and completely rejected the notion
of the transcendental and autonomous work of art that modernism had praised.
For them conceptual art was as an experimental and critical practice fundamentally
connected to the communication processes, information economies, representational
systems, ideological power structures, and codes of the surrounding social and
cultural reality, including the art institution.
In a text from 1975 published in the American conceptual art magazine The Fox
and carrying the programmatic title “A Declaration of Dependence”
co-founder and artist Sarah Charlesworth describes this change in the status
of the work of art towards the contextual. The backdrop for her declaration
was the disillusioned, retrospective realization that conceptual art could not,
as it had originally set out to, exist outside institutions in its own dematerialized
aesthetic sphere: “When we discuss a work of art or an art tradition,
we are discussing a phenomenon in which exists in an integral relationship with
the entire complex of human and social and historical forces defining the development
of that work or tradition. This same complex of social and historical forces
in turn inevitably defines the context in which the work or tradition claims
significance, and ultimately functions as a force or an agent in the ongoing
evolution of that culture. Thus we are at once the products and the producers
of the culture in which we participate.” Charlesworth’s description
of the contextual nature of conceptual art points towards aesthetics based on
the relationship between the internal structure of the work of art and external
non-artistic structures. The dependence she declares represents both a condition
and a potential. Art is both “framing and being framed,” to quote
the title of Hans Haacke’s 1975 monograph.
Three generations going at the context
This contextual definition of the work of art experienced a revival in the 1990s
when a new generation of artists more or less explicitly reinterpreted the heritage
of conceptual art’s social politics. A number of critics and curators
quickly picked up on this revival, and among them were Peter Weibel. In 1993
Weibel curated the show ”Contextual Art. Art of the 90s”, which
presented a group of upcoming artists of the new decade and a few of their influential
predecessors. (Before I go on I would like to note that while Weibel is certainly
not the only one to theorize the art of the 90s or contextual art in general
his exhibition nevertheless stands as a landmark that had a seminal influence
on the discussions of contextual aesthetics at the time. I also want to note
that his term contextual art, which he developed in connection with the exhibition
is somewhat ambivalent, because, as Jan Avgikos points out, “the context
was always already there”; meaning that whether art is pre-modern, modern
or post-modern, it exists within a context. In this sense Weibel’s term
contextual art is a tautology, which does not specify that what makes contextual
art contextual is its thematization of the relation between the work of art
and its context. Not surprisingly, other terms have been introduced, for example
by the German scholar of conceptual art, Thomas Dreher, who uses the more specific
term Context Reflexive Art, or the American art historian Anne Rorimer, who
talks about “Context as Content.” However, I will not to go further
into the principles involved in this terminological discussion and simply stick
with Weibel’s term.)
Back to Weibel’s exhibition. A monumental catalogue, which included Weibel’s
curatorial text, entitled “Contextual Art. On the Social Construction
of Art” accompanied the exhibition. The text was an updated version of
his 1971 text “A Contextual Theory of Art”, in which he had criticized
the “syntactical” poetics of modernism to emphasize the social aspects
of language (use), i.e. communicative relations and the structural conditions
behind the linguistics, to conclude that “contexts [were] more important
than texts.” In the 1993 text Weibel expanded the theoretical horizon
of his contextual aesthetics from the perspective of contemporary art that had
emerged in the early 90s. He was no longer concerned with the structural textualization
of art as such, but with the relations between the symbolic language of art
and social spaces and institutions. He emphasized art’s potential to criticize
the false consciousness of the constituted powers and to create social fields
of art characterized by critical consciousness and transparent structures. Instead
of repeating the avantgardistic conception of an absolute other reality, of
a transcendence of the context, the contextual aesthetics of the 1990s stressed
different transformations of the contexts, reworkings of specific and actual
realities. The relation between the work of art and its context characterized
a complex dynamic of constant negotiations and exchanges, an “open field
of signs and actions”, as Weibel some years later described it in his
text, “Art as Open Fields of Action” written for the Austrian Pavilion
at the 1999 Venice Biennale. It is thus important to notice that Weibel’s
contextual aesthetics do not dissolve the work of art in a contextual determination;
rather it emphasizes the works of art’s ability to act actively in relation
to its context.
Weibel added a historical dimension to his contextual aesthetics by pointing
out three generations of contextual artists. The first generation was the conceptual
art of the 60s and 70s, which criticized the art institution, a.k.a. the white
cube, as an oppressive and restrictive space that only accepted as certain type
of art and a certain type of aesthetics. The second generation, which emerged
in the late 70s and ‘lasted’ close to a decade, was involved with
a critique of the representations of the social field within the art institution.
The third generation, which is the most interesting generation for this discussion
of the contextual aesthetics of software art, took the stage in the early 90s.
This generation represented a direct involvement or intervention in the social
field; it replaced symbolic actions with real actions, and became “partisans
of the real”, to use one of Weibel’s formulations. Instead of acting
politically within the art institution, this generation acted aesthetically
within the social field. And in relation to this generation, and echoing Charlesworth’s
idea of artists being both produced by and producers of the culture, Weibel
formulated a contextual aesthetic based on the idea that the recognition of
art as a social construction, represented a potential for the construction of
the social. The last paragraph in his text thus reads: “The goal of the
social construction of art is to take part in the social construction of reality.”
The arrival of a fourth generation: software art
I believe that the different trends of conceptual art outlined above, plus Charlesworth’s
and Weibel’s theories respectively, form a relevant historical and theoretical
perspective from where an understanding of the conceptual dimension in the cultural
trend of software art can be developed. It is a perspective that allows us to
see important works of software art as part and innovators of an aesthetic tradition,
which approaches art’s conceptual dimension from a context of social engagement.
The perspective points back to Jack Burnham’s 1970 exhibition “Software,
Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art”, which is a hot topic
in current discussions about the relationship between conceptual art and software
art. In his thorough and enlightening writings on the exhibition Edward Shanken
explains how Burnham saw “[t]he notion that art can be separated from
its everyday environment [as] a cultural fixation.” Burnham used software
as a metaphor for conceptual art, which aesthetically computed the politics
of the technological developments that influenced post-modern culture at large.
And from Burnham, the perspective points beyond modern aesthetics based on formalistic
taste and ideas of absolute artistic autonomy, beyond the black box of Donald
Knuth’s “art of programming”, to the ‘expanded’
aesthetics based on conceptual criticism and interdependence between software
art and its cultural, social, economical, political, and technological contexts;
to a re-declaration of dependence.
More specifically, I think that this perspective allows us to pursue Weibel’s
historical thesis and suggest that a number of significant artists working within
(or associated with) the cultural trend of software art, constitute a fourth
generation of contextual artists. It is a generation represented by a diversity
of artists and works like LAN (TraceNoizer), I/O/D (The Web Stalker), Mongrel
(Linker), 01.org (life_sharing, VOPOS), Knowbotic Research (10_dencies, Connective
Force Attack), EDT (Floodnet), Carbon Defense League/Institute for Applied Autonomy
(re-code.com), ubermorgen (The Injunction Generator), and RSG (Carnivore), to
mention just a few. This latest addition to the ‘contextual family’
is closely related to the third generation, but the artists of the fourth generation
are digital by birth and act as partisans (freedom fighters as well as construction
workers) of the culture of software, not of the real as such. They conceive
software art as a criticism of the culture of software as a highly politicized
field, as a ”society of control” like the one described by Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. This society they write, echoing Gilles Deleuze
in his book on Michel Foucault, is a society where power is ”exercised
through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems,
information networks etc.) (...) toward a state of autonomous alienation from
the sense of life and the desire for creativity.” However, these contextual
software artists do not limit their criticism to claims of aesthetic independence
and exclusivity; rather they apply it to the culture of software. Instead of
taking up the dialectic position of the negative outsider, they conceive their
criticism to be positively dialogical in the sense that they work from the inside,
both with and on the culture of software. It is a generation that believes in
software art as a wide-ranging activity directly involved in the shaping and
construction of the culture of software, it’s material structures and
collective imagination. It sees this culture as a context, which is not pre-formatted
but “up for grabs,” for de- as well as re-coding. In the name of
free information flows, open source, creative commons and tactical media use
it wants to get “behind the blip” of the culture of software, on
to its ideological and conceptual politics, and revitalize the desire for digital
creativity and the sense of digital life.
Tools for re-contextualization by way of conceptuality
Like all other construction workers these artists need tools; but instead of
using the standard tools available at the software supermarket they produce
their own alternative tools, produced in alternative ways and, not least, for
alternative uses. These alternative tools are not tools to be used for specific
purposes in the construction of concrete objects and specific products. Rather,
their qualities lie in the ability to generate a diversity of open-ended and
abstract, yet real processes of production, on every scale and in all directions,
within the culture of software. They are “means of mutation”, not
stabilizers. Their powers are constituent rather than constitutional, to borrow
a distinction from Hardt and Negri. They bring about change, difference, and
liberation, sometimes even of a revolutionary nature (this is the rise of a
new kind of working class). Instead of building the same over and over again,
reproducing the familiar or the identical, they are productive, creative, and
innovative in a radical and fundamental sense. Working in real-time, the creative
modes of operation of these tools are set on “becoming” and “actualization”
in the Deleuzian sense, which means the bringing into existence of that which
can neither be pre-scribed or terminated. To quote the French art historian
Nicolas Bourriaud from his important text Relational Aesthetics written in 1998,
these tools produce “formations rather than forms,” in the sense
that they are concerned with dynamic and differential relationships rather than
with enclosed objects.
As such, it is not only the conceptual production of the tools themselves, or
the tools in themselves, as much as the potential uses and users that the tools
hold in relation to the different contexts of the culture of software, which
interests the fourth generation of contextual artists. They are, as Thomas Dreher
puts it in his text “Networking Artists”, “programmers of
programming possibilities”. These programmers of programming possibilities
conceive their tools for a multitude of users, including themselves, to make
them work and work with them on their own through more or less direct interpretive
interaction (which is not to be confused with simple choose-and-click interactivity).
Their aesthetics of conceptual production thus implies aesthetics of contextual
use, which is in continuation of Matthew Fuller’s notion that software
“participate in “conceptuality.”” This notion, which
is formulated as a critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s technological skepticism,
refers to software’s construction of concepts or more precisely to software’s
conceptualization of ways of thinking, knowing, seeing, and doing. Through its
design, use of metaphors, representational structures, and practical functionalities,
software not only determines possible uses, but also constructs a user. To paraphrase
Fuller: Software engineers ‘humans’ through HCI. Human here does
not refer to human beings of flesh and blood, but to ”conceptual persons”
like Descartes’ cogito, Nietzsche’s Dionysus, and Plato’s
Socrates; persons which Deleuze and Guattari see as the origin, courier, and
subject of a philosophy. Fuller’s emphasis on the conceptuality of HCI
differs from those critics and artists who see the back-end as the decisive
level of conceptuality in software art. Significantly, his emphasis makes it
possible to re-include visuality in the aesthetics of software art, although
not in the form of abstract imagery. Rather, inspired by Lakoff and Johnson’s
theories on “metaphors we live by” and phenomenological theory on
the structural nature of perception, it is a conceptual visuality referring
to the reflective and productive mind, not solely to the contemplative eye.
(In parenthesis, I would like to add that I think this is an important re-definition
of the visual dimension not just in software art, but in conceptual art in general
that hopefully will be discussed in detail on future occasions.) As Fuller’s
exhaustive analysis of Microsoft Word, the archetypical example of conventional
software, shows, this conceptual engineering of humans is very often regulative,
manipulative, and one-dimensional, in the sense that it reduces the use or user
to a question of usability and simple effectiveness. But as his insightful text
on The Web Stalker shows with equally conviction, this participation in conceptuality
also represents a significant aesthetic potential for software. To paraphrase
the classical I/O/D slogan: If software is mind control then come and get some.
And it is this aesthetic potential that the fourth generation of contextual
artists works with and develops further. By reappropriating and reconceptualizing
the politics of HCI on the level of programming, design, and functionalities,
it turns software art into a contextual activity, mental as well as practical,
involved with the forms of social reproduction, communicative relations, power
structures, and technological developments in the culture of software. It rejects
the use of software, which isolates the user and his application from the rest
of the world, as well as the rationales of universal homogeneity expressed by
the three-clicks-and-you-are-where-you-want-to-be logic. Instead, it embraces
singularity and heterogeneity in toto. Subversion, distortion, criticism, dialogue,
fantasy, science fictions, remixes, affections, antagonisms, paradoxes, irrationalities,
and complexities are its principles of engineering; connectivity and experiments
its working ethos. In other words, by constructing alternative tools, this generation
seeks to engineer alternative humans and consequently, this is the hands-on
utopia, create an alternative culture of software.
Towards an aesthetic of contextual software not-just-art
My suggestion that software art represents a fourth generation of contextual
artists is an attempt to escape the idea that software art represents yet another
avantgardistic break in the history of art. Software art, like multi-media art
and net.art before it, is part of the historical continuum of post-modern art.
Of course, software art is also part of a technological development that introduces
(what seems like) radically new forms of art. But as the post-modern, or post-media,
aesthetics of conceptual art point out: Art is primarily conceptual and only
secondarily formalistic, and because it is conceptual it is also contextual.
Therefore, it seems important to me to turn attention to which new conceptualizations
of art in general, and conceptual and contextual art in particular, software
art introduces through these specificities. By this I do not intend to assimilate
software art and reduce it to just another new kid on the block, on the contrary.
Even though software art, like every art form, has its particular qualities,
these qualities need to be qualified through the establishment and discussion
of connections, of differences as well as of similarities, to other art forms,
for instance to contextual art; and I believe that software art can benefit
from these connections in a number of ways. They emphasize the relational, inclusive,
and synthetic qualities of software art, which, to me, seem to be some of the
most relevant for a discussion of software art in relation to the contextual
trend in contemporary art. They make it possible, and plausible, to discuss
the aesthetics of software art as part of the “material tradition”
that Bourriaud places his relational aesthetics in. This tradition is concerned
with how materials (in the broadest sense) are fundamentally coded by culture
and how they can be de-coded and re-coded by art. Fuller anticipates this discussion
with his look “behind the blip”, “digital objects” and
interest in “materialist energies in art and technoculture”, as
does Alex Galloway with his neo-Marxist readings of the Internet in his recent
book Protocol. Hopefully, more will follow.
Another important aspect of these connections is that they make it possible
to bridge a contradiction between software as art and software as a tool, which
is based on the traditional separation of art and technology, the purposeless
and the functional, the sensuous and the rational, found in both classical and
modern philosophy. Some critics talk about something like “a pure technicity
without purpose”, implicitly saying that what defines software, as art,
is exactly that it is not a tool. According to the contextual aesthetics of
software art suggested here, the definition is not that categorical. It leaves
any notion of formalistic purity behind to define a new kind purposefulness
that recognizes an essential potential in software art’s ability to reconceptualize
art through the tool, and the tool through art, which was, I believe, exactly
what Burnham, among others of his time, tried to do. Fuller also anticipates
such a reconceptualization by introducing the term not-just-art in relation
to The Web Stalker. This canonical work of software art, he writes, “can
only come into concurrence by not just being itself. It has to be used.”
However, the fact that The Web Stalker has to be used does not disqualify it
as a work of art: “Alongside the categories of art, anti-art and non-art
something else spills over: not-just-art.” I find this term very instructive
for a further development of software aesthetics that avoids the avantgardstic
idealism of either-or and is able to balance the vital dynamics between the
aesthetic and the instrumental, the art institution, and the culture of software,
and embrace their interdependence. In digital, virtual, or, maybe more appropriately,
soft terms, it updates what Bourriaud, talking about the art of the 90s, has
called “operational realism.” In his Relational Aesthetics he defines
this realism, which he implicitly opposes to pictorial realism, as “the
presentation of the functional sphere in an aesthetic arrangement”, in
which the artist “aims to set up a certain ambiguity, within the space
of his activity, between the utilitarian function of the objects he is presenting,
and their aesthetic function.” I believe this ambiguity is also present
in the term not-just-art. Not as hindrance or hesitation to call a piece of
software ‘art’; on the contrary, this ambiguity represents an aesthetic
flexibility and elasticity that allows software art to move in Marxian interstices
of the culture of software and thus create spaces that differs from “the
“communication zones” that are imposed on us” as Bourriaud
puts it; hitherto unknown aesthetic spaces for reflection and production, conceptual
as well as contextual.
As a closing remark I want to emphasize that the contextual approach to software
art that I have presented here, is, of course, just one of many ways to give
this art form of today and tomorrow a historical and theoretical perspective.
Other ways exist and more will be discovered in the future. That is how it should
be. Software art history and theory should not be objective sciences, but experimental
methods and models for the production of aesthetic knowledge and experience.
Instead of trying to distil the pure form of software art, they should contaminate
and pollute software art in multiple ways leading to complex, rich, and visionary
understandings of software art, as well as of the culture of software.
Jacob Lillemose, Copenhagen 2004
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