http://www.cooper.edu/art/techno/essays/ascott.

html

Turning on Technology
by Roy Ascott

 
Roy Ascott is director
of the Centre for
Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts of the University of Wales College, Newport, U.K., and is
on the editorial board of Leonardo.

Art’s affair with technology has led to more than a marriage of materiality, and
more than the augmentation of intelligence that high-speed computing power and
ubiquitous networks bring to the human condition. The significant outcomes are
as much spiritual as biological or social. In this reconfiguration of ourselves and our
culture, the process of transformation lies between what I call cyberception,1
technologically extended cognition and perception, and the technoetic aesthetic,2
art allied to the technology of consciousness. As for the social impact of new
media, it is well over thirty years since McLuhan pointed out that “we
are...suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before,
informed as never before, free from fragmented specialism as never before--but
also involved in the total social process as never before.”3

Nowadays, we are more likely to describe this as the telemadic navigation of

hypermedia and the net, but the point remains: we are engaged in a new social
process. This in turn flows from the new thinking that circulates in, around, and as
a consequence of the convergence of computers, communications, and
biotechnologies, which is leading to the reinvention of the self, the transformation
of the body, and the noetic extension of mind. In the process, art has shifted its
concern from the behavior of forms to forms of behavior. While artists engage
optimistically with this shift, some are not uncritical. Speaking of our bionic
ambitions for the body, for example, Michael Joo feels that “our demand...for
hyperextensions of our physical selves...is tragically ironic.”4 Critical and poetic
responses can co-exist, and multimedia can be “structured around extremes--
extreme behavior, irrational actions, or illogical technology” (Susan Otto). There is
no doubting the sensitivity, vitality, and invention that informs the highly
diversified field of technology-based art.

Of course there are exceptions. When art is no more than craft, when the artist
engages in little more than exploring what a machine can do, the output can be
banal. In fact, most early computer-based art took this route, a kind of digital
extension of modernism. Not so in the case of Techno-Seduction. Here the
conceptual base is substantial, and human values predominate. Questions of
gender, race, power, identity, the body, and the environment are raised at
interactive interfaces and within responsive installations that enrich the viewer’s
transactions with significance and sensibility. Narrative structures are reexamined.
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All is under the sign of transformation and within the cannon of uncertainty:
“identities are not fixed, but contingent and mutable” (Christine Tamblyn).

The rubric under which the exhibition is presented may imply that technology is
inherently seductive, or that it is an instrument of seduction, drawing us into a
less than human world without art or values. But I would argue that the reverse is
true. We artists are trying to seduce the machine: we wish to embrace it with our
ways of thinking and feeling. We want computers that emote, networks that are
sentient, robots that care. We stroke their screens, play with their mice, run our
fingers over their keyboards, to entice them into our field of consciousness. At
the same time, powerful claims are presented for the emotional capacity of
technology: “With a pulsed laser and the metaphysical medium of holography, I
wanted to dig out of those bodies a taste of human passion and angst” (Harriet
Casdin-Silver).

Ever since Rosenblatt’s Perceptron,5 with many false starts we have been trying to
seduce the intelligent machine into a more human way of thinking. What are neural
networks if not the measure of our determination to bring artificial learning and
associative thought into line with our own cognitive processes? This principle of
seduction is best exemplified in the technology of artificial life,6 whereby we invite
technology into the living world. Can artificial consciousness be far behind?

Henri Bergson wrote: “Consciousness seems proportionate to the living being’s

power of choice. It lights up the zone of potentialities that surround the act. It fills
the interval between what is done and what might be done.”7 In short, it is the
space of art. Bergson, properly admired for his affirmation of the Heraclitean flux
and flow, lacked only the dynamics of our networked hypermedia to complete his
model of mind. The cognitive rhythms, the jumps and leaps, the hyperlinks,
tunneling from mind to mind, image to sound, sound to text, from real locations to
virtual places, from people in the street to identities in cyberspace, these
characterize the desires and ambitions of artists caught up in this techno-
seductive dance of the mind.

Seven years ago, when I wrote “Is there Love in the Telematic Embrace?” for Art
Journal,8 it was to identify attraction, affinity, love, or, as we say, “connectivity”
as central to art’s concern and its augmentation by telematic media. I argued that
the artist’s responsibility was now toward context rather than content, with
meaning emerging from the interactions of the viewer and their necessarily
unstable relationship. The principle of open-endedness and indeterminacy,
extending to every part and player in the technoetic arts, is even more insistent
today.

“Meaning, like the body and its culture, is fleeting, transitory, and has no center or
hierarchy” (Jenny Marketou).

Just as intelligence is spreading everywhere, leaking out of our brains and spilling
into our homes, our tools, our vehicles, so too is connectivity. We are about to
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see the environment as a whole come online--a global networking of places,

products, ideas, with the Internet as a kind of hypercortex. Increasingly, artists like
Jessica Irish seek to link their installations and electronic sculptures inextricably
with the World Wide Web. While for Adrianne Wortzel cyberspace is where the
present can be “archaeologically” excavated from a virtual place in the future.

With everything connected, everything can be shared, including, of course,

responsibility. Poignantly, Duane Slick reminds us:

“Everything I see, everything I hear, I have become responsible for.”

As this exhibition demonstrates, art can be propositional and computational as

much as visual or metaphorical. Janet Zweig speaks for a whole generation of
artists when she claims to be “more interested in the possibilities of using the
computer as a thinking device than as an imaging device.” It may at first appear
strange to be told that the “game of images”9 is over. There never was a time
when the image was so fecund, so insistent. But while it remains substantially
visual, art is increasingly based in concepts, constituting in many ways a kind of
philosophical process. It is more street smarts than grand narrative, attuned to
what lies beneath the surface of things, questioning the why more than the what:
“It is the unseen, interior structures of nature and thought that interest
me” (Kathleen Ruiz). Melinda Montgomery enlists science-fiction to explore
questions of mind-body identity.

In this technoetic culture, the art we produce is not simply a mirror of the world,
nor is it an alibi for past events or present intensities. Engaging constructively
with the technological environment, it sets creativity in motion, within the frame
of indeterminacy, building new ideas, new forms, and new experience from the
bottom up, with the artist relinquishing total control while fully immersed in the
evolutive process. The viewer is complicit in this, interactively adding to the
propositional force that the artwork carries. It is seduction in semantic space:
Barthe’s juissance all over again.10 And it is a noetic enticement, an invitation to
share in the consciousness of a new millennium, the triumphant seduction of
technology by art, not the seduction of the artist by technology.

1See Roy Ascott, “The Architecture of Cyberception,” in M. Toy, ed., Architects in

Cyberspace (London: Architectural Design, 1995), 38-41.

2 “Noetic” is from the Greek nous, mind.

3Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1964), 358.

4Unless otherwise cited, quotations from artists in the Techno-Seduction

exhibition are from their artist’s statements.
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5
See Frank Rosenblatt, Principles of Neurodynamics (New York: Spartan Books,
1962).

6Artificial life is concerned with generating lifelike behavior, artificial intelligence

with intelligent behavior. See Christopher G. Langton, ed., Artificial Life (New York:
Addison-Wesley, 1989), 1-47.

7Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Michell (New York: Holt, 1922),
179.

8Roy Ascott, “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?” Art Journal 49, no. 3
(Fall 1990): 241-47. See also Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and
Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
489-98.

9The phrase belongs to Deleuze: “But a game of images never replaced the
deeper game of concepts and philosophical thought for Nietzsche.” Gilles Deleuze,
Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983),
31.

10See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Roland Miller (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1975).