Transcribed by Benjamin Woodard
I just wanted to try and address something you wrote in your introduction the conference Mo, and that was this question of the effect of the digital in terms of how artists look at the world and perceive worlds and I want to try and get back to a question of specificity and these questions of difference that have come up over the day and yesterday. I also want to think about the figure of the digital in and how the figure of the digital contemporary art practice that is often being used as a referent to the questions of the production of democracy, the production of equality but at the same time equality is purchased through these ideas of the proliferation of individual identities so it is a very liberalist understanding of equality vis a vis the digital as this kind of figure sensory experience in a lot of art practices. I think this goes back to something that Suhail mentioned about the aesthetics of destabilization and the concept of instability that art reifies and I think often, this has been connected to the vista of the digital that can give access to this space of real instability. There is a kind of ethic of indeterminacy that artwork has enjoyed very much and I wanted to think about this as what Reza talks about as the fantasy of the ineffable which is located in a digital aesthetic that is managed as a weak ideology in contemporary art. These empirical mirrors of the digital are actually inconsequential politically because they misunderstand what the digital machine is and is not. So this manifestation of egalitarian, differentiated and horizontal dreams ends up as a private theatre that regresses critique to the level of parody. So I wanted to reflect on this and rather than ask rather how we produce the experience of the digital as equivalent or adequate to the real, we instead ask how this space of decision, this system of regulation, mediation and communication demands we reshape our methods of critique and operations without cause or linear cause.
But I also think that the digital in this formulation, its more rationalist formulation or computational formulation, instructs us to move past the ideas that supported the critique the name, and condition of art and makes myths of these things and regulates them to this weak ideology as I have said. But it is a weak ideology that still convinces artists and artists still claim and often this artists call themselves activists and I am not sure about this at all. So through the demand of the digital we see this emergence of two types of language reemerging that are often oversimplified as being:
a – the networked operation of power of power where scientific reason produces knowledge space and
b – flaky, interpretative, ambiguous, ambivalent, aporetic abstraction of the image that gives poetic expression to these systems [28]
This is where we get this idea where the image is weak but ideologically dangerous in this traditional formulation of the evil demon of images like we see in Baudrillard where ambiguity is easily rationalized and simplified.
I wanted to think about how some people have responded to this idea of the image in this conference already where weve seen one person, I can’t remember their name, already talking about their practice as dysfunctional in this kind of Kantian ideal of where the image is rational and presupposes an orientation through its irrationality and we also see this idea that Martha was talking about in response to Suhail where we cannot think about a paradigm of art because art address is always in a moment of utter specificity but I think both of those responses are totally incorrect because it is really clear to me that arts’ labor, its political charge, in a world that has aligned itself with a liberal mantra of human freedom that often artworks melt into each into a proliferation of more stuff. That basically puts forward the idea that artwork can emancipate us and to do so it must be engaged in the vista of free interpretations. So to understand the artwork here it offers us freedom and it must be taken as discrete, individual and different it must be just like us. and I think that is where Martha comes from.
But I want to ask about the computational languages we have addressed
and the operations of reason that have been put forward today and the supposed non-ideological language of science as well and to talk about the scientific image that might surpass the conditions of the natural science and the experimental discourses of the humanities that love interpretation.
But I want to ask about this politics of this science and I want to think about and to think about about the same ideology of freedom is reclaimed in the mastery of the neutral we experience this problem directly and perennially in art practice when we are told that perceiving the existing conditions of the artwork differently, through the lens of the digital, is enough work to do if we want to recondition our existing reality. So it goes it is enough to read the world differently enough in order to reproduce and engage the world differently.
So what I am thinking about is how these theories of the universal science, and often employing the digital to do so within arts, is a kind of logic of interpretation, that the thought of the digital elicits [31] and it risks the notion that it does not matter that artworks or culture should take on a radical rethinking of method nor must they operate differently in any, empirical, perceptual or experential sense.
So is the digital an alibi for the proliferation of more stuff tied to a fateful acceptance expressed in idiom what happens, happens.
And I’m also think of Alex’s reference to Turrell and Laruelle where the adequation of the scientific real to the image resides in the aesthetic genre of mystcism, nature and spirit. I cant help think of Turrell’s work in this case as a fake universal, rather the privative of arts experience
Art an expression recovers the problem of interpretation then. Basically I want to get to the problem of knowledge and information that Suhail brings up as well as implicate Nick’s positive account of the model, and in addition I think that the question of mediation is something that a non-representational art just imagines it can get over – this is a fantasy. And too often the claim to non-representationalism in arts naively imagine they are no longer dealing with language.
So just to get over this I want to think about our problem of designating our account of the digital as an organizational structure of informational economies to art without irony towards production means we must think the digital without using this as metaphor or as an interpretive model that would simply look at existing art differently. So I don’t want to think of the problem of semantics here but I want to think about a practically producing artwork that can be thought of as political and not ethical and I think this is because interpretive models are valorized are not enough to dismantle the fundamental myths that are habituated to the artworld. So moreover this interpretive method, employed as a means to embed the digital as a pre-political reality of culture, or disclose these traditions of advances capitalism ever more naivley.
So what if we were not to oppose science to the image and instead were to understand the rational power of the non-contradictory logic of the image in its operations. What would it mean to undertake this reconceptualization of the world as a practical undertaking that considers the
force of images as a part of that world. How we can think of the artwork as a specific case, since the image that is the artwork if it is spoken of at all, spoken of by philosophy and theory, serve as replaceable examples of wider causes. Does it matter, in the context of the digital, in the thrall of information, what artists do?
Is it a question of analyzing the informational capacity of an artwork specifically rather than claiming some essential properties of the image. Or just like the ethos of the capitalist accumulation massive enhanced and complexified by the digital does it require a new ethos, a new name, under which to labor?
But if we are to think specifically of the condition of art as the scientific method as a model producing entity can this be done without valorizing the different as we heard with Martha, or with Suhail, and Suhail if art through the digital is a refusal of correlational abstractions does it demand a new form of specificity? So to Reza as well, can the physical description be understood without producing the formal hierarchy with these levels of rationalizing lets say if so, does this return us to the spatio-temporal context based accounts of art, events, and objects?
So I guess what I’m wondering about is the qualitative particularity and its place within these systems and as these systems, without reconditioning these accounts themselves to renew a new form of critical idealism.