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I'd like now to speak to two ideas which currently interested me. The
first is one from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and is
to do with the extended phenotype:
"In biology, the genes in the egg would be called its genotype, while
the physical expression of those genes -- the chicken -- would be
called its phenotype. Dawkins called this marriage of organism to
artifact The Extended Phenotype - the title of his second book,
published in 1982. Still extending the outer limits of his replicator
idea, Dawkins used this "extended phenotype" construct to look beyond
the individual and artifact to embrace the family of the organism, its
social group, the tools and environments it created. These are part of
the physical "readout" of the genes, the extended phenotype of the
replicating code. The invisible code in genes are therefore, in a very
real sense, manipulating large chunks of the visible world to their
advantage.
Of course humans -- with our massive and complex array of technologies
-- have extended our phenotypes more than any other living species.
Just like a bird's nest, a beaver's dam, or a groundhog's intricate
set of underground tunnels, our technologies are now an integral part
of our evolutionary fitness. In light of Dawkins' work, to be a
scientist today and talk about human evolution divorced from
technological evolution no longer makes sense. In the truest and most
fundamental sense, human evolution is now inextricably bound with
technological evolution. Taken to its natural conclusion, Dawkins'
idea suggests that humankind is really co-evolving with its artefacts;
genes that can't cope with that new reality will not survive into
future millennia." (Michael Schrage, Wired magazine, July 1995, pg
172)
I'm interested in how artists working with technology fit into this
framework: whether they are positioned in a classic McLuhanesque avant
guard position, or whether they are positioned differently, at the
front-end of the human/machine interface, and serve to reveal the
machine (and/or the machine's intelligence, ie our new intelligence)
to itself.
Even though much of the technology we use was developed by the
military-industrial complex, this is changing. Char Davies, who
exhibited a Virtual Reality (VR) work at the annual International
Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Montreal in 1995, was
originally a painter who decided she wanted to work with technology,
but wasn't particularly delighted with any of the image software
available. So she and her partner developed software which was to
become SoftImage -- described to me by an artist who uses it as
"extremely intelligent and intuitive". Their company has just been
purchased by Microsoft which means that their software (or a version
thereof) may become cheaper and more accessible to the general public.
Or it may not.
The work at ISEA, "Osmose", was a very different VR work, in that it
was a radical departure from the usual "disembodied" approach. It
situated the navigation tools directly onto the body, rather than
using the dislocated data glove, and its environment was amorphous and
dreamlike, not angular and gridlike. So this is an example of an
artist using the VR concept to create an astonishing work which seeks
not to remove ourselves from the body, but rather to heighten our
experience within it. By doing this work, Char Davies has shifted
human/machine evolution in her direction.
A number of the works I've seen at the ISEA events are working within
this kind of parameter. It's a pity that we will not see many of these
works in Australia, even though we have a number of events which are
supposed to offer us leading-edge global practice, the 1996 Biennale
of Sydney being one of these.
Which brings us again to the state, and its relation to culture. Geert
Lovink is from a Dutch group called Adilkno -- the Foundation for the
Advancement of Illegal Knowledge. In his address at ISEA he quoted
West German pop theorist Mark Terkessides from his book Kulturkampf
(Cultural Struggles, Cologne, 1995). Terkessides sees it as a mistake
to consider culture as an issue of power, as was done in the seventies
and eighties. He even suspects a 'deal' between the establishment and
its erstwhile critics, in terms of "if you let us govern in peace, and
stop bringing up the power question, then you can have culture". It is
an interesting way of looking at culture and the way it operates in
Australia.
For example, the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at
the Queensland Gallery in 1993 could be seen as an example of the way
culture operates to suit a liberal/leftist curatorial agenda. We fly
artists in with their works which may talk about, for example, human
rights abuses and labour rights abuses in Indonesia, which is all very
well. However, the Australian state is extremely encouraging of trade
and business ties with a country such as Indonesia, and of course sees
the issue of East Timorese sovereignty as having no currency. The
Triennial was, in 1993, largely funded by the Department of Foreign
Affairs and Trade, other government departments and corporate
sponsors, and described in media releases as an act of 'cultural
diplomacy'. The gap is not acknowledged in conference discussion, and
any discussion along these lines is in fact quite rigourously
discouraged.
At the conference the art works were largely discussed in terms of
aesthetics and art history, not in a social, political and economic
context. Of course, expensive events such as these need all the
financial assistance they can get. Rather than try to conceal the
motivations of organisations which foot the bill, it would be of
greater advantage to discuss them, and their implications for cultural
practice. This would then enable the development of a more
conceptually sophisticated and effective framework for regional
cultural critique.
The way this kind of denial of means-of-production issues (and this
doesn't mean a simply a retrieval of neo-marxism and its attempts in
the seventies to foreground "ideology critique") happens in art and
technology circles could be illustrated by a panel discussion at ISEA
on aesthetics. Panel member Virginia Rutledge, a curator from the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, was saying that you couldn't discuss
aesthetics without discussing production issues. It was her curatorial
experience that the technology itself was a major factor, in terms of
trying to stage exhibitions --ie where to get the machines from etc --
a factor which no doubt Clare Williamson from ACCA will concur with.
As she was speaking she was cut off by the (hideously verbose) panel
moderator, Derek de Kerckhove, from the University of Toronto, who
said "we are talking about aesthetics here, not equipment, sorry,
we'll go on to the next speaker..." As any curator knows, obtaining
the equipment to show the work is always difficult, as artists
themselves more often than not do not own it themselves. It was an
outrage, but, within the framework of high art-wordliness, was
accepted. If you start to think of artists as pushing the boundaries
of revealing our new phenotype, then these issues of access to
equipment are in fact critical questions.
To conclude, I'd like to say that it is not that I think trade shows
and the like are excellent sites to show technology-based works,
however they do have their place. They open the works up to viewing by
new audiences who may never go to the rarefied spaces of contemporary
art galleries, especially in Australia. Not surprisingly, many people
within the trade show and business environment are very interested in
the works and the ideas which they are working with. Using these kinds
of exhibition spaces also gives a more rounded images of Australia, or
Information Technology and Telecommunications, as well as pointing to
the undercurrents of human/machine evolution.
Galleries however, still occupy the prime site of exhibition as the
works (in a perfect world) can be staged in the way they were meant to
be, without the distraction of sound and light spill. It could be that
galleries become akin to churches in this respect. Sacred. But as a
friend of mine remarked, no-one in an art gallery ever cries out in
spontaneous joy...
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Linda Wallace
email: hunger@sysx.apana.org.au
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http://sysx.apana.org.au:80/artists/hunger/acca.html
