Re: LIFESCIENCE: Monsters

[Eugene Thacker <maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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PROFRICHAR@aol.com wrote:
> 
> But beyond all these examples, they have
>  more or less remained (marginalized?) w/in "art", despite all their
>  emphasis on technique, artist-as-craftsman, engineering, etc.
> 
> so why is that do you have an explanation for that eugene?
>  i am asking seriously because i do not have an answer instantly

hi birgit - yes this is a persistent problem w/ in so-called art
communities & their audiences, & certainly wouldn't want to pretent to
have an answer here - only that it's a very old (some would say tired)
problem w/in the historical "avant-gardes" (e.g., Futurism, Dada,
Surrealism, Constructivism, etc. etc.) - the problem of "recuperation"
inherent in the rhetorical and political stance of an "avant-garde"
movement. Paul Mann calls this the "theory-death" of the avant-garde -
the point at which even the very "death" or incorporation of the
avant-garde into mainstream culture becomes a cultural commodity, or is
abstracted from its political context (e.g., the very complicated
politics of Italian Futurism appropriated & abstracted in Wired, or in
trendy histories of early electronic music).

but aside from this, i would propose that, while all the discussion on
this list concerning the negoiations between "art" and "science" (or the
non-difference between the two), what's also at stake is the ways in
which any activity - whether it is called (by habit, due to historical
contingency, due to cultural hegenomies) art or science - is always
embedded in a multitude of qualitatively different relationships. this
is not just "context" (e.g., that the way a particular activity is
enframed determines how it will be received - which assumes that all you
have to do is do "art" in the context of "science" & there you have it).
instead it is a question of how networks of relationships actually
constitute, formulate, even materialize particular practices.

thus the question is not, "why is this activity called 'science'?" nor
is it "why is this activity being reduced to 'science'?" maybe the
question is instead "what are the conditions and relationships that are
set up so that a particular activity (e.g., stem cell research,
transgenic art, multimedia performance, online symposium) can possibly
arise in a particular way?

what are some practical responses here? i don't know, although the
exploration into intermediary categories or "hybrids" seems promising -
producing zones of activity whose primary force is to confound and
perturb the solidification of categorical habit (e.g., mixing web
programming, AI concepts, "metadesign"). also modes of appropriation,
simulation seem promising - not as nihilistic celebrations of no
meaning, but as ways of critique from the inside (e.g., post-media
performance, electronic disturbance)...

eugene


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