texts
"It is the nature of the society
in which we want to live,
that is in question."
Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Edited by Roger Reynolds and Karen Reynolds
Copyright © 2001 Jean-Baptiste Barrière and the Composition Area, Department of Music, the University of California, San Diego
Published by Permission
The following TEXT was commissioned by the Composition Area, Department of Music, University of California, San Diego for its SEARCH initiative. The TEXT is copyrighted and appears in its original publication here. While links TO this TEXT from other sites are welcome, the TEXT itself may not be reprinted for any reason without express agreement in writing from the copyright holders [Please contact Roger Reynolds: info@rogerreynolds.com to facilitate this.].
SEARCH EVENT II, 16 February 2001, University of California, San Diego
PART II
...Cassandra gets haptic and becomes interactive...
The future of music comes about through the exploration of new instruments, as well as by the extension of traditional ones, and the former is a field that has been too much neglected up to now. Transducers, gestural interfaces, have to be put in the hands of interpreters; players have to be associated with the heart of this research in order that it benefit from their incomparable knowledge. The aim should not be the demagogy of pretending to make everybody a musician, but rather to extend musicianship. We have to build on musical knowledge (which is an infinite resource) rather than to rely only on engineering, as though there were not already a musical culture.
Interactivity will also be a central part of the future of music. As television has been for the most part lost as an educational tool, and is now used as a leisure and entertainment device, interactivity as it is being used today is, unfortunately, most highly developed in so-called video games. There are enormous musical possibilities at stake here, and they should not be investigated uniquely within the domain of games. Meanwhile, musicians should not abandon this domain, but should rather help games to become more knowledge-development oriented, rather than purely mindless entertainment. This would then offer interesting creative perspectives.
The future of music will develop through a reconsideration of the interaction with scientists which has been one the most disappointing promises of the 20th century. But the future of music should reside, more than ever in the past, in the exploration of new forms -- for instance, through confrontation and collaboration between artists from all domains -- all sorts of forms, and in particular the exploration of interaction between images and music.
One should refuse purely illustrative uses of music, which put it again and again in a utilitarian role, but, rather, accept participation and contribution in all kinds of works that are forged according to a master plan where the target is meaningful, and/or the experience educative. One of these forms is installation.
Rather than assembling a more or less complex set up of devices, technical, media-oriented and/or aesthetic, the object of an installation, in order to be relevant in the field of art, could consist in instantiating a sensible reflection on the very nature of this activity, even beyond art as it is today. And, a fortiori, if an installation proceeds from a premise of interactivity, it should be assembled and operate as a reflection on the interaction between the artificial and the real, at the very moment of the triumph of the virtual.
Such an approach, both self-referential and trans-referential, should proceed in a sensible, if not sensual manner. Discourse of/on art does not imply sterility, necessarily. And the lost innocence of art conditions this auto-reference, this auto-critique.
This is, then, about establishing an interrogation, staged through artistic practice, through a form that should be sensed, experimented with, and assessed also (but not only) as the enunciation of an aesthetic as well as an ethical project: a statement on the state of things, on our relationship with a reality more or less "mediatized". This should be done without falling into the traps of making a user's manual or an argumentative caricature of a didactic or a politically mediocre art.
In the disorder of contemporary art -- so disturbing for those who cannot think without the aid of categories -- such an enterprise, out of the norm, looks particularly ambitious and even pretentious, and is probably bound to fail. But it still appears valid, and could even reveal itself to be healthy. Even more, when installations use new technologies, these have too often, unfortunately, the function of obscuring rather than clarifying, through their own self-justifying, self-installing, self-sufficient ideologies.
A part of the aesthetic challenge today -- in opposition to the excesses of certain conceptual art in its technological variety
-- consists in taking the risk of "stating what it is that one is making" while taking responsibility for "making what it is that one has stated one will". We must not fall into the trap of the programmatic art form, or get disillusioned by the effects of such rhetoric: the audience is the only judge, and the sensible experience that he/she has lived will be the only determining one at the moment of the artistic judgment, the only one which counts in this domain, no matter to what degree the discourse alone may be convincing. The issue is definitively not achieving a technical "tour de force", or even a simple technological demonstration. It is rather about shaping technical procedures to the service of sensible experience, carrying out interrogations on the nature of these and on the ways they change our perceptions, our relationship to the world.
I want to encourage the deliberate adoption of more simple technologies (and consequently more affordable and hopefully more masterable ones) than those used today in the best virtual reality systems (those that allow quasi-perfection in simulation and image synthesis). Projects could even show a lack of interest in purely technological performance, insisting on the use of technology to serve an expressive purpose, one which arises out of staging the potential dangers of virtuality (especially of the manipulation of an individualÕs image or voice, and consequently of some attributes of this individual's identity).
The aesthetic form chosen could aim clearly at provoking, without arousing confusion: on the contrary, it could provoke a personal reflection which itself could elaborate, for instance, on the troubling experience of encountering altered instances of one's own image and voice. This is, in a very modest way, what I have tried to explore in my cycle Reality Checks.
There should be no fascination with the occult, the dark side of technology, toward which our civilization, today, is looking for comfort, desperately searching for values and spirituality.Much to the contrary, we should be reversing these sick, compulsive devices, these contemporary clichés and, while doing so, we should nourish our work from them, as the operatic form has nourished itself from archetypes in order to better transcend them, in order to undertake a true aesthetic interrogation. Once again, without losing track of the primordial exigence of the sensual experience (versus the conceptual background) of the work.
Because works of art that use new technologies too often have a tendency to devolve into new avatars of conceptual art as I underlined earlier, a program itself can become self-sufficient, devaluing even the necessity of a realization.
Also, the interest of interactivity is not in whatever demagogic illusion might convert the audience into a creator, by whatever means, and at no artistic or personal cost. It is more about realizing a form of electronic palimpsest: where each participant contributes by inscribing his own comment onto a collective work in a perpetual becoming, by exploring his own image, by revealing the "frightening foreignness" of its possible electronic transformations. And by installing the interactive work in its function as mirror: the giver of reflections. The aim and the process are the same: a confrontation of virtual and real worlds.
Electronic devices for sound and video capture are not simply recorders; they modify reality. Not only do they send back images to us -- literally and metaphorically -- but they allow us, even force us, to get some distance from them, and therefore also allow us the possibility of taking up a new position in relation to them.
At such a distance everything becomes possible: introspection or fear, auto satisfaction, amusement or painful questioning. An extreme case is the one in which we are confronted by our own image, our own voice. These devices then become objective and subjective analyzers at the same time.
Reality Checks is a series of integral -- that is, they mix images and sounds -- interactive pieces, where the spectator is confronted with his own image (precisely with representations of his own appearance and voice) and has to interpret it.
He is exposed to situations where the image of himself is subject to a progressive drift that he can control -- but only partly, since the images have their own inexorable life that reminds him of the powers of a hidden order, one beyond appearances, which therefore establishes that all images demand interpretation.
Interactivity becomes the vector of interpretation: by exploring a space, one constructs his own interpretation of the reality to which he is exposed. A self-portrait can then become a process of revelation, serious or playful according to the perspective that each person chooses to give it.
Reality Checks attempts to be both a philosophical and artistic experience, using the new interactive computer technologies for image and sound processing to revisit and question the canonic forms -- as, in this case, the self-portrait -- by questioning the status of reality and representation, as well as the question of virtuality.
The Reality Checks series is a collection of virtual reality pieces about the increasingly, mutually dependent status of reality and virtuality, how they interact, how they eventually conflict with each other. They are meant to be intimate experiences, living parables concerned with our changing relationships to objects -- as well as with ourselves -- questioning our present and future in a world where the border between them may tend to vanish, leaving us with even more questions about our identities.
...Cassandra discovers Adorno...
Art is a mimetic behaviour that, to objectivate itself, uses the most advanced rationality -- in terms of mastering materials and technical procedures. By means of this contradiction, this behavior responds to the contradiction of reason itself. If the goal of the rationality was an accomplishment necessarily non-rational in itself -- happiness is the enemy of rationality, an end, but still needs it as a means -- art would integrate this irrational telos. It uses for this purpose a limitless rationality in all its different procedures, while in the so-called technical world, it stays itself irrational, a prisoner of production relations. Art is mediocre in technological times when it makes an illusion of it, by presenting itself as the social and universal mediation.
Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetische Theorie, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970. [My translation into English.]
These considerations should not be forgotten when we are urged again and again to reduce art to technical demonstrations, or when we may tend to overemphasize the role of technology in our work, for instance for publicity purposes.
This establishes also, again and again, the place of criticism, including self-criticism; the quest for meaning; the search for values that art should retain or recover again. Because the 60's wanted to get rid of oppressive values (mostly the values which had lost meaning), they destroyed most values. Value is by default, therefore, the market, and the processes that enforce it are social and cultural Darwinism. We need to re-establish values in a time of deculturation. Our responsibility is to transform deculturation into acculturation, that is, into a learning process. We have to find or to help to find the "structure that links" (cf: Bateson, above).
What is it that we might find interesting in techno? Or in any other form of music, especially in that which we find problematic? This may be a Judeo-Christian relic, but nevermind. It is a valid attitude, because it helps to establish the links between us, and within us.
Search for values, all sorts of values: rational values, emotional values, in any case, personal values, which you can, however, share with others.
Learn from scientific metholodogies. For instance: learn from mistakes. Accept criticism. Accept error. Transform error, or chance, into gold.
Being concerned with the future of music also implies fighting for redefining the social status of the artist, as well as the social role of the artist.
Ambitious artistic works using new technologies are prisoners today of an infernal logic which limits them either to "puttering", because of a lack of means or a lack of the mastering of means, or to the production of demonstrations whose value is a mere justification of technology. So they are mired in technological propaganda or in communicational agitation, rather than being true works of art.
It is about time that we bring to maturity what can be conceived of as an emerging art: digital art. And this maturation should proceed, in a slightly paradoxical way, from the desacralization of technology, through apprehending the correct measure of its contribution to artistic creation. Digital art will only take its place in the world of art when it is recognized as art in a more general sense; therefore, when its specificity is accepted not anymore as foreignness but as identity, as significant difference -- when it is able to forget, therefore, technology as such and to concentrate on expression. To reach this aim, it is necessary to conceive and realize a collective and global agreement regarding objectives: from training to research, from production to diffusion.
Obstacles that prevent this development are numerous. To start with, there is the widespread demagogy that pretends that anybody can become an artist with and thanks to a PC. All the problems of art will be handled, including the economic ones: there will be no more reason to pay artists for their art since everyone would become an artist thanks to technology. This vision will be used -- as a matter of fact, is already used -- also as a pretext for the disengagement of governments from art: since making art costs nothing, or nearly nothing, why should they give money to artists?
But since everybody is an artist, nobody is anymore. The end of art -- after the end of history.
In this cultural model, dominated by a form of economic logic, everybody becomes a consumer of art technology rather than being an artist. This has to be interpreted, of course, in the context of the installation of the new economy, of the mutation of material goods towards immaterial ones, services (cf. Jeremy Rifkin: The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience, Tarcher/Putnam, 2001).
However, soon, it is the existence of art itself which is threatened. It would be wrong to just consider that rejecting this vision of things is nothing more than a corporate reaction of artists afraid of losing their prerogatives and seeing their existence threatened. There is much more to it than just protecting artists: protecting art (and, beyond, a vision of culture and society) that may altogether vanish with them.
Multimedia creation, accessible to all, is for most people exemplified by the techno movement, and considered as an artistic experience sometimes, seemingly, as valuable as many of those that are produced by artists stuck in academic prisons, not even knowing how to evaluate themselves.
But, more often, such creation is unhappily limited, closed in on itself, lacking references, ignoring art history as well as the established techniques which constitute the apprenticeship of the artist's profession. It deprives itself of the possibility of putting its own product into perspective, of evolving by building on the foundations of a heritage which rather than being a burden can allow an analytical and critical dimension to develop.
The true artistic aims of today and tomorrow demand long and complex training, as much technical as artistic. The profession of the artist today is largely as much as, if not more, a speciality, than other professions proceeding from long and complex training programs. We should help political people in charge of cultural and artistic education understand that it should proceed by a continuous artistic apprenticeship at all the levels of education, from kindergarden to university and beyond. The ultimate aim must be to allow the reception and understanding of art at the same time that one is initiated into its practice, in order to allow anyone to take pleasure from art all his life, as well as rendering him or her capable -- with all the proper and necessary knowledge -- of making the choice to take on art as a profession, with all the difficulties that will follow automatically, such as finding his or her own way, and making a living from it.
One can see that, when considering the subject of digital art, one is drawn more deeply into a societal problem concerning the future of art, as well as of culture in general. This is why answers must be collective and not left to a form of cultural Darwinism inspired by neo-liberalism, which would too automatically constitute the default ideology in cultural matters through blind submission to the presumed-to-be-objective logic of the market and cultural industry. This is why these questions are in truth political questions that demand political answers, answers that we wish to be responsible and ambitious.
For an artist, now and in the future, the aim should be to get for himself mastery of the tools and concepts that will allow him to truely assume the objectives of art. He cannot do this entirely alone. It proceeds through a conception of constantly new training, after the university, throughout life, a training conceived to teach him -- and give him all the necessary potential -- to take up these challenges. It proceeds, too, by re-evaluation of the idea of research in art. The methodological model of scientific research must be adapted to artistic research, this against the often naïve experimentation in some artistic practices that are in fact a discredit to art.
Finally, it proceeds by the production and demonstration of works -- with all the effort of realization necessary to accomplish them -- as well as the accompanying pedagogy necessary for their optimal reception.
New structures have to be imagined and implemented, having a common resource in an accessible network of experience and knowledge, materials, humane and logical means, in all the concerned domains: educational, artistic, scientific, and technological. Creativity must also manifest itself on the institutional side. If governments cannot assume these tasks alone anymore, handicapped by all sorts of other agendas, we will have to develop new structures, imagine new forms of investment in art, including for instance studios and laboratories founded and managed directly by groups of artists and researchers.
We have to acknowledge that the large cultural institutions (museums, operas, theaters, etc.) that would have the means, have not assumed their responsibilities in this domain. We will have to convince them to do so. It is urgent that we break down the narrow contemporary mind-set which imposes a self-satisfied, mediocre theoretical and ideological prison upon the world of art. Here, too, we must shake up all forms of academicism. One must think from the outset at an international level, develop international resources rather than those that are oriented towards local communities only. We must question again and again the systems of artistic evaluation, the local (often mediocre) powers -- academic, institutional, media-oriented -- that decide for everybody what is or is not art.
We must consider new practices with curiosity and generosity, develop new criteria of evaluation that are specific to them, on top of, and not instead of the traditional criteria. We must allow this new art to develop and mature. Here again, there is a political perspective. It is the nature of a society in which we want to live that is in question. To allow new art to develop is to allow it to change us. What would be the use of art, if it was not to change the world, even just for a moment?
...Cassandra overdrive...
Cassandra wakes up one morning and decides to brutally change her own gender. This is considered, in the 21st century, the "last frontier". She succeeds in booking a reservation on the Web site of the Transformers' Society for that same afternoon. When he comes back home in the evening after the operation, he turns on the TV and falls asleep. He dreams of hearing a woman's voice, a voice whose words he cannot at first understand. Little by little, however he starts to decipher them: "Since I know that the real is in no way real, how could I know that dreams are dreams?"
From a creative adapatation of a classic Japanese poem by Jacques Roubaud (cf. Mono no aware, Gallimard, 1981). [My translation from the French.]