Digital art and meaning : reading kinetic poetry, text machines, mapping art, and interactive installations

308 Pages·2011·3.232 MB·English

by  Simanowski, Roberto

digital art and meaning
electronic mediations
Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors
35 digital art and meaning: reading kinetic poetry, text machines, mapping
art, and interactive installations
Roberto Simanowski
34 vilém flusser: an introduction
Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo
33 does writing have a future?
Vilém Flusser
32 into the universe of technical images
Vilém Flusser
31 hypertext and the female imaginary
Jaishree K. Odin
30 screens: viewing media installation art
Kate Mondloch
29 games of empire: global capitalism and video games
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter
28 tactical media
Rita Raley
27 reticulations: jean-luc nancy and the networks of the political
Philip Armstrong
26 digital baroque: new media art and cinematic folds
Timothy Murray
25 ex-foliations: reading machines and the upgrade path
Terry Harpold
24 digitize this book! the politics of new media, or why we need open
access now
Gary Hall
23 digitizing race: visual cultures of the internet
Lisa Nakamura
22 small tech: the culture of digital tools
Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors
21 the exploit: a theory of networks
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker
20 database aesthetics: art in the age of information overflow
Victoria Vesna, Editor
19 cyberspaces of everyday life
Mark Nunes
(continued on page 292)
DIGITAL ART AND MEANING
Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art,
and Interactive Installations
roberto simanowski
Electronic Mediations 35
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Chapter 1 was previously published as “Holopoetry, Biopoetry, and Digital Literatures:
Close Reading and Terminological Debates,” in The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing,
Reading, and Playing in Programmable Media,edited by Peter Gendolla and Jörgen
Schäfer, 43–66 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007).
“A Fine View” is reprinted by permission of the poet, David Knoebel.
“Talk, You” from Dead, Dinner, or Naked(Chicago: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern
University Press, 1993) is reprinted by permission of the poet, Evan Zimroth.
Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simanowski, Roberto.
Digital art and meaning : reading kinetic poetry, text machines, mapping art, and
interactive installations / Roberto Simanowski.
p. cm. — (Electronic mediations ; v. 35)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-6737-6 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-6738-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Digital art. 2. Interactive art. I. Title. II. Title: Reading kinetic poetry, text machines,
mapping art, and interactive installations.
N7433.8.S56 2011
776—dc22 2010033909
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface Against the Embrace vii
Introduction Close Reading 1
1 Digital Literature 27
2 Kinetic Concrete Poetry 58
3 Text Machines 90
4 Interactive Installations 120
5 Mapping Art 158
6 Real-Time Web Sculpture 187
Epilogue Code, Interpretation, Avant-Garde 208
Notes 231
Bibliography 259
Index 275
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Preface
AGAINST THE EMBRACE
in 1990, British artist and self-proclaimed visionary theorist Roy
Ascott wrote, in his essay Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace, “The
past decade has seen the two powerful technologies of computing and
telecommunications converge into one field of operations, which has
drawn into its embrace other electronic media, including video, sound
synthesis, remote sensing, and a variety of cybernetic systems” (2003,
232). Ascott’s statement updated his concept of behaviorist art, which he
had proposed more than twenty years before at the high time of the
search for art forms in which the artist is no longer in complete control of
what is happening, or what is presented with or to the audience. In the
meantime, this version of participatory or interactive art had successfully
allied with technology and transformed itself from an aesthetic (and ide-
ological) concept to a common feature of art within new media. As Ascott
explains, the “telematic embrace” implies that “meaning is the product of
interaction between the observer and the system, the content of which is
in a state of flux, of endless change and transformation” (233). Such a
state of flux, Ascott continues, is in opposition to the traditional artwork,
which “requires, for its completion, the viewer as, at best, a skilled decoder
or interpreter of the artist’s ‘meaning’” (234). As Ascott adds, the traditional
artwork “gives rise to the industry of criticism and exegesis, in which those
who ‘understand’ this or that work of art explain it to those who are too
stupid or uneducated to receive its meaning unaided” (234).
As this passage reveals, what is at stake in the embrace that he and oth-
ers are promoting is not only the work of the artist but also that of the
critic. This democratization of the art system seems to want to leave every-
thing to the audience—the production of meaning as well as its analysis.
There is clearly a lot of affection for the audience in the telematic embrace.
• vii
Although the disempowerment of the artist needs further discussion, any
dismissal of the critic simply calls for a rejection. Why should an interac-
tive work not be the subject of criticism and exegesis? Does interaction
automatically supply its viewers with education, rendering the assistance
of critical and pedagogical professionals dispensable in any attempt to
understand the meaning of a work?
Ascott is not really acknowledged as a theoretician in the field of digital
aesthetics—which may not come as a surprise, given his obvious opposi-
tion to the industry of criticism. However, he nonetheless represents a
particular point of view that is manifest in many approaches to digital art,
one that is marked by the unconditional embrace of the audience and the
resulting rejection of the critic. This book rejects such an embrace and
embraces the advances of the critic. It reformulates the questions raised
in the title of Ascott’s essay and asks whether there is meaning in the tele -
matic embrace. To answer this question, the book addresses three other
embraces that occur in the discussion of digital arts: code, body, and pres-
ence. I discuss them in turn.
Code is without doubt an indispensable element in every discussion
of digital arts because everything happening on the screen or on the
scene is first and foremost subject to the grammar and politics of code. In
many cases and in many different ways, it is important to understand
what has been done and what can be done on the level of code to under-
stand and assess the semantics of a digital artifact. However, a preoccupa -
tion with code threatens to divert our attention from the actual meaning
of an artifact. It encourages claims such as the notion that everything in
digital media is actually literature because everything is represented as
alphanumeric code, or that digital spaces represent a strong desire for
control over the messiness of bodies and unruliness of the physical world
because everything in digital media is coded and computed.1Although
such claims are not entirely unsubstantiated, they are hardly helpful. If
we take, for instance, an interactive installation such as David Rokeby’s Very
Nervous System(1986–1990)—where the physical action of the interactor2
alters the acoustic information output by the system—we quickly recog-
nize that this closed-circuit installation is not literature; nor does it intend
to control the messiness of the body. It is an interactive performance that
encourages the interactor to generate a body completely different from
the controlled body of everyday life. An abstract embrace of the code with
no regard to its materialization on the screen or on site, the formalistic
viii • PREFACE
focus on technologies behind the interface neglects the actual experience
of the audience and impedes access to the artwork’s aesthetics.
No doubt the body is an important element in any analysis of inter -
active installations. Theorists generally have no problem acknowledging
that the specificities of the lived body (gender, race, age, weight, health)
contribute to the way a painting, text, or performance is perceived. If the
audience is physically engaged in the art and the interactor’s body be -
comes the central focus of the aesthetic experience, the body’s importance
increases significantly. In such a context, we “think” much more directly
through the body and somehow feel the meaning of the work at hand.
However, direct bodily sensation and experience must not be our final
point of consideration. We must also think the body and reflect, as we will
see, even on those experiences that the body does not have during an
installation. The body may be our general medium for “having a world,”
as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002, 169) puts it; our mind is the indispens -
able means of understanding the mediated world. We must analyze and
interpret the body’s action in the context of the specific framework that
the author provides, and with respect to the implications that this may
have for the interactor beyond the actual aesthetic experience. The im -
mersed interactor eventually has to emerge from the spontaneous, intu-
itive embrace of the given situation and regain reflective distance. Even in
an interactive performance, the phenomenal body can finally be treated as
a semiotic body—indeed, it must do so in the context of critical reading.
Any shift from phenomenal to semiotic appreciation is obstructed by
altered consciousness and participation in dialogue with the work, such
as is enthusiastically advocated by many theorists of interactive art. Inter-
active art is often conceived as a turn from content to event, from the
communication of a message to the production of a space that inaugu-
rates dialogue, or from the private symbolic space that traditional art pro-
vides to a period of experiential time that asks to be lived through.3Yet
such an approach often neglects the fact that the inaugurated dialogue
embodies a symbolic space on which we may reflect, as does the fact of
living through experiential time itself. Meanwhile, the abandonment of
reflection is in line with certain statements of aesthetic theory, which object
to an overemphasis on content or to the exclusive role of hermeneutics in
Western culture, favoring an attention to the materiality of the signifier
over any examination of its deeper meaning. Such a move against interpre -
tation,such a farewell to interpretation—to invoke the titles of two rele vant
essays by Susan Sontag and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht—can be understood
PREFACE • ix