ART NETWORK DISCUSSION

(Back to a networked future)

 

In greater connectivity do emergent network technologies also deny spatial difference?

 

I have been interested in networks since 1983 when Media-Space, a Perth based art research group, proposed a national arts network that would confront the ‘tyranny of distance’ experienced in Western Australia. The group was linked through ARTEX, a global art network. ARTEX had succeeded in focusing a number of artists from around the world into developing thematic networked art projects. These early network group projects had a euphoric feeling of connectivity. A successful development of one of these projects was to become the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA-STAR), which was a world-wide trans-disciplinary research community founded by Roy Ascott in 1994. Its innovative structure involves collaborative work and supervision: both in cyberspace and at regular meetings around the world.

 

The first of Ascott’s art works in this area was ‘world in 24 hours’ (1982), where he created a planetary throw of the I CHING. He wrote, ‘computer-mediated networks in my view, offer the possibility of a kind of planetary conviviality and creativity which no other means of communication has been able to achieve. One reason may be that networking puts you, in a sense, out of body, linking your mind into a kind of timeless sea’ (Ascott 1984, 29).

 

There is now serious attention being paid to research networks. The Australian Research Centre Research Networks discussion paper (2003) is a timely move to instigate and develop innovation within this area. The discussion paper states ‘ At present, the program elements in the National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP) tend to under-emphasise the importance of network formation, with insufficiently strong support and incentives for individual researchers and small research teams to extend their connections with other researchers and those involved in innovation more widely’ (ARC 2003).

 

By way of contrast, in 1984 Roy Ascott had written,

 

Telematics has arisen an ethos of cross-disciplinary science and is set within a cybernetic perspective of the world. Numerous writers have attempted to describe the enormous changes they see occurring in human awareness, which some see as a kind of planetary consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin imagined a noosphere, a thinking layer, enveloping the biosphere of the earth. Peter Russell has more recently advanced the hypothesis of the emergence of a planetary brain…

 

(Ascott 1984, 50-51)

 

These comment some two decades ago illustrated the potential of the network. The ARC Research Networks document now indicates that there is need to extend research teams so that they make more meaningful and innovative connections. However there are also concerns that need to be addressed about the network momentum today. Is it just becoming a platform for e-commerce or an online learning environment? What was suggested in 1984 was that ‘information exchanges shuttling through the networks at any one time can create patterns of coherence in the global brain, similar to those of the human brain’ (Ascott 1984, 51). The network seems to have stalled in regards to the ideas of our expanded consciousness and education in the arts has not yet grasped the potential of this medium.

 

In this chapter I will contrast a network discussion conducted in 2003 with what Ascott forecast, and has tried to implement since his first paper in 1967.[1] At that time (1984) telematic networks were computerised telecommunications systems thinking. A chapter, which he subsequently wrote for one of the first Australian publications ‘Art and Telecommunications’, and which was published in 1984, is the focus for the ensuing dialogue. Comparisons will be drawn between this publication and the online networked mediated discussion.

 

I conducted this 'research' experiment in order to a record an ‘actual’ usage rather than study existing institutionalised forms of communication: for example, to discover what progress had been made and to what extent the network’s terms of reference had been narrowed down. During the network discussion we posed questions about the innovation, euphoria, and spatiality of the network. The questions were designed to explore the virtual space of the network. Represented in the network discussion were academics, artists, and industry participants.

 

uestions posted for online discussion were:

• o      Network building in a digital age is in a continual process of renegotiation, can it be defined?
• o      What was the euphoria that was connectivity?
• o      How are concepts of networked difference defined in relationship to the locale
• o      What is innovation within arts, media, and design in relation to networks?
• o      Can the network become a planetary university?
• o      Are networks collapsing space and time; denying difference?
• o      How can new ideas of networks be identified?
• o      Will networks deny debate by collapsing the education learning space?

 

The discussion session

 

12:33, Friday June 13 2003

A Can the network be defined

 

B Do we have a context for 'the network'?

C - 'yes - network is such a vague term, or...open to so many interpretations'

B Yep, got them ... so, is network interchangeable with cyberspace/the internet, it’s this context, then?

D How is network building in the digital domain distinct from all sorts of other mediated networks?

C - but can the network define itself? Not sure if you aren't reifying and animating 'the network' there perhaps

A Well I don't think that networking in other ways is different. I just wonder what the outcomes that will be developed from this potential.

C Use 1, I think, is metaphorical / conceptual, and is roughly analogous to 'cyberspace' - it implies a certain sensibility towards new technologies, the possibilities of explicitly mediated identities, creating something beyond the self...

C Use 2, I think, is infrastructural - what are the actual networks of technology, people, organisations, processes which both flow from (1) and also permit us to imagine (1) as a transcendence of...a non-networked state?

A . . . creating the something beyond the self is a part that intrigues me about the notions of networks. Here the self is a series of networks.

C - and use 3 is...procedural - meaning something like what we are doing now. You can't DO (3) without (2); you can have (2) without 1 or 3, and lots of (3) permits you to think 1

D So then it would relate to a general failure of ordinary social interaction and exchange?

 

A There was a euphoria around networking that drove this, has it changed?

 

B metaphoric/Gibson-derived/imagined?

C Maybe that, to imagine that there is 'space' inside the computer is similar to imagining 'the network' as transcendent

E - that euphoria has changed for some people yes

D - but are we aware of the processing dimension of computing when we are networking on line?

E Well, some are

B Sometimes ... more often when that processing fails or slows ...

E - but i think this dissolves for a lot of people

C That's the point...we don't explicitly think of the computer as a computer

E The computer is dissolving slowly too

A When you are online now does the computer really come in to the dimension

 

A Can we look at how the concepts of networks deny a difference in relationship to a locale

 

E Yeah I don’t get a visual metaphor in my mind when doing this sort of discussion anyway

A It is when they turn them off and you see your reflection is still grinning

D What's nice is that certain ordinary rules are suspended

E - but I feel inextricably involved and ‘there’

D There can't be a leader

E Yes in certain online spaces they are

B Surely technical ability can make a leader

A Are we trying to normalise networks? Should we be trying to explore and confront networks?

B True, but then owners or operators of given environments (networked) often end up stepping in and making rules

 

A Is there innovation going on here to draw it back to an arts media relationship?

 

A Can we find innovation happening in networks or just normal behaviour?

D - it is a new, imperfect form of simultaneity (experimental)

B But surely one-liners like this can also be a bit unthought through?

E And that is a problem?

C Yes there is still euphoria about cyberspace, cyberlife, networking etc etc; but I would argue that the euphoria is found elsewhere and is not perhaps a consequence of the experiences of the network, BUT a precondition for 'thinking' the network - that is, our belief in, fascination with, horror of technology, within a technologised society, is the motivation for the conceptualisation of 'the network' as 'outside' or beyond or better

E It is the conceptualising in real time

C notes the way time-streams are diverging here....

B Well, I suspect the massive explosion of (we) blogs might be a newer version of cyber-euphoria (and a lot to do with the age group it most appeals too, as well)

D Networks seem to be regarded as technology put towards proper human ends

E I must say that the sort of euphoria that we are talking about here really turns me off at times

B I suspect we have multiple euphorias to go with our many networks

 

A: Could I take the discussion from notions of euphoria to innovation ‑ that this medium is one in which creates the potential for or denies innovation?

 

D Yes, I was just thinking about the larger politics of the network

C I guess I am thinking that the 'network' is often conceived in spatial terms as in Paul's question about the 'net as a planetary university...or rather, the euphoria and even innovation around the network is about being some WHERE (thinking of telepresence for example)

C but...in fact...temporality is also reinvented and reshaped by networking.

F In terms of innovation, what about the way networks bring things together? That might be one form of innovation.

A Once you have been online you are no longer innocent of its effects

B Or the global could become the mono ... 'the network' allowing 100,000 students to listen to the same banal lecture all over the mediated globe ...

C Innocent implies an ethical responsibility, and also complicity in 'the network'

 

A Can we not have an ‘innovative’ networked planetary university?

 

C Yes, but not because of the network

D But the network is also differentiated (I'm thinking in Bakhtinian terms)

B I suspect those who have investments in the 'networked planetary network' are less innovative in use terms than they'd believe ... I suspect webct owners think they innovate

 

A Can I ask the networks, are they collapsing space and time for us?

 

C Going back to innovative university idea - I think that, assuming for the moment that we can discuss 'the network' or even 'networks' as things, the network undermines 'the university' as a social and cultural institution

C I think 'the university' is, rather like 'the network', an idea more than a real thing: there are such significant differences between kinds of universities, and within universities, that the network is perhaps coming to replace the university as a totalising ideal to which many might subscribe and some would criticise

C I guess I'd say that critical thinking does not depend necessarily on uncollapsed space and time.

E These notions of collapsed space and time are so large they are really quite hard to comprehend

C However, those aspects of the currently accepted processes which signify 'critical thinking' that are linked to particular spatial arrangements and temporal narratives might need to be rethought.

C For example: continuous education via communities of never-ending discussion seem to me to avoid the 'time off' from study needed for reflective thinking

E And acceleration is not collapsed

C And we can see here, I think, how the problem with terms such as space and time is that we need to locate them within a social and cultural process - the university, as a space, is often a transcending space, outside of normal society - a temporary autonomous zone perhaps?

C Maybe the network is (or contains a sub network?) whose critical, subversive, transcending quality exists because it is 'outside' something else

A That I think is my point the never ending discussions need to create a new space of thinking. this is where the innovation should come in networks

 

A: Can new ideas of networks be identified?

 

F I was going to ask - can it ever be that defined - but would like to hear some non[-spatial metaphors for debates on the network

A I thought stealth technologies was an interesting way to describe some of these things but it seems again spatial

C Perhaps the thing about spatial metaphors is that, in fact, they are not about space...perhaps we construct an idea of 'space' as a form of sense-making about relationships between things? and the network is a new kind of relationship

C So, the network not only changes the way we think about, and experience, current time as different individuals (ie more aware of difference, more markers of the lack of commonality); but produces a greater capacity to share a common relationship, as individual now, with material from 'the past'

E It is a juncture between real time and rootless memory or history

B So, the internet might reduce images to an iconographic historicity?

 

Session Close: Friday June 13 15:08:05 2003

 

 

The online discussion brought me back to a list of concerns highlighted in Roy Ascott’s text in ‘Art and Telecommunications’. These concerns still seem to me to be largely undealt with in most visible applications of networks in an art education environment.

 

Was the network user in a sense dissolving into the computer itself? Having developed a non-critical approach, was the user becoming anaesthetised to its potential? The concept of dissolving brought up in the online discussion seemed to define a question about the person’s geographical location in relationship to network. The group’s conversations were based around an imagined space within which discussions exist. In order to function this space must be by its very context a conceptual one ‑ existing either metaphorically or literally for the user. To conceive of the spatiality of a network is a role in which the arts could be heavily involved. Ascott states

 

Telematics does not generate a new order of art discourse but demands a new form of criticism and analysis

 

(op. cit. 44).

 

Regarding the question of euphoria, I was interested to see the if euphoria which I had first experienced in the 1983 project ‘Australia 2003’ ‑ when Tom Klinkowstein demonstrated the Artist’s Electronic Exchange System (ARTEX) to the experimental art group Media-Space ‑ still existed within networking. The ‘Australia 2003’ project was organised by Eric Gidney in Sydney. It linked up ‘an exchange of telefax images which took place in April 1983 between students in Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth’ (Gidney 1984, 16).

 

I was looking for evidence as to whether there was still a sense of wonder and euphoria in regards to artistic networking. I was reminded of Ascott’s description of the total experience of working with the new technologies,

 

            Work at the interface of the network, at a console with keyboard. VDU, printer or plotter is, in itself sensuously satisfying: the rhythm of the printer, the unrolling of the paper, the glow of the CRT, the secret stillness and precision of the software, immaculately delicate responsiveness of the keyboard, the whirring and bleeping of control signals can induce moods which can excite enthusiastic expectancy or a meditative tranquillity

 

(op cit. 54).

 

In the online discussion for this section it was demonstrated that the euphoria connected with networking seemed to have given way to the politics of cyberspace. Ascott stated that the network

 

. . . .subverts the idea of individual ownership of the works of imagination. It replaces the bricks and mortar of institutions of culture and learning with an invisible college and a floating museum the reach of which is always expanding to include new possibilities of mind and new intimations of reality’

 

(op cit, 57).

 

Making the network part of an educational system can deny its own spatial potential for a ‘planetary collegium’. The thought that 100,000 students can listen to the same lecture is a common idea that is used to negate the real research needed to be done in the area of art networks. The misunderstanding predicates the one-on-one learning environment as more important than this form of mediated knowledge without looking into what is constituted through virtual studio spaces.

 

Within the discussion there was a desire to define rules that can be placed on and within the network. The context of the group’s discussion was based in the networks relationship to the arts, where the unpredictability and unmanageability are part of its very nature. The use of ‘normalise’ in connection with the network places the emphasis back on the user to define for themselves its social status.

 

The question of innovation in networking was part of the strategy to determine the relationship art has with researching the network as a creative medium for expression. The discussion was directed into the area of research into spatiality that we ‘define’ when we discuss networks and whether there were any attempts to research what appears to be collapse of conscious spatial understanding. Is the network coming to terms with this issue? Does this suggest we are creating a reactive rather than a proactive network?

 

The discussion stated that a planetary university has always existed. The networked planetary university will create its own dilemma by setting up critical, ethical, and moral questions that are exciting research areas. Virtual history is significant in seeing the network as having a connection to an understanding of our memory as a database. The consumption of virtual history is developing forms of consciousness. This concept puts the networks in a space of needing to develop these new ideas of memory. Ascott stated

 

The dream has become realised now, with vast dimensions and implication in the telematic domain. Two of the principal components, machine memory and artificial intelligence (Al) have hardly begun to be investigated by the artist. On our agenda must be the inquiry into the extent to which, through its internal ‘semantic network’ calling upon memory and intelligence, the computer can itself contribute to our artistic strategies

 

(op. cit 49).

 

The discussion touched on all the topics: defining networks, euphoria, difference, innovation, collapsing space and new ideas. What I would like to emphasise here is how in this network discussion there is a clear concern with the question of spatiality. One of the group stated that ‘perhaps the thing about spatial metaphors is that, in fact, they are not about space’.

 

Ongoing discussions concerning the networks in the area of an educational environment ignore questions concerning the spatial potential of a research network. To explore the environment of the network is difficult . . . ‘If not impossible, to fully appreciate the importance of telecommunications, not only as space and time transcending technologies, but as technological networks within which new forms of human interaction, control and organisation can actually be constructed’ (Marvin 1996, 54).

 

Don Foresta, a contemporary of Ascott who was working in Paris, and who developed projects in the early 1980s states, ‘The organizational space is at the same time a communication space, a visual space, an intuitional space, the space we call imagination and the way we see things operating. It will probably be at least another generation or two before we have consensus on the shape of that space, but if we are to believe what art and science have been saying, it is probable that that space will exist in time, be an interactive process and organised horizontally with a geometry quite different from the Euclidian geometry of renaissance perspective’ (Foresta 1997, ). This statement was written in 1997 as part of The Souillac Charter for Art and Industry. The authors were a small group of specialists from art and industry meeting in Souillac, France to draft a charter proposing a dialogue between artists and the telecommunications industry, governments, and international organizations. The Charter emphasised the importance of artistic creativity and the new forms of expression available through advances in telecommunications.

 

The architectural structure ‑ the physical presence of educational facilities ‑ has been under threat as independent skilled people use convergent networked technologies to bypass the system. Stocker writes,

‘The scene is defined by self-reinventors and spin-offs who have acquired their soft skills in direct dealings with the material or as by-products of the media design institutes, most of which are not oriented on art but on the training of media workers’ (Stocker 2001). This kind of innovation (that could happen within the research network area) needs to be given more consideration. It would be relevant to explore the questions of spatiality within the arts agenda. There are many reasons for this focus, but the main one relates to Roy Ascott’s description of a planetary consciousness. With wearable wireless networks, students can link into this ‘noosphere, a thinking layer’, ‘a planetary brain’. The main concern is that the network has become an immersive screen of text which, when linked to the computer user’s ability to cut and paste, can reproduce itself endlessly without any critical digestion. The ‘thinking layer’ that could be the networked world is not being researched in an art context beyond its practical display of information between nodes and e-learning. In 1984 Ascott referred to what was needed to understand the potential of exploring concepts of network art,

 

To ‘understand’ what is going on in the transactional process of network art is to merge the waves of planetary inputs, the modulation of ideas passed around the multiplicity of terminals, and to identify with the patterns of change which surge through the lines of communication.

 

(op. cit, 36).

 

The network has not discovered its own spatiality, and the flat space of the screen in which it appears only camouflages this spatiality. The screen with its relationship to perspectival space only allows the viewer a privileged understanding of a paradigm of seeing. Paul Virilio states that, ‘He mourns the destruction of distance, geographic grandeur, the vastness of natural space, the vastness which guaranteed time delay between events and our reactions, giving us time for the critical reflection necessary to arrive at a correct decision’ (cited in Manovich 1996). The destruction of distance has happened; we are connected; the organic thinking layer is waiting and in its place is the institutional approach. Questions need to be asked as to how this network affects our understanding of the world. How do we develop critical reflection in the area with this new spatial fabric that lacks the distancing of conventional critical creative space?

 

According to Michael Heim ‘Besides function, another aspect of the formal definition of ‘world’ is that it is a context or weaving-together of things. World makes a web-like totality. The web gives context to anything that happens within it. World is a total environment or surround space’ (Heim 1998, 91).

 

There is obvious renewed interest in research networks in Australia and possibilities of the network are there still there to be explored.. I think the need for spatial research of the network and the human conscious experience issues referenced through Ascott and Foresta are where the primary work needs to be done. Foresta stated that ‘It will probably be at least another generation or two before we have consensus on the shape of that space’ (Foresta 1997, ).

 

There is the possibility in that digital network has served its short time it is will be replaced and this could potentially be through the development of Nano Technologies. Then we will be embarking on much more invasive concept of networks, intimated when Ascott spoke about the development of networks: ‘engagements of creative minds in telematic systems will effect human consciousness and transform our culture’. (Ascott opcit, 52)

 

Artists within the Symbiotica research studio in the human biology department at the University of Western Australia are exploring some of these concerns through their MEART project. ‘We recorded the electric signals (neural activity) from the culture in Atlanta. These neurons are cultured over 60 electrodes fitted on a glass substrate. These electrodes pick up 60 channels of activity from the neurons.

The data received from the neural activity is processed both in Atlanta & Perth to control in real time the robotic (drawing) arm. The feedback loop is closed by stimulating the neurons (again, 60 electrodes, 60 different areas in the culture) when various events in the gallery space occur. In ‘Biofeel’ we had MEART ‘draw portraits’. Each morning we captured an image of a visitor in the gallery. Then we degraded it to 60 Pixels that correlated to the 60 electrodes that stimulate the neurons. We used this blue print to constantly stimulate the neurons’ (SYMBIOTICA 2003). There is link to be made between Ascott’s thoughts in 1984 when he said, ‘The creative use of networks makes them organisms.’ (Ascott op cit, 56) and the work of Symbiotica stimulating neurons through the network to drive robots. The network is returning to the body.

 

 

 

 

ARC Implementation Plan for National Research Priorities Paper (2003). See http://www.humanities.org.au/policy/OPPORTUNITIES/networks.htm

 

           

Ascott, R. (1984). Art and Telematics - Towards a Network Consciousness. Art and Telecommunications. H. Crundmann. Vancouver, A Western Front Publication.

           

Foresta, D. (1997). Souillac Charter, Mit Press. 1997. http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/souillac/malvy.html

           

Gidney, E. (1984). The Artist's Use of Telecommunications. Art and Telecommunications. H. Crundmann. Vancouver, A Western Front Publication.

           

Heim, M. (1998). Virtual Realism. New York, Oxford University Press.

           

Manovich, L. (1996). Cinema and Telecommunication /Distance and Aura. http://www.manovich.net/

           

Marvin, S. G. a. S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City. London: Routledge.

           

Stocker, G. (2001). Takeover - About the thing. 2002. http://www.aec.at/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp?iProjectID=8202

           

SYMBIOTICA (2003). MEART. 2004 http://www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au/.

           

Internet references:

 

Planetary Collegium

http://www.planetary-collegium.net

ARC Research Network

http://www.arc.gov.au/grant_programs/centres_networks/research_networks.htm

Souillac Charter

http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/souillac/malvy.html

MEART

http://www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au/

Gefried Stocker Ars Electronica

http://www.aec.at/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp?iProjectID=8202