Page 238 - The Black Box Book

create works of exceptional beauty by their hands, they are independent
and free from influences from the others. This dichotomy, as a result,
creates an artist, isolated outside of the Technological System, locked
in their romantic realm of individual genius as in an escapist ghetto, and
freed from the structural hold of formal rationality. (Kagan, 2013, p. 70) In
the 20th century, a number of art movements addressed the difficulties
of this profound division of the social from the technological, and artists
refused to remain silent in the face of technocratic authority in their pur-
ported capacity as producers of aesthetic objects.
Before going into greater detail about how systems art and media
art contribute to interdisciplinary dialogues between science, technology,
and society, it is important to note how artistic research, in general, un-
derlies inventive data practices and how it can question the default lines
of inquiry that are built into data infrastructures, including reassembling
them in accordance with public interests.
Artistic research is grounded in practice led research as a distinc-
tive feature of the research activities conducted by arts and humanities
researchers. It involves the identification of research questions, contexts
and problems, while the research methods and outputs incorporate a sig-
nificant focus on creative practice. At that interdisciplinarity in artistic
research involves not only multiple disciplines (informatics, biology, ...), but
also multiple base domains of inquiry. Graeme Sullivan (Sullivan, 2009)
defines those domains as
Interpretivist: constructivist creation of meaning, network,
dialogue, interdiscipline
Empiricist: exploratory, conceptual, reflective, discipline-based
Critical: positionality-change, contextual, perspective, question,
transdiscipline
Art practice is meta-theoretical, practical, reflexive, post-discipline
and makes use of visual systems accordingly. It also comes in coupled
with abovementioned interpretivist, empiricist and critical domains form-
ing theory dimensions: Meaning-making, Enact-explain, Create-critique.
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ENTANGLEMENT OF VIDEO
ART AND SYSTEMS ART
In the September issue of Artforum in 1968, Jack Burnham published
an article Systemic Aesthetics, where he wrote :
“Increasingly, products – either in art or life – become irrelevant
and different set of needs arise: these revolve around such con-
cerns as maintaining the biological livability of the earth, produc-
ing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding
the growing symbiosis in man-machine relations, establishing pri-
orities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and
defining alternative patterns of education, productivity and leisure.”
(Burnham, 1968, p. 30)
Burnham, art theorist, critic and curator, who established the field of
systems art, continued:
“In the emergent ‘superscientific culture’ long-range decision making
and its implementation become more difficult and more necessary.
[...] A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, on-going
relationships between organic and non-organic systems be these
neighborhoods, industrial complexes, farms, transportation systems,
information centers, recreation centers, or any of the other matrixes
of human activity.” (Burnham, 1968, p. 30)
The editorial of the first issue of Radical Software in 1970, pointed
to an obsession with hardware, be it in the form of land, labor, or capital,
in contrary to software as an access to information and its dissemina-
tion. In the argument, the ‘techno-sphere’ and cybernetics were placed
on the same level as natural and organic systems, and the software
was introduced as a realm of the real power, and thus as a place where
the battle must be fought over information structures:
“Unless we design and build alternative information structures that
go beyond and reconfigure existing ones, then alternative systems
and lifestyles will be nothing more than products of the existing
process.” (Radical Software, 1970, p. 1)
It is significant that the magazine dedicated to independent video
practices, had three equal sections, Hardware, Software, and Environ-
ment, which differs its approach to the issues connected with media from
McLuhan’s technological determinism.
In a similar vein Michael Shamberg, author of Guerilla Television,
(Shamberg, 1971) the major Radical Software publication, describes
the word radical not in the sense of political revolution and physical dis-
ruption of the system, but as a post-political discontinuity with the past,
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