Page 239 - The Black Box Book

create works of exceptional beauty by their hands, they are independent ENTANGLEMENT OF VIDEO
and free from influences from the others. This dichotomy, as a result, ART AND SYSTEMS ART
creates an artist, isolated outside of the Technological System, locked
in their romantic realm of individual genius as in an escapist ghetto, and In the September issue of Artforum in 1968, Jack Burnham published
freed from the structural hold of formal rationality. (Kagan, 2013, p. 70) In an article Systemic Aesthetics, where he wrote :
the 20th century, a number of art movements addressed the difficulties
of this profound division of the social from the technological, and artists “Increasingly, products – either in art or life – become irrelevant
refused to remain silent in the face of technocratic authority in their pur- and different set of needs arise: these revolve around such con-
ported capacity as producers of aesthetic objects. cerns as maintaining the biological livability of the earth, produc-
Before going into greater detail about how systems art and media ing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding
art contribute to interdisciplinary dialogues between science, technology, the growing symbiosis in man-machine relations, establishing pri-
and society, it is important to note how artistic research, in general, un- orities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and
derlies inventive data practices and how it can question the default lines defining alternative patterns of education, productivity and leisure.”
of inquiry that are built into data infrastructures, including reassembling (Burnham, 1968, p. 30)
them in accordance with public interests.
Artistic research is grounded in practice led research as a distinc- Burnham, art theorist, critic and curator, who established the field of
tive feature of the research activities conducted by arts and humanities systems art, continued:
researchers. It involves the identification of research questions, contexts
and problems, while the research methods and outputs incorporate a sig- “In the emergent ‘superscientific culture’ long-range decision making
nificant focus on creative practice. At that interdisciplinarity in artistic and its implementation become more difficult and more necessary.
research involves not only multiple disciplines (informatics, biology, ...), but [...] A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, on-going
also multiple base domains of inquiry. Graeme Sullivan (Sullivan, 2009) relationships between organic and non-organic systems be these
defines those domains as neighborhoods, industrial complexes, farms, transportation systems,
information centers, recreation centers, or any of the other matrixes
Interpretivist: constructivist creation of meaning, network, of human activity.” (Burnham, 1968, p. 30)
dialogue, interdiscipline
Empiricist: exploratory, conceptual, reflective, discipline-based The editorial of the first issue of Radical Software in 1970, pointed
Critical: positionality-change, contextual, perspective, question, to an obsession with hardware, be it in the form of land, labor, or capital,
transdiscipline in contrary to software as an access to information and its dissemina-
tion. In the argument, the ‘techno-sphere’ and cybernetics were placed
Art practice is meta-theoretical, practical, reflexive, post-discipline on the same level as natural and organic systems, and the software
and makes use of visual systems accordingly. It also comes in coupled was introduced as a realm of the real power, and thus as a place where
with abovementioned interpretivist, empiricist and critical domains form- the battle must be fought over information structures:
ing theory dimensions: Meaning-making, Enact-explain, Create-critique.
“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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