Leonardo Electronic Almanac

Interference Strategies: Is Art in the Middle?

Lanfranco Aceti

If we look at the etymological structure of the word interference, we would have to go back to a construct that defines it as a sum of the two Latin words inter (in between) and ferio (to strike), but with a particular attention to the meaning of the word ferio being interpreted principally as to wound. Albeit perhaps etymologically incorrect, it may be preferable to think of the word interference as a composite of inter (in between) and the Latin verb fero (to carry), which would bring forward the idea of interference as a contribution brought in the middle of two arguments, two ideas, two constructs.

It is important to acknowledge the etymological root of a word not in order to develop a sterile academic exercise, but in order to clarify the ideological under - pinnings of arguments that are then summed up and characterized by a word.

Interference Strategies

Paul Thomas

The theme of ”˜interference strategies for art’ reflects a literal merging of sources, an interplay be - tween factors, and acts as a metaphor for the interaction of art and science, the essence of transdisciplinary study. The revealing of metaphors for interference “that equates different and even ”˜incommensurable’ concepts can, therefore, be a very fruitful source of insight. ” [1] The role of the publication, as a vehicle to promote and encourage transdisciplinary research, is to question what fine art image-making is contributing to the current discourse on images. The publication brings together researchers, artists and cultural thinkers to speculate, contest and share their thoughts on the strategies for interference, at the intersection between art, science and culture, that form new dialogues.

[1] David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order and Creativity (London: Routledge, 2000), 45.

The Art of Decoding: n-Folded, n-Visioned, n-Cultured

Mark Guglielmetti

Scientific modelling requires us to suspend disbelief, nowhere is this more palpable than in artificial life, an area of computational research investi - gating the principles that constitute a living system “without making refer - ence to the materials that constitute it. ” [1]

This paper investigates artificial life visualisation as both a scientific concern and in relation to media arts. Of interest in this examination is the normative protocol of looking at an artificial life simulation or ”˜world. ’ Analogous to looking through a telescope or microscope, the view into the artificial life world is monocular and often fixed; in this regime we look at ”˜organisms. ’ This strategy of looking through the scientific lens to observe a ”˜natural world’ enfolds other forms of cultural tactics that require decoding including but not exclusive to Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, Disney nature films and other “apparatus-based universes which robotize the human being and society. ” [2]

Subsequent to identifying these protocols in artificial life visualisation I describe a number of works which exploit normative computational procedures to align artificial life image making into optical consistency with other forms of contemporary culture and to celebrate the ”˜ocular madness’ found in art forms such as neo-baroque image making and Islamic art.

[1] C. Adami, Introduction to Artificial Life (New York: Springer, 1998), 4.

[2] V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 70.

The Case of Biophilia: A Collective Composition of Goals and Distributed Action

Mark Cypher

Rather than follow the machinations of a singular artist in the production and exhibition of an interactive artwork, this paper uses an actor-network approach to collectively hold to account a whole host of actors that literally make a difference in the production of an interactive artwork, Biophilia (2004-2007). My main argument is that in order for any action to take place both humans and non-humans must on some level collectively work together, or, in actor-network terms translate one another. However, such new relations are predicated and indeed just as dependent on and what these new actors are willing to give up as it is to do with what they can offer. Needless to say that when the negotiations are momentarily over, actors give up individual goals and compel others to collectively form new definitions, new intentions and new goals with each interaction. In other words, the ”˜work’ represents neither the beginning nor the end of a particular event, but is described more as a continually shifting and cumulative series of distributed actions.

Contaminated Immersion and Thomas Demand: The Dailies

David Eastwood

If, as Oliver Grau has stated, immersion “is characterized by diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening, ” any artwork might be thought of as potentially im - mersive. Arguably, immersion is a condition contingent upon the viewer responding to the artwork, rather than an inherent quality within the artwork alone. Considered in relation to some art historical contexts, the relationship between immersive experience and interference will be discussed in order to contextualize Thomas Demand’s Kaldor Public Art Project, The Dailies. Demand’s project both relates to and departs from some of the key aspects of what is conventionally thought of as immersive art. It is useful to consider this in order to engage with the implications of immersion in art, and reflect on the possibility of strategic interferences operating within what might be described as contaminated immersion.

Gesture in Search of a Purpose: A Prehistory of Mobility

Darren Tofts

This paper explores the uncanny anticipation of mobile telephony in the history of the visual image. Drawing on our remix project, The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, it critically engages with contem - porary media culture’s obsession with the occupation of the hands as an unwitting gesture in search of a purpose. This gesture is a bodily panto - mime imagining an indispensable, intimate apparel that has modified the body’s relation to itself and remote others through mobile media. These images are suggestive of bodily rhythms that synchronize the hand, the ear, the eye and the mouth that have not always made sense. In this they foreshadow the potential media that will, in time, resolve this postural er - gonomics into a meaningful function: the immediate and continuous com - munion with unseen and absent others. The visual archive can become the unconscious of contemporary media when its images are re-coded through the writing of implicit and anachronistic narratives. The combina - tion of image and text, in the form of captions, denotates and detonates at one and the same time, creating a double vision that, once seen, can never be unseen.

Headless and Unborn, or the Baphomet Restored Interfering with Bataille and Masson’s Image of the Acephale

Leon Marvell

This paper investigates Bataille and Masson’s drawing of the Acephale, the escutcheon of Bataille’s esoteric cabal and the journal ( Acéphale) that espoused his vision of a violently sacralised society. Masson’s drawing of the acephalic monster is the emblem of Bataille’s negative Absolute, and is therefore the final image, a talisman to wipe out all other images. I unearth a hitherto unsuspected connexion between the Acephale and a magical text, one of the Papyri Graecae Magicae. Noting that the Acephale is an ”˜emblem’, I point towards the tradition of the emblematic books, a tradition that began with Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica. I then propose that Caillois’s ”˜objective ideograms’ and the idea of mantic decaptitation was in part responsible for the production of Masson’s image. Capitalising on these imaginal connexions, I conclude by re-imagining the image of the Baphomet, and in particular Eliphas Levi’s famous drawing of the ”˜Goat of Mendes. ’ I suggest that the Baphomet is the secret twin of the Acephale, and that it is Levi’s aim to make his Baphomet the ultimate hieroglyphic emblem, the supreme condensation of the mysteries of the occult tradition. Thus the Baphomet is the necessary occult complement to the headless monster of Bataille and Masson.

Images (R)-Evolution: Media Arts Complex Imagery Challenging Humanities and Our Institutions of Cultural Memory

Oliver Grau

Considering its technological and thematical contexts, digital art conveys different – even more complex – potentials of expression than traditional art forms (such as sculptures, paintings, etc.), what makes digital art a paradigmatic expression of its time? This article emphasizes the variety of (complex) topics that are expressed within digital art, ranging from globalization, ecological and economic crises (virtual economy), media and image revolution to questions of the body and its societal norms. Due to the imminent problems of archiving, the digital arts are threatened by its loss – a problem that is reinforced by the insufficient practices of cultural institutions to display, collect and research digital art. Post-industrial societies require digital arts based on contemporary media dispositive to reflect upon current and future challenges, just like art history was always informed by its contemporary media technologies. By establishing concerted international strategies and new scientific tools it is the aim of this essay to provide a framework to enable media art histories and image science as well as the digital humanities to engage more fully with current digital developments in order to enable the humanities to meet with its (current) responsibilities. By discussing examples from a variety of projects from the natural sciences and the humanities, this article tries to demonstrate the strategic importance of these collective projects, especially in their growing importance for the humanities.

Interference Wave Data and Art

Adam Nash

This article investigates the nature of digital data as a medium for art. Specifically, what are the qualities and specificities unique to the medium of digital data, and how can artists working with this medium create work that cannot be created in any other medium? References are made to Friedrich Kittler, Mark B. N. Hansen, Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Munster and Claire Colebrook to establish a bivalent ontological model of digital data. This bivalence is described in terms of ”˜data’ and ”˜display, ’ where ”˜data’ exists in an indeterminate state inaccessible to hu - man perception until a determining operation is performed to modulate the data into a ”˜display’ state, where ”˜display’ does not necessarily imply visual display. Such a model suggests, in McLuhanist and Deleuzean terms, a medium that retroactively virtualises all previous media. This model is compared in detail to Gilbert Simondon’s ontological model of transductive individuation. Finally, modulation - in the form of parameter selection - is presented as the defining work of the artist in the digital medium.

Interfering with the Dead

Edward Colless

An ancient library of what has become known, if contentiously, as the “gnostic gospels” was accidentally exhumed in 1945 from a monastic grave - yard in Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Among these esoteric texts, most of which were lost to history since their hasty burial in the fourth century, the Gospel of Thomas has an especially piquant pedigree. Cited throughout early Christian literature as an exceptionally heretical and prohibited text that had been purportedly composed in the first century CE, its cryptic (when not incomprehensible) apothegms are claimed to have been secret knowledge written by the twin brother of Jesus Christ. This claim, even taken as figurative, poses a modest predicament for the archaeology of Christian theology. However, taken as an artifact of media archaeology, this text – one of its verses, in particular, which proposes an equation of knowledge and death – extends a dark perspective on our own contemporary cultural imperatives with embodiment and performativity.

Merge/Multiplex

Brogan Bunt

The tradition of modern and contemporary art seems to be characterised by an endless pushing back of the boundaries separating art and everyday life, art and the sphere of the social. This is typically interpreted in terms of a work of merging and blurring – an effort of interference that affects dimensions of both art and life. This paper suggests an alternative concep - tion. Drawing upon the metaphor of electronic multiplexing, it argues that, while never simply absolutely distant from one another, art and the sphere of lived relations and social interaction are closely interleaved and yet re - tain a sense of distinct, differentiated identity. The energy of their relation, their potential to suggest new relations, depends upon an interplay of het - erogeneous and always contingently determinable component signals.

A Robot Walks into a Room: Google Art Project, The New Aesthetic, and the Accident of Art

Susan Ballard

On the 1st February 2011 Google unleashed the Google Art Project, a new way to engage with the major collections of the world’s art galleries. With the Google Art Project came a new way of viewing, not just art but the other objects that inhabit art galleries. Google Art Project depends on a robot looking machine. This aesthetic machine is a different form of digital material that has entered into what have for a long time been quiet still spaces for human, and not machine contemplation. With an equal focus on the spaces between things as much as on the things themselves, Google Art Project suggests a new way of understanding art, in the interval. Except it is not new at all. This essay draws a connection between the Google Art Project, James Bridle’s new aesthetic tumblr log and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in order to suggest that accidental encounters and ghost images formed in the spaces between things remain key to contemporary understandings of aesthetics.

Towards an Ontology of Colour in the Age of Machinic Shine

Mark Titmarsh

This paper argues that the enduring mystery of colour, in particular its el - emental effusiveness, has been tamed and managed by notions of good taste and chic that equate cultural maturity with a limited palette. Yet co - lour in all its post industrial forms continues to break free of constraints in an audacious display of autopoiesis. The science of colour based on image, mimesis, and the physiology of the eye has missed the phenomenon of co - lour altogether because it takes place at the incalculable level of shine and radiance. Ontologically colour makes things manifest by revealing them in their unique presence rather than merely facilitating communication, rep - resentation or spectacle. Before colour is seen, before light can facilitate a look, colour looks back in such a way that looking and seeing are provoked.

Using Thierry de Duve, David Batchelor and Martin Heidegger it will be shown that these ways of being with colour are extended by a formal evolution in painting whereby expanded painting addresses everything in the everyday world that carries colour from data screens to plastic utensils and even paint itself. Ultimately, the medium of painting however decon - structed or expanded, has become the entity to ”˜whom’ the work of colour is addressed.

Transversal Interference

Anna Munster

Increasingly, the images we regard as authoritative – those with a seem - ingly direct relation to the ”˜truth’ of our brains, profiling our identities, or mapping our universe – are not generated optically. They are composed out of other media, notably sonic and electromagnetic materialities, and other processes, primarily algebraic and statistical transforms. In actuality they are transmaterial assemblages. Yet such heterogeneous image enti - ties continue to command the epistemological privilege of indexicality that light-based images previously claimed. If the scientific, authoritative image is already constituted ”˜transgenically, ’ what implication does this have for interference as a viable aesthetic strategy? To what extent can artists and cultural producers visually interfere with the politics and ethics of such im - aging practices? This article suggests that we should abandon the strategy of interference as intervention in favour of a better understanding of in - terference as pattern, indeed fabric, subtending many contemporary non - visual imaging practices. I argue for a transversal diagrammatic approach to the nonvisual image; to diagramming as both a holding together and a dynamic deformation of images into new assemblages. In turn, such dia - grammatic practices reflexively remind us that what we see as fixed and authoritative images are instead processual, virtual and speculative modes of ”˜viewing’ and engaging life.

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