ARS ELECTRONICA
*
HUNTING THE FUTURE
In ‘Know Brow’ Art and Ars Electronica
The Hidden Curriculum; Today’s Art and Media Technical Education;
Tomorrow’s Core Curriculum; Give Me Liberty or Give Me Art History
Iona Miller, 4/2004
“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ~ Arthur Koestler
"Art is simply a right method of doing things. The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces." ~ Thomas Aquinas
“Getting swamped by new information that you have difficulty handling may predispose you to a mental disorder, but if you have high intelligence and a good working memory, you are more likely to be able to combine bits of new information in creative ways.” ~ Shelly Carson, Harvard psychologist
‘Know Brow’ art is the product of new media, ars electronica, that transcends the dichotomies of high and low brow. It implies the knowledge, attitudes and skill sets necessary to produce art with highly technical processes, but also the visionary capacity to see multiple layers of meaning through direct experience. This knowing is a discovery process, a seeking, a gnosis that cuts a path through the mindscape of the ‘now’ toward the future that remains perpetually undefined.
We commune with the past to inform our present, not just as a homage, but to gain initiation to that transtemporal way of knowing and honoring our cultural roots. Defining the ‘hidden curriculum’ makes a strong statement about the missing element in art education, and the silent blocks in the system to its fulfillment. Institutions have been just as remiss in honoring the future, the rightful place of digital fine art, as they have been in passing on the legacy of the past.
‘Know brow’ art, as a movement, encourages the active, constructivist acquisition of artistic knowledge and openness to new forms and media, as well as technical capacities. We want to inspire more than digital “factory workers” or proficient craftspeople.
We want to enable the student to make, shape or organize with a telos, a meaningful purpose that has deep psychic rootedness: one who invents, not adopts; who shapes not copys; who builds not assembles; who is capable not merely competent; who is efficacious not just efficient; who experiments not just conceptualizes. There is a bliss that comes from within one that energizes the human desire to enact, to enable, to engage, to outwork it, i.e. to transform oneself and the world (bizarre and grandiose as this may sound).
* * *
PART I
The Hidden Curriculum in Art Education
Today’s fine arts, graphics, or multimedia artist is likely to be very technically proficient in his specialty but unlikely to have a fluent working knowledge of the history of art. Why? Because it is hardly taught taught in art school beyond simple art appreciation. Why? Because the pressures of an already highly technical and crowded curriculum leave no room.
As a by-product of neglecting the past, a general art education also does nothing to emphasize the obvious importance of the future -- new modalities, such as digital fine art, computer generated imagery, or interactive media. This attitude needs to be inculcated and reinforced in artists, curators, and directors. Artists will use more and more technology as time goes on, though traditional media will always have their aficionados. We need to be both pro- and post-active about our active experimentation: thinking, designing, doing, and reflecting.
Soon we will have Virtual Reality installations with interactive full immersion experiences and simulations that rival so-called “real life.” The next century will see electronic artistic possibilities we can’t even imagine. But is the art world, with its biases and prejudices ready to embrace such interactive art? Is its importance being reinforced anywhere in the system? Is there any historical precedent for such a quantum leap in the content and delivery of an artistic expression?
In terms of art history or appreciation, what more do we need to know than that most of the artistic genius seems to have been born in Italy? Plenty! We need to hunt the rest of the story. We need to 1). define the Hidden Curriculum, 2). Discuss how it affects learning and creativity, and the acceptance of digital art forms, 3). Describe how to find it, 4). Provide an example of how we are addressing it in the educational setting, particularly in highly technical artforms, such as new media.
Educational events are complex with many variables and dynamic changes, dependent on their context. Each educational opportunity is different whether structured or self-taught. For learning and applying any new knowledge, attitude is much more important than the knowledge itself. We must translate knowledge into practice by also changing the attitudes that motivate the learning and application of any new knowledge.
There are three types of curricula:
1). Formal, the stated, intended, and formally offered and endorsed curriculum. This is what the system offers; what we now do.
2). Informal, unscripted, mostly ad hoc, interpersonal forms of teaching and learning.
3). Hidden curriculum, a set of influences that operate at the level of organizational structure and culture. It can perpetuate bias, create confusion with mixed messages, idealize the normative, foster relative cynicism, and create inconsistency between education and reality.
We should care about the implicit programming of our art students regarding the later discrepancy, especially as it relates to art history, because we want to: 1) communicate consistency between objectives and outcomes; 2) optimize the learning environment; 3) and, inform the process of curricular reform while documenting the outcome for efficient use of resources.
Where do students learn the things we don’t teach them, both enriching and stultifying? Where do they learn the culture of the college, university, business, organization or profession? Where do students learn other than in organized environments?
What is encouraged and discouraged or disparaged in the academic and media school setting? Art, as perhaps no other discipline, is molded by a magnetic draw from the future. It calls to the artist crying out for manifestation, often a precursor of things to come in society in general. Some artists can intuitively sense the ‘next’ moment, the next milestone of art history. Some of them become it, while others toil in obscurity.
The art education system revolves around policy decisions, student admissions, faculty recruitment and its evaluation, recognition/awards, tenure/promotion, grant awards, faculty bonuses/raises, distribution of space, institutional slang or ‘jargon’, and resource allocation. That leaves little time or incentive for funding the emotional side of artistic enrichment, which feeds creativity and creates lifelong learners and those who learn by doing, by experimenting with new forms and media.
We need to be willing and able to step back and assess just what messages are being created by and within the very structures we have developed and are responsible for. Once we find the areas that are blocking the total educational process, we can 1). Do nothing. 2). Change our practices, procedures, environments, rules, etc. 3). Start over from scratch. 4). Or, embrace the Hidden Curriculum, becoming aware of outdated attitudes and prejudices that limit our palettes.
In the world of art, this hidden curriculum is embedded in the entire history of art and all that it can tell us about fostering (and discouraging) the creative process. The Academies have always been resistant to new modalities and struggled actively against them, refusing to even show work that did not conform. Academic art is a term applied to any kind of art that stresses the use of accepted rules for technique and form organization. It represents the exact opposite of the creative approach, which results in a vital, individualistic style of expression.
The old guard in all institutions has a vested interest they jealously guard. Change and revolution for them means their reign has come to an end, so they are resistant to new ideas, including the authenticity of new media such as ars electronica.
Today’s Art and Media Technical Education
We can examine the full range of influences, restructure the learning environment instead of just modifying the curricula, create opportunities for reflection, seek non-traditional students and teachers, focusing on the teachers in addition to the students. The three areas affected by the hidden curriculum are attitudes, knowledge, and skills. All directly affect execution, beginning with inspiration and passion informed by a deep understanding of the artistic heritage, and crowned by state-of-the-art technical virtuosity.
We should try to define what we are changing, why we are changing it, and with what intended outcome, anticipating and modifying unintended consequences. For example, an unforeseen consequence of the electronic art revolution is a generation of technically proficient but uninspired practitioners and amateurs. It seems anyone with a Photoshop program can now consider himself or herself “an artist,” but then it is not necessarily for them to say. There is art that hangs on the refrigerator and art that hangs in the Louvre.
The hidden curriculum affects teaching and learning; it can be identified and addressed in your own educational environment. Institutions have a responsibility to facilitate students not only in critical thinking skills and artistic technique, but in the ability to be self normative and self reflecting, to be aware of the distinctions between self and the roles one occupies in the realm of art, and how structural factors, social situations and cultural contexts affect their work.
Tomorrow’s Core Curriculum
The whole culture of art is due for a revolution in electronic arts; it has already begun. Content refers to the sensory, subjective, psychological, or emotional properties we feel in a work of art, as opposed to our perception of its descriptive aspects alone. The content of art, the expression, essential meaning, significance, or aesthetic value of a work of art, may remain the same, but the means of execution and delivery will shortly be unbound.
Culture is a set of learned ways of thinking and acting that characterizes a decision-making human group. A progressive curriculum should include core values of lifelong learning, not so much in the content of formal lectures, but as a recognized and cultivated core facet of the artistic personality, fostering changes from the inside out.
If the system is flawed, the system should be examined and overhauled. We need to teach aesthetics (a compound of the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of art having to do with the nature of beauty and its relation to human beings) and motivation as inspiration flows forth from there.
More than passive, active or experimental learning, our ethos should be attitudinal and aspirational, as well as inspirational. We want deliberate, participative, effective artificers, not simply dreamers or designers. Intentionality combines all three with good personal business sense. Practical knowledge leads to deliberation, disclosure, collaboration, implementation.
To produce well-rounded artists, not just conventional craftspeople, a holistic educational system might include the following critical design dimensions: inner/outer; left/right brain; horizontal/vertical; intentional/futures; small/big picture; design/enactional; efficacious; performative (Wildman, 2003). We need to provide the tools for constantly reformulating both our Personal Achievement Plans and Business Achievement Plans, as both are essential to artistic success in today’s competitive markets, especially in the area of intense active experimentation.
1. Lifestyle: [inner/outer balance dimension] (intension--vertical, consciousness; extension, breadth, application) Bringing the Personal Achievement Plan and Business Achievement Plan together.
2. Self-Awareness: Knowing what is inside oneself, i.e. who you are and what makes you pump. Authenticity, calling, integrity, and ethicality. Personal Achievement Plan. [Living from ones Core].
3. Worldliness: Knowing what is out there. Sophisticated or cosmopolitan understanding of the diverse world we live in both empirically, what is out there, as well as ecologically and morally; how we should then live Political savvy. Here one’s integrity and system ethicality come into play, as key priorities for action. Macrostructural awareness. Art is always political, but some is moreso. [Living for Gaia’s core]
4. Self-Systems Balance: allowing for agency while recognizing the huge influence of structures and institutionalized processes; comprehending what is within our domain to change and what is dictated by the system, (maintaining the 20/80 balance). There are characteristic ways art is produced, acquired, displayed, exhibited, recognized, and honored.
5. Pragmatism: Business focus. Self doing/artificing a Project/Enterprise focus (extension). Business Achievement Plan. Communicative action. In this dimension, it is the customer that is being produced (museum, patron, dealer, gallery, collector, audience, etc.). The dealer system is a means of sale and distribution usually from galleries. Prestigious international dealers contract artists and provide salaries in exchange for promotion and exhibitions. Its main effect is to provide art to wealthy collectors and public galleries, however a side effect is to keep artists and general public apart, and raise prices.
6. Design: for pragmatic shaping of functionality, e.g., potter rather than sculpturer (concept->design->enactment->learning->concept). This same pattern can be enacted within the art career arc time and again to redesign the career. Design is a framework or scheme of construction on which artists base the nature of their total work. In a broader sense, design may be considered synonymous with the term form.
7. Balance: between and respect for analysis and synthesis, part and pattern, Yin and Yang [Left Brain/Right Brain dimension]
8. Creativity: true originality, even if only in your original business.
9. Innovation: (organizational innovation process, continuous improvement) including social analysis, synthesis, and innovation based on complex feedback from the environment.
10. Capability focused: Attitudes, skills, knowledge; competence plus values; experience, creativity and citizenship in the art community and at large. Includes affective and effective, i.e. emotional intelligence within artificer intelligence.
11. Performative: active experimenter. Enactment capability dimension, not abstract conceptualisers, reflective observers or concrete experiencers.
12. Telos: i.e. awareness of the link between present action and the big picture, in particular, the future which is drawing us forward. Teleology relates to the study of ultimate causes/ends/designs/intent immanent in action in nature/society or of actions in relation to their ends or utility.
13. Philosophical: links to discourse of phenomenology as it relates to perception, art, image formation and production; esoteric and exoteric dimensions.
14. Poietic: productive, formative: (1) poetic; imaginative. (2) performative; intentionality a step away from self formative, i.e. autopoiesis from hermeneutics and chaos theory, self organizing also linked to fructified and efficaciousness.
15. Pangogical: artificer-learning interfaces Androgogical and Pedagogical without destroying either. Both self-teaching and formal education are encouraged. Learning happens in the complex environment.
16. Artifactual: An element of utility. The artifact may be useful in day to day life though not used that way, yet the artifact is more than technically correct or even well designed; it is imbued with wisdom. Efficacy is ‘sureness to produce’ the desired final effect. This means integration of process from the final end i.e., the user not producer. Interface integration maximizes design from the point of view of the final user and thus requires waste reduction or elimination; interactive art.
17. Informal: or third sector focused, without excluding private and public but transformative of this conventional dichotomy, i.e. art that is intimate or private yet still recognizable, rather than only idiosyncratic. Art not created for solely narcissistic (self-indulgent) or commercial purposes, but with individual as well as societal value.
We can prioritize this project sufficiently with a ‘statement of intent.’ Communicative action is about achieving through deliberation common criteria and meaning with which to direct actions in those regards. The aspects of communicative action include:
*Freedom of thought and expression that comes from moral autonomy, including nonhierarchical, non domination, communicative competency, transparency, integrity (internal constitution) and ethics (external constitution)
*Generalisable or universal applicability not just for an elite through applying the tests: “what is good for the goose and, “Do unto others.”
*Language consistency.
*Shared priority clarity.
*Individually, collectively, and organizationally role modeling the sort of world we seek to artifice.
*So in this sense, artificing a progressive curriculum includes a component of CART, Communicative Action Research Team, i.e. concept through design and deliberation to action.
We can remember that art is basically a communicative action, designed to convey (or enact) our subjective vision to another’s perceptions. There are virtually infinite ways of doing so for those whose imaginations are unbound. It was not through the search for safe or comfortable art that a work such as “A Starry Night” came about.
PART II
Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Art History
A Short Course in the Digital Revolution
Art is the most fundamental activity that characterizes modern man. Knowledge of the rich history of art adds depth to our perception, heightens awareness, and provides a sense of our place in the world. It is the foundation on which to build a relationship to the panoply of iconography, symbolism, and archetypes that art draws from continually. Art is a discipline of consciousness, whose ecology is to recycle itself.
The Postmodern era ushered in a hodge-podge of styles harking back to bygone eras. Postmodernism began in the 1970's, when the dominant styles of art - Minimalism and Conceptualism - seemed to no longer fit in a world struggling with a myriad of social problems. As a result, a plurality of styles developed. Some Post-modernists forcefully expressed a desire to do away with art that seemed to have no meaningful content, and began to turn back to figurative art and the establishment of meaning.
Other Post-modernists attempted to extend modern art in new ways by appropriating earlier styles, which they modified. Due to the sheer variety of sources and styles it is difficult to catergorize Post-modern artists with the same ease of earlier styles or movements. The post Postmodern era saw the development of new media, such as digital fine art, digital animation, multimedia, holography, computer generated imagery (CGI), interactive gaming, even virtual reality, etc., with styles all their own.
Computer enhanced images are produced with a stage of manipulation in digital language using computer software. It can be applied to other media, such as photographs or scans of traditional media, or 3-D objects. This awesome technology is used by photographers, filmmakers, the advertising industry, web designers, graphic designers and increasingly available to fine artists.
Museum quality prints can be made by the enhanced giclee or other processes. (Giclee; literally means little squirt in French. It is the latest digital printing technique enabling "print on demand". Originally it was a term used by Iris printers but rapidly became the generic term for top quality digital prints using archival quality inks on heavy weight paper or canvas.)
Suddenly, the entire history of art became fodder for a raw-image-hungry medium that gobbled up, digested, and spat out a pot pourri of historical, fantastic, and futuristic iconography in the digital vernacular. Rapid cut clips are the visual equivalent of ‘sound bites.’ We see the familiar old images, here a Michelangelo reference, a Van Gogh homage, or a Duchamp pun -- but they have become virtually meaningless in the new context, a fractal blur.
There is nothing new under the sun, the saying goes. In art, it means there is rarely anything truly innovative, and that most imagery is a rehash of previous work, in which the statement was perhaps more succinctly embodied. Virtually any work can be considered derivative or deconstructed by its critics. The exceptions are works of genius, milestones in the history of art. They foresee the future, hunting it down in the forest of kaleidoscopic potential creations.
To ignore or fail to meaningfully incorporate the broad and delicate strokes of the arc of art’s evolution over the centuries means impoverishment of the spirit. One’s artistic soul remains starved for the lavish feast that is still spread before us, so close yet so far away. Knowledge of art history, experience of historic art, helps develop conceptual perception...creative vision that derives from the imagination.
Each and every artist needs to claim this legacy anew, whether in the academic setting or on his own. The visionary gift is an activity of the soul that draws not only on the collective unconscious, but also on collective consciousness on what has gone before. How else can we hunt the future but with our vision?
As educators, we need to instill a love of art in students, not merely technical prowess, so that the technical media do not dictate the creation through mere programming. The world is full of hacks in every profession who know their craft but lack that vital spark of originality, of boldness. Artifice and artistry are different qualities. Exercise of talent is a different faculty from imagination, let alone genius.
Artistic drive comes from a love affair with the imaginal, the procreative urge to externalize and manifest one’s vision, to embody meaning, to express the authentic self. It comes in a rapid-fire series of emotional impulses which we act upon with intentionality, yet open to the intrusion on our will of the creative process. It is not only the history of art, but also the passion of that journey that should be conveyed.
We live fully immersed in a stream of imagery, originating both internally and externally. Images come in from the outside through the senses, and are also produced autonomously from the unconscious as an ongoing visual narrative, often metaphorical in nature, of our experience. In fact, this imaginal dimension is our experience. Everything we perceive of ourselves, others and world is filtered through it. Those images we seek to express are born within it and emerge from it through the creative process.
Art helps us remember who we were, truly are, and who we will become both individually and as a society. Information is infused by resonance through direct experience, evoking creative ideas, feelings, and motivated behavior. Interactive art functions in a similar way as dynamic experience.
It unpredictably seduces and surprises, shattering pre-existent notions. Each image emerges from the creative context that links all events, real and imaginal, the underlying destructured phenomenal field, the meaningful void of the transcendent imagination.
Art, like science, is a vocation or calling, a path toward truth and self-realization, for both maker and spectator. Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality, and the organization of our perceptions. Gauguin said, “There are only two kinds of artists -- revolutionaries and plagiarists.”
Revolutionary work marks a transition in a civilization’s worldview. The digital revolution marked such a transition. Arguably, today the marriage of art and science is embodied in new media: digital and electronic arts. Highly technical media have made new images possible through programs that render images virtually as fast as we can think them up. But it requires a lifelong learning curve that is daunting and unrelenting. It requires we continuously update our skill and knowledge base to realize our creative dreams.
Independent of either high or low brow dichotomies, ‘Know Brow’ art doesn’t value art history to create an artificial hierarchy of works that are intrinsically better than others, but to maintain the thread of continuity that informs the world of imagery. We commune with the past to inform our present. It is not to contrive a homage to an older reference, but to gain initiation into the visceral and experiential state from which it was created. Direct experience of that imaginal reality that is the essence of knowing, a gnosis.
The artist who recognizes upon reflection the influence of the past in his own works perceives a level of meaning that may not be obvious to the casual spectator. This level of metanarrative has everything to do with the vast panoply of art history.
Historical art can inspire and give us impressions that morph in our own deep subconscious taking on the geist of the present. It is intrinsic in the moment of conception that a work of art, that elemental vision will be brought forth in the chosen medium, in a symphony of attitudes, skills, and knowledge.
Planned or unplanned, a work embodies the meaningful moment even if comes from a fortunate technical ‘accident’. The intentionality to create is always there when we interface with our cyber allies. Often any resemblance to past historical works is discovered upon reflection rather than during the inspirational or execution phase, which is likely to be spontaneous and somewhat unconscious.
The electronic arts are so complex that today’s digital fine artist or filmmaker is almost as much of a scientist as an artist. Still, it is incumbent on him or her to maintain a deep root in art, not just mining the archive of historical imagery for base material. This will only become more so as digital rendering programs take over much of the drudgery of execution.
Experimentation with new compositional programs can yield surprising results moving artists into heretofore-unexplored territories in their work. Still, even new media’s novel appearance can echo the iconography, moods and textures of past eras and their styles. It is the same in fashion where looks and eras are recycled deliberately but interpreted in today’s fabrics and cuts. It all depends on how you accessorize it.
Innovation requires more than sampling and restyling. It requires a personal archaeology that means digging up that unique portion of our human depths that wants to come to birth through you, that which comes to be through a conspiracy of necessity and coalescence.
One must commit to the image and let it speak for itself in the now, with little or no thought to the past or future. When one opens to the moment, to the process, a flow emerges. Serendipity and synchronicities require fluidity of imagination, an inner eye for what could be important to incorporate, as well as fluency in technical procedures.
Style emerges as the result of habitually reiterating creative choices and recycling favored elements. The same ideas roll around over and over, evolving into variations on a theme. Some artists stake their career on this rather uncourageous course instead of evolving further. It may be less a desire to maintain commerciality or please their public than simply lack of fresh inspiration. That inspiration can be rekindled by immersion in new exciting fields of imagery, new mindscapes, new places, new media, great art.
“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ~ Arthur Koestler
"Art is simply a right method of doing things. The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces." ~ Thomas Aquinas
“Getting swamped by new information that you have difficulty handling may predispose you to a mental disorder, but if you have high intelligence and a good working memory, you are more likely to be able to combine bits of new information in creative ways.” ~ Shelly Carson, Harvard psychologist
‘Know Brow’ art is the product of new media, ars electronica, that transcends the dichotomies of high and low brow. It implies the knowledge, attitudes and skill sets necessary to produce art with highly technical processes, but also the visionary capacity to see multiple layers of meaning through direct experience. This knowing is a discovery process, a seeking, a gnosis that cuts a path through the mindscape of the ‘now’ toward the future that remains perpetually undefined.
We commune with the past to inform our present, not just as a homage, but to gain initiation to that transtemporal way of knowing and honoring our cultural roots. Defining the ‘hidden curriculum’ makes a strong statement about the missing element in art education, and the silent blocks in the system to its fulfillment. Institutions have been just as remiss in honoring the future, the rightful place of digital fine art, as they have been in passing on the legacy of the past.
‘Know brow’ art, as a movement, encourages the active, constructivist acquisition of artistic knowledge and openness to new forms and media, as well as technical capacities. We want to inspire more than digital “factory workers” or proficient craftspeople.
We want to enable the student to make, shape or organize with a telos, a meaningful purpose that has deep psychic rootedness: one who invents, not adopts; who shapes not copys; who builds not assembles; who is capable not merely competent; who is efficacious not just efficient; who experiments not just conceptualizes. There is a bliss that comes from within one that energizes the human desire to enact, to enable, to engage, to outwork it, i.e. to transform oneself and the world (bizarre and grandiose as this may sound).
* * *
PART I
The Hidden Curriculum in Art Education
Today’s fine arts, graphics, or multimedia artist is likely to be very technically proficient in his specialty but unlikely to have a fluent working knowledge of the history of art. Why? Because it is hardly taught taught in art school beyond simple art appreciation. Why? Because the pressures of an already highly technical and crowded curriculum leave no room.
As a by-product of neglecting the past, a general art education also does nothing to emphasize the obvious importance of the future -- new modalities, such as digital fine art, computer generated imagery, or interactive media. This attitude needs to be inculcated and reinforced in artists, curators, and directors. Artists will use more and more technology as time goes on, though traditional media will always have their aficionados. We need to be both pro- and post-active about our active experimentation: thinking, designing, doing, and reflecting.
Soon we will have Virtual Reality installations with interactive full immersion experiences and simulations that rival so-called “real life.” The next century will see electronic artistic possibilities we can’t even imagine. But is the art world, with its biases and prejudices ready to embrace such interactive art? Is its importance being reinforced anywhere in the system? Is there any historical precedent for such a quantum leap in the content and delivery of an artistic expression?
In terms of art history or appreciation, what more do we need to know than that most of the artistic genius seems to have been born in Italy? Plenty! We need to hunt the rest of the story. We need to 1). define the Hidden Curriculum, 2). Discuss how it affects learning and creativity, and the acceptance of digital art forms, 3). Describe how to find it, 4). Provide an example of how we are addressing it in the educational setting, particularly in highly technical artforms, such as new media.
Educational events are complex with many variables and dynamic changes, dependent on their context. Each educational opportunity is different whether structured or self-taught. For learning and applying any new knowledge, attitude is much more important than the knowledge itself. We must translate knowledge into practice by also changing the attitudes that motivate the learning and application of any new knowledge.
There are three types of curricula:
1). Formal, the stated, intended, and formally offered and endorsed curriculum. This is what the system offers; what we now do.
2). Informal, unscripted, mostly ad hoc, interpersonal forms of teaching and learning.
3). Hidden curriculum, a set of influences that operate at the level of organizational structure and culture. It can perpetuate bias, create confusion with mixed messages, idealize the normative, foster relative cynicism, and create inconsistency between education and reality.
We should care about the implicit programming of our art students regarding the later discrepancy, especially as it relates to art history, because we want to: 1) communicate consistency between objectives and outcomes; 2) optimize the learning environment; 3) and, inform the process of curricular reform while documenting the outcome for efficient use of resources.
Where do students learn the things we don’t teach them, both enriching and stultifying? Where do they learn the culture of the college, university, business, organization or profession? Where do students learn other than in organized environments?
What is encouraged and discouraged or disparaged in the academic and media school setting? Art, as perhaps no other discipline, is molded by a magnetic draw from the future. It calls to the artist crying out for manifestation, often a precursor of things to come in society in general. Some artists can intuitively sense the ‘next’ moment, the next milestone of art history. Some of them become it, while others toil in obscurity.
The art education system revolves around policy decisions, student admissions, faculty recruitment and its evaluation, recognition/awards, tenure/promotion, grant awards, faculty bonuses/raises, distribution of space, institutional slang or ‘jargon’, and resource allocation. That leaves little time or incentive for funding the emotional side of artistic enrichment, which feeds creativity and creates lifelong learners and those who learn by doing, by experimenting with new forms and media.
We need to be willing and able to step back and assess just what messages are being created by and within the very structures we have developed and are responsible for. Once we find the areas that are blocking the total educational process, we can 1). Do nothing. 2). Change our practices, procedures, environments, rules, etc. 3). Start over from scratch. 4). Or, embrace the Hidden Curriculum, becoming aware of outdated attitudes and prejudices that limit our palettes.
In the world of art, this hidden curriculum is embedded in the entire history of art and all that it can tell us about fostering (and discouraging) the creative process. The Academies have always been resistant to new modalities and struggled actively against them, refusing to even show work that did not conform. Academic art is a term applied to any kind of art that stresses the use of accepted rules for technique and form organization. It represents the exact opposite of the creative approach, which results in a vital, individualistic style of expression.
The old guard in all institutions has a vested interest they jealously guard. Change and revolution for them means their reign has come to an end, so they are resistant to new ideas, including the authenticity of new media such as ars electronica.
Today’s Art and Media Technical Education
We can examine the full range of influences, restructure the learning environment instead of just modifying the curricula, create opportunities for reflection, seek non-traditional students and teachers, focusing on the teachers in addition to the students. The three areas affected by the hidden curriculum are attitudes, knowledge, and skills. All directly affect execution, beginning with inspiration and passion informed by a deep understanding of the artistic heritage, and crowned by state-of-the-art technical virtuosity.
We should try to define what we are changing, why we are changing it, and with what intended outcome, anticipating and modifying unintended consequences. For example, an unforeseen consequence of the electronic art revolution is a generation of technically proficient but uninspired practitioners and amateurs. It seems anyone with a Photoshop program can now consider himself or herself “an artist,” but then it is not necessarily for them to say. There is art that hangs on the refrigerator and art that hangs in the Louvre.
The hidden curriculum affects teaching and learning; it can be identified and addressed in your own educational environment. Institutions have a responsibility to facilitate students not only in critical thinking skills and artistic technique, but in the ability to be self normative and self reflecting, to be aware of the distinctions between self and the roles one occupies in the realm of art, and how structural factors, social situations and cultural contexts affect their work.
Tomorrow’s Core Curriculum
The whole culture of art is due for a revolution in electronic arts; it has already begun. Content refers to the sensory, subjective, psychological, or emotional properties we feel in a work of art, as opposed to our perception of its descriptive aspects alone. The content of art, the expression, essential meaning, significance, or aesthetic value of a work of art, may remain the same, but the means of execution and delivery will shortly be unbound.
Culture is a set of learned ways of thinking and acting that characterizes a decision-making human group. A progressive curriculum should include core values of lifelong learning, not so much in the content of formal lectures, but as a recognized and cultivated core facet of the artistic personality, fostering changes from the inside out.
If the system is flawed, the system should be examined and overhauled. We need to teach aesthetics (a compound of the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of art having to do with the nature of beauty and its relation to human beings) and motivation as inspiration flows forth from there.
More than passive, active or experimental learning, our ethos should be attitudinal and aspirational, as well as inspirational. We want deliberate, participative, effective artificers, not simply dreamers or designers. Intentionality combines all three with good personal business sense. Practical knowledge leads to deliberation, disclosure, collaboration, implementation.
To produce well-rounded artists, not just conventional craftspeople, a holistic educational system might include the following critical design dimensions: inner/outer; left/right brain; horizontal/vertical; intentional/futures; small/big picture; design/enactional; efficacious; performative (Wildman, 2003). We need to provide the tools for constantly reformulating both our Personal Achievement Plans and Business Achievement Plans, as both are essential to artistic success in today’s competitive markets, especially in the area of intense active experimentation.
1. Lifestyle: [inner/outer balance dimension] (intension--vertical, consciousness; extension, breadth, application) Bringing the Personal Achievement Plan and Business Achievement Plan together.
2. Self-Awareness: Knowing what is inside oneself, i.e. who you are and what makes you pump. Authenticity, calling, integrity, and ethicality. Personal Achievement Plan. [Living from ones Core].
3. Worldliness: Knowing what is out there. Sophisticated or cosmopolitan understanding of the diverse world we live in both empirically, what is out there, as well as ecologically and morally; how we should then live Political savvy. Here one’s integrity and system ethicality come into play, as key priorities for action. Macrostructural awareness. Art is always political, but some is moreso. [Living for Gaia’s core]
4. Self-Systems Balance: allowing for agency while recognizing the huge influence of structures and institutionalized processes; comprehending what is within our domain to change and what is dictated by the system, (maintaining the 20/80 balance). There are characteristic ways art is produced, acquired, displayed, exhibited, recognized, and honored.
5. Pragmatism: Business focus. Self doing/artificing a Project/Enterprise focus (extension). Business Achievement Plan. Communicative action. In this dimension, it is the customer that is being produced (museum, patron, dealer, gallery, collector, audience, etc.). The dealer system is a means of sale and distribution usually from galleries. Prestigious international dealers contract artists and provide salaries in exchange for promotion and exhibitions. Its main effect is to provide art to wealthy collectors and public galleries, however a side effect is to keep artists and general public apart, and raise prices.
6. Design: for pragmatic shaping of functionality, e.g., potter rather than sculpturer (concept->design->enactment->learning->concept). This same pattern can be enacted within the art career arc time and again to redesign the career. Design is a framework or scheme of construction on which artists base the nature of their total work. In a broader sense, design may be considered synonymous with the term form.
7. Balance: between and respect for analysis and synthesis, part and pattern, Yin and Yang [Left Brain/Right Brain dimension]
8. Creativity: true originality, even if only in your original business.
9. Innovation: (organizational innovation process, continuous improvement) including social analysis, synthesis, and innovation based on complex feedback from the environment.
10. Capability focused: Attitudes, skills, knowledge; competence plus values; experience, creativity and citizenship in the art community and at large. Includes affective and effective, i.e. emotional intelligence within artificer intelligence.
11. Performative: active experimenter. Enactment capability dimension, not abstract conceptualisers, reflective observers or concrete experiencers.
12. Telos: i.e. awareness of the link between present action and the big picture, in particular, the future which is drawing us forward. Teleology relates to the study of ultimate causes/ends/designs/intent immanent in action in nature/society or of actions in relation to their ends or utility.
13. Philosophical: links to discourse of phenomenology as it relates to perception, art, image formation and production; esoteric and exoteric dimensions.
14. Poietic: productive, formative: (1) poetic; imaginative. (2) performative; intentionality a step away from self formative, i.e. autopoiesis from hermeneutics and chaos theory, self organizing also linked to fructified and efficaciousness.
15. Pangogical: artificer-learning interfaces Androgogical and Pedagogical without destroying either. Both self-teaching and formal education are encouraged. Learning happens in the complex environment.
16. Artifactual: An element of utility. The artifact may be useful in day to day life though not used that way, yet the artifact is more than technically correct or even well designed; it is imbued with wisdom. Efficacy is ‘sureness to produce’ the desired final effect. This means integration of process from the final end i.e., the user not producer. Interface integration maximizes design from the point of view of the final user and thus requires waste reduction or elimination; interactive art.
17. Informal: or third sector focused, without excluding private and public but transformative of this conventional dichotomy, i.e. art that is intimate or private yet still recognizable, rather than only idiosyncratic. Art not created for solely narcissistic (self-indulgent) or commercial purposes, but with individual as well as societal value.
We can prioritize this project sufficiently with a ‘statement of intent.’ Communicative action is about achieving through deliberation common criteria and meaning with which to direct actions in those regards. The aspects of communicative action include:
*Freedom of thought and expression that comes from moral autonomy, including nonhierarchical, non domination, communicative competency, transparency, integrity (internal constitution) and ethics (external constitution)
*Generalisable or universal applicability not just for an elite through applying the tests: “what is good for the goose and, “Do unto others.”
*Language consistency.
*Shared priority clarity.
*Individually, collectively, and organizationally role modeling the sort of world we seek to artifice.
*So in this sense, artificing a progressive curriculum includes a component of CART, Communicative Action Research Team, i.e. concept through design and deliberation to action.
We can remember that art is basically a communicative action, designed to convey (or enact) our subjective vision to another’s perceptions. There are virtually infinite ways of doing so for those whose imaginations are unbound. It was not through the search for safe or comfortable art that a work such as “A Starry Night” came about.
PART II
Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Art History
A Short Course in the Digital Revolution
Art is the most fundamental activity that characterizes modern man. Knowledge of the rich history of art adds depth to our perception, heightens awareness, and provides a sense of our place in the world. It is the foundation on which to build a relationship to the panoply of iconography, symbolism, and archetypes that art draws from continually. Art is a discipline of consciousness, whose ecology is to recycle itself.
The Postmodern era ushered in a hodge-podge of styles harking back to bygone eras. Postmodernism began in the 1970's, when the dominant styles of art - Minimalism and Conceptualism - seemed to no longer fit in a world struggling with a myriad of social problems. As a result, a plurality of styles developed. Some Post-modernists forcefully expressed a desire to do away with art that seemed to have no meaningful content, and began to turn back to figurative art and the establishment of meaning.
Other Post-modernists attempted to extend modern art in new ways by appropriating earlier styles, which they modified. Due to the sheer variety of sources and styles it is difficult to catergorize Post-modern artists with the same ease of earlier styles or movements. The post Postmodern era saw the development of new media, such as digital fine art, digital animation, multimedia, holography, computer generated imagery (CGI), interactive gaming, even virtual reality, etc., with styles all their own.
Computer enhanced images are produced with a stage of manipulation in digital language using computer software. It can be applied to other media, such as photographs or scans of traditional media, or 3-D objects. This awesome technology is used by photographers, filmmakers, the advertising industry, web designers, graphic designers and increasingly available to fine artists.
Museum quality prints can be made by the enhanced giclee or other processes. (Giclee; literally means little squirt in French. It is the latest digital printing technique enabling "print on demand". Originally it was a term used by Iris printers but rapidly became the generic term for top quality digital prints using archival quality inks on heavy weight paper or canvas.)
Suddenly, the entire history of art became fodder for a raw-image-hungry medium that gobbled up, digested, and spat out a pot pourri of historical, fantastic, and futuristic iconography in the digital vernacular. Rapid cut clips are the visual equivalent of ‘sound bites.’ We see the familiar old images, here a Michelangelo reference, a Van Gogh homage, or a Duchamp pun -- but they have become virtually meaningless in the new context, a fractal blur.
There is nothing new under the sun, the saying goes. In art, it means there is rarely anything truly innovative, and that most imagery is a rehash of previous work, in which the statement was perhaps more succinctly embodied. Virtually any work can be considered derivative or deconstructed by its critics. The exceptions are works of genius, milestones in the history of art. They foresee the future, hunting it down in the forest of kaleidoscopic potential creations.
To ignore or fail to meaningfully incorporate the broad and delicate strokes of the arc of art’s evolution over the centuries means impoverishment of the spirit. One’s artistic soul remains starved for the lavish feast that is still spread before us, so close yet so far away. Knowledge of art history, experience of historic art, helps develop conceptual perception...creative vision that derives from the imagination.
Each and every artist needs to claim this legacy anew, whether in the academic setting or on his own. The visionary gift is an activity of the soul that draws not only on the collective unconscious, but also on collective consciousness on what has gone before. How else can we hunt the future but with our vision?
As educators, we need to instill a love of art in students, not merely technical prowess, so that the technical media do not dictate the creation through mere programming. The world is full of hacks in every profession who know their craft but lack that vital spark of originality, of boldness. Artifice and artistry are different qualities. Exercise of talent is a different faculty from imagination, let alone genius.
Artistic drive comes from a love affair with the imaginal, the procreative urge to externalize and manifest one’s vision, to embody meaning, to express the authentic self. It comes in a rapid-fire series of emotional impulses which we act upon with intentionality, yet open to the intrusion on our will of the creative process. It is not only the history of art, but also the passion of that journey that should be conveyed.
We live fully immersed in a stream of imagery, originating both internally and externally. Images come in from the outside through the senses, and are also produced autonomously from the unconscious as an ongoing visual narrative, often metaphorical in nature, of our experience. In fact, this imaginal dimension is our experience. Everything we perceive of ourselves, others and world is filtered through it. Those images we seek to express are born within it and emerge from it through the creative process.
Art helps us remember who we were, truly are, and who we will become both individually and as a society. Information is infused by resonance through direct experience, evoking creative ideas, feelings, and motivated behavior. Interactive art functions in a similar way as dynamic experience.
It unpredictably seduces and surprises, shattering pre-existent notions. Each image emerges from the creative context that links all events, real and imaginal, the underlying destructured phenomenal field, the meaningful void of the transcendent imagination.
Art, like science, is a vocation or calling, a path toward truth and self-realization, for both maker and spectator. Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality, and the organization of our perceptions. Gauguin said, “There are only two kinds of artists -- revolutionaries and plagiarists.”
Revolutionary work marks a transition in a civilization’s worldview. The digital revolution marked such a transition. Arguably, today the marriage of art and science is embodied in new media: digital and electronic arts. Highly technical media have made new images possible through programs that render images virtually as fast as we can think them up. But it requires a lifelong learning curve that is daunting and unrelenting. It requires we continuously update our skill and knowledge base to realize our creative dreams.
Independent of either high or low brow dichotomies, ‘Know Brow’ art doesn’t value art history to create an artificial hierarchy of works that are intrinsically better than others, but to maintain the thread of continuity that informs the world of imagery. We commune with the past to inform our present. It is not to contrive a homage to an older reference, but to gain initiation into the visceral and experiential state from which it was created. Direct experience of that imaginal reality that is the essence of knowing, a gnosis.
The artist who recognizes upon reflection the influence of the past in his own works perceives a level of meaning that may not be obvious to the casual spectator. This level of metanarrative has everything to do with the vast panoply of art history.
Historical art can inspire and give us impressions that morph in our own deep subconscious taking on the geist of the present. It is intrinsic in the moment of conception that a work of art, that elemental vision will be brought forth in the chosen medium, in a symphony of attitudes, skills, and knowledge.
Planned or unplanned, a work embodies the meaningful moment even if comes from a fortunate technical ‘accident’. The intentionality to create is always there when we interface with our cyber allies. Often any resemblance to past historical works is discovered upon reflection rather than during the inspirational or execution phase, which is likely to be spontaneous and somewhat unconscious.
The electronic arts are so complex that today’s digital fine artist or filmmaker is almost as much of a scientist as an artist. Still, it is incumbent on him or her to maintain a deep root in art, not just mining the archive of historical imagery for base material. This will only become more so as digital rendering programs take over much of the drudgery of execution.
Experimentation with new compositional programs can yield surprising results moving artists into heretofore-unexplored territories in their work. Still, even new media’s novel appearance can echo the iconography, moods and textures of past eras and their styles. It is the same in fashion where looks and eras are recycled deliberately but interpreted in today’s fabrics and cuts. It all depends on how you accessorize it.
Innovation requires more than sampling and restyling. It requires a personal archaeology that means digging up that unique portion of our human depths that wants to come to birth through you, that which comes to be through a conspiracy of necessity and coalescence.
One must commit to the image and let it speak for itself in the now, with little or no thought to the past or future. When one opens to the moment, to the process, a flow emerges. Serendipity and synchronicities require fluidity of imagination, an inner eye for what could be important to incorporate, as well as fluency in technical procedures.
Style emerges as the result of habitually reiterating creative choices and recycling favored elements. The same ideas roll around over and over, evolving into variations on a theme. Some artists stake their career on this rather uncourageous course instead of evolving further. It may be less a desire to maintain commerciality or please their public than simply lack of fresh inspiration. That inspiration can be rekindled by immersion in new exciting fields of imagery, new mindscapes, new places, new media, great art.
INSPIRATION
WHAT INSPIRES ME
A Field Theory of Art and the Imagination
By Iona Miller 10-2005
Inspiration, noun
1: arousal of the mind to special unusual activity or
creativity
2: a product of your creative thinking and work; brainchild
3: a sudden intuition as part of solving a problem
4: arousing to a particular emotion or action
5: the act of inhaling [inhalation, breathing in]
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. ~ Carl Jung
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. ~ Buddha
The psychedelic experience is, in my opinion, what every piece of transcendent art aspires to. Even without ever having a psychedelic experience, the act of taking an image or piece of music from your imagination and translating it into a physical medium which can be shared with others is psychedelic in and of itself. Not only is the act of creating art semantically psychedelic (mind-manifesting) it is also an exercise in the crystallization of imagination, which is indeed the very essence of the psychedelic experience. ~James Kent, Psychedelic Information Theory
Sensual Culture
Inspiration should be a verb, not a noun; it is a complex dynamic, a force of Nature and our nature. When someone asks me what “inspires” me and my artwork, I can’t imagine naming any one thing, or list of “things”. It’s like asking my favorite color. I can’t help but answer, ALL, “all of the Above and Below”.
What doesn’t inspire the artistic eye that doesn’t merely “look at”, but “sees through” to the imaginal depth of any given perception or experience? Rather than the impressionistic senses informing the soul, the soul informs the multisensory experience of being. Inspiration means life, the opposite of death. It implies purpose, direction, meaning, ecstasy, creativity.
Any moment can be as inspirational as the next. Inspiration can come from an internal movement or sensation, a love affair with color and form, the awe of an incandescent moment, even the pain of a soul on fire struggling to express itself or the zeitgeist of the times. All ways of looking at reality are imaginative. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.
The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. It is the hidden ground behind symbol, archetype, metaphor, image. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature.
Our imagination is not something possessed by our minds, but the fundamental conscious/unconscious field of our psyche, our soul. The imaginal field is not derivative, but the very ground of our existence, conditioning all of our experience. It is where the personal encounters the transpersonal and finds “I AM That”. Imagination is the primary irreducible activity of the soul.
The image-making psyche or soul is the primary creative capacity, not only in art. Yet, perhaps, this is what is meant when it is said an artist has ‘soul,’ the capacity to draw on the inspirational mythopoetic taproot to Source, the creative field. Imagination is the basis of soul. In fact, to live the artistic life is to live immersed consciously in that aesthetically-nuanced Reality, to find it virtually inescapable.
Imaginal Ground as Aesthetic Paradigm
The intrapersonal process of art and the products of art have different cultural meanings. However, the primary purpose of art as a culture is to externalize and concretize for some time that ephemeral ever-morphing field of the image-scape. It merges subjective and objective through an affective, aesthetic experience. Our cultivation of the soul restores the human dimension to experience, destigmatizing imagination as merely fantasy, illusion, dream, or delusory perception.
It is the mind that is perhaps a distorting lens, structured by beliefs, myths, and philosophies, even those of so-called rational science. This is so because the mind is in the Imagination, the Anima Mundi, rather than the reverse. We can’t think without images. Multisensory images constantly condition our meaningful perception of the world, inner and outer. They organize our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, our responses.
Our images condition our perception and perspective, the way we see. As artists, it isn’t what we see and depict, but how we see it. Traditional art promotes conformity. Interesting art, as distinct from what we could call “sofa art”, has something to say, a unique perspective or point of view that speaks to the observer or participant.
Art as a culture is a traditional means of confronting the imagination. Art as a process is not confined by rules of academic art. The digital revolution challenged the traditional world of painting, but computer-assisted art is no less human because the tool has changed from a brush to a program. In fact, it is the human dimension of this art that keeps it interesting, over-riding the sterility of mere technical perfection.
People turn to film and art to help them contextualize experience, personal and collective. The “art world” as a biased cultural force cannot predetermine how any generation will meet the imagination. Dogmatic expression of fantasy is an oxymoron. It discourages the genuinely novel, demoting it to novelty.
Thus, there is no “artform” today, because even “The Present” barely qualifies as such. Thus, “fame” has become a pseudo-artform superceding the importance of one’s ouvre in the public domain. The “artist”, a role-playing put on, becomes a mere novelty or element of the media spectacle, there to provide entertainment.
The more we attune to the imaginal field, the closer we come to the semantic idea of “inspiration”, as a lived and breathed reality, renewed in each instant. That ‘present’ can remake our past and forge our future. Why should inspiration or creativity be “unusual” when, in fact, it goes on all the time? It quickens, exercises, elevates and stimulates the intellect and emotions with passion, purpose, meaning.
Make friends of The Muses. Inspiration is simply the loving expression of a heightened and churning impulse toward creativity. What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels.
If you want to be inspired, live a life undergird and informed by that inherent capacity. Quit fantasizing that you do not! Inspiration comes from the imaginal field, the zero-point of soul -- even if we are as unaware of it as the quantum field.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. Embrace the image. Soul mediates between mind and body, personality and world. Believe in the truth of images. Don’t institutionalize your imagination or experiences.
We “make soul” by living life, by irrepressibly imagining possibilities. Soul is rooted firmly in the mundane world. We cannot be in the physical world without demonstrating the archetypal or the imaginal. We might conclude that imaginative behaviour and physical behaviour exist in a symbiotic relationship
Quit falsely imagining that you are uninspired, that you are separate at all from the heartfelt Source of inspiration, the communication of Truth. Cultivate your soul, giving it a voice. Challenge your accepted, institutionalized way of perceiving, habitual forms, with an imaginative aesthetic response.
Beauty is the manifestation of the soul, reflecting the ways we are touched, psychically and sensually. We connect with objects through imagination and feeling, our heartfelt response to our senses. Imaging is an aesthetic activity that evokes human feeling. The value of images is their ability to evoke feeling, elaboration, speculation, and transformation. Engage process and inspiration flows. You become artist, not as a role but a vocation, when you return that heart and soul to the world.
________________
Also see, The Relativity of Body and Soul,
http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com/custom3.html
On the nature of spirit, soul and body.
____________
WHAT IS ART?
There are historical, theoretical, aesthetic, conceptual and technical challenges presented by the relatively recent collision of art, culture and computing power. Through envisioning information as popular media, science fiction, computer games, marketing tools, learning simulations, and artist's projects, technology has been and will continue to be a key component of culture rather than just a digital wasteland. Art itself can be a powerful communal stimulant.
What Is Art, Anyway?
Does our talk about art and creativity illuminate the subject or confound its dynamic form further? Performance artist, Lauri Anderson says, “Talking about art is like dancing about architecture.” Nevertheless, art is in no danger of being drowned in the volume of discourse that surrounds it.
The aesthetic experience is tied to the way we engage certain objects or processes in a unified, intense, complex and pleasurable way. Pleasure is the key to aesthetic value. Desire is its driving force. The path of desire has never been an easy one.
Any ideas about art remain culture-bound and subjective. Whether we come to it with a romantic or work ethic, art remains a fantastic, seductive, mysterious process, largely for the initiated. But we all value art for what it teaches us about ourselves, others and the world. Whether art is sublime, frightening or pleasing we cannot ignore or deny its immediate impact. Something in the composition, configuration, or setting, implicit or explicit -- is inviting.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that systematically characterizes reality. The ontology of art seeks to determine what kind of thing an artwork is and provide a means of determining when and where “artworks” occur. Materialists think it is a physical thing (artifact), while Idealists reckon art is a pattern of thought or emotion (aspect), perhaps shared in some way with an audience.
An artist is a person who participates intentionally with understanding in the making of a work of art. A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object, which is presented to them. The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems. An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public. (George Dickie)
No overarching policy can possibly determine what is art among genres, eras, or cultures. As with food, the pleasure comes in the tasting, not reading the recipe. Art theories proliferate (postmodern, romantic, expressive, emotive, essential, significant), proving that no single notion can encompass its glory. The common properties are only threads of similarity.
But we all agree that mankind is artful, and some societies make no distinction with “non-art”, doing everything in the best way that can be done. The philosophy of art explores these issues. Art has its own laws. Issues for the artist include fidelity to one’s self and vision (or in performance to the script, tempo and other dramatic elements), locus of creation, creativity, and the artist’s intention.
On the other hand, the artworld is a dynamic social institution with its own agenda, consisting of established practices, historical value, and the exercise of critical judgment, signification, and aesthetic value.
Today, an open concept of art is an essential precondition of creativity and novelty in the field. We are either inspired by or wrestle with our media until we discover and realize a form. Form is a process at work, "a flux", a gestalt.
Creating can refer to a process or a product; composition, innovativeness, novelty, originality or advancement beyond the current tradition. But creativity is also an essentially self-expressive means of transcending the normal limitations of ordinary life, “possession” by the divine.
Frames for art are disappearing as it becomes more and more part of everyday life, the vibrant environment -- not a ‘something’ to be cordoned off in a stuffy museum. Functional art, such as web media, requires no interpretation, just immediate engagement. We don’t simply react, but interact. The process is visceral but somehow “makes sense,” quite literally. It makes the observer a collaborator. Subject matter and content are now ubiquitous.
Cyberculture and web life have blurred the distinction in modern culture, as we are immersed in an ocean of imagery and signs. We discover art and beauty at the click of a mouse, and judge by our visceral reactions.
The essence of art does not lie in its definition; it is far too complex. Despite differences in technique and media, connecting the fine with the applied arts, we connect the pragmatic and the idyllic. Inspiration can be an exaltation, but elaboration, especially with technical media can be painstaking, reflective, analytical work.
Aesthetics is something else. What is artful, beautiful or ugly depends to some extent on taste, or acquired taste (gesture of approval). A work that isn’t necessarily beautiful can be very compelling, such as plasticized human corpses. Aesthetic value is based on reasonable arguments that describe the criteria, credentials or defining features of that value.
But pleasure or enthrallment is the key to aesthetic value, in general.
“Pleasure” thus becomes a quality of the work, itself. The mind is susceptible to its unique impact, its implicit or explicit beauty. But today we can also find beauty in the flow state of interactivity, the ease with which we navigate an artificial environment and imbibe the information it contains. Like a fine meal, it nourishes us in a way that struggling with technology cannot.
An aesthetic experience is a subjective reaction which can momentarily suspend time and consciousness, a sort of transport or fixation, an intuitive contemplation or “ecstatic” state of mind. As human beings, we have an innate craving for ecstasy as much as for novelty seeking. Suddenly, through apprehension, our mental activity is sparked, rendered unified, intense, complex and pleasurable by the sublime.
The “beauty” contest is over. Art is no longer an imitation of life. Postmodern artists reduced the chasm between art and real things to immediate knowledge. Art teaches us about emotions and truths that cannot be discovered or learned in any other way. It stimulates thoughts that cannot be depicted or portrayed. An object’s truth is its being, its emergence. The hyperreal has made the merely real virtually obsolete.
Today’s cutting edge art is challenging, confrontive, transgressive. Short-circuiting our rational minds, it grants us privileged entree into the mystical, the irrational, the nondeterministic. We slide down the rabbit hole, constantly bombarded with it in a pandemonium of nonlinear forms. They feed the older needs of the human mind.
In the dynamic model, morphology is a plurality of elements in which what is formed is immediately broken down and re-formed. Growth is a constant interchange of its own elements with the environment, taking-in and giving-out patterns in all directions. There is no hard boundary between ourselves and our surroundings, no before or after in the formative process, in cause and effect, in outward and inward.
Interactive art works pose special problems. An interactive art work can only be interpreted through interaction, either as first-person or as bystander. It is obvious that the experience differs between the two positions, whereas one acts and the other watches the acting. The question is whether it is possible to extract the artwork from the interaction with it, let alone the (im-)possibility of extracting the interaction among the beholders (first-person and bystanders) of the artwork from the interaction with it.
This leads to further questions: how is the interactive artwork interpreted when the spectator has left it, or has changed it? Is it possible to interpret interactive art works without interacting? Is it possible at all to interpret art works through interaction, and thereby accept the interpretation from a distracted interpreter?
'Interactivity-theory' must be added to traditional aesthetics. Based on experiences from computer games and web-design, an aesthetic understanding of the concept of interactivity counters aesthetics in many ways. (Michael Hammel)
http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2001-abstracts/hammel.html
Contemporary art is characterized by an increase in the use of technological media, such as videos, television and computers. The human body has also become a site of artistic investigation. It is a challenge to conventional gallery spaces as an exclusive site for artistic display. There is increasing interest in process and procedure as opposed to a finished or static artifact.
Context and intentionality are crucial. Design (understood as rational planning) forms an important part of the realization of an interactive artwork. There are many design tasks (often distributed among co-creators or helpers): for example, designing an interface, or a flow-chart for a hypertext architecture. There is also need for engineering skills.
However, neither a beautifully designed software code, nor an ingeniously engineered hydraulic platform is a work of art. An artwork requires something else, a kind of surplus of inspiration and signification which will transcend the rational assembly of the "machine parts", melt them together and give them a raison d'etre on a higher level of abstraction.
Art is multi-layered and open-ended. There is no final "solution" to an interactive artwork, no way to exhaust its meanings. Modern art is transient, interdisciplinary, multimedial, process-oriented, discursive, dependent on concept and context and besides that increasingly aimed at interactivity with the recipient. Its diversity is in need of documentation in a wider sense, in case it should at some point be subjected to scientific questions and authenticity by those who were not present at its conception and presentation.
Contemporary art requires rethinking and a strategic procedure in its documentation. Documentation is a work of art, is a process, navigation, interpretation and a tool for communication and discussion. The instruments of digital and multimedia technology require specific art efforts. The increasing presence of digital media appliances in museums changes the viewing habits of visitors to the museums as well as researchers. There is an entirely new set of curating problems and questions to cope with. (Harald Kramer)
Interactive art is firmly rooted in the aesthetic upheavals of the 20th century. The questioning of the role of the artist, the work, the audience, the market and the relationship between art and society by the dadaists, the constructivists, the surrealists and others prepared the ground.
In the 1960's Fluxus, happenings and "participation art" (Frank Popper), cybernetic art, the art & technology movement, environmental art and video art already provided many of the ingredients of interactive art.
In an artwork which also incorporates an on-line connection the situation gets even more complex: in addition, there is now the possibility of communication with real humans in remote locations as well as with manifold software agents and knowbots residing in the net. Sometimes it will be difficult to tell which is which.
In the near future we will probably see more and more of these kind of hybrid artworks, with both a local and a global face, and providing the user the simultaneous experience of being present and faraway in some distant location. Such situations tend to reduce rather than increase the narcissistic potential of the medium.
We are arguably moving through successive transpositions toward a world where man is art; the locus of art has returned to the immediacy of the body in performance and body art. In interactive art, we become part of the system, part of the dynamic artifact or experience. And, often we are changed tangibly by that interaction.
CYBERART MYTHS: Seven Ways of Misunderstanding Interactive Art:
Interactive art is a very recent phenomenon. It is still in its infancy. It will take a long time for it to mature as an Artform.
Interactive artworks celebrate high tech. They belong to the computer fair, the science center and the corporate headquarters, but not to the art museum. There isn't any serious role for interactive artworks in the art world.
Instead of pursuing serious artistic and intellectual goals interactive artists are content with technological trickery. There is no significant difference between an interactive artwork and a well-made video game or some other interactive application. The maker of an interactive artwork is a designer or an engineer rather than an Artist.
Interactive art is the latest manifestation of the "death of the author". The "interactive artist" is merely a context-maker, who provides the basic ingredients, sets up the situation, and then disappears. The spectator-turned-into-the-user provides the meanings, in a sense creates the work at the moment of the interaction.
The much touted "interactivity" of interactive art is pure hype. One has to point and click or keep touching an on-screen menu, to be rewarded by mindless strolling in a pre-existing virtual landscape or by the pleasure of choosing between a few pre-programmed alternatives. There is no real responsiveness, no sense of contributing something to the work, of getting a real personal answer.
Real interactivity is always related to the idea of the "interpersonal", something happening between human beings. Interactive art, however, is "intra active", creating a monologic loop between the user and his/her self-representations, mediated by technology. The artwork serves merely as a mirror. "Interactive art" is the ultimate triumph of the "aesthetics of narcissism".
Interactive art is masculine in nature, just like "the culture of interactivity" in general. The spreading of interactive technology represents the counter-attack of masculinity in a culture "feminized" by watching television. (Erkki Huhtamo, University of Lapland)
Four-step version of creativity or creative process (Douglas Morgan):
“Preparation” during which the creator becomes aware of a problem or difficulty [and] goes through trial-and-error random movement in unsuccessful attempts to resolve a felt conflict.
“Incubation”, renunciation or recession, during which the difficulty drops out of consciousness. The attention is totally redirected.
“Inspiration” or insight. The “a-ha” phenomenon, characterized by a flood of vivid imagery, an emotional release, a feeling of exultation, adequacy, finality.
“Elaboration” or “verification” during which the “idea” is worked out in fully developed detail.
Chip Body Travels in the Astral Plane and Virtuality
Recent realtime journeys include Amsterdam in Spring 2005, Brisbane, Australia and points beyond (Castle on the Hill, Mt. Warning; Gold Coast) for the Sept. 2004 Nexus conference. An art/music/film tour Oct. 04 with fellow artists Bob Judd and Laurence Gartel gartelmuseum.com to Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Hollywood. And a trip to the Canadian border {Seattle/Blaine/Semiahmoo) for publishing discussions and R&R over New Years 2005, and World Nutricutical Conference, Anaheim.
Like Einstein riding his beam of light, I like to make imaginary journeys and forays into the astral and virtual worlds. My photos capture the atmosphere of those soul travels and offer the viewer a glimpse into my rich inner life. Who knows where I'll be going next, or who I will be appearing as, haha. Many of my gags are whims, or the result of what is available in real time to work with. I am a big fan of the Jungian notion of the bricoleur who works with what is at hand, that which appears and WANTS to be incorporated in a hyperdelic or surrealistic manner. In this way I am continually embodying my imaginal reality with linear time.
A Field Theory of Art and the Imagination
By Iona Miller 10-2005
Inspiration, noun
1: arousal of the mind to special unusual activity or
creativity
2: a product of your creative thinking and work; brainchild
3: a sudden intuition as part of solving a problem
4: arousing to a particular emotion or action
5: the act of inhaling [inhalation, breathing in]
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. ~ Carl Jung
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. ~ Buddha
The psychedelic experience is, in my opinion, what every piece of transcendent art aspires to. Even without ever having a psychedelic experience, the act of taking an image or piece of music from your imagination and translating it into a physical medium which can be shared with others is psychedelic in and of itself. Not only is the act of creating art semantically psychedelic (mind-manifesting) it is also an exercise in the crystallization of imagination, which is indeed the very essence of the psychedelic experience. ~James Kent, Psychedelic Information Theory
Sensual Culture
Inspiration should be a verb, not a noun; it is a complex dynamic, a force of Nature and our nature. When someone asks me what “inspires” me and my artwork, I can’t imagine naming any one thing, or list of “things”. It’s like asking my favorite color. I can’t help but answer, ALL, “all of the Above and Below”.
What doesn’t inspire the artistic eye that doesn’t merely “look at”, but “sees through” to the imaginal depth of any given perception or experience? Rather than the impressionistic senses informing the soul, the soul informs the multisensory experience of being. Inspiration means life, the opposite of death. It implies purpose, direction, meaning, ecstasy, creativity.
Any moment can be as inspirational as the next. Inspiration can come from an internal movement or sensation, a love affair with color and form, the awe of an incandescent moment, even the pain of a soul on fire struggling to express itself or the zeitgeist of the times. All ways of looking at reality are imaginative. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.
The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. It is the hidden ground behind symbol, archetype, metaphor, image. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature.
Our imagination is not something possessed by our minds, but the fundamental conscious/unconscious field of our psyche, our soul. The imaginal field is not derivative, but the very ground of our existence, conditioning all of our experience. It is where the personal encounters the transpersonal and finds “I AM That”. Imagination is the primary irreducible activity of the soul.
The image-making psyche or soul is the primary creative capacity, not only in art. Yet, perhaps, this is what is meant when it is said an artist has ‘soul,’ the capacity to draw on the inspirational mythopoetic taproot to Source, the creative field. Imagination is the basis of soul. In fact, to live the artistic life is to live immersed consciously in that aesthetically-nuanced Reality, to find it virtually inescapable.
Imaginal Ground as Aesthetic Paradigm
The intrapersonal process of art and the products of art have different cultural meanings. However, the primary purpose of art as a culture is to externalize and concretize for some time that ephemeral ever-morphing field of the image-scape. It merges subjective and objective through an affective, aesthetic experience. Our cultivation of the soul restores the human dimension to experience, destigmatizing imagination as merely fantasy, illusion, dream, or delusory perception.
It is the mind that is perhaps a distorting lens, structured by beliefs, myths, and philosophies, even those of so-called rational science. This is so because the mind is in the Imagination, the Anima Mundi, rather than the reverse. We can’t think without images. Multisensory images constantly condition our meaningful perception of the world, inner and outer. They organize our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, our responses.
Our images condition our perception and perspective, the way we see. As artists, it isn’t what we see and depict, but how we see it. Traditional art promotes conformity. Interesting art, as distinct from what we could call “sofa art”, has something to say, a unique perspective or point of view that speaks to the observer or participant.
Art as a culture is a traditional means of confronting the imagination. Art as a process is not confined by rules of academic art. The digital revolution challenged the traditional world of painting, but computer-assisted art is no less human because the tool has changed from a brush to a program. In fact, it is the human dimension of this art that keeps it interesting, over-riding the sterility of mere technical perfection.
People turn to film and art to help them contextualize experience, personal and collective. The “art world” as a biased cultural force cannot predetermine how any generation will meet the imagination. Dogmatic expression of fantasy is an oxymoron. It discourages the genuinely novel, demoting it to novelty.
Thus, there is no “artform” today, because even “The Present” barely qualifies as such. Thus, “fame” has become a pseudo-artform superceding the importance of one’s ouvre in the public domain. The “artist”, a role-playing put on, becomes a mere novelty or element of the media spectacle, there to provide entertainment.
The more we attune to the imaginal field, the closer we come to the semantic idea of “inspiration”, as a lived and breathed reality, renewed in each instant. That ‘present’ can remake our past and forge our future. Why should inspiration or creativity be “unusual” when, in fact, it goes on all the time? It quickens, exercises, elevates and stimulates the intellect and emotions with passion, purpose, meaning.
Make friends of The Muses. Inspiration is simply the loving expression of a heightened and churning impulse toward creativity. What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels.
If you want to be inspired, live a life undergird and informed by that inherent capacity. Quit fantasizing that you do not! Inspiration comes from the imaginal field, the zero-point of soul -- even if we are as unaware of it as the quantum field.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. Embrace the image. Soul mediates between mind and body, personality and world. Believe in the truth of images. Don’t institutionalize your imagination or experiences.
We “make soul” by living life, by irrepressibly imagining possibilities. Soul is rooted firmly in the mundane world. We cannot be in the physical world without demonstrating the archetypal or the imaginal. We might conclude that imaginative behaviour and physical behaviour exist in a symbiotic relationship
Quit falsely imagining that you are uninspired, that you are separate at all from the heartfelt Source of inspiration, the communication of Truth. Cultivate your soul, giving it a voice. Challenge your accepted, institutionalized way of perceiving, habitual forms, with an imaginative aesthetic response.
Beauty is the manifestation of the soul, reflecting the ways we are touched, psychically and sensually. We connect with objects through imagination and feeling, our heartfelt response to our senses. Imaging is an aesthetic activity that evokes human feeling. The value of images is their ability to evoke feeling, elaboration, speculation, and transformation. Engage process and inspiration flows. You become artist, not as a role but a vocation, when you return that heart and soul to the world.
________________
Also see, The Relativity of Body and Soul,
http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com/custom3.html
On the nature of spirit, soul and body.
____________
WHAT IS ART?
There are historical, theoretical, aesthetic, conceptual and technical challenges presented by the relatively recent collision of art, culture and computing power. Through envisioning information as popular media, science fiction, computer games, marketing tools, learning simulations, and artist's projects, technology has been and will continue to be a key component of culture rather than just a digital wasteland. Art itself can be a powerful communal stimulant.
What Is Art, Anyway?
Does our talk about art and creativity illuminate the subject or confound its dynamic form further? Performance artist, Lauri Anderson says, “Talking about art is like dancing about architecture.” Nevertheless, art is in no danger of being drowned in the volume of discourse that surrounds it.
The aesthetic experience is tied to the way we engage certain objects or processes in a unified, intense, complex and pleasurable way. Pleasure is the key to aesthetic value. Desire is its driving force. The path of desire has never been an easy one.
Any ideas about art remain culture-bound and subjective. Whether we come to it with a romantic or work ethic, art remains a fantastic, seductive, mysterious process, largely for the initiated. But we all value art for what it teaches us about ourselves, others and the world. Whether art is sublime, frightening or pleasing we cannot ignore or deny its immediate impact. Something in the composition, configuration, or setting, implicit or explicit -- is inviting.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that systematically characterizes reality. The ontology of art seeks to determine what kind of thing an artwork is and provide a means of determining when and where “artworks” occur. Materialists think it is a physical thing (artifact), while Idealists reckon art is a pattern of thought or emotion (aspect), perhaps shared in some way with an audience.
An artist is a person who participates intentionally with understanding in the making of a work of art. A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object, which is presented to them. The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems. An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public. (George Dickie)
No overarching policy can possibly determine what is art among genres, eras, or cultures. As with food, the pleasure comes in the tasting, not reading the recipe. Art theories proliferate (postmodern, romantic, expressive, emotive, essential, significant), proving that no single notion can encompass its glory. The common properties are only threads of similarity.
But we all agree that mankind is artful, and some societies make no distinction with “non-art”, doing everything in the best way that can be done. The philosophy of art explores these issues. Art has its own laws. Issues for the artist include fidelity to one’s self and vision (or in performance to the script, tempo and other dramatic elements), locus of creation, creativity, and the artist’s intention.
On the other hand, the artworld is a dynamic social institution with its own agenda, consisting of established practices, historical value, and the exercise of critical judgment, signification, and aesthetic value.
Today, an open concept of art is an essential precondition of creativity and novelty in the field. We are either inspired by or wrestle with our media until we discover and realize a form. Form is a process at work, "a flux", a gestalt.
Creating can refer to a process or a product; composition, innovativeness, novelty, originality or advancement beyond the current tradition. But creativity is also an essentially self-expressive means of transcending the normal limitations of ordinary life, “possession” by the divine.
Frames for art are disappearing as it becomes more and more part of everyday life, the vibrant environment -- not a ‘something’ to be cordoned off in a stuffy museum. Functional art, such as web media, requires no interpretation, just immediate engagement. We don’t simply react, but interact. The process is visceral but somehow “makes sense,” quite literally. It makes the observer a collaborator. Subject matter and content are now ubiquitous.
Cyberculture and web life have blurred the distinction in modern culture, as we are immersed in an ocean of imagery and signs. We discover art and beauty at the click of a mouse, and judge by our visceral reactions.
The essence of art does not lie in its definition; it is far too complex. Despite differences in technique and media, connecting the fine with the applied arts, we connect the pragmatic and the idyllic. Inspiration can be an exaltation, but elaboration, especially with technical media can be painstaking, reflective, analytical work.
Aesthetics is something else. What is artful, beautiful or ugly depends to some extent on taste, or acquired taste (gesture of approval). A work that isn’t necessarily beautiful can be very compelling, such as plasticized human corpses. Aesthetic value is based on reasonable arguments that describe the criteria, credentials or defining features of that value.
But pleasure or enthrallment is the key to aesthetic value, in general.
“Pleasure” thus becomes a quality of the work, itself. The mind is susceptible to its unique impact, its implicit or explicit beauty. But today we can also find beauty in the flow state of interactivity, the ease with which we navigate an artificial environment and imbibe the information it contains. Like a fine meal, it nourishes us in a way that struggling with technology cannot.
An aesthetic experience is a subjective reaction which can momentarily suspend time and consciousness, a sort of transport or fixation, an intuitive contemplation or “ecstatic” state of mind. As human beings, we have an innate craving for ecstasy as much as for novelty seeking. Suddenly, through apprehension, our mental activity is sparked, rendered unified, intense, complex and pleasurable by the sublime.
The “beauty” contest is over. Art is no longer an imitation of life. Postmodern artists reduced the chasm between art and real things to immediate knowledge. Art teaches us about emotions and truths that cannot be discovered or learned in any other way. It stimulates thoughts that cannot be depicted or portrayed. An object’s truth is its being, its emergence. The hyperreal has made the merely real virtually obsolete.
Today’s cutting edge art is challenging, confrontive, transgressive. Short-circuiting our rational minds, it grants us privileged entree into the mystical, the irrational, the nondeterministic. We slide down the rabbit hole, constantly bombarded with it in a pandemonium of nonlinear forms. They feed the older needs of the human mind.
In the dynamic model, morphology is a plurality of elements in which what is formed is immediately broken down and re-formed. Growth is a constant interchange of its own elements with the environment, taking-in and giving-out patterns in all directions. There is no hard boundary between ourselves and our surroundings, no before or after in the formative process, in cause and effect, in outward and inward.
Interactive art works pose special problems. An interactive art work can only be interpreted through interaction, either as first-person or as bystander. It is obvious that the experience differs between the two positions, whereas one acts and the other watches the acting. The question is whether it is possible to extract the artwork from the interaction with it, let alone the (im-)possibility of extracting the interaction among the beholders (first-person and bystanders) of the artwork from the interaction with it.
This leads to further questions: how is the interactive artwork interpreted when the spectator has left it, or has changed it? Is it possible to interpret interactive art works without interacting? Is it possible at all to interpret art works through interaction, and thereby accept the interpretation from a distracted interpreter?
'Interactivity-theory' must be added to traditional aesthetics. Based on experiences from computer games and web-design, an aesthetic understanding of the concept of interactivity counters aesthetics in many ways. (Michael Hammel)
http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2001-abstracts/hammel.html
Contemporary art is characterized by an increase in the use of technological media, such as videos, television and computers. The human body has also become a site of artistic investigation. It is a challenge to conventional gallery spaces as an exclusive site for artistic display. There is increasing interest in process and procedure as opposed to a finished or static artifact.
Context and intentionality are crucial. Design (understood as rational planning) forms an important part of the realization of an interactive artwork. There are many design tasks (often distributed among co-creators or helpers): for example, designing an interface, or a flow-chart for a hypertext architecture. There is also need for engineering skills.
However, neither a beautifully designed software code, nor an ingeniously engineered hydraulic platform is a work of art. An artwork requires something else, a kind of surplus of inspiration and signification which will transcend the rational assembly of the "machine parts", melt them together and give them a raison d'etre on a higher level of abstraction.
Art is multi-layered and open-ended. There is no final "solution" to an interactive artwork, no way to exhaust its meanings. Modern art is transient, interdisciplinary, multimedial, process-oriented, discursive, dependent on concept and context and besides that increasingly aimed at interactivity with the recipient. Its diversity is in need of documentation in a wider sense, in case it should at some point be subjected to scientific questions and authenticity by those who were not present at its conception and presentation.
Contemporary art requires rethinking and a strategic procedure in its documentation. Documentation is a work of art, is a process, navigation, interpretation and a tool for communication and discussion. The instruments of digital and multimedia technology require specific art efforts. The increasing presence of digital media appliances in museums changes the viewing habits of visitors to the museums as well as researchers. There is an entirely new set of curating problems and questions to cope with. (Harald Kramer)
Interactive art is firmly rooted in the aesthetic upheavals of the 20th century. The questioning of the role of the artist, the work, the audience, the market and the relationship between art and society by the dadaists, the constructivists, the surrealists and others prepared the ground.
In the 1960's Fluxus, happenings and "participation art" (Frank Popper), cybernetic art, the art & technology movement, environmental art and video art already provided many of the ingredients of interactive art.
In an artwork which also incorporates an on-line connection the situation gets even more complex: in addition, there is now the possibility of communication with real humans in remote locations as well as with manifold software agents and knowbots residing in the net. Sometimes it will be difficult to tell which is which.
In the near future we will probably see more and more of these kind of hybrid artworks, with both a local and a global face, and providing the user the simultaneous experience of being present and faraway in some distant location. Such situations tend to reduce rather than increase the narcissistic potential of the medium.
We are arguably moving through successive transpositions toward a world where man is art; the locus of art has returned to the immediacy of the body in performance and body art. In interactive art, we become part of the system, part of the dynamic artifact or experience. And, often we are changed tangibly by that interaction.
CYBERART MYTHS: Seven Ways of Misunderstanding Interactive Art:
Interactive art is a very recent phenomenon. It is still in its infancy. It will take a long time for it to mature as an Artform.
Interactive artworks celebrate high tech. They belong to the computer fair, the science center and the corporate headquarters, but not to the art museum. There isn't any serious role for interactive artworks in the art world.
Instead of pursuing serious artistic and intellectual goals interactive artists are content with technological trickery. There is no significant difference between an interactive artwork and a well-made video game or some other interactive application. The maker of an interactive artwork is a designer or an engineer rather than an Artist.
Interactive art is the latest manifestation of the "death of the author". The "interactive artist" is merely a context-maker, who provides the basic ingredients, sets up the situation, and then disappears. The spectator-turned-into-the-user provides the meanings, in a sense creates the work at the moment of the interaction.
The much touted "interactivity" of interactive art is pure hype. One has to point and click or keep touching an on-screen menu, to be rewarded by mindless strolling in a pre-existing virtual landscape or by the pleasure of choosing between a few pre-programmed alternatives. There is no real responsiveness, no sense of contributing something to the work, of getting a real personal answer.
Real interactivity is always related to the idea of the "interpersonal", something happening between human beings. Interactive art, however, is "intra active", creating a monologic loop between the user and his/her self-representations, mediated by technology. The artwork serves merely as a mirror. "Interactive art" is the ultimate triumph of the "aesthetics of narcissism".
Interactive art is masculine in nature, just like "the culture of interactivity" in general. The spreading of interactive technology represents the counter-attack of masculinity in a culture "feminized" by watching television. (Erkki Huhtamo, University of Lapland)
Four-step version of creativity or creative process (Douglas Morgan):
“Preparation” during which the creator becomes aware of a problem or difficulty [and] goes through trial-and-error random movement in unsuccessful attempts to resolve a felt conflict.
“Incubation”, renunciation or recession, during which the difficulty drops out of consciousness. The attention is totally redirected.
“Inspiration” or insight. The “a-ha” phenomenon, characterized by a flood of vivid imagery, an emotional release, a feeling of exultation, adequacy, finality.
“Elaboration” or “verification” during which the “idea” is worked out in fully developed detail.
Chip Body Travels in the Astral Plane and Virtuality
Recent realtime journeys include Amsterdam in Spring 2005, Brisbane, Australia and points beyond (Castle on the Hill, Mt. Warning; Gold Coast) for the Sept. 2004 Nexus conference. An art/music/film tour Oct. 04 with fellow artists Bob Judd and Laurence Gartel gartelmuseum.com to Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Hollywood. And a trip to the Canadian border {Seattle/Blaine/Semiahmoo) for publishing discussions and R&R over New Years 2005, and World Nutricutical Conference, Anaheim.
Like Einstein riding his beam of light, I like to make imaginary journeys and forays into the astral and virtual worlds. My photos capture the atmosphere of those soul travels and offer the viewer a glimpse into my rich inner life. Who knows where I'll be going next, or who I will be appearing as, haha. Many of my gags are whims, or the result of what is available in real time to work with. I am a big fan of the Jungian notion of the bricoleur who works with what is at hand, that which appears and WANTS to be incorporated in a hyperdelic or surrealistic manner. In this way I am continually embodying my imaginal reality with linear time.
