Misunderstanding Mediums
In his book, Understanding Media, subtitled the Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan tells the world that "the medium is the message" and, as any college student in the world can tell you just by looking it up on Wikipedia, this idea that "the medium is the message" prophesizes the general upheaval of local cultures as they give way to increasingly globalized conditions.
These globalized conditions are most pronounced in what McLuhan saw as "the global village" – that is to say, an international culture of "electronic interdependence" that many years later we can see materialize in the networked space of flows we call the Internet.
Of course, his thoughts were very controversial because he went out of his way to insist that technology itself is not a moral vehicle for society.
"Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds?"
"To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers."
I bring this up right from the start not because I am a McLuhan scholar who wants to debate his old ideas, but to say that as an interdisciplinary media artist who travels around the world performing and exhibiting my new artwork in different venues as well as different art and non-art contexts, it is very easy for me to misunderstand if not outright dismiss the moral dimensions of what we have come to call globalization and in misunderstanding the media also finding it beneficial to misuse the media apparatuses I have at my disposal as I make my artwork.
The term apparatus is loaded, of course, and I use it loosely, particularly in relation to the writing of Vilem Flusser who, in his short book Toward a Philosophy of Photography, uses the term apparatus to refer to devices that work with a program to make or compute images.
Flusser, in Toward A Philosophy of Photography writes:
"The task of the philosophy of photography is to question photographers about freedom, to probe their practice in pursuit of freedom."
Here, the photographer is not just someone who uses a camera to take pictures, but is a kind of science-fictional philosopher who is using emerging media apparatuses to expand the concept of writing while generating new iterations of art practice in a media saturated environment like the one most of us live in today.
Flusser goes on to write that "one can outwit the camera''s rigidity," "one can smuggle human intentions into its program," "one can force the camera to create the unpredictable, the improbable, the informative," and "one can show contempt for the camera" by turning away from it as a thing and focusing instead, on information. In other words, freedom (for Flusser) is "the strategy of playing against the camera."
But how can one work against the camera and who is this creative entity who uses the camera as a tool to probe their practice in pursuit of freedom?
In a new book of artist theory that I am writing, I call this creative entity the artist-medium. The artist-medium is a hactvist performer who intuitively taps into their unconscious readiness potential as way to intervene in the new media discourse that permeates the all-encompassing scene of globaization and is willing to play or jam with whatever new media apparatuses they have access to in order to continually engage themselves in acts of creative expression.
For those of us who intentionally seek ways to "misunderstand" the normative uses of these apparatuses that permeate our daily lives, whether they be media gadgets, cameras, laptops, or even managerial or bureaucratic or governmental apparatuses, probing our practice in pursuit of freedom Is perhaps deeply connected to a will-to-aestheticize, even if it is in anti-aesthetic will, where we misuse the media not so much to showcase our moral superiority but to highlight the ways we are integrating these apparatuses into our own daily practices while using them to selectively sample from the abundant source material at our disposal so that we may creatively remix our lives, our lives as artists who resist "understanding" per se so that we may pursue our freedom in unconsciously generated acts of creativity which, Alfred North Whitehead explicitly refers to as "the principle of novelty" in his philosophical opus Process and Reality.
Let me give you a taste of the way a small group of people I was collaborating with last summer decided to participate their localized network culture and who, as part of a larger practice-based research agenda, began actively hybridizing their approach to creatively work together across media genres and boundaries to focus on issues related to foreigness, human intention, unconscious improvisation, and working against the camera.
Last summer, while I was an artist in residence commuting between the beautiful and wild, back-to-nature region of Cornwall, UK, and the urban intensity of London (where I was granted some seed funding from both the Tate Modern museum and the University College Falmouth), I began writing and directing what I have been calling my second "feature-length foreign film" as part of my "Foreign Film Series" – this one shot entirely on mobile phone in Cornwall. The cast and crew were made up fellow D-I-Y amateur enthusiasts, net artists, and theoretical scholars who love arthouse cinema and were interested in working with me on experimenting with what for lack of better I would call the contemporary Youtube video aesthetic in relation to the films of some of our favorite film artists like Michaleangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, both of whom, as fate would have it, died the same day during our production. The production was composed in realtime as a kind of structured improvisation with an unknown duration. Basically, we were all asked to "play ourselves" but to also let the inferior mobile phone digital video apparatus with its better-than-ever quality occasionally record our constructed situations. These constructed situations, a term I sample from the Situationists and manipulate for my own uses, were part of a group dérive or drift through time, a time that often felt timeless as the solstice days came and lingered so that at times it felt like there were seven days in Saturday alone followed by a Sunday that would disappear in a quick series of hallucinatory blinks we could no longer keep track of.
In fact, they say the Cornish light, the mere quality of the light in relation to our seeing the sky and dramatic cliff landscapes, has led to some of the strangest surrealist and abstract expressionist painting ever made – which makes sense given that during and after World War Two many European surrealists escaped to Cornwall and their practices were forever changed by their time spent in this environment.
Here are two pictures from this feature-length foreign film, entitled Immobilité, introducing the French actress Camille Lacadee and the Polish actress Magda Tyzlik-Carver:
This kind of socially networked group performance which we produced while living our daily lives in what Hakim Bey calls a "Temporary Autonomous Zone" (TAZ) is not necessarily new. There are great precedences in works like Andy Warhol's "Chelsea Girls" and Derek Jarman's "Jubilee" not to mention John Waters "Pink Flamingos" or on an even more intimate scale the film "Fuses" by the feminist performace artist Carolee Schneeman, but it was still exhilarating and full of misunderstandings that we never truly understood but that raised the level of both our desires and our anxietes during production.
What was it about our lives as artist-researchers that made us agree to participate in this structured improvisation that would enable us to use our intersubjective yet autobiographical experiences as source material for an artistically composed work of postproduction art.
I say "postproduction art" because it seems to me that all art is now postproduction art, that in probing our practice in pursuit of freedom we are forever sampling from and manipulating whatever source material we have available to us at any given time and are more likely than not to use various media technologies to further postproduce the present as way of keeping ourselves one step into the future.
Of course, it's only when we download all of the recorded data into the computer and begin constructing yet more situations that we begin truly blurring the various tense fields (past, present, future perfect) and challenge ourselves as artist-mediums.
"Every film is a foreign film," writes Atom Egoyan in the introduction to his anthology "Subtitles" and, yes, as you saw, Immobilité is loaded with subtitles too even if we never really sense where the voices are coming from and whose texts have been manipulated to create our mashed-up script (in this case, it's a remix of Henri Levebre's "The Production of Space", Michel de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life," Kathy Acker's "The Language of the Body," and W. E. Sebald's "Rings of Saturn").
These strategic misunderstandings, misreadings, mistranslations, miscommunications, and misuses of technology that permeate the work somehow lead to what Whitehead refers to as "the novel production of togetherness" – something that may transcend borders, especially as we reinvestigate what it means to be a postproduction artist who accesses source material everywhere. In Process and Reality, Whitehead writes:
"[Â…] the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition."
This concrescence that Whitehead speaks of, points to a merging or fusion or even mixture of source materials that the contemporary artist as remixologist depends on for their daily sustenance. How the contemporary artist chooses to mix these elements, whether they be images, sounds, text, code or other media elements, is all part of a strategy to creatively misunderstand or at least creatively destruct the information flows of the mediascape's status quo.
Of course, the idea of "creative destruction" of the status quo is a business proposition, one that comes from Joseph Schumpeter, a Moravian-born economist and political scientist who developed some of the earliest theories on the so-called "business cycle" as well as what we still refer to as entrepreneurialism which he understood to mean "wild spirits" i.e. those innovators who break the cycle of repetition and circular flow and are able to reset the direction our creative capital flows in by taking risks and positioning themselves to be way ahead of their time.
But that sounds like our old ideas about the avant-garde too, yes?
Avant-garde artists are said to be ahead of their time, as if "being ahead" were to signal a creative entity who – to quote Ezra Pound – acts as "the antennae of the race."
Jean Cocteau approached this from a different angle. He once wrote that "When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."
Is it possible that artists use "musunderstanding" as a strategic device in probing their practice in pursuit of freedom while knowingly situating the work so that it is ahead of its time? Or does that kind of thing just happen on its own?
"Misunderstanding as an artistic strategy" will be one of the subjects we address at a follow-up panel discussion today but to be more broad in our focus for this plenary session, I want to close my remarks by following up on something Maria has mentioned in a recent email dialogue we had where she wondered if the "understanding" of other cultures or "othernesses" is really necessary to the creative process and then went on to suggest that we can see art from other places or other times functioning as a source of inspiration or becoming part of a pictorial representation without particularly understanding the scientific or cultural context the source material comes from.
I found this very thought-provoking because it relates to some of my current thinking on contemporary art, particularly new media art that we see being exhibited, distributed or otherwise performed in the network culture. I am thinking particularly of the work of collaborative art groups like The Yes Men, Reena Spauling, DJRABBI, and etoy (whose member Zai will be on the art panel this afternoon).
In the email dialogue with Maria Tarantino [the moderator], I suggested that the contemporary artists I am working with or most excited by are moving away from "understanding" per se and are instead looking at ways to creatively remix "source material" available in the borderless network as a way to interject "countermeasures" into the normative measures being distributed by the traditional forms of power we all encounter on an everyday basis. The postproduction art of these contemporary artist-hactivists is part of a larger interventionist strategy is intended to "probe their practice in pursuit of freedom." The theorist Ken Wark philosophizes on this hacktivist aesthetic when, in his Hacker Manifesto, he writes:
"History is the production of abstraction and the abstraction of production. What makes life differ in one age after the next is the application of new modes of abstraction to the task of wresting freedom from necessity. History is the virtual made actual, one hack after another. History is the cumulative qualitative differentiation of nature as it is hacked. " (emphasis M.A.)
And I would add that as artists who are hardwired in their DNA to "become innovative" or to innovate new forms of art, we might be unconsciously predisposed to hacking into the abstract as a way to perform what feels like a sacred duty, that is, to intervene in the false consciousness of the moment, OUR moment, which is over-run with new media technologies, information bombardment, and political corruption as witnessed in the current global financial meltdown. When in my seminar this semester, I asked these young media artists what kind of survival strategies they were imagining given the possibility of a very "worst-case scenario" as a result of all of the organized corruption in the flows of globalized capital, they began discussing precursor movements or philosophies that have always attracted them but were resonating now more than ever, particularly Situationist strategies of dérive and détournement, as well as the TAZ or "temporary autonomous zones" suggested by Hakim Bey. The more they began outlining their desires to sample from and manipulate ideas, practices, and gestures from the Situationists and Bey as well as a few others, the more they started convincing themselves that they were now in a better position than ever to start building their own private utopias and countermeasures as a way to reinvent the practice of everyday life. We have a new slogan in the art lab:
Postproduce the present
Interestingly enough, McLuhan, appearing on an old Canadian Broadcast Company's public TV show that I can only now experience on Youtube, is caught on tape saying
"The artist, when he encounters the present,
the contemporary artist, is always seeking
new patterns, new patterns of recognition,
which is his task [...] His great need,
the absolute indispensability of the artist,
is that he alone and the encounter with the present,
can give the pattern recognition [...] He alone
has the sensory awareness to tell us
what our world is made of."
What the postprodcution artists of today are telling us is that our world is made of source material, that it is present everywhere, and that it breathes life into the hactivist strategies of remixologists all over the world.
Please forgive me for any misunderstandings.
