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Attractors: Notes on Aesthetics and Network Form
Brett Stalbaum
Contemporary evaluations of the aesthetic and ontology of network forms
are too often sorted into categories which emphasize the incompatibility
and opposition between assumed binaries that are instantiated once again,
and then moreover, in spite of substantial positions to the contrary that,
even if they do not prove satisfactory on their own strength as
philosophical resolutions to the problems at hand (polemics are always
possible), do nevertheless provide significant weight to questions about
the original assumptions regarding contradictory opposites (which mark the
bounds of possible aesthetic perception), in the first place. Two common
examples of the tendency to perceive network forms via latent models are
instantiated in the science vs art debate, and in the polemics surrounding
virtual form as opposed traditional object making. Combined with
contemporary misunderstandings regarding the nature of a network (which is
often cast as spacio-temporal or hypertextual), and the entrance of
artists working with network form as a medium or space for preformative
agency, we find that sedimented assumptions regarding the ontology of art
surrounding these polarities (art vs. science and 'real' vs virtual), have
contributed generally to the misunderstanding of an unsorted field of very
diverse activity.
It is this activity, sometimes called 'net.art', which we have as of yet
rarely been able to treat with anything more than those comfortable though
largely debunked romantic-modernist models of art, artists, audiences, art
institutions, as well as the relationships existing between the four. None
of my treatments of the more or less contemporary aesthetic theories
presented here will be news to anyone within the field of analytical
aesthetics, nor should they be, given that the intention of these notes is
not to provide clear amendments or proposals within the bounds of that
tradition, but simply to articulate that counters (or alternatives), to
the aforementioned models both already exist and actually considerably
pre-date the network art forms that have stimulated those models as the
parameters of debate. I conclude these notes with a suggestion that
complex processes involving the formation and decay of semiotic,
institutional, productive and perceptual modes be adopted as a basis for
the aesthetic analysis of net.art because it mirrors the operational mode
of the networks which it would seek to evaluate.
Regarding the art vs science issue, much of the contemporary debate
relative to net.art revolves around the very assumption that art and
science are fundamentally contradictory spheres of endeavour. So the
argument runs: since networks have resulted from trajectories of science
and technology, art must by definition have some secondary relationship to
network form. Such arguments often take the form of statements like,
"Networks are a new medium that artists can now explore." Now whether this
kind of thought is evaluated as excluding network forms from any status as
art, for justifying them some subordinate status within the art world, for
the foundation of a new movement in art based on the medium, or even for
arguing some superior status for network form as art, (based on the
supremacy of science to which art has finally subordinated itself), we can
argue that it is the implementation of the false dichotomy in the first
place that is generating the misconceptions. If it isn't simply adequate
to conjure the ghost of Leonardo DaVinci to show that it is the dichotomy
marking the parameters of the science vs art discourse that is at fault,
let's undercut the topical question and ask why it is, based on active
models of art ontology, that art and science are so often held apart from
one another? The main underlying mythology still running in the system is
that there is a clear division between the emotive and the cognitive that
define the principle differences between art and science.
In a 1968 critique titled "The Activity of Aesthetic Experience", Nelson
Goodman identifies and resolves this issue by undermining the "domineering
dichotomy between the cognitive and the emotive", and theorizes that "this
pretty effectively keeps us from seeing that in aesthetic experience the
emotions function cognitively." Now, we should in retrospect lend to
Goodman the support some fairly exactly contemporary theory about the
closed structure of the nervous system and the then necessary expansion of
the conception of cognition beyond analytic reasoning to the overall
ontogenic structural drift of an organism (Maturana, Varela), but while this is a
nice general confirmation of Goodman's narrower argument within
aesthetics, it would only be necessary here if we were trying to flesh out
the aesthetic experience of an individual cognitive unit; which was not
Goodman's main mission. His endeavor was, (and it is mine here), to point
out that it is the operative semiosis (though he would not have used
explicitly semiotic terminology), within the larger system that dictates
the cognitive outcome, (or at least that the outcome actually exists, more
or less objectively, within a third-order structural coupling such as
language or modes of perception). Therefore it holds that any aesthetic
evaluation divided along the lines of the cognitive and the emotive is
not plausible: the instantiation of science as opposed to art is without merit.
Away with it go critiques based on methodological differences between the
two supposed poles. For example, art that adheres to a rigorous set of
scientific controls does not disqualify itself as art, anymore than a
passionate scientist necessarily invalidates her study through strong
feeling.
Goodman states that it is best to examine "the aesthetic relevance of the
major characteristics of the several symbol processes involved in
experience and to look for aspects or symptoms, rather than for a crisp
criterion, of the aesthetic." These "symptoms" are suggested to be in
conjunction with aesthetic experience. He states that these are not
however necessary and sufficient conditions for anything like "aesthetic
value," which by and large he seeks to undermine in general. He goes on to
describe four symptoms, syntactic density, semantic density, syntactic
repleteness, and an un-jargoned symptom that "distinguishes
exemplificational from denotational systems." Of most interest here is the
close relationship (or potential mappings), between what Goodman is doing
in the essay, and thinking that was taking place contemporaneously with
Goodman under the rubric of semiology. His notion of denotational and
expressive elements map most obviously to the denotation/connotation pair,
(and probably could suffer from the same errors of extreme dichotomy that
denotation and connotation did up until the time that Roland Barthes
described them as a continuum that is always ideological.) Goodman's
explication of "Syntactic Density" maps very closely to syntagmatic
analysis, and "Semantic Density" to paradigmatic analysis. Something quite
interesting that Goodman brings to the table is his notion of "Syntactic
Repleteness", which refers the relative implementation of semantic systems
as opposed to diagrammatic or schematic systems; where greater "Syntactic
Repleteness" means more syntagmatic repleteness as opposed to
paradigmatic; or a way of making statements not about syntactic and
semantic density in isolation from one another but rather as relative
aesthetic symptoms according to the equation Syntactic Repleteness =
Syntactic Density/Semantic Density. Such an exposition lends weight to my
argument that net.aesthetics are relative to the distributed and always
fluxuating systems of third-order structural coupling (systems of
semiosis), which define a domain, such as the "art world", and further
indicates that we should seek to evaluate the activity of network art
forms; not only their visual surface. But even failing to do so, it
clearly shows that continuing to pit art against science as an evaluative
aesthetic tool is a fairly useless endeavour.
Little time will be spent on the polemics surrounding virtual form as
opposed traditional object making in these notes, but it must be pointed
out that, within the art world at a minimum, this is no longer a serious
debate nor has it been for some time. Once again, the debate's historical
resolution far precedes net.art, and it should further be pointed out that
much like the DaVinci example in science vs art, no one should have to do
more than unfurl the history of performance art (Italian Futurism or Dada
will do), to resolve the matter within the context of working artists (if
not aesthetiticians). In short, performance artworks and conceptual
artworks have given us many objectless art examples for an extended time.
Nevertheless, we can at least give one significant position from
aesthetics that clarifies the proposition that artworks do not require an
object, but rather that art "is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic
theories, so that one use of theories, in addition to helping us
discriminate art from the rest, consists in making it possible." Arthur
Danto;1962.
Rather than attempt to generate just another argument or comparison of the
relative merits of oppositional stances surrounding art and technology, it
is important to attempt to understand the processes through which
stratification in art discourse is generated in the first place. It is
through such an analysis that many of the assumptions regarding the
incompatibility of art with other fields of endeavor can be accounted for,
and perhaps encouraged to self-modify to meet contemporary cultural phase
states. The key concepts necessary to perform this analysis derive from
Deleuze and Guttari, but have been nicely focused by Manuel De Landa in
his recent book One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. The fundamental
idea is that there exist abstract processes which manifest themselves in
similar ways within extremely different natural systems. This idea is what
allows De Landa, for example, to usefully compare the non-linear
organizational processes behind geological, biological, and linguistic
histories.
Among the abstract machines that De Landa explicates are a sorting machine
and a meshwork machine. Presented here in obscenely simplified form,
sorting machines are stratifying forces that taxonomize, categorize,
classify, and ultimately glue the results into stable structures. Examples
that De Landa presents to demonstrate the results of sorting machines are
sandstone, centralized bureaucracies, societal class structures, major
languages such as English, and various other hierarchical structures.
Meshworks are processes that organize around "autocatalytic attractors",
or processes which are capable of integrating other processes in closed
loops of mutually beneficial stimulation. Examples here are granite,
chemical clocks, markets, and various kinds of networks.
Importantly, hierarchies and meshworks are not viewed as contradictory
processes: there can be hierarchies of meshworks or meshworks of
hierarchies, all of which can take extremely complex forms. Nevertheless,
tensions between these two forms of organization do exist, but it is
viewed as a productive tension that stimulates necessary drift. Further,
the history of the structures formed by these processes is viewed as the
history of material interaction of those abstract processes. Under this
analysis, it is possible to both account for the non-linear material
forces that shape a discourse, and to potentially shepherd the meshwork of
structures in such a way that novel spaces for artistic agency emerge.
This includes the possibility of non-biological matter or raw data as
participants in, or even as autonomous creators of, fine art.
Returning now to the polemics taking place within art discourses regarding
technology, it is critical to begin the task by intentionally not
considering how hierarchical structures such as art institutions or
traditional aesthetic theory contradicts or conflicts with emerging
networks of independent artists and theorists, (or how heavily stratified
disciplines such as contemporary scientific methods conflict with more
meshwork-like processes of bricolage and tinkering in the arts). Instead,
what is key to consider is how the spaces in which stratified structures,
such as the art-institutional world, meet up and self-organize with
meshworks of artists and theorists, (or how relatively fixed ideas about
art or science interact with emerging meshworks consisting of elements of
both). As autocatalytic art attractors form new mutually beneficial
networks of heterogeneous elements, they constitute not a radical
challenge to homogenizing art hierarchies, but instead function as
producers of new materials to be sorted or meshed into increasingly novel
forms that are compatible with the arts precisely because they emerge from
adaptive non-linear processes. In short, this kind of analysis can do much
to explain not only the contemporary emergence of new fine art media such
as video and network, but perhaps even to predict future systems based art
forms such as legal art, genetic engineering art, or corporation as art.