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Christiane Paul j
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Context Providers explores the ways in which digital art and culture Margot Lovejoy is author of
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so-called new media art. In this enlightening volume, the editors have enlisted
a comprehensive body of opinion by theorists and practitioners to present one Studies Graduate Programs at niR
complex answer - it’s the context, stupid.” ---Steve Dietz, founding artistic director, The New School, New York; and n
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“Media art is not just an art form that utilizes media technology, as people tend I
to think. This excellent volume, written by pioneers in the field, explores its real edD CONTEXT Margot Lovejoy
meanings to us and our society with ample examples and theoretical insight. Such Victoria Vesna is a media artist, iaE
a book has been long needed.” ---Machiko Kusahara, media art curator, author, Professor and Director of Art |
Professor, Waseda University, Japan.” Sci center at the UCLA School AR Christiane Paul
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“With major essays written by a range of experts in this emerging field, Nanosystems Institute; and PROVIDERS: Victoria Vesna
Context Providers articulates a seminal language to previously unexplored Visiting Professor at Parsons The
territories. It explores ethics in the conditions of meaning in ways that New School for Design.
are both accessible and provocative.” ---Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist, filmmaker,
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis.
Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
ISBN 978-1-84150-308-0
0 0
Cover image courtesy of Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer (See Figure
9 781841 503080 1.i.2. ,”BODY MOVIES: Relational
Architecture 6”, 2001)
intellect | www.intellectbooks.com
Context Providers:
Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
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Context Providers:
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Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
Edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul,
and Victoria Vesna
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First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect,
The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press,
1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: Lesley Williams
Typesetting: John Teehan
Index: Silvia Benvenuto
ISBN 978–1–84150–308–0 / EISBN 978-1-84150-539-8
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................1
Part One:
Defining Conditions For Digital Arts: Social Function, Authorship, and Audience ........13
Margot Lovejoy
Missing In Action: Agency and Meaning In Interactive Art ..............................................31
Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken
Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art .................................................................55
Sharon Daniel
Play, Participation, and Art: Blurring the Edges ..............................................................89
Mary Flanagan
Part Two:
Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production ...................................103
Christiane Paul
Aesthetics of Information Visualization ..........................................................................123
Warren Sack
Identity Operated In New Mode: Context and Body/Space/Time .....................................151
Marina Gržini ć
Game Engines As Creative Frameworks ..........................................................................175
Robert F. Nideffer
Mapping the Collective ....................................................................................................199
Sara Diamond
Part Three:
Shifting Media Contexts: When Scientific Labs Become Art Studios .............................233
Victoria Vesna
Biotechnical Art and the Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm .......................................................243
Anna Munster
Working With Wetware ....................................................................................................259
Ruth G. West
Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications ..........................................275
Ellen K. Levy
Art and Science Research: Active Contexts and Discourses .............................................299
Jill Scott and Daniel Bisig
Index ..............................................................................................................................329
Biographies ...................................................................................................................345
INTRODUCTION
One of the main goals of this book is to provide context for an understanding of art
that uses current technologies as a medium and to examine the multiple contexts
that inform conditions of meaning in this medium. Using the term “context providers”
as the title for a book, one cannot avoid invoking the term “content provider” and its
connotations. Rather than setting up an opposition between context and content, this
book aims to examine the relationship between the two, and the shifts in meaning that
digital technologies may have brought about in understanding the interplay of content
and context.
The term “content provider” had become a catchword in the times of the booming
dot com industry, suggesting that the task of “cultural producers” in general and artists
in particular would be to “fill” technologies with ideas, themes, and meaning. The
terminology and concept seemed to suggest a return to a pre-McLuhanite age, ignoring
all previous discussions about medium as message and the interconnectedness of form
and content. One has to wonder if this seemingly deliberate neglect of previous critical
discourse was brought about by the new technologies themselves, which, in their infancy,
may have appeared as a mere commercial tool without inherent aesthetic qualities.
It was just a few decades ago that humanity saw the earth in context. Through
development of technology, driven by the cold war, we landed on the moon and for the
first time saw the planet we live on from a distance, in relation to the universe. This was
a televised event, a live transmission that was watched by a record number of people
globally. Those of us old enough to remember sat transfixed by the grainy black-and-
white images and listened attentively to the broken voice signals. Buckminster Fuller
referred to our planet as “Spaceship Earth” and Marshall McLuhan inspired many with
the idea of the “global village.”
In 1957, roughly a decade before the moon landing and at the height of the cold war,
the United States responded to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR) launch
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Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
of Sputnik by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the
Department of Defense (DOD) in the United States to establish the lead in science and
technology. In 1964, a proposal by the RAND Corporation, the foremost cold war think
tank, conceptualized the Internet as a communication network without central authority
that would be safe from a nuclear attack. By 1969, four nodes of supercomputers (at the
University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the
Stanford Research Institute; and the University of Utah) formed an infant network, named
ARPA Network (ARPANET) after its Pentagon sponsor. ARPANET was born in the same
year Apollo landed on the moon. Telematic and computer culture emerged out of military
interests and remain directly connected to it—more than any other art form to date.
Many artists immediately responded to the cultural climate of their time and early on
experimented with video Porta-Packs, networks, and satellites. In 1977, Liza Bear and
Willoughby Sharp in New York and Sharon Grace and Carl Loeffler in San Francisco
organized “Send/Receive,” which employed a communication technology satellite (CTS)
and featured a fifteen-hour, two-way interactive transmission between the two cities.
Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, in conjunction with the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) and the Educational Television Center (Menlo
Park, California) organized the world’s first interactive composite image satellite dance
performance between performers on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States.
The performance included the first satellite feedback dance, a three-location, live-feed
composite performance accompanied by flutist Paul Horn playing his time echo. These
artists were very consciously striving to create context to expose others to the wonders
of connectivity. Of course, this all had been anticipated by earlier generations of artists—
the Dadaists, the Futurists, and even the Surrealists. Indeed, many performative and
interactive contemporary works can be traced back to conceptualist work (as the authors
in this book frequently point out).
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the context for artistic creation has
again fundamentally changed. The 1990s were a crucial decade for the development of
digital art and constituted a “digital revolution,” delivering an unprecedented amount of
affordable computer power and software tools and making computers almost ubiquitous.
The World Wide Web took the notion of connectivity to new levels. Media artists started
moving into academia. There, many saw biotech and increasingly nanotech as the next
space for exploration, and they used labs as an entirely new creative context.
Information usually is of little value if it cannot be contextualized and filtered, and
digital technologies are the perfect tool for creating a referential framework that supports
these tasks and processes. The way data and information are processed by means of these
technologies—particularly within a communications network such as the Internet—
again requires a renegotiation of polarities, such as text/context and content/context.
As a multilayered informational system that is in constant flux and reorganization, the
networked digital world seems to perfectly embody the notion of unstable contexts.
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Introduction
In the networked environment, links make it possible to connect texts and visuals
to the contextual network they are embedded in, to visualize the network of references
that would normally be separated by physical space. Digital culture is based on the
absence of structures that are common in the offline world, which is saturated with
hierarchies that do not make much sense online. Offline events, places, or objects situate
themselves within a field of relations, most of which are kept out of sight, separated
by space. The immediacy of transition that is made possible by hyperlinks erases the
perception that we have moved between blocks of information that—in the offline
world—would be pages and shelves, or even cities and countries apart. The order of the
elements is no longer a reliable indicator of hierarchies. The spatial distance dividing
the center from the margin or text from context is subordinated to the temporality of
the link.
Context was traditionally understood as subordinate and supplemental. The
hyperlinked structure of the Web undermines the distinction between a central text and
its supplemental context: without any hierarchical structure, every context is yet another
central text or vice versa. Digital media make relations and connections accessible and
incorporate what we usually understand as context; they constitute a denatured context,
enriching the context even as they contribute to making the very notion of context
redundant.
Similar to the interconnectedness of form and content, medium, and message, the
relationship between context and content can hardly be set up as a simple dichotomy. At
least conceptually, content provides context for a related thematic area, and every context
can become content, depending on the thematic lens under which it is examined.
Reading Context
At least since the 1960s, critical theory in the humanities has thoroughly analyzed the
relationship between text and context. Deconstruction and poststructural theories, in
particular, have profoundly influenced our understanding of the relationship between
text and context. Postructuralism and Derridean deconstruction questioned notions
of linear developments, hierarchies, and dichotomies (such as presence/absence),
emphasizing the noncenter as a starting point for a playful exploration of meaning.
Derridean deconstruction tries to dismantle the hierarchizing or totalizing effects of
binary structures and to inverse binary opposition; it attempts to preclude the emergence
of a synthesizing term that would produce a new hierarchy or totalization. Jacques
Derrida distinguishes between “logocentric” writing, based upon a phonetic–alphabetic
script conveying the spoken word, and “écriture,” grammatological or poststructuralist
writing that concentrates on the primary processes that produce language. These theories
provided the basis for many central characteristics of Postmodernism as a cultural, social,
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