::fibreculture:: Natalie Jeremijenko on technology, art and knowledge

[Chris Chesher]

I've just been to a talk at the College of Fine Arts by the new media 
artist / engineer Natalie Jeremijenko. She gave a typically 
fast-forwarded exposition of a number of projects she's been working on 
that are very much relevant to questions discussed in Fibreculture.

The question she asked throughout was whether art can create knowledge. 
By this, she means -- can art can produce knowledge that can operate 
with the same degree of authority as that created by the empirically 
verified, peer-reviewed facts of big science?

Many of her projects test the hypothesis that engineering structures 
participation: different arrangements of technology support different 
social and power relations.

What's impressive about Jeremijenko's work is that she thinks with her 
engineering. Her projects make articulate arguments; they convincingly 
document the world; and they make very funny jokes. They do this with 
minimal need for supporting documentation, and with economical, 
rigorous technical competence and flair.


ANTI_TERROR_LINE ( http://www.bureauit.org/antiterror/ )

The anti-terror line is a public online facility established to allow 
people getting hassled by over-vigilant anti-terrorist security to 
record the incident. If an alert and alarmed policer of anti-terrorism 
gets on your case, you can call a specified phone number on your mobile 
and record the incident in real time. Later you can visit the website 
to annotate the recording. This aims to create collection of recordings 
of incidents that illustrate the social costs of increasingly 
ubiquitous surveillance and security in public places.


Feral robots ( http://www.bureauit.org/feral/ )

What can you do with robot dogs besides and teach them how to sit or 
maybe play soccer? The Feral Robotic Development squad retrains such 
dogs to sniff out toxic waste or radioactive materials. They let packs 
of these dogs loose on industrial sites that have supposedly been 
cleaned up. The dogs follow the strongest concentrations of toxins. 
Instead of the standard 'dog cinema' front-facing camera, these have 
cameras facing backwards to show the faces of the people following the 
dogs, trying to make sense of where they are going as they hunt down 
undocumented traces of dangerous chemicals.


Bone Transducer Interface

This installation jokingly puts Jeremijenko's students in their proper 
place: kneeling down with their head against the wall outside her 
office. The bone transducer is based on a re-engineering of a 
technology that lets scuba divers hear underwater by vibrating the 
bones in the listener's skull. To hear the details of her office hours, 
students have to get down on their knees, and place their forehead 
against the wall.


Each of these systems draws attention to the often ignored ways in 
which technical systems structure the manner in which users 
participate. The knowledge that each creates is quite specific. The 
Anti-terror line creates a database documenting incidents of civil 
inconvenience and harassment. The feral robots produce video 
performances illustrating the geography of health-threatening 
environmental pollution. The bone transducer inspires ritualistic 
performances parodying the power relations implicit in 
institutionalised student-teacher relationships.

These performances may not speak with the same institutional authority 
as scientific papers or diagrams; but they may point in the direction 
for strategies that will create vigorous forms of knowledge with 
popular appeal and political efficacy.

This kind of knowledge matters because the articulation of an open 
participatory politics of the future will not only operate through 
discourse, but through engineering itself. And Jeremijenko makes a 
convincing argument that art is an appropriate institutional context 
for the expression of these kinds of truth claims in hardware and 
software.


More details about Jeremijenko's projects are online:

http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/projectdatabase/projects/livewire.html







-- -
Dr Chris Chesher                         Work phone 61 2 9385 6814
Senior Lecturer                          Messages:  61 2 9385 6811
School of Media and Communications       Fax:       61 2 9385 6812
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of New South Wales            Email: c.chesher at unsw.edu.au
UNSW Sydney 2052                         http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/
UNSW CRICOS Provider Number: 00098G