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

[Terry Flew]

Chris and other FC'ers

For me, the issue raised by this presentation/post is the relationship between creativity and innovation. In the old days (ie. 10 years ago) the answer was simple: creativity was what artists did, and you got Arts Council grants for; innovation was what scientists did, and got counted by the OECD as evidence  that your nation was an information or knowledge economy. 

The problematising of these categories comes at a time when there is serious debate about the turn to a 'creative' or ideas- based economy. We have in Brisbane at present John Howkins, author of "The Creative Economy: how people make money from ideas", who is presenting such arguments to State and local government, as well as to the punters at the Ideas Festival http://www.ideasatthepowerhouse.com.au . There is also, of course, Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class", which presents similar arguments through a mix of statistical geography and Hegelian meta-narrative. 

The relationship between creativity and innovation, and the discourses that surround each, strokes me as a particularly fertile ground for critical debate at this time. I throw this one open to comment from others on the list.

Cheers
Terry


>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.
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>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?
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>Many of her projects test the hypothesis that engineering structures participation: different arrangements of technology support different social and power relations.
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>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.
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>ANTI_TERROR_LINE ( http://www.bureauit.org/antiterror/ )
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>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.
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>Feral robots ( http://www.bureauit.org/feral/ )
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>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.
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>Bone Transducer Interface
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>More details about Jeremijenko's projects are online:
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>http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/projectdatabase/projects/livewire.html
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>-- -
>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      
>
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Dr. Terry Flew
Senior Lecturer and Discipline Head, Media and Communication
Course Co-ordinator, Creative Industries postgraduate coursework degree program
Reviews Editor, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies

Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology

GPO Box 2434
Brisbane Queensland 4001

Phone: 61-07-3864 2276
Fax: 61-07-3864 1810
Mobile: 0405 070 980
Email: t.flew at qut.edu.au
Research profile: http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/people/staff/next.jsp?userid=flew&secid=Introduction

CRICOS No: 00213J

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