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

Fri Aug 15 00:23:50 EST 2003

Dear Chris, Terry and Fibreculture,

> the articulation of an open participatory politics of the future will not
only operate through discourse,
> but through engineering itself.

In my mind what made these works powerful was their abilty to deploy both
discourse and engineering in a way that fundamentally altered the
potentialities of both. For me the projects were an intervention in the
configurative potential of the discourses and technologies which they
deployed- they were a playful interconnection of an otherwise distinct and
overdetermined technics - a techno-discursive fight against the
overdetermination of meaning and application. (embedding history in
devices -rehistoricizing technology - struck me as particularly powerful)

What struck me was how productive (rather than creative) the projects were.
They were productive of new knowledges not because they offered creative
representations or because they, in themselves, illustrated the
aforementioned over-determinations but because their reconfiguration of
technology and discourse elicited a field of potential becoming that was
dynamic and heterogenous. The result is what Brian Massumi has called
elicited and involuntary.....

At this stage I can only see this as the expression of a revolutionary
politics because it works against determined outcomes and preconceived
applications........ to paraphrase Natalie - how many goverments,
institutions, and schools of thought are today structured and financed to
devote time to that what has been historically a most profitable scientific
practice, that is, to 'see what you are not looking for' - to suspend agency
in the hope of vivifying unforseen potential which may in turn yeild
un-realized truths  prostheticizing our engagement with the world in new
ways?  The arts is the place for this because the mode of engagment is
critical and participatory and because it is a field where indeterminate
outcomes are currently tolerated (fly under the radar).

There is much more to be said here..... I hope someone (else) is interested.

Thanks,

Mat Wall-Smith
(your humble sandwich hand tentatively delurking)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Terry Flew" <t.flew at qut.edu.au>
To: "Chris Chesher" <c.chesher at unsw.edu.au>;
<fibreculture at lists.myspinach.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 7:44 PM
Subject: Re: ::fibreculture:: Natalie Jeremijenko on technology, art and
knowledge

> 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.
> >
> >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
> >
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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
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>
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> Email: t.flew at qut.edu.au
> Research profile:
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>
> CRICOS No: 00213J
>
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