::fibreculture:: Natalie Jeremijenko on technology, art and
knowledge
Danny Butt
db at dannybutt.net
Fri Aug 15 09:03:50 EST 2003
Terry, good points...
We just had Anna Munster and Lisa Grocott over for a workshop on Creative
Practice as Research discussing some of these issues. I'll post to announce
when the materials are online, but in the interim here's a few points:
1) "I don't know much about creativity or innovation, but I know what I
like." As you allude to, we're really talking about finding institutional
languages that can support certain kinds of activities. The work of the
historians of science on what constitutes "research" or "science" shows that
there are people who own the terminology, and use that ownership to control
financial and social resources. The focus, then is on defining what *isn't*
research/science/innovation so you can tell people to go and find their
money somewhere else.
Over time, new definitions become accepted - e.g. in New Zealand's Ministry
of Education's research definition the creative arts are accepted as valid
embodiments of research processes - yet other government agencies still have
a hard time getting their heads around cultural studies as a valid area of
research (which relates to the NSW secondary curriculum restructuring, but
that's another list discussion). The focus on "creativity" in a range of
disciplines seems to be giving research funders sleepless nights.
Potentially good times for the creative sector.
2) If we look at the dissemination of, say, fashion, I think it calls into
question the traditional notion of research as adding to an accumulating
body of knowledge. When NYC street fashion is embedded in music TV and finds
a home on the streets of South Auckland, we're talking about a significant
contribution to the fashion field, which instantly affects how producers in
that field conceive of their discipline. But Auckland fashion innnovators
haven't waited for fashion scholars to write about it and publish it in a
peer-reviewed creative industries journal. So is "knowledge" embedded in the
music video, and if so how do we review it? My personal view is that the
definitions of research need to be expanded to include "additions to the sum
of human knowledge *and experience*". Substantially novel experiences may
not be able to be codified as "knowledge" in its typically textual form, but
nevertheless they can be exchanged and they definitely play a major role in
defining the field in the creative disciplines.
3) How do you peer-review (or in the NZ terminology, "Quality Assure")
creative outputs? Most of the mechanisms I've seen in areas like e.g. design
are pretty shoddy and use competitions or exhibitions as evidence of
contribution to the field. But anyone working in the fields knows that
"award winning" work is not always the most influential. There's also a
funny mixing of reception for creative outputs, with unclear distinctions
between professional audiences and end users.... perhaps there's something
in Lash's discussions on reflexive accumulation and identity construction
which can help us here?, not sure....
cheers
x.d
--
http://www.dannybutt.net
Terry Flew wrote on 14/8/03 9:44 PM:
> 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
> 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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