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

[Anna Munster]

For what it's worth - my take on Natalie J's talk was slightly different. Her 
focus was not on the term creativity at all. In fact she mentioned that she 
found the term perjorative and was one that techno-corporate types tended to 
hand out to her when they thought she was doing something totally off the air!
This is an interesting geo-economic point, given that the notion of creative 
industries is not so much parlance in the US because I suppose the third way 
policies have not been taken up at industries levels there.
In fact, Natalie's talk was, I thought, posing the question - can art produce 
knowledge that may make truth claims? Her argument, that it could, rested upon 
an idea that by producing  knowledge through open source structures of 
participation and interaction that operated within everyday visual culture it 
would be possible to contribute to a broadening of the knowledge base.  What 
artists do then is to produce cultural knowledge that exists within a broadened 
field of visual literacy opening the 'closed world' of the 'scientific' 
knowledge base produced by the military-industrial complex.

I found this argument really interesting because in fact it moved away from 
concepts of both creativity and innovation into the empirical world. Granted it 
is a radically different kind of empiricism being put forward here. But it's a 
bold move to propose that cultural production can lead to facts (although of 
course she is not the first to suggest this - latour, stengers, deleuze etc). 
But her talk was one of the best cases argued from the point of view of arts 
production,
cheers anna