Technoetic Arts - Volume 12, Issue 2-3, 2014

The interior of the body is an alien landscape, the frontiers of which we are continually expanding. Technological developments have allowed us to see more and more of what lies beneath the skin. Starting with the violently erotic public spectacle of dissection in amphitheatres, through X-ray and endoscopy, to other current and future technologies that work towards the yet to be realized ideal (or myth) of a truly non-invasive but microscopically detailed depiction of the human body. This opening up of the human interior to our gaze is not exclusively a medical phenomenon. It is an exploration that has been shared by scientists, artists and entertainers, variously reappropriating imagery and technologies of seeing. Each new invasive technology brings with it the somewhat naïve belief that it can excavate the essence of the subject, their passions, motivations and faults, their ‘souls’ for lack of a better word. Yet while an X-ray can certainly not tell us anything of the subject’s personality, as we delve deeper we discover more about our chemical and electrical natures, encouraging the perception that our consciousness is the ‘sum of our parts’. However, as technologies have become more sophisticated, there has been an increasing tendency to present the body in segments, detached from their surrounding structures. A certain objectification and distancing that occurs when we view the flesh laid open. How do we engage with these views culturally, and how do they influence how we view others and ourselves? In this article I grapple with notions of a mutating body that we are actively in the process of changing in the context of my own and others’ visual practice, with particular emphasis on making the mediated nature of these images visible. I will engage in a celebratory but critical discussion of others’ and mine.

Our culture is engaged in a process of dismantling the traditional processes of producing individuations and meaning. The borders between the engineered and organic, human and technological are dissolving as the individual reaches for the integrated experience. Liminality is the present state of dissolution of the self as a subject and a stage leading towards a new kind of individuation. There is a potential in developing a new language centred in the experience of the sensing body in order to move beyond the dialectical world-view initiated in an era marking the beginning of scientific progress. In this article, I will provide an overview of the processes that shaped the idea of a subject as an ontological entity. These processes will be viewed through the lens of scientific and aesthetic pursuits. I will follow with a short introduction of object-oriented ontology, which arose with the development and popularization of computers. I will then explore the border between the two ontologies and a possibility for crossing over through the use of the sensing body or bare life. In effect, I am arguing for aesthetics as a new form of language capable of bridging the different manifestations of being in the technological and biological life.

This article aims to provide an account of self-reflexivity through recent debates that pertain to thinking about contemporary network culture. It focuses on the shifts from the mechanistic to the organic, and then towards the post-organic, pertaining particularly to current debates around an understanding of systems and structures. Although it employs a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from philosophy to mathematics, this article traces the lineage from modern art towards thinking about systems. This work is part of an ongoing research objective that is directed towards practice-based research, particularly aimed at art practice that seeks to intersect with emerging network thinking and culture. One of the intentions of this article is to consider the account of self-reflexivity towards the implication of a ‘system as the medium’ in contemporary art practice, which is found in the writing of Francis Halsall. The research is part of an agenda that seeks to explore the conditions of production in contemporary culture, as a supplement to practice-based research. This article frames the debates around self-reflexivity through the chapter entitled ‘Strange loops’ by Mark C. Taylor, which is found in his book The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001). It traces the lineage that Francis Halsall provides in his book Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (2008), and seeks to provide an account of self-reflexivity towards his consideration of the system as medium, found in the chapter entitled ‘Systems aesthetics and the system as medium’. In this chapter, Halsall provides an inclusive account of the medium that arguably covers the extent of contemporary art practices, through his contribution to system aesthetics.

The account of self-reflexivity introduced in this article follows a parallel pathway to some of the major points in Halsall’s development of the system as medium. These include the ontologically stable modernist art object; the impact of cybernetics and information theory on art practice and discourse; and art that seeks to intersect with the environment.

There is something frustrating in the concept of algorithm that can even worry: its limitations. An algorithm does not need the time to define itself, it possesses in its structure everything that defines it and can work exclusively in a site, such as a computer, which is itself another finite system. Whenever a particular algorithm will be executed it will always be inexorably equal to itself because the number of possible states is finite. A logical­mathematical algorithm is essentially very different from a living being that reveals its being only in the passage of time, in the relationship with the environment, in the happening of events. On the contrary there is a strong relationship between living things and the art, since art essentially needs time to express itself. The art has a time dimension, if for no other reason, because the purpose of art is reaching human beings. But art, through technology, can also broaden its horizons. Art can make use of the technology and can do exactly as the man whose expression is, to grow, to expand, to discover new identities, to conduct an investigation in those distant places, on the border with the irrational.

As the post-digital organic landscape evolves through the rapid hybridization of ­practices, from genetic engineering to the creative use of nano technologies and syncretic approaches that are made easier by an always growing number of ­planetary connected telematic networks, and as we face, as a species, increasing environmental problems that more and more people and organizations plan to fix through geoengineering and terraforming solutions, the divide between the engineered and the organic tends to blur… At the same time various contemporary intellectual trends and path of research in philosophy, anthropology, or even archeology and geology lead to reconsider the place of human in the Universe, the anthropocentred perspective or even the concept of Nature itself. Be it through concepts as diverse as Next nature, Anthropocene, Spaceship Earth, the Laboratory Planet or symmetrical archeology. Through the democratization of access to various tools like 3D printers, bio experiment kits or free software communities, the number of transdisciplinary experiments and research projects is growing, which by feedback is accelerating the processes of merging between disciplines. Those different factors are accelerating the hybridization of disciplines and intellectual trends the same way the re-engineering of nature from the nano to the geno level are blending the border between natural and artificial. How are those technoetic approaches and their interconnection a game changer of the geo-eco-nano-politico-philosophico-spiritual landscape on Earth in the twenty-first century? I will discuss these questions in this article while showing the differences and similarities between some of the main philosophical concepts that are currently applied to those questions. By recontextualizing those various philosophical approaches maybe we can draw a map of the future evolutions and mutations that will influence learning, research and creativity in the coming years and decades.