Technoetic Arts - Themed Issue: ‘On Modes of Participation’, Nov 2021

How do we show what we know? How do the models used to interpret, build understanding and sustain relationships with the world, work? Artificial intelligence models – particularly those characterized as ‘deep’ learning models – provoke a reframing of, and renewed attention to, these basic questions. Machines designed to learn through continuous, embedded use give rise to a form of automated intersubjectivity premised on normative notions of continuity, completeness and repair that are often opaque. A turn to poetic practice may revivify supple categories of human and non-human, with attentive connection across multiple worlds, discursively explaining these models even as they enfold us. A companion video to this text can be viewed at: https://vimeo.com/525096901.

What happens when humans and birds engage each other through a collaboration-as-fantasy mediated by computers? Could such an exercise be modelled in a way that helps us to transcend the techno-ocularcentric fetishes for precision and certainty which demarcate our time? From Edgar Wind’s notion of 'incarnation' – as the place where empirical experience and metaphysical foundation meet in the single cognitive and experiential act – this article bridges the analogue with the digital, navigating nature’s strategies to embody inherited and learned complex behaviours in the design of nests, in what I call data-nests.

As we move towards a world that is using machine learning and nascent artificial intelligence to analyse and, in many ways, guide most aspects of our lives, new forms of heterogeneous collaborative teams that include human/intelligent machine agents will become not just possible, but an inevitable part of our shared world. The conscious participation of the arts in the conversation about, and development and implementation of, these new collaborative possibilities is crucial, as the arts serve as our best lens through which we can explore the full spectrum of potential possibilities and futures. Through the complex relationships formed through heterogeneous human/intelligent agent collaboration, we are given the opportunity to re-examine some of our assumptions and suppositions of teamwork and forms of relating and thinking within a group environment.

Community acts of material signification are an important form of sculpture that occur through an exchange of human and non-human agents. First these acts of sculpture are discussed in relation to extended mind, the morphogenic model of making, material engagement theory and entanglement to frame how humans shape the world as collaborators with non-humans by extending mind through material. I then discuss various acts of community material accumulation that I consider sculpture, skateboarding and clay forming as evidence of extended mind, comparison of the morphogenic to the hylomorphic model of making, occurrences of materials affecting other materials absent of human intervention and my recent participatory installation Stone Fruit. These topics are used to present a lens for understanding the production of sculpture as a collaboration with opposed to dictation on systems of materials, places and people. This lens, in turn, presents community sites of material accumulation to be an important form of sculpture production.

Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers her first-person perspective of entanglements of light and air during the 2020–21 pandemic from her position in academia and Florida.

Sara Ahmed’s enquiry on what it means for sexuality to be lived as oriented from the work Queer Phenomenology inspired the art series ‘A Sexual Series’, based on post-humanist theory and asexual experience. Shapes of performative alter egos materialized from a queer cyborg position of technologically enhanced crip experiences (the strong symbolical constructing process of straightening scoliosis surgery). From being a glitch of the past towards a post-individualist future, the artificial intelligence sexbot is a metaphoric, elevated cyborg drag version of the artist to embody asexuality and queer Otherness. Based on multitudes of CUNTraDICKtions to encourage self-reflection, the series explores the complexities of ob/scene and on/scene performances; the position of a sex positive asexual as well as questions of belonging as a naturally artificial rebel.

Virtual reality is all too often considered as antithetical to reality, the former being an entity fully separated from the latter. Since there has been historically no consensus among philosophers as to what constitutes reality, this article seeks to contribute to the debate on i crucial issue. It argues that reality should be considered as including non-tangible properties and that, from the first-person point of view, virtual reality is part of the reality of each and every one of us. Furthermore, grey zones between reality and virtual reality, that is to say environments in which reality blends with fantasy and highly personal perception of our surroundings are much more common than often assumed. The article claims that architecture is the most powerful foundation for virtual reality and therefore creator of grey zones. Real spaces (such as cafés or streets, and moreover cities) offer experiences more intense than any typical virtual environment and cause the blurring of awareness in which world we are. Virtual reality is an impoverished reality, and attempts to realize it have led to disastrous outcomes. On the contrary, grey zones, partially anchored on the materiality, actually enrich reality with non-tangible qualities, without threatening its authority in our souls and minds.

Aura & Transvestment is a transmedia project consisting of a series of generative images, an experimental form of cryptomedia and a video essay. By describing its own powers and contradictions, the work explores notions of value, ownership, authenticity, artificial scarcity and abundance in the digital realm. The project is a critical analysis of non-fungible tokens used as proof of ownership for digital art, taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura as a starting point. It argues that, for tokenized art, cryptography serves as an artificial source of auratic power that reverts the political potential of reproducibility falling back to a magical and ritual notion of aura. This time around the ritual performed is that of property, authenticity, ownership, markets and commodification. Finally, the article outlines alternative uses of cryptography and distributed ledger technologies to support artistic labour and proposes transvestment as a temporary counter-action for the reallocation of value from capitalist forms of production and into commons-based models of social coordination. Submitted to this journal is an adaptation of the script for the video essay, alongside other elements of the project. Please visit: https://aura-transvestment.art/.

This article explores and challenges notions and methodologies of conservation, including the use of blockchain technologies as a means of establishing provenance of a physical BioArtwork, of the artist’s documentation encapsulating their intentions and of the conservator’s records required for the artwork’s ongoing care. The exploration is done through a case study of an art project called ‘Unruly Objects and Biological Conservation’ created by Anna Dumitriu with support from Alex May. The artwork consists of three items containing RFID tags sealed in resin – which point to the location of the artist’s documentation. Therefore, the works physically include instructions for maintaining their inherent concepts and materiality for the benefit of the conservators. Such instructions can often be difficult to track down, or become disassociated from the artwork while the digital preservation of this storage method also poses its own set of questions. The works also include biological material including mud from a bacterial ecosystem known as a Winogradsky Column, living plant material and SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) RNA from a plasmid construct.