Marius Watz - Thoughts on Code and Art

Taking the New Aesthetic to the cleaners

Bruce Sterling just posted a new article about the hotly-debated topic of the New Aesthetic, somewhat flatteringly taking the text I wrote for Creators Project as a departure point (or angle of attack, depending on how you see it.) Go read it: Generation Generator (New Aesthetic).

I’d qualify it as only “somewhat” flattering, though, as his text does take the form of a serious critique of some of the positions I’ve argued over the last year or so regarding computational aesthetics. Notably, he refers to my Eyeo talk and the Algorithm Thought Police provocation. It’s nice to see that someone was paying attention.

But despite Sterling’s calling me a “generative apologist” I would tend to agree with several of his points. And even when I don’t it’s still a pleasure to see some real critical thinking on the subject for once.

I guess the only thing to do now is to write a response to the response to the response.

The Problem with Perpetual Newness

[Julia Kaganskiy of The Creators Project asked me to comment on Bruce Sterling’s “Essay On The New Aesthetic” along with 5 other art & tech writers (Kyle Chayka, Jonathan Minard, Greg Borenstein, James George and Kyle McDonald). You can find the collected texts on Creators Project, below is my subjective spin on the subject…]

My take on the New Aesthetic? On immediate reflection I’d say “good job” and “go easy on the drones”. But inevitably there is the jaded voice in the back of my head wanting to snarkily ask, “What took you so long?” Not “you” as in the particular group of people who curate and promote the New Aesthetic meme, but “you” as in (Western) society at large, the technology-addicted masses who want their Facebook (MTV, not so much) and smartphone bliss, yet manage to be continually surprised by the not-always-pleasant byproducts of their addiction.

There really is no excuse for being technoculture illiterate if you’re under 40 and living in the Western world. You can plead ignorance of the technological specifics, but not of the cultural effects produced by the gadgets and interfaces that have invaded your life. Technology is not something that happens to other people, nor can you escape it by hiding out in “the humanities.” To be human is to be technological.

Lacking a ubiquitous and intuitive understanding of the complex interactions between technology and human culture, sources like the New Aesthetic (NA) become golden. NA is an attempt at diagnosis of the most recent mutations of the human condition, a difficult task best attacked obliquely and from the flank, with subtle observations rather than head on with manifestos (which are not very New Aesthetic, by the way).

NA is part meme, part techno-ethnography and part Tumblr serendipity. Its art is juxtaposition: If we put this next to that and this other thing, surely a new understanding will emerge. And you know what? It works surprisingly well. Whether that success is the product of brilliant curation or the result of feverishly sign-deciphering minds scanning image after image for clues that might not be there is academic. If it works, it works.

The “New” part is deceptive, however. Most of what NA offers up for examination is not all that new. Technologies like machine vision and geo-location are old by most standards. What is new is their integration into our lives to the point where we are bringing them to bed. Smartphone habituees will think nothing of installing a sleep-tracking app and putting their phone on the mattress, where accelerometers will presumably make sage observations about your quality of sleep. This is the new Aesthetic—human behavior augmented by technology as often as it is disrupted. The New Aesthetic is a sign saying “Translation Server Error” rather than “Post Office”. The New Aesthetic is faces glowing ominously as people walk down the street at night staring at their phones—or worse, their iPads.

We need NA like we need weather vanes warning us of oncoming storms, because tech-driven cultural innovation has a nasty habit of becoming an inevitability with little regard for personal preference or even legal precedence. Once conceived of, or even just scribbled on a napkin during a drunken startup crawl, it is as though they might as well always have existed.

Yes, GPS will come storming out of the wilderness survival gear catalogue and give your mother an incredibly increased action radius. Yes, computer GUI elements will sprout legs and appear lounging around your neighborhood as though they had always been there. Yes, digital glitch is as much of a cultural artifact as the graininess of film or the bad colors of Polaroids. And that guy on the corner with the World of Warcraft battleaxe replica 1 instantly looks at home from the moment that he appears. Yes, you think, now that I see it, it makes perfect sense.

Marius Watz for Creators Project, April 6, 2012

1 That would be the artist Aram Bartholl, performing his “1H” intervention.

Concept vs. Form, that old chestnut

This post is a response to a longer thread on Google+ between Ben Bogart and myself. Specifically, the following is specifically a response to his long post titled Is generative art conceptual or formal? (the post is not currently public, but if you’re on G+ you might be able to see it).

1. I don’t believe in segregating work into concept or form camps. But such a division exists de facto. If you read the [eu-gene] mailing list you will find a community of generative artists who are largely disdainful of form for form’s sake, and who believe in conceptual stringency or scientific precision as parameters in the work.

   If Generator.x ever represented a community, I’d venture to say that community is more concerned with form than with logic or science. But that doesn’t mean the work is without concept. Casey Reas might be an artist whose output is sumptuous and painterly, but he stands apart from the pack by using a Lewittian method of breaking down his works into plaintext rules.

2. In my own work I am concerned with the expression of non-verbal forms and spaces as the consequence of parametric processes, and I rarely if ever provide my audience with a text explaining my concept or the process I went through. I believe in letting the work speak for itself, even if that means that viewers might overlook an aspect that might have been essential to the artist.

   A lot of my “studio time” (in quotes because it doesn’t happen in a studio, but my nomadic presence in physical and net space is analoguous to other artists’ studio time) is spent I “reading” and consuming forms and structures by random sources, primarily other artists but also from pop or vernacular culture in general. This is how I do research, not by building a scrapbook to copy from but as a means to trigger ideas or interests in my own world of ideas. I’m a form junkie, and I don’t think that makes me a shallow person.

   However, I’m always baffled by the notion that conceptual work is somehow “formless” and purely cerebral. I consider concepts as having form just as much as I do colors and layouts. The best conceptual artists have high form, often expressed as wit or a certain poetic elegance. The best performance artists have form expressed as communicable emotional experience. I have never been impressed by any artwork in any medium unless it had a good form in some way.

3. To return to generative art, I would firstly say that I disown that label. It describes a “how” without a “why”, and hence is meaningless as a description of a movement or a conceptual direction.

   I have tentatively coined the phrase “Software Abstraction” as a provocation describing artists like myself who construct software systems to produce abstract form, generally with a focus on the final output but still very much aware of the process as a conceptual device. Despite the art world’s current dislike for manifestoes or movements, I think some coherent term is needed. The group of artists largely considered “generative” have very different concerns than Verostko and others, coming as they do from a completely different cultural context. And their interests should bear defining.

   Software Abstraction seems to me like a short and concise summary of these artists’ practices, based as they are on computational processes and software as a creative medium. Abstraction is what they do, with obvious nods to movements like Op Art, Minimalism and Constructivism. They are not uncomfortable with the black box logic of complex software processes, and consider the output to be the primary form of the work even though their personal experience (through knowledge of the underlying system) is more complex. Some feel the need to make the system explicit, others do not.

   Addendum: Florian Jenett has argued that the term Software Abstraction still chains artists to a technology and thus hinders integration with a larger contemporary art discourse. This may or may not be true, but I would argue that A. It’s a concise label describing a specific identifiable practice, and B. There is always a need to distinguish one’s work from the vast masses of artists out there. At least this label borrows both from technology and art theory, the latter usually conspicuously absent in media art discourse. Casey Reas takes a different position, pointing out that Abstract Art is a dead and outdated art form and that it would be better to align oneself with Constructivism. Either way, I would like nothing more than for someone to come up with a brilliant label that makes my feeble provocation redundant.

4. As a final point, I’ll concede that I have often described a certain schism in generative art along the concept / form lines described. To demonstrate it I have borrowed the idea of “weak” and “strong” from artificial intelligence, definining “strong generative art” as a more pure investigation of system and logic where output is almost incidental. It follows that “weak” generative art is then work that exploits computational processes to create complex art works in various media with a significant priority on the product of those processes.

   In reality, I am not particularly concerned with expanding this argument, but let me add that I have always expressed a certain scepticism towards work that claims to be logically “pure” or objectively scientific. I think machine logic is a sexy idea that generally is a fantasy, given that the parameters of that logic is always defined by artists that are merely human. Thus their creations are usually full of the normal imperfections introduced by subjective bias that the artist is often less that conscious of.

Book: NEW ART/SCIENCE AFFINITIES

Published by the CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Miller Gallery, “NEW ART/SCIENCE AFFINITIES” is a new book created in a “book sprint” by some interesting thinkers on the intersection between art and science. I’m pleased to say that it features myself as well as a slew of people one should be honored to be in the company of. The free PDF option is a welcome gesture.

In their own words:

The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry have co-published “New Art/Science Affinities,” a 190-page book on contemporary artists that was written and designed in one week by four authors (Andrea Grover, Régine Debatty, Claire Evans and Pablo Garcia) and two designers (Luke Bulman and Jessica Young of Thumb).

“New Art/Science Affinities,” which focuses on artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology, was produced by a collaborative authoring process known as a “book sprint.” Derived from “code sprinting,” a method in which software developers gather in a single room to work intensely on an open source project for a certain period of time, the term book sprint describes the quick, collective writing of a topical book.

The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Chapters include Program Art or Be Programmed, Subvert! Citizen Science, Artists in White Coats and Latex Gloves, The Maker Moment and The Overview Effect.

Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz.</div>

[..]

“New Art/Science Affinities” (2011, 8.5x11 inches, 190 pages, perfect-bound paperback, 232 full-color illustrations) is available for purchase ($45.75) through print-on-demand service Lulu, or for free download via the Miller Gallery website (http://www.cmu.edu/millergallery/nasabook).

Things I’ve learned from disagreeing about (Media) Art on the Internet

1. Don’t do it. Count to 10. Read XKCD. Don’t do it.
2. Art is more fun to make than talk about. If you’re an artist you’re better off working. It’s not like there are enough hours in the day.
3. If you must discuss art, do it only with people you 90% agree with. It’s more productive that way.
4. Being pragmatic rarely pays off in a debate. Who cares that you might be right?
5. Never try to explain why you don’t give away the source code to all your projects. You will look like a selfish dick, and it’ll make you want to quit making art altogether.
6. Never discuss making a living from art. You will be seen as a money-grubbing capitalist without ideals. Art is the only job where people expect you not to worry about your living standards or having a sustainable economy.
7. People who aren’t artists generally expect artists to be principled and noble, even if it means going hungry and not being able to have health insurance.
8. Articulating a well-reasoned argument in written form takes a minimum of an hour. Think of the things that could have been accomplished in that hour.
9. Net art 2.0 is a lot of fun. I haven’t seen so much nihilism since highschool. Also, there are kittenz.
10. Discussing art over a beer in a bar or at home is a Good Thing. Discussing art on the Internet while drinking a beer is a Bad Thing.
11. Don’t do it. It won’t make anyone like you more, and it’s likely to make you enjoy art less.