Digital Art is the new Primitive Art

Meet “Venus” of Willendroff, an 11.1cm statuette dating approximately 15,000 to 10,000 BCE. Her home is a pedestal in Vienna's Naturhistorisches Museum. A profound discovery by archaeologist Josef Szombathy in 1908, she is distinguished as the earliest example of primitive art (Stokads). The texture and pronunciation of shape and surface emphasises her abstract form as other-worldly and goddess like.

Ahem…

There is no doubt that the “Venus” is a beautiful object, beautiful enough to name it after our beloved classical icon of western beauty, negating its own historical context. It may appear as a mere nominal anachronism, yet the Eurocentric naming of the figurine points to the danger of positioning a statuette of a naked fat woman under the canon of “Art”. Art in the western sense is a relatively modern ideology. The culture of Art as we know it today is the result of the modernist phenomenon of secularization and specialization. Thus, the cultural production and consumption a of Picasso or Pollack, differs greatly from the context of a prehistoric figurine.

It's a crime to strip the figurine of its cultural context and impose western ideologies of Art on to it. Rather, we can postulate that the figurine is a product of an “archaic sacred” civilization, an idol perhaps, that shares the same world as her worshipers. As Szerszynski article describes, the world of an “archaic sacred” civilization, has no division between the divine and the human. Unlike the monotheistic notion of sin and salvation, the world of gods is situated in the world of humans. Yet, the point of particular intrigue, and excitement, is Szerszynski idea of a “postmodern sacred”, a weird position with one foot in an “archaic sacred” world, and another foot in a “salvation seekers” world.

And this is where it gets interesting. Like the fat woman figurine to a prehistoric tribe, the materials of technology are crucial components to the rituals and practices of our daily lives. Our tenuously reliance on technology has transform such materials to our cultural idols. Like the statuette that serves as both practical and spiritual cultural product, similarly, our relationship to a light switch, that enables us to turn a light bulb on and off, offers to us, on a ‘postmodern sacred’ plane, a practical and spiritual fulfilment. In a ‘postmodern sacred’ sense, it provides a site of salvation, a salvation not directed to a metaphysical world or entity, but points back to us. Technology in a sense is the project of humanity.

The ‘cult’ technology within the secularized field of “Art” (with a capital A) I believe, needs to be celebrated and understood as a cultural phenomenon, not on a pedestal or within the neutral white walls of a gallery. In turn, our participation will lead to greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us. To appropriate a Joseph Beuys philosophy, “if there is conscious awareness towards our environment and actions, then everything is art, and everyone is an artist”.

It is all rather exciting.

Ganna be Heidegger for Halloween

What can be scarier than convoluted philosophy?

Geeze, this blog’s collected more cyberdust than Napster. I confess I’ve been neglectful to the blog, but not to the course kit. I have to admit I was ‘losing faith’ in this class before I got into the course kit readings. And though I’m a bit of an anti-essentialist (who isn’t no a days?), I find the philosophy of Agamben and Heidegger’s nonetheless intriguing.

There are a few things that turned me on and off in Heidegger’s essay. One aspect I find troubling (as I bantered on about in class) is the logocentricism that is of principle support to his argument. As if returning to the etymology of words validated them as “more true”, rather than understand words as a constructed social concept. The pedestal treatment of the Classical Greeks as the ‘ideal’ society that coexisted with nature also raised one eyebrow for me. It sounds similar to More’s “Utopia”, an imaginary world used as a rhetorical tool to contrast the crumby reality of European culture.

Yet weather Hiedegger’s description of the classical Greek world is true or not is of no importance. Just like More's use of “Utopia”, Hiedegger uses ancient Greece as a literary tool to convey his argument. And I admit, it is really good use of rhetoric. Yet what strikes me is Heidegger’s grammatical structuring of “questioning concerning technology” in the first paragraph of his essay. Heidegger encourages a step back and “prepare a free relationship to it [technology]”, which will thus lead to a greater understanding of it. Thus, by positioning himself outside the culture he critiques, allows him to peel away the skin to get to the pithy seed, or the essence of technology: “the relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology” (63). Almost through an anthropological viewpoint, perched like a raven on a telephone wire, Heidegger’s concern around the question becomes “what is technology?” This “outsider” curiosity reminds me of a documentary where a white guy from England traveled to China seeking an answer to the question “what is Buddhism?” Weaved within the rituals and routines of everyday life, Buddhism and Chinese culture are inseparable and is understood rather, as a way of life. Likewise, technology is inseparable with western culture, and can not be understood as consisting of an ‘essence’ separate from cutlure.

Moreover, the trouble with the grammer of the question lies in the verb “is”. In the sentence “what is technology”, the verb presupposes a tangible concept or a concrete ‘thing’ that ‘is’ technology. The question of what “is” frames technology within an essentialist box; a perspective that I’m simply not interested in. As a participant within the technocratic culture, I’m interested in investigating the cultural process that are undergoing as a result of technology, and the sub sequential affects and effects that occur.

Yet, I appreciate Heidegger’s returning to art and poetry as the ‘redemptive’ qualities of our culture. Digital technology has become a leading medium in the production of art, and I am fascinated by this marriage of art and technology. Still an embryonic medium, I’m not intrigued by the ‘newness’ of a techno-aesthetic, but rather the creation of new myths for a relatively new culture.

Oh Agamben:

Even the pronunciation of your name is a complication to me.
Reading The Open, is like reading the Tao...in German.

In conversation with western philosophy figure heads, ‘The Open’ brings to the forefront the tension in the divide between animal and human as separate natures; a perceived truism prevalent in western societies. In opposition to this divide, Agamben proposes a potentiality to dismantle the ‘anthropomorphic machine:’ the hierarchization of a linear evolution with ‘Man’ as a complete project. Though he never quite pinpoints just how one can reorient this mode of thinking, Agamben proposes the ‘Open’, a state of being within the caesura of man and animal.

Yet this state within the ‘open’, and the subsequential unfolding of ‘oikinomia’, is articulated in a convoluted interpretation of Heidegger, leading to a matrix of aporias and paradoxes. And like the Tao, I assume this complication, this problematization of a complete answer, contributes to the meaning of Agamben’s- or perhaps to the entire canon of philosophy.

Particular to Agamben’s “The Open”, this intrinsic frustration symptomatic of the limits of language to express a particular philosophy, a concept, a the-meaning-of-life idea, is perhaps an empirical example of Hiedegger’s 'closedness’. Language, verbal/visual/any medium of communication is what limits yet makes available an acknowledgement of our existence.

Technology thus, comes into this frame of problematization by presenting an ‘objective’ language: science. Science presents a disjunction between the designation of Homo Sapien, and the humanistic distinction of Man, the latter being a product of the ‘Anthropomorphic machine’. This disjunction (along with many others examples) has stigmatized the language of science as the deconstruction of essentialism. Yet a view of the ‘open’ is perhaps science confirming essentialism- an essence Agamben calls ‘bare-life’.

Captivation in bare-life is illustrated in the perpetual routine of a bee, and man’s profound boredom in a train station; for in this state, man forfeits the narcissism of purposefulness, “the deactivation of possibility” (67) and is equated to the existence of an insect. A bee does not come into the world with the idea “I am an important component to the homeostasis of the environment.” The purpose and behavior of a bee as a pollinator, and as instinctive survival is a scientific inference. Likewise, the biological explanation for man’s behavior can equally bee seen as reactions to primitive needs for survival. Yet science can not satisfy the question of purpose. The idea of man having a purpose, greater than any other organism, is but a product of the “anthropomorphic machine”. In this light, technology, language, human effort becomes actions without purpose, like a bee that drinks honey though his abdomen has been removed. Science is thus, the animalization of the human, and consequently the humanization of animal.

It seems this interpretation has taken a nihilist spin, and whether that is a good thing or bad is questionable. But I suppose a better question is: am I even making any sense. It seems, only a Taoist can appreciate the paths in her travels of hyper-paradoxes.

What the fuzz:

A scentific study Spirituality and Religion

Spirituality and Religion: Unfuzzing the Fuzzy

That must have been a pretty rusty Gillette blade the Society of Scientific Study for Religion was using to ‘unfuzz’ the definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’; especially since by the end of the study, the definitions remain obscured.

There are a number of things that simply just don’t work when trying to simplify complicated ideas. ‘Empirical studies’ that involve the surveying of public opinion through a simple binary system of consent and dissent, is nothing more but the negation of diverse opinions and emotions inherent in the complexity of ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’. The establishment of a ‘common’ definition is almost like a type of scientific hegemony.

The contradiction these tests pose is perhaps most evident when listing the ‘goal’ to de-polarize (institutional) religion and spirituality as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ respectively. Yet ironically, the entire study is dependant on the categorization of emotions and opinions, even people in to social statuses, creating a mosaic, rather than a spectrum of understanding. A stark example is the ‘danger’ of SnR mental health workers that may impose their ‘liberal’ beliefs on patients as mentioned on page 15. As if the 27 returned surveys represented the entire body of the Mental Health profession, the assumption that an SnR attitude poses a ‘danger’ only reverses the polarities of ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’, rather than subverting polarities.

The study is soaked with examples of the limitations science has to ‘unfuzz fuzzy terms’. My ‘favourite’ example is the content category key on page 9: a legend of 14 sentenced-stringed categories, each epitomizing the participants abstract ideas of the ‘Sacred’. Category 5: Hope, is treated like a bird in a cage, isolated in one category, as if all the other definitions lacked this crucial ‘emotion’, which I find hard to believe. But nothing beats category 14: Uncodable. I imagine someone writing a poem about Jesus, and having the iambic pentameter translated as a syntax error.

The only attention I’d give the Society of SSR’s, is to view their efforts as a reflection of a technological culture attempting to translate the esoteric language of spirituality and religion, to an objective numeric domination represented as ‘facts’. Aside from this, I see nothing fruitful in S of SSR’s attempts; to butcher a Habermas quotation, ‘nothing rises from a de-sublimated meaning, or a deconstructed form; an emancipatory effect does not follow’.