Syndicate: Digital Deviance

[Syndicate admin <syndicate@v2.nl>]

Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2001 16:06:17 +0200
From: "christine laquet" <c_laquet@hotmail.com>
Subject: Digital Deviance

Hi Nettimers !

Here is the press release and the Statement in english and french of the
exhibition Digital Deviance, running in Le Magasin, Centre National d'Art
Contemporain in Grenoble, France.

PRESS RELEASE

DIGITAL DEVIANCE
Exhibition June 3 - September 2, 2001 opening Saturday June 2 at 6 pm
(performance by Critical Art Ensemble (new project: GenTerra) curators: the
10th session of L'Ecole du Magasin Aur?lie Gandit, Nathalie Gilles,
Christine Laquet, Jean-Fran?ois Sanz.

L'ECOLE DU MAGASIN
This curatorial training program gives students the practical experience and
mastery of the conceptual, methodological and technical tools pertaining to
the organization and reception of exhibitions. Framed by a teaching staff
which directs and defines the curatorial program over ten months, the 10th
session composed this year of four curators did researches and had specific
meetings (artists and theorists) in order to develop the conceptual
elaboration of the project.

THE PROJECT
Digital Deviance questions and reconsiders the artistic strategies of
resistance to the power structures connected to digital methodology. The
term of "digitality" implies a principle of thinking and action. It
qualifies a way of interpreting the world and acting within it. Digital
methodology, transmuting an established order from one system to another, is
usually linked to technological applications without however being bounded
to them. Inherent to the phenomena of cultural and social resistance, this
"digitality" expresses itself through these tactics that appropriate the
principles of neo-liberal and capitalist system to fight it better. In the
same way, the strategies of resistance conceived by artists in the Sixties
use this digital principle and manifest themselves through visual, aesthetic
and social interventions (Hans Haacke, Group Material...). On the initiative
of the curators, the artists-activists collective Critical Art Ensemble was
invited to collaborate on the formulation of the project statement upon with
the theoretical and methodological content of the exhibition is based (this
text is available in the press kit and on the site of the 10th session).

THE EXHIBITION
Digital Deviance combines multiple artistic strategies of resistance
according to this principle of digitality: infiltration, sabotage,
insertion, simulacre... The issue is to experiment an art which aims at
direct action into society. A network of international artists
under-represented in France will be offered a visibility

Association of Autonomous Astronauts (A.A.A)

Gregg Bordowitz

Heath Bunting and Nathalie Jeremijenko

Carbon Defense League Aka hacktivist.com Aka Creation Is Crucifition

CELLmedia

Vuk Cosik/Ascii Art Ensemble

Jordan Crandall

Critical Art Ensemble (C.A.E)

Matthew Fuller, Simon Pope & Colin Green (I.O.D)

Gregory Green

Keith Piper

?tmark

Aura Rosenberg

Brian Springer

Paul Vanouse

as well as other groups already confirmed on the gbench scene

bureau d'?tudes

Casseurs de Pub

THE SITE
Designed as an educational and evolutionary tool, the site created by the
10th session presents the theoretical process and the different steps of the
curatorial project. http://10emesession.free.fr

Contact press: Ecole du Magasin: Aur?lie Gandit, Nathalie Gilles, Christine
Laquet, Jean-gban?ois Sanz
155, cours Berriat
38028 GRENOBLE Cedex 1
tel. +33 (0)4 76 21 64 75 - fax +33 (0)4 76 21 24 22
e-mail: 10emesession@free.fr


STATEMENT:

Digital Deviance


The present text constitutes the meeting-point of the work undertaken in the
framework of our research, as well as a material manifestation of our
thinking process. It seems necessary therefore to describe the context and
the specific circumstances in which it was born. We chose to undertake a
curatorial project striving to define and question the notion of
"cyberculture". Right from the start, we looked into the work of the
collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Their theoretical writings on
electronic media and biotechnologies, their stance as activists/artists and
cultural resistants, their work integrating and combining varied modes of
expression, seemed to us, particularly pertinent to our field of
investigation. We invited Steve Kurtz and Steve Barnes, founder members of
CAE, to Grenoble , and worked together during the last week of March 2001.
To us, this procedure and pedagogical context are already, in themselves, a
curatorial act in that they query the traditional relationships that exist
not only between artists and exhibition curators, but also in a wider sense,
those that exist between cultural institutions and the public. The result of
this collaboration was the production of a statement written in English, of
which the present text is both a translation and revised by curatorial team.

About Digital Deviance

If our research was originally developed around the idea of cyberculture, it
soon became clear to us that this notion was too generally defined to enable
the elaboration of a strategy for an exhibition, especially because of the
fact of the current use of the term. Cyberculture is, indeed commonly
associated with online informatics and also implies a direct reference to
the research in the field of robotics and cybernetics. But our position and
our intentions in this project cannot be limited to these specific fields
and the use of the term of cyberculture would have a limiting effect on
possible outcomes, espacially in terms of the media choice.We looked for
another topic with which we could express our interests better. This lead us
to the idea of digitality, a concept theorized by CAE in an article entitled
Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance (1). Although the French
equivalent of the English digital is "numerique" we have chosen to translate
here the neologism digitality ("digitalit?") elaborated by CAE so as to
remain as close as possible to the original terminology. This concept is
better defined and seems to better correspond to contemporary practice and
to the present-day cultural situation.

Our research into digitality began with the identification of its limits as
a model (in the light of how it has been recently represented in the
cultural landscape). First, we noticed a discrepancy between its theoretical
possiblities and its practical applications in different exhibitions.
According to its common meaning, digitality (and by extension, digital) is
often defined technologically rather than by its methodological and/or
philosophical dimensions. However, digitality is more than a simple
characteristic meant to qualify a technical device ; rather it describes a
way of interpreting the world and acting within it. We also wish to query
the idea of a bipolar and Manichaean opposition between the digital and the
analogic. Historically, the world has been interpreted through the hegemonic
filter of the analogic. Although, over the past two centuries, that is to
say, at the epoch of mass reproductibility and the emergence of the
capitalist system of production, the digital model has challenged this
domination of the analogic paradigm.

>From a strictly technical point of view, the conflict between the two models
took shape when, in 1948, Claude Shannon, an electrical engineer from the
Bell laboratories, managed to solve the problem of sending a clear signal
over a noisy channel. The solution consists in transforming sound into a
numerical/digital code which can be emitted through the channel and
retransformed into sound at its reception. Digital coding of the signal
enables the latter to go through the channel without its structure being
disrupted or deteriorated, and its decoding on arrival allows the reception
of a clear and intelligible message. In the field of information and
communication technology, the analogic model rapidly became less useful. But
the influence of the digital has equally extended gradually to the field of
cultural production. From the viewpoint of general principles, the
difference between the analogic and digital lies in a contrast between the
basic postulates: while the analogic claims that order emerges from chaos
(and chaos from order), the digital suggests that order comes from order
(through encoding). The digital attitude consists therefore in isolating and
appropriating an existing order in a specific system, a determined field;
and in moving, decontextualizing and applying that order in a different
field.

Thus, in the artfield, one can oppose, in a didactic manner, two different
procedures. On the one hand an analogic-type procedure which would consist
in representing, via the canons of art history and criticism, the quest for
an original style which would be unique to the artistic vision of its
author, and which would have the object to bring into evidence a singular
and unusual perception of order, detached from the chaos of sensations (in
this case the work cannot be duplicated, it can only be forged or fall into
discrepitude with time). On the other hand, a digital-type procedure would
consist of producing a work by mechanical means that guarantee the
possibility of an equivalent reproduction (here, the work defies originality
since it can be reproduced as long as the constituent products continue to
be manufactured).

We do not mean to suggest that the digital and the analogic exist as pure
bipolar and opposing forms, but rather they exist on a continuum on which
there are many hybrid manifestations. Let us take, for example, the Fordist
model of production. From 1904 on, Henry Ford attempted to manufacture
digital cars in that all the completed units of production were equivalent
to one another, off the assembly line. However, by putting at the buyers'
disposal all sorts of kits destined to adapt the basic models to their
specific needs or to their individual aesthetic choice, Ford integrated too,
analogic characteristics to adapt to demand. The problem with the Fordist
model appeared in the process of production itself. Ford, as well as other
manufacturers asked their workers to become an extension of the digital
machinic apparatus. In other words, the workers, literally were incorporated
into the assembly lines were they were transformed from bodies of desire to
bodies of instrumentality. In relationship to the principle of efficiency,
capitalist economy has insisted that desire may take no object other than
those accepted within the parameters of production and consumption. This
reductive tendency of capitalist political economy has been a key site of
political resistance. The works of Marx and Engels on the textile industries
of London in XIXth century had already brought to light this alienating mode
of capitalist production. This phenomenon of the instrumentalization of
workers' bodies appears equally, be it in a caricatural manner, but
nevertheless quite explicit, in the Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin.
Activists, through both analogic and digital means, have attempted to
reestablish the liberation of desire by disturbing, disrupting and
subverting the structures and codes that homogenize and channel individual
desire and collective consensus as far as their definition and expression is
concerned.(2)

We propose to focus our attention for our project on digital means of
resistance. We want to envision how and to what extent cultural resistance
can appropriate digital characteristics of the system in order to turn them
against it.

By definition, deviance is a turning away from a norm, a behaviour beyond
the common rules of society. Thus, activism can be considered as a sort of
social deviance in that it legitimizes the expressions of desire which are
typically labeled "marginal", "abnormal", "pathological" or "illegal". The
appropriation of the capitalist tendency toward the digital by activists
appears in cultural landscape as deviance in both form and content. As form,
digital cultural practice has been reduced to three or four standardized
categories : net.art, interactivity, virtual reality and on some occasions,
video. Practitioners of resistant digitality either subvert or expand the
institutional categories of New Media and thereby tend to be placed in the
subject position of deviant in the eyes of cultural institutions. In terms
of content, digital deviants engage a pedagogical practice that expands the
field of public discourse (3) on issues of representation in macro
contestational process.

The connection implied between desiring bodies, resistant digital practice
and public discourse will be a central focus of our project in general, and
our exhibition in particular.

Against Method

Methodology is the most difficult element to describe in our process. This
is because all methods have a unique problematic - those inherent
causalities which predetermine the result of any given exploration.

So, we wish, as far as possible, to minimize our methodological
restrictions. Of course, we cannot reject a priori all system of
organization but we mean to adopt principles that are as open-ended as
possible. Such a notion implies a Dada?stic position that can integrate
contradiction as a necessary component of experimentation.(4) Our aim is to
make evident the strategies and modes of enunciation rather than forms, we
wish to present a series of manifestations, some contradictory, of the
digital model, the possibilities of interpretation in order to maximize.
These cultural digital methods based on ordered reproduction are defined in
terms such as : appropriation, plagiarism, montage, sampling, recombination,
detournement, readymades, clones... These typologies can materialize in any
medium. Technology is not what associates a cultural practitioner with
digitality; rather, it is the philosophical interpretation and methodology.

Moreover, it seems important to stress that we are interested in a specific
network, an artistic scene already constituated and active, but at the
moment, or not very visible in France, especially within its cultural
institutions. The artists/activists whose work we present are in contact
with each other, they have often worked together on common projects, and
they share, of course, similar interests and methods. So it is a question of
appropriating an existing order, then to create from that, a new order,
reconfiguring this network, by introducing new elements presented in a new
context. That is to say by making them accessible to the French public
through an exhibition held in a extensive cultural institution.

The second problematic within our process arises from our position relative
to the art center in which we work as subjects following a curatorial
training program. Like our theoritical model and like ourselves as subjects,
our methodological process is in a state of becoming. Rather than a finished
product, our goal in the exhibition is to propose a representation of our
procedure of analysis of digital cultural principles and practices, at a
particular point in time.

A Brief Discussion of the Institutional Approach

After reviewing the literature on past exhibitions which have dealt with
issues in digitality, cyberculture, and/or activism, what became clear was
what we wanted to avoid in terms of exhibition strategies considered
inapplicable to our project. In the 1990s, the assimilation of the digital
New Media, its association into particular technical apparatus with, as well
as the division of the genre into a limited set of fixed, homogneized
categories contributed to defining a global problematic inspiring the
majority of exhibition strategies (Mythos Information at Ars Electronica,
ZKM's Net Condition). The shows did little to energize discourse on the
philosophical implicatons of digitality, nor did they provide a contrast of
possibilities that could act as a catalyst for a more enriching public
conversation. Moreover, the permanent collections of these institutions,
those of ZKM notably, are also concerned by this problem : the interactive
vision engines that such institutions tend to collect generally become
technological dinosaurs after a few years due to the rapid changes in
technology regarding both hardware and software. Our approach would be
closer to that of the Kunstlerhaus in Stuttgart curated by Fareed Armaly
whom we also invited as consultant to our project. This institution,
although devoted to the study of the media over the last 2O years does not
present a simple showcase of technical possibilities linked to the digital :
it reserves a large place for traditonal media, notably printed work and
envisages digitality in terms of methodological possibilities rather than
technical ones.

The history of the relationships between art and activism being a long and
complex one has led us to attempt to search through volumes of information
looking for exhibition strategies that could answer our specific needs. With
the introduction of digitality in all its forms into activist discourse, the
field of possibility has radically expanded. We thought that we had to
address issues such as high velocity online communication, online/offline
relationships, networking possibilities, and electronic tactics. We had to
frame all this by the more general issue of globalization, which has in
turn, radically expanded the space and scope of activism. To a degree, these
new fields have not been adequately theorized, nor have enough practices
been tested over time ; however, we believed that we could work by analogy
with certain exhibition strategies of the past. Two key exhibitions that
influenced our considerations on how to proceed were Group Material's
Democracy Project and The World Information Organization's Future Heritage
project. Both used digital methodologies in terms of replicating systems of
culture for subversive purpose ; yet they were still successful at opening
their initiatives to all varieties of media produced from different subject
positions.

The older of the two exhibitions, the Democracy Project (1988/89 presented
at the DIA Art Foundation in 1990) was useful to us in two ways. First,
diverse public spheres from a large spectrum of specific roles (consisting
of professional and amateur artists, students, activists, art critics...)
represented multivariant cultural identities and contributions. Secondly,
the exhibition was open to any medium. Although electronic digital media in
a technical sense was absent from the exhibition, it was present in a
conceptual sense. From this model, as well as the discussions that we had
about this with Julie Ault we began to understand how we could use digital
forms for our own purposes.

The web site of Future Heritage (http://www.world-information.org)
exhibition presented for the first time in Brussels 2000, gave us a more
contemporary use of contrast and difference as a means of articulating and
representing marginal resistant discourse. This exhibition combined
machinical coding technology, analogic systems, mundane technical
interventions, state of the art informatics and bioinformatics, and volumes
of 2-D graphics to create a representation of invisible activities that have
an impact on everyday life. This strategy had the effect of freeing us from
a tendency towards the most current research as well as reinforcing our idea
that digital machines did not have to dominate the exhibition.

Rather than presenting a collection of visual apparatus that only contribute
to the progress in technical research, our aim in this exhibition is to show
an ensemble of diverse works which could contribute to a pondered discussion
on the conceptual possibilities of digital cultural practice.

Magasin's Curatorial Training Program _ 10th session

Notes:

(1) Critical Art Ensemble. Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance, in
The Drama Revue, MIT press, Winter 2000.

(2) Guattari, F?lix. Soft Subversions and Chaosophy, New York: Semiotext(e),
1996. We would also like to take this opportunity to state that we are in
agreement with Guattari's position on desire. Desire is all that exists in a
human being before the introduction of language. Desire is an open field
that has an infinitude of possible trajectories, and is always in a state of
becoming. While desire cannot be inscribed by semiotic codes, it can be
channeled by them by reducing this open-ended schizophrenic field to a
constricted, rationalized flow suitable only for the machinic flows accepted
by the dominant political economy. Disturbing these boundaries is a primary
goal of digital activism.

(3) "public discourse", this expression has to be understood here in the
sense given to it by Group Material in the Democracy Project: this sense
implies a proximity de facto between the public and the presented works (and
even sometimes an active and direct participation in their production), and
therefore a real interactivity - not a fake one as it is the case in most
so-called interactive exhibitions.

(4) "A Dada?st remains completely cold in front of any serious enterprise,
he feels there's something in the wind from the minute one stops smiling to
adopt an attitude and a facial expression announcing that something
important is going to be said. A Dada?st is convinced that a life which
deserves to be lived will be possible only if we start by never taking
anything seriously, and if we remove from our language the profound but
already decayed senses accumulated over centuries ("looking for the truth";
"defending Justice"; "being passionately interested in"; etc). A Dada?st is
ready to promote joyful experiences even in the fields where change and
experience seem to be excluded (for example: fundamental functions of
language). Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. London: Verso.




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