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I have seen a yet-unknown art developing in the recombinant currents of cultural production and technological evolution. I believe the known form of this art will emerge slowly, a by-product of countless individual actions and adaptations passing through layer upon layer of shifting social and technological filters. The yet-unknown art probably will not grow to critical mass until at least 2 human and 33 Moore generations have passed, and certainly will become fully visible only in hindsight. Moreover, this art, like any emerging art, may appear mundane when envisioned now, using only current language, tools and accepted frames of reference. How then can I succinctly and intelligibly communicate here the scale and structure of what I have seen? Perhaps, if I reiterate some of my assumptions and the conjectures that fueled my vision, you the reader will generate your own image of my yet-unknown art.
Let me begin by saying that I assume 25 years to be one human generation and 1.5 years to be one Moore generation. I also assume that during the next two human generations: Moore's law will continue to apply, and, while there may be significant changes to the global environmental, political, and technological eco-systems, there will be no KT boundary events. I assume that the scale of human nature will continue to enlarge exponentially and that humans or their systems will be forced to fill any crucial evolutionary niches that are displaced in the process. I assume that, by the end of this period, universal access to most means of production and distribution will be enabled and fostered by the existence of an open, accessible and global cyberspace. Access by individuals and groups to these means of physical, virtual and ideological production will be largely computer mediated and will be constrained primarily by socio-economic, not technical considerations. I assume that the industrialization of cultural production will continue and that practical, science-based forms of social and cultural engineering will be developed and implemented by states and corporations in this period. Science and technology necessary to support this effort will emerge from the fields of genetics, memetics, complexity, computing, management and others. Of course, any social and cultural engineering projects will proceed in spite of religious or humanistic considerations, whatever their merit. Finally, I assume that, in this context, describing the yet-unknown art as 'just the extension of contemporary practice' would be like calling the hydrogen bomb 'just a lot of TNT'.
With these assumptions in mind, I conjecture that:
1. A yet-unknown art will become visible, as fine artists once more become skilled inventors, growers and breeders of generative processes per se; processes that may be used by anyone to produce products or notate ideas. Under these conditions, the generative processes themselves will become the primary product as well as the major focus of notation. Of course, artists have historically been skilled at using and adapting generative processes in order to produce products and to notate their ideas. In addition, a focus on process has long existed among many artists and critics. However, while contemporary art theorists using written language have begun explicitly to produce analytic processes for general use in limited academic contexts, few contemporary fine artists explicitly produce and disseminate generative processes that can be decoupled from their personal identities, works, or styles.
2. A yet-unknown art will become visible as artists begin explicitly to grow art, not to make art. Artists will recombine and set in motion self-regulating generative processes that can produce forms, structures, and dynamics across a spectrum of data types and a range of dimensionalities. Adaptable functionalities will be released to feed on and process data streams that can then be re-integrated into artworks, fresh insights, or new generative processes. The artist will soon act more like an animal breeder than a craftsperson, while the focus of the curator may shift away from archeology towards physiology. An interesting by-product to this transition will be that living art can easily be taught to recall all the steps the artist took during breeding and training. For many types of artwork, it will be possible to plot the trajectory of the creator through the work, as well as map the path of every viewer or art historian.
3. A yet-unknown art will become visible as artists begin to create open-ended and appropriate scale computer languages that will live and develop in global cyberspace. Personalized appropriate scale computer languages are a natural by-product of the evolution of language and culture that will enable individual creators to function effectively on a global scale and also provide a new means of 'rigorous' communication with people outside the arts. This enabling technology will re-inforce the shift in art towards 'encapsulated process as product' and 'artist as breeder'. These languages will enable the functional abstraction of structure, form, dynamics and concept, and provide the ability to easily encapsulate art ideas and processes. They will be compatible with standardized languages spoken by machines yet need not conform to the existing standardized metaphorical or command languages in vogue with humans. Art languages will be implemented as alphabetic, ideographic, referential, mechanistic, direct manipulation, or many other forms. However, all will be able to articulate, concretize, legitimate and amplify an artist's relationship to the global, computerized and industrialized means of physical, virtual and ideological production while supporting a personal and idiosyncratic vision.
With all that said, I come to the end; my time is gone, and my space full. Therefore, I leave the proof of my conjectures on a yet-unknown art to you, the reader.
Jamy Sheridan
Baltimore
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