|
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 |
|
|
