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It reads almost like a test question. It seems to beg for Borgesian paradoxes, the base materialism of Bataille, or even Duchampian humor, but these are the very strategies which index the horizons of our own era, that is, the limits beyond which we cannot see. And since prophetic vision is, at best, a ludicrous con game, the most straightforward answer to my mind would be the one offered by Debord, as he quotes von Cieszkowski: post-theoretical synthetic praxis. Though the phrase is a neo-Hegelian anachronism, it remains evocative. What might succeed the division of theory and praxis? What might come after art and theory?
Whatever form it might take, it seems inevitable that this "yet unknown art" would involve a dialogue with technology, but that is nearly a tautology in a digital world and has probably been so since the Renaissance, at least, and possibly earlier. For drawing is certainly a form of technology, though not usually considered one; it's so low-tech that it lies beyond the horizons of "technology". But some have argued, notably Hollis Frampton, that a technology can only become art after it has achieved obsolescence. To look to recent examples and to compare apples to oranges, Vuk Cosic's ironically trivial excursions into ascii art are, without question, of greater inherent interest than any preciously technological artifact Bill Viola has ever produced. In the context of technology, low-tech is always better.
But perhaps even a "dialogue with technology" may be outmoded, as it retains a kind of crypto-dualism between logos and the world, but this "perhaps" is again the return of the same, repressed. Were I to point to this future, it should be in a mode that instantiates this newness. Might we not, after all, consider language a kind of technology, a thought technology? I am not writing here - and I am certainly not speaking - of the powerbook on which I type, or even the poetry or theory generators which have been party gags for decades, but of the viral entity which mediates our experience of the world from before the age of two.
If Bentham's auto-icon remains majestic in its silence, to answer this historical musical question, we can, at least, oxymoronically "look" to the wisdom of Karl Valentin. At the entrance to his own personal museum in Munich, he posted the following declaration: "Free admission to anyone over 80 in the company of both parents".
Keith Sanborn
New York
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