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The "unknown" of art today is a process and a limit. The
process goes by many names (tactical media, pragmatics, and critique),
but generally involves working outside of a strictly defined art
context (including materials, techniques, and bodies). The limit
is not so much the unknown (that which is the temporary converse
of knowledge), but rather what Georges Bataille called "non-knowledge".
Non-knowledge is not so much a something gained or downloaded as
it is a critical and affective awareness of constraints and flexibilities
of knowledge itself. The unknown of art today is the non-knowledge
of tactical media processes. The practice of doing something to
critically and affectively perturb a limit might be called "molecular".
A more specific context: a strange phenomenon is currently taking shape in the intersections between art and science. The once-divided "two cultures" have found a new common ground which includes art exhibition, public education, science documentary, science workshops and kiosks at museums, pop science books, and a general promotion of the promises of science research and application, mediated by a rhetoric of humanism. Examples: the art exhibit "Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution" held at Exit Art in NYC, and sponsored by the Gene Media Forum, a collective of representatives from the biotech industry. The 2001 human genome exhibit at the NYC Museum of Natural History, including interactive kiosks, a lecture series, and laboratory workshops on biotechnology for the public. Series of talks and discussions on biotech, such as the recent one in London between Francis Fukuyama and Gregory Stock, presented by the Institute of Ideas, with funding from The Discovery Channel, Novartis, and the Wellcome Trust. This fall (2002), the "BA Festival of Science", put on by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and featuring a series of workshops, talks, and convention stalls. There are many other examples which could be included here, but the point is that there is an increasing trend towards integrating art and science in a number of different ways.
Now, not every example is as problematic as the next; for instance,
artists whose work is highly critical of biotechnology have been
shown in such contexts, and often the lectures or talks associated
with a given exhibition can touch upon highly contentious and complex
issues. Indeed, often the scientists themselves are the first to
insist on the complexity of scientific knowledge and the need to
develop non-reductionist positions. What is, however, at issue are
the different ways in which art comes to serve and is defined by
science (as a discipline and an industry), and the ways in which
science offers itself as source material for its abstraction and
visualization in art contexts (as a discipline and an industry).
Nowhere is this more evident today than in the culture industry
of the two cultures, especially in biotechnology and genetics. In
worst case scenarios, art comes to play the role of public relations
for the biotech industry, and any artists engaging with biotech
must ask themselves whether or not the mere use of metaphors or
techniques from biotech is in itself problematic. In best case scenario,
we have a case of mutual critique and reciprocal transformation;
neither art nor science should come out of such an encounter unchanged
or unmarked. The division of disciplines is secondary to the articulations
of industries (the culture industry, the biotech industry). Both
are secondary to even more fundamental issues: working with living
matter, its ethics, its modes of individuation, variable forces
which give meaning to certain formations of living matter (human
populations) and not to others (ethnic genomes in databases).
We can reiterate Critical Art Ensemble's suggestions concerning
tactical media:
Tactical media is a form of digital interventionism, with the understanding
that "digital" is not limited to silicon-based computer
technologies. Digital here connotes an ethic, a practice, a mode
of working with matter through re-combinations, modulations, assemblies
& disassemblies, resonance, consonance, dissonance. We can also
reverse this: "biological" here refers to a "bio-logic",
a means of working with living matter as information, of approaching
DNA as a computer, of materializing studies of metabolic networks.
The dichotomies of virtual reality have nothing to do with the tensions
of virtuality. The relationships between embodiment/disembodiment,
flesh/machine, biology/technology are really specific formulations
of matter calcified by a range of contexts who benefit from them:
entertainment, medicine, education, social interaction, etc.
Tactical media supports amateur practice, since the practitioner
makes use of whichever media necessary for a given context. Amateurism
and hobbyism are important here, as they both imply an interest
in learning as well as an interest in re-appropriating, re-purposing.
We can learn from gaming culture: "mods" for biotech.
However, this does not mean the freedom to do whatever one wants
with your mods, and neither does it license a total lack of knowledge
or responsibility. What is important about this amateurism and hobbyism
are the ways in which practitioners construct customised environments
for learning and critiquing for themselves (and this implies the
development of unique communities of differentiated specialists).
Tactical media is non-teleological but directed; it supports multiple
agendas and fully implies all the complexities of ethical action.
Tactical media is ephemeral. Yes, artifacts are made, essays are
published, stuff is exhibited, actions are documented. The issue
is not the total annihilation of "stuff" but rather the
persistent questioning of how stuff obtains value, and how the value
of stuff - especially in biotech - is simultaneously living and
undead.
This is, perhaps, too general. Tactical media in the context of
the intersections between art and science in biotechnology suggests
several things:
First, the digital divide applies to biotech, in a "biotechnical
divide". But the have's and have-not's are divided along several
lines. Access to information (privatised databases), access to means
of education ("ok, you got access, now what does it all mean?"),
access to practices (lab techniques), and access to specialised
communities ("oh, you're an artist - what are you doing here?").
Secondly, the possibility of transformative debate and discussion
will depend on how "bio-knowledges" are enframed, distributed,
and mediated. Critical Art Ensemble has used the term "bio-knowledge"
to refer to the complex of specialised understandings of the body
(genomics, stem cell research, regenerative medicine), understandings
of institutional networks in which those understandings are housed
(research institutes, universities, pharma corporations, etc.),
and understandings of the broader socio-cultural impact of biotech
(SF films, ads, pop science books, etc.).
Thirdly, a question: will the PC happen to biotech? We can look
to personal computing as an example. Recall the proliferation of
computer hobbyist subcultures in the 1970s: magazines such as "Creative
Computing" (with their left-coast liberalism and trippy graphics),
computer kits such as the "Altair 8800". We know what
happened: the black-boxing of computers, and Apple and Microsoft.
What would happen to biotech and to our bodies if biotech became
as ubiquitous in certain developed areas as the PC?
The figure of the tactical media practitioner - amateur or hobbyist
- becomes centrally important here. Between our current stage of
government-industry regulation (the Human Genome Project is the
equivalent of the ENIAC) and increasing consumerism of biotech (the
PC-ing of biotech), the need for a tactical understanding of this
newest of the new media is all the most pertinent. This is, perhaps,
our limit or non-knowledge concerning biotech, one of the dominant
discourses on the body and "life".
Eugene Thacker
Atlanta
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