Technology, Presence Aesthetics and the Frame (more Gumbrecht)

Continuing to think through Gumbrecht's theories of presence and aesthetic experience, I want to focus briefly on his comments on technology, and especially media technologies, in relation to presence. Gumbrecht is understandably ambivalent: "I am trying to neither condemn nor give a mysterious aura to our media environment. It has alienated us from the things of the world and their present - but at the same time, it has the potential for bringing back some of the things of the world to us." [140] Gumbrecht links this alienation with a "Cartesian" desire for omnipresence - the decoupling of experience from the body. But he also suggests that "the more we approach the fulfillment of our dreams of omnipresence ... the greater the possibility becomes of reigniting the desire that attracts us to the things of the world and wraps us into their space" [139]. So the Cartesian tendencies of communications media drive us back towards a consciousness of, and a desire for "presence." This reaction is clear in new media art (and theory), which seems increasingly focused on embodied experience despite, or because of, its (critical) immersion in technology.

Elsewhere in Gumbrecht's writing technology, and even media art, crop up again. In a recent paper on "Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds" Gumbrecht considers how presence-type experiences can manifest outside the stale, exhausted realms of Art, and perhaps bring about a "re-enchantment of the world."

It might be that, at the intersection between some possibilities offered by contemporary technology with that longing for re-enchantment ... we have a chance of discovering the potential for a much more dispersed and decentralized map of aesthetic pleasures, and of a much less "autonomous," stale and heavy-handed style and gesture of Art. ...

Should such a possibility exist indeed, much will depend on the capability of artists and intellectuals to avoid its transformation into a "program." For I am not talking of the complicated merits of new art forms like "video art" or "digital installations" here but ... of straightforward pleasures like driving a high-powered car, riding on a speed train, writing with an old fountain pen or, for some of us at least, running a new software program on the computer - pleasures that do certainly not require the institutional status of aesthetic autonomy." [316]

From a media arts perspective this passage comes over as a sort of theoretical rollercoaster. "Dispersed, de-centralised aesthetic pleasures" and the "re-enchantment of the world" seem like excellent descriptions of the aims, if not always the outcomes, of current media arts. But apparently not! The "complicated merits" of these "new art forms" (sheesh) are no good; give us everyday kinesthetic pleasures instead. And then a final twist: "running a new software program on the computer" might just qualify as one of these dispersed, non-Art aesthetic experiences - echoing one of the refrains of software art.


Gumbrecht is probably most useful for new media art when taken at an angle, rather than head-on. One resonant concept in this "Everyday Worlds" paper is the device of the frame, a "structural threshhold in the flow of our perception" that draws our aesthetic attention to a section or "view" of the everyday world; Japanese culture is held out as an example here. For Gumbrecht this ubiquitous frame is a key device for the potential re-enchantment of the everyday. There are some striking parallels here with new media practice. In the systems art tradition, the frame plays a similar role, isolating or condensing a zone of reality in order to draw our attention to its immanent dynamics. Hans Haacke's 1963 Condensation Cube (above) is the perfect example. In data art, too, framing is a central, constitutive process; in one (idealised) sense data art simply selects and presents segments of the real, with the implication - just like Haacke's Cube and the temple gates - that what's here, is everywhere else; that this beauty (or whatever) is ubiquitous, all-encompassing.

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Andy Gracie: Symbiotic Systems

British artist Andy Gracie creates bio-robotic composites, systems that play out a tightly-coupled symbiosis between biological and technological elements. Gracie recently asked me to write about his work, and the text below was an initial response - a longer essay will be out later in the year.

New media art is overrun, now, with monsters, hybrids, chimera and cyborgs, with real and figurative mixtures of the made and the born, the "natural" and the "unnatural". Miscegenation - the archaic taboo on inter-racial breeding - is revived here in a kind of inverted form. The transgressive thrill of mixing "bio" and "tech" is a recurring theme, and while cyborg art is now relatively old (Stelarc), it maintains its visceral effect because it accesses a primal (turned cultural) mechanism of identity-formation. This is me: that is not me. Artists use this effect as a tactical hook, but by focusing on the cyborg / monster, work like that of Stelarc, Piccinini or SymbioticA can have a kind of renormalising effect; as long as the chimera is objectified, it remains (safely) other, over-there. My humanity is never at issue.

In the late 1960s, art practice began to come to grips with the emergence of post-industrial capitalism, a social order characterised by increasing connectivity and interdependence. Influenced in part by the emerging field of cybernetics, artists turned to the figure of the system - a dynamic, real-time, abstract network of causally intertwined entities and forces (more). In "Systems art" the work itself is a real-time system, a process that performs some quality of system-ness or "systemacity," and in doing so it alerts us to the complex, networked systemacity in which we continue to find ourselves.

Small Work for Robot and Insects

Gracie's work reflects the concerns of the chimera tradition, contemplating technologised life, or living technology. However its great strength is that it does so through the methodology of systems art. It breaks open the monstrous figure and reveals it to be not a thing but a process, a coupling, a coming-together, a co-negotiation. Others, such as Ken Rinaldo, have explored similar hybrid systems; Rinaldo seeks to exemplify a mutually-beneficial symbiosis between biology and technology. Gracie's work is less idealistic, but potentially richer in its implications, for symbiosis lies on a continuum with parasitism, and the dynamic networks of real ecological relations operate not in pursuit of some overarching "harmony," but locally, specifically, functionally. Gracie's work plays out the externalised character of ecological relations; his robotics illustrate what is machinic about all ecologies: networks of functional connection. In Fish, Plant, Rack the connections are played out: fish (sound) robot (nutrients) plant (video) fish. None "recognises" or is "aware of" the others, but all are coupled into an adaptive network of mediated stimuli and response.

Fish, Plant, Rack

Here mediation is not a representational process, but a concrete connection, a way of coupling an agent with its physical envirionment. Gracie's earlier Samplebot demonstrates this, as its piezo-electric pickup transduces its physical environment into sound, and interprets that sound as instructions for its behaviour; the "program" here is only partly digital; it is largely embedded in, and comprised of, the robot's environment. This is the beginning of stigmergy, the biological phenomenon where the environment acts as a shared medium which shapes, and is shaped by, organisms within it.

Stigmergy, like symbiosis and parasitism, is beautiful in the way it obliterates conventional thinking about agency, subjectivity and environment. Agency is not local and internal, but distributed and external, embedded in the environment. Agents are not independent but interlinked, and not like the consenting adults of the social realm, but through partial, contingent, concrete channels of input and output. Agents don't recognise each other, but selectively and adaptively mis-recognise; nonetheless they become inextricably, functionally, coupled. Here is the real, important, monster: agency is systemic; systems have agency. Gracie's work diagrams the systems that we are ourselves enmeshed in, and explores the hybrid, emergent and collective agencies that must be latent in these networks.

update: for more on Gracie's work, including some technical detail on Small Work for Robot and Insects, see this paper co-authored with Brian Lee Yung Rowe.

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