The modal weight of an interactive and electronic artwork; relational materiality, distributed cognition and the actor-network

 

( Please read the notes in Slideshare )

Dr Mark CypherMurdoch University

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Electronic Art and Data is immaterial, disembodied, without physical qualities?

• Simon Penny (1999)- 'Code... is a long step from the pragmatic materiality of sculpture’

• Lev Manovich (2001)-electronic media exists 'not as a material object but as data‘.

• Laura Beloff (2006) -Software and digitized data are replacing the traditional physical dimensions of artworks. As such, immateriality is evidently a relevant notion… [that] excludes itself from the physical realm...

• Christina Grammatikopoulou (2010) insists that 'artists working within the computer space are absolutely free from the confines of matter’

  • The problem with these descriptions is that data, networks 

(the purely technical kind) and computers are seen to operate bereft of material. 

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Affordance is:in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy… An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. Gibson (1979)

• highlights relations • the composition of the relation inevitably entails humans and nonhumans with durable “physical” qualities

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Translation :  to say that actor A translates actor B, implies that A defines or explains B. However, translation does not imply that A has total control. For A will act in relation to past translations and this history will affect the form of future relations. Both actors A or B could be human or nonhuman, the distinction is not important. What is important is that all relations and the processes of mutual definition are described

• highlights symmetrical or human/ nonhuman relations • translation is triangular, it involves a translator, something that is translated and a medium in which that translation is inscribed (Callon 1991) 

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Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain

•  in the case of Biophilia at Bios 4 mediums are everywhere

and provide affordance at every stage

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Biophilia’s Installation space-

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• mediums have a 'modal weight' in that they help to establish and delineate the range of possible relations to which actors have access to at any one time (McGrail 2008)

Mediums involved in the installation of Biophilia in Seville are vital, yet they cannot take all the credit for making the 'work‘

• Mediums are generally the result of previous actor-network investment

• Inscription- is embedded, into bodies and components, that have in turn afford all kinds of prescribed programs of action

• Entities must have secrets ... held in reserve Potential for change via ‘reservedness’ McGrail (2008) , ‘Plasma’ Latour (2005) or ‘internal reserve’ (Harman 2009 )

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  when actors re-align in translation new affordances are possible. -allows others - to 'tap into new sections of their reserved nature

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• Problems with heat, light, technical components, solved through the intervention of sociotechnical dimension. As a result medium durability and stability, does not inhere entirely in the materials and actors themselves, but in conjunction with the sociotechnical networks that constitute it

The conditions of production (translation) are ‘phenomenotechniquely’ embedded in material,

 Latour and Woolgar (1979)

The central importance of this material arrangement is that none of the phenomena 'about which' participants talk could exist without it. Without a bioassay, for example, a substance could not be said to exist. The bioassay is not merely a means of obtaining some independently given entity; the bioassay constitutes the construction of the substance. …It is not simply that phenomena depend on certain material instrumentation; rather, the phenomena are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory.

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Relational Materiality : medium cannot be entirely understood in isolation. Material along with

its surrounding network, is in part folded, transubstantiated and reformatted, if not co-constituted of the sociotechnical means of its construction. All of which phenomenotechniquely construct a kind of relational materiality

Data as Information Materiality:• Kirschenbaum… while it is technically possible to create

conditions under which electronic writing can subsist without inscription and therefore vanish without a trace, those conditions are not the norm of the medium but the special case

• Thus not only is software and data phenomenotechniquely inscribed in a medium and thus constituted of its modes of production, data has a modal weight and operates in ways that delineate the range of possible relations to which actors have access to at any one time 10

Delegation and the matter of the expression; 

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here the shift in the meaning is much greater since the very nature of the "meaning" has been modified. The matter of the expression has changed along the way. 

• Participants interacting with Biophilia- test, play, iteratively experiment,

using bodies, clothes, shadow

- participants are aligning and navigating the relational material affordances of the situation to engage some relations whilst discounting others

- interacting with artworks like Biophilia is the concrete substantiating instance that brings forth the intentional state to act, according to the ‘situational affordances’ of a given sociotechnical and relational material engagement

• shift in the relational matter of the expression, which is for all intents and purposes an effect of the 'delegated' sociotechnical network, subsequently forms a shift in its information materiality and thus its potential meaning.

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Circulating Reference

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