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Artist as Engineer

i-DAT, University of Plymouth, 2-3 June

Where does socially engaged, participatory and education arts activity stand within current debates around contemporary arts practice?

Location: Sherwell Centre, University of Plymouth, UK
Dates: 2-3 June 2003

This symposium organised by i-DAT seeks to investigate a recent radical shift in the artist.s social role influenced by the advent of new technologies and new collective practices. Walter Benjamin (in The Author as Producer of 1934) describes the shift in the role of the cultural producer from a supplier of the productive apparatus, into an engineer who sees his [/her] task in adapting that apparatus thus reconciling the means of intellectual production with technical quality.. The symposium asks what conclusions might be drawn from a parallel between the contemporary practice of techno-art collectives and Benjamin's statement that it is simply not enough to have political commitment without at the same time thinking through its relationship to the means of production and the technical apparatus?

Speakers

Etoy (Switzerland)
http://www.etoy.com/
CUKT, Central Bureau for Technological Culture/Piotr Wyrzykowski (Poland)
http://cukt.art.pl
Mongrel/Harwood
http://www.mongrel.org.uk/
Bureau of Inverse Technology/Natalie Jeremijenko (USA)
http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie
Redundant Technology Initiative/James Wallbank (UK)
http://www.lowtech.org/
The Institute of Applied Autonomy (USA)
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/

The symposium will be chaired by Armin Medosch (UK/Austria), Geoff Cox & Joasia Krysa (i-DAT)

i-DAT (Institute of Digital Art and Technology) is a new organisation engaged in the production and distribution of digital media with a broad cultural remit across the fields of art, industry and education.
http://www.i-dat.org/

Artist as Engineer symposium schedule

Monday 2nd June 2003

Tuesday 3rd June 2003

moderators:

Armin Medosch is a writer, artist and curator. He is a co-founder of the online magazine Telepolis - The Magazine of Netculture - which he co-edited from 1996 to 2002. With Telepolis he was awarded the European Online Journalism Award (2000) and the Grimme Online Award (2002). Together with Janko Röttgers he edited Netzpiraten (published 2001, Heise Verlag), a collection of essays which protray the internet's underworld of hackers, crackers, virus writers, hoaxers and software pirates. In 2001/02 he co-curated the online art exhibition Kingdom of Piracy which was launched at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2002 and shown at DEAF, Rotterdam, and FACT, Liverpool. He is currently writing a book on Free Networks for dpunkt/Heise Verlag.

Geoff Cox is an artist, teacher and projects organiser at i-DAT (Institute of Digital Art & Technology) as well as currently Senior Lecturer in Computing, University of Plymouth, UK. He is a member of the CAiiA-STAR (Science Technology Art Research) research group with an interest in the application of dialectical thinking to generative art. He recently co-curated the touring exhibition Generator with Spacex and with support from the Arts Council of England and is currently working on another project engaging with ideas around artificial life Vivaria . He is a trustee of the UK Museum of Ordure.

Joasia Krysa is a curator at i-DAT (Institute of Digital Art & Technology) and Lecturer in Interactive Media at School of Computing, University of Plymouth, UK. She is interested in issues around digital media curating, currently researching at STAR (Science Technology Art Research). She has been writing for various art publications including Magazyn Sztuki, Make, Art Margins, The Subsol Reader. Most recently, she co-curated Hybrid-Discourse, a series of events investigating the current relationship between digital art production and the culture industry and Globalica: conceptual and artistic tensions in the new world disorder symposia for WRO biennale, Wroclaw, Poland.

Some introductory notes on The Author as Producer essay of 1934 that underpin the Artist as Engineer symposium

An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his [/her] products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works. (1983: 98)

The significance of The Author as Producer essay lies in requiring the author to act as an active agent, to intervene in the production process, and property relations, to change 'technique' and transform the apparatus. This is the organising function that Benjamin proposes demanding the author reflect upon the production process - setting the laboratory in opposition to the finished work of art.

The essay is centrally concerned with questions of social engagement. A progressive writer (artist or cultural producer) acknowledges the choice of in whose service, or more particularly class interests, the writing (artwork) operates. This, Benjamin explains, is usually called pursuing a tendency, or expressing commitment and he takes this to be a key term (1983: 86) He explains that more often than not, commitment is seen in opposition to quality and suggests they might be synthesised to be one and the same - and sets out to prove it so using a dialectical method of argument. As a result, he argues that for a work to be politically correct, it must simultaneously be correct in the literary sense. The first principle he establishes is that the work is not autonomous in itself and must be inserted into the context of living social relations themselves determined by production relations according to materialist criticism. Instead of making the usual opposition of whether a work is reactionary or revolutionary, he simply asks: what is its position within the production relations of its time - and this is a question of technique for Benjamin.

Technique has a particular sense in German derived from Technik (technology and skill in German) but serves the purpose here to collapse the false separation of form (or method) and content. It also allows for the synthesis of commitment and quality that Benjamin proposes. He cites the Russian writer Tretyakov who as an operative writer typifies suitable technique and lies outside the established canon of literary forms as a journalist. This is the part of the argument for Benjamin who thinks that the category of literature should evolve according to the energy of the time and include new forms and confusions. He calls this the melting-down process of established forms - the temperature of which is determined by class struggle. In this way new forms can be cast (evoking Marx's phrase all that is solid melts into air perhaps). His example of this regenerative process is the newspaper, because it throws into question a number of established separations - of academic and popular modes, of descriptive and creative writing, but perhaps particularly the separation between writer and reader:

For as literature gains in breadth what it loses in depth, so the distinction between author and public, which the bourgeois press maintains by artificial means, is beginning to disappear in the Soviet press. The reader is always prepared to become a writer, in the sense of being one who describes or prescribes. As an expert - not in any particular trade, perhaps, but anyway an expert on the subject of the job he happens to be in - [s]he gains access to authorship. Work itself puts in a word. And writing about work makes up part of the skill necessary to perform it. Authority to write is no longer founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnical one, and so becomes common property. (1983: 90)

This exists in potential for Benjamin as he recognises that property is crucial here. Along with this, he is keen to criticise the intelligentsia's attitude of mind as having little practical use: 'the important thing in politics is not private thinking but, as Brecht once put it, the art of thinking inside other people's heads' (1983:92). He further stresses the important distinction between theory and activism: that it is simply not enough to have political commitment however revolutionary it may seem, 'without at the same time being to think through in a really revolutionary way the question of their own work, its relationship to the means of production and its technique.' (1983: 91) This is what Benjamin defines as a producer: 'Technical progress is, for the author as producer, the basis of his [/her] political progress' (1983: 95). He continues that to be merely at the side of the proletariat is no place to be: 'the place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible place. What is required is 'functional transformation', Brecht's phrase to describe the 'transformation of forms and instruments of production' (1983: 93). In other words, a practice that not merely engages with the apparatus or is satisfied with finished works but one that seeks to transform the apparatus - and thus proposes technical innovation and revolutionary use-value over mere modishness (by this he is thinking of photographers who depict poverty as spectacle - human misery as an object of consumption in his words, 1983: 96).

The problem of course, even then, is that technical innovation and social engagement happens all the time but without putting into serious question the ruling interests. Improvement of the production apparatus for Benjamin, necessarily means in terms of Socialism - the combination of commitment and quality in technique, so to speak. A further example of good technique in the essay is that of Dadaism, that sought to test art for its authenticity by ideas such as the 'readymade' and photomontage. He describes this as follows:

You put a frame round the whole thing. And in this way you said to the public: look, your picture frame destroys time; the smallest authentic fragment of everyday life says more than a painting. Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it. (1983: 94)

Benjamin further suggests that cultural production requires a pedagogic function. It must have the function of a model (1983: 98) turning consumers and readers alike into collaborators. His example is Brecht who uses the apparatus of epic theatre to reveal the 'functional relationship between stage and audience, text and production, producer and actor. Epic theatre, he declared, must not develop actions but represent conditions. As we shall see it obtains its conditions by allowing the actions to be interrupted.' (1983:99 - and reminding us usefully of the title of the symposia series) The infamous Brechtian alienation technique (with the emphasis on 'technnique' in this context) works against the illusion of theatre, allowing the audience to recognise real and present conditions. Thus the mediated (ideological) artifice is uncovered through a process of testing and observing through practice and dramatic actions the alienation of the audience - hopefully in a lasting manner. It is Brecht who exemplifies the opposition of 'the dramatic laboratory to the finished work of art' (1983: 100).

The essay recommends that the writer (artist, cultural producer) must reflect upon their position within the production process like a technician, demonstrating expertise alongside solidarity. This alliance is necessary to transform him [/her], 'from a supplier of the production apparatus, into an engineer who sees his task in adapting that apparatus' (1983: 102).

[Geoff Cox & Joasia Krysa]

References:

All references to Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, London: Verso 1983; written as a lecture for the Institute for the Study of Fascism, in Paris, April 1934. A more recent translation is available in Michael W. Jennings, ed, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al, Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University 1999, pp. 768-782.