thinking about art after the mediafirms and public institutions in the usa alone spent an incredible $1,750 billion on
information technology and software development. Through our bodies run technical
strands that help us to prolong our lives. networks are no longer merely the hope of
an egalitarian reorganization of societies; they have become in themselves effectively
structured figures in developed power relations. The generations of scientists, artists,
and engineers that are now learning, studying, testing, researching, organizing, and
leading have been schooled by their experience with technical media to a greater or
lesser extent. The media do not hold any particular attraction for them, but have
become self- evident areas of activity in everyday life. When technically everything is
now more or less possible, the issue is increasingly to make the possible more impossible.
motivated by the anthropological deliberations of Ritter and Flusser, some years
ago i began to work with an anthropology in the art context, which is also to be
understood as operational. its objective is to keep open the possibilities of being active,
of progressive action, for the time to come, both for scientists and artists who are deeply
committed to experiment.
in principle this operational anthropology functions by reducing the complexity of
the relations between the autonomous fields of knowledge and work of arts, sciences,
and technologies, and conceiving them as different historical qualities in the relationship
between art and media, as outlined earlier in connection with the strategic and tactical
term ‘media art’. art in this context means art that is affected by media, in the sense of
an experimental aesthetic praxis which engages with science and technology. otherwise
the qualities of the relations, which are the issue here, would make no sense.
i differentiate between four relational qualities: art before media, art with media,
art through media, and art after the media. This list should not be understood as a
chronological sequence of qualities, but as differently weighted priorities in the deep
time structure that interests me. historically, the qualities overlap and in part run
parallel. The second and third relational qualities are the simplest to understand, not
only because they reach into the present day.
art with media reflects on the artistic utilization of insights achieved by mathematics,
arithmetic, and geometry, their application in mechanics and optics, and the pressure
that results from this utilization in the direction of artefacts and technical systems
for communicating, learning, illusionizing, shocking, entertaining, and persuasion/
conversion. art with media implies an instrumental relationship. in this relational
quality flat or curved mirrors, pipes, funnels, rollers, magnetic telex machines, and
mechanical combinatory systems serve as prostheses for art, but are not an essential
precondition for art to exist. These media expand artistic praxis, can potentially make
it more effective, but they do not renew it, and do not necessarily change it. This
relational quality is similar to what Raymond Williams, one of the founders of cultural
studies, once called an ‘accidental’ relationship (Williams 1974).
in a narrower historical perspective this quality evolved in europe since the
geometrization of seeing and the mathematization of the image in the second
Renaissance; it developed further with the innumerable models for ciphers and
elaborately staged spaces for technical images in the sixteenth century, and resulted in
first highlights with concepts for the automation of music compositions, the sequencing
of harmonious melodies, and the invention of a great number of visual special effects in
the seventeenth century. essentially all mechanical, optical, and acoustic innovations