It’s one of those conspicuous incongruities. While the arts columns warn of no less than the complete transformation of reality under the thrall of Google and the like, within the field of art itself, a seemingly modest discussion is being held about post-mediality and post-digitality. Summed up concisely, these two catchwords can be made quite productive. Post-mediality fervently insists that it no longer makes sense to classify artistic disciplines in terms of media. This should really have been known for some time by now, but the resulting range of consequences is far from being fully understood. Post-digitality indicates that digital media is so pervasive that its components can hardly be categorized any more, even by recently established dichotomies such as analogue/digital, offline/online or physical/virtual. Often, however, this narrower understanding of discourse is not pursued; instead, the terms are used to express the idea that media is done with somehow. The internet, if it counts for anything, is accordingly said to be one of many tools that can be used for artistic work. Thus, the exhaustion of the approaches that once ruled critical media art meets here superficial self-marketing strategies that attempt to at least rhetorically distinguish themselves through the addition of the prefix “post-.” This goes hand in hand with a conservative trend spawned by the ever-increasing sums of money that currently shape the art system.
As a result, the in-depth exploration of the current conditions of mediality is willingly left to the creative industries, where it is only undertaken in the rarest of cases, however. In most cases, this would hardly be possible anyway, because existing creative industries programs force even those projects that have critical potential, such as the Viennese project Data Dealer – an online game about collecting and selling personal data, which can only be won by evading laws and regulations – to conform to a stifling commercial logic.
Meanwhile, the reconstitution of reality on the basis of digital media, reflected in the arts pages primarily as a loss of an endemic state, is extremely contradictory and therefore represents a highly challenging and rewarding field of action for artists. After all, artistic methods often manage to forge different and unusual approaches to these generated realities, exploring their ambivalence and potential and sometimes even intervening in their constitution.
The role of digital artefacts, especially databases, in the creation of reality is a theme that the artist group YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji) has pursued for a long time. Their current project Endless War, which the duo has been developing since 2011 in collaboration with Matthew Fuller, is based on the Afghan War Diary published by WikiLeaks. This diary, which covers the years 2004 to 2010, is composed of a database of nearly 91,000 field reports, each referring to a relevant military event in the field. Human and mechanical perspectives are mingled in these entries; they converge with one another and mutually constitute a machine that produces the specific visibilities that in turn become the basis of adaptive war strategies. The Endless War database, therefore, is not a (virtual) representation of a (physical) reality but one of the central material resources in the creation of these events. Reality is recorded here through various sensors and filters, split into its smallest components, the “data points,” only to be reassembled once again. The main body of the War Diary consists of traces left by a complex techno-social machine which simultaneously observes, processes and generates reality. It operates through the use of cultural, technologically coded assumptions that are not always consciously made but which are inscribed in practice nonetheless. In order to visualize these forms of reality generation, the traces of which can be found in the database, the entire data volume must be evaluated algorithmically so that it to become accessible to human perception. In order to conduct this process in an artistic fashion, media may not simply be understood as tools – or else the assumptions encoded here would simply be reproduced. Instead, their generative dimensions and productive capacities in terms of addressing specific issues must be the center of attention and artistic action. This is impossible without an in-depth exploration of the techno-political conditions of media beyond their tool-like nature.
An entirely different approach to examining the constitution of reality through media is taken by the Spanish artist group platoniq (Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum). In the context of the Spanish financial crisis, which also resulted in a dramatic reduction in cultural funding, the group founded the crowd funding platform goteo.org together with Enric Senabre. This platform is geared towards more than the expansion of the market principle into the pre-production phase offered by conventional platforms such as kickstarter.com, startnext.de and countless others. Instead, crowd funding is understood here as a social process in which the main objective is not to collect money but to develop new models of production by and for the commons. The software was written and workshops were held in a practice-oriented manner under conditions of acute social crisis. For geoto.org, each project must create concrete crowd benefits, meaning it must produce something that can flow back into the commons and extend the pool of resources for all. Interesting dynamics develop here, particularly in terms of new decentralized production methods. The design of an “open source shoe” as well as an “open source 3D printer” were among the projects financed in this way. Goteo.org created a platform seeking to enable what is stated by its slogan: “crowd-funding the commons.” With its help, platoniq are building on previous projects such as its Bank of Common Knowledge (2006–2010) and Burn Station (2003–2010), transferring the viral logic of the free software to the social and economic field. In order to achieve their goal of generating another form of reality where living and working is possible, they have currently left the reference field of art.
Beyond the formatting of the creative industries and the White Cube, somewhere between DIY and the commons, but nonetheless deeply hidden in the techno-political matrix, are resources for artistic criticism and the generation of reality. Activating these calls for an in-depth understanding of the media dimension of the present day, but practice must at the same time go beyond this.
On September 3, 2014, the international conference Information as Reality – Critical Cultural Practices in Digital Networks will be held at the LENTOS Kunstmuseum in Linz, organized by the World-Information Institute (http://world-information.net) in cooperation with LENTOS and springerin. The articles in this internet edition of the magazine provide an outlook on the planned discussion topics. A special issue of springerin will appear following the symposium (January 2015 issue).
Translated by Jennifer Taylor
