CURSOR 3
CURSOR: On art and social networks (continued)
Paul McLean
For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)
ART
What does artistic choice mean in the digital medium? Referencing data mining practices and nomenclature is helpful to the dimensional artist exploring meaningful options in his work. Almost any digital application for artistic purposes will require migration into the dimensional domain by the practitioner. Some artists in this transitional era desire to expand their toolset from traditional artist tools (like painting in oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, etc.; sculpting in hard or soft natural or artificial materials; drawing in pencil, charcoal, pastel, ink, etc.; and so on) to include digital tools for expression or articulation. Some artists (usually, though not exclusively, younger artists) opt to focus solely on digital tools for creative fulfillment, but seek to participate in the Western Art tradition or lineage, which is interlinked with the traditional media.
At present, in the post-Critical Discourse, artistic choice is afforded an expanded significance. Now, choice is parsed and de-constructed, and pre-observed (locally or remotely, in fact or abstractly), and has for decades been argued over, in essence establishing – whether correctly or not – “choice” as its own medium, with a set of caveats, predeterminations, qualifications, corrections pre-applied to its expression. The modern battles over the nature of choice and choice’s relationship to artistic motivations and outcomes are not neutral. That is to say, these efforts to pertain psychology, Marxist politics in various iterations, culture studies, gender studies, conservative ideology, religious perspectives, corporate economic “realities” and so on to artistic choice are dictations of intent, which may or may not have anything to do with art.
So, what is an artist to do? A blank canvas, a color preference, a content selection, a brush gesture or key-punch now is no longer simply an opportunity for creative action, or so the critic would argue, and never was. The attachment of critique in the dominant position collectively constitutes for the artist a conditional layer composited on the artwork, and the making of it, in part and whole, which the artist ignores at the risk of being critically shunned.
As should be obvious, this hierarchy is fundamentally not technical, but epistemological. It does, however, produce technical effects. It also certainly produces cultural and political consequences. If the artist is beholden to the critic in this system, then the artist’s creative freedom is vulnerable to the critic’s agenda-based approval.
To understand the artistic value of horizontal social networks, at least in their emergent stages, is to recognize the cleverness of artists in developing freedom-enhancing response systems. When confronted with oppressive force(s), arrayed in vertical topologies, artists will tend to move fluidly and laterally, rather than engaging directly. History explains this tendency, in terms of survival response, attuned to the maintenance of productivity levels. If upward progress is retarded, artists will engage modal responses that involve reflexivity (such as inward-looking exercises, as in the personal narrative), superficial documentation (such as surface representation), metaphysical lyric (such as hyperbolic illustration of moral maxims), and nonsense (such as lists of things). This is by no means an exhaustive account.
I would argue that the transmigration to dimensional practice began as a modal response, but developed into a systemic phenomenon, fundamentally reorganizing and reasserting perception. One manifestation, or precursor, or pre-condition of the phenomenon is mechanical symmetry. In dimensional analysis, the spectrum of pertinence and descriptive/applicable values of symmetry are so instrumental as to be structurally ubiquitous. Precedents can be found in many systems of decorative design. Symmetry is in creative production trans-cultural and –historical. Symmetry is, in one sense, the materialized anti-timeline. It should not be surprising that symmetrical form is routinely attached to architectures that house spiritual elevation practices, especially the visionary sort. It should also not be surprising that symmetry is plentiful in societies of significant technical achievement that for whatever reasons have determined to highly restrict figuration for artistic representation.
Understanding horizontal social networks on the web with respect to artist applications and communications requires a comprehension of lateral modal movement by artists in response to oppressive vertical hierarchies. To do such an analysis, one must recognize that art is not only a visual medium, but an oral medium as well.
Study of apprentice relationships among artisanal traditions is helpful. Engagement in one is even more helpful, for elucidation of art’s dependence on language for survival. As educators know, some students learning best by watching processes and observing outcomes. Others progress through hands-on engagement. Still other students, probably most, are best served by a hybrid of observational and hands-on illustration of technique. The “why” of art is attached to the “what” and “how” of art by means of communication from teacher to student, student to teacher (in the form of query or comment), and peer to peer. Transmission of art from generation to generation is therefore a complex procedure combining fabrication, observation and linguistic transmission.
EXERCISE
Using “Technology Note prepared for Management 274A; Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA; Bill Palace, Spring 1996 (http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/index.htm), let’s explore social networks on the web dimensionally.
QUESTIONS:
· Describe how artists are organized into groups
o In society
o In the academy or school
o In associations
o Demographically
o Other ways, especially as demonstrative of reactive organizational behaviors among artists, especially those that might be characteristic of identity choices
· Integrate Palace’s definitions of classes, clusters, associations and sequential patterns into your considerations.
· Scan Palace’s “five major elements” of data mining. If you were attempting to describe artists instead of data, how might Palace’s process-elements be redefined to “paint a (dimensional) picture” of the artist and art? What are the effects of associations? What kinds of artist relationships yield the most productive artist output? What are the variances?
· As you begin to build a profile, link analysis and transactions, especially with regards art and artist as type, object or subject of desire or expressive value, and potential “reach” of transmission.
· What do you learn about the recent trends towards artists working in collectives, both virtual and “actual?” What kinds of architectures are developing to serve the needs of such associations? What kinds of impacts does collective association have on individual artistic performance?
Moving forward with Palace’s summary, consider his rules of analysis. Consider the terminology. There are important clues to dimensional practice to be found here.
Asymmetry, non-linearity, prediction, teachable “resembling biological neural networks in structure”…
Optimization (as in genetics), combination, mutation (unpredicted or unpredictable outcomes of combinations), selection (based on “survival of the fittest”)…
Decision Trees, “representing sets of decisions” for the purposes ultimately of predicting outcomes based on rules…
Nearest Neighbor, positing similar into combinative average sameness…
If-then rules…
(Finally) Data visualization: The visual interpretation of complex relationships in multidimensional data. Graphics tools are used to illustrate data relationships.
CONSIDERATIONS
As a cursory scan of the various elements introduced in the above text might suggest, dimensional analysis is currently applied in many directions all at once: by business interests, artists, scientists (computational and biological, to list two, not to mention the “soft” scientists) and so on. Palace continues by asking, “What technological infrastructure is required?” I would suggest we might continue by asking, what sort of society will emerge from dimensional analysis? In my thesis I addressed effects of Management as a discipline on the fabric of human society. The results of that inquiry were in some aspects exceedingly grim. The motivations of the data miner are as important as the size of the database and the query complexity, if one introduces a moral component into the analysis. Introducing a political component is similarly important, if one considers that power and the enforcement of power is a realistic concern, when the query broadens, as by the question, “What will be done with the data mined?”
