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| start [020190630 134608] – [presentations and publications] joost | start [020210624 170639] – [research description] joost |
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| A recently updated short description of my research goes as follows: | A recently (020210624) updated short description of my research goes as follows: |
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| Artists who work with technology often develop their own tools as part of the articulation of an aesthetic language. My research starts from the comparison of this process with the mutual transformations of devices, procedures, concepts and scientists that take place in a scientific lab. I am investigating the mutual construction of tools and artist, as a way to take a conceptual and practical step in my work and position it more explicitly relative to recent developments in the exact sciences. Central to formulating such a position will be to reflect on the dialogue between humans and technology, focusing on the point where concepts and materials interact. By engaging in a dialogue with devices and the cultures they are part of, I want to open a space of alternative technical possibilities. These are musical, poetic as well as utopian, and form a critique of a purely functional approach to technology. | This research project started as an attempt to deal with a question that Socrates gets asked in his dialogue with Meno: how can we learn something we don't already know ? I will be exploring what I think is one answer, that new things can be learned in interaction with devices outside of us. It is an answer that interests me because what I have been calling a 'dialogue with machines' has been at the heart of |
| | my media-art practice for many years. But despite these roots, the aim of this project is not primarily to think about art; the aim is to clarify the concept of a 'dialogue with machines' and expand it to |
| | a view of technology that is also relevant outside of the arts. By focusing on the agency of |
| Having technology as the other side in a dialogue implies that it has some degree of autonomy. To articulate my thoughts about this, I am looking into concepts relating to surprises caused by human inventions and artefacts.\\ | technological artefacts in speculation and creation, I hope to contribute to a reflection on technology |
| Mathematics is perhaps the archetypal example of such surprising 'otherness', when described as the science of unexpected consequences of definitions and rules written down by humans. Many mathematicians have written about the autonomy of mathematical objects (Lochak, Lautman, Zalamea), and there are interesting discussions by mathematicians of the role of notation and material realization in mathematical creativity (Chatelet, Rotman). The chaotic systems that were discovered in the 20th century are dramatic examples of the complex and unpredictable behaviours of simple equations (Abrahams, Ueda).\\ | as something else than a tool to subjugate our planet and ourselves.\\ |
| A second important track for thinking about a dialogue with technology are ideas about the autonomy of technological development; since the Industrial Revolution there have been many analyses of technology as a dominating or liberating force that is not under the control of humans (Ellul, Winner, Simondon, Marx, Shelley).\\ | Practical work has focused on the room full of historic and recent analog computers that has been my studio for the past few years. I have been making artistic works nourished by a form of media-archeology that serves two purposes that are almost opposed: it seeks to illuminate aspects |
| A third track, relating more directly to practical activities, consists of fairly recent ideas about the agency of materials and devices in science (Pickering, Barad, Rheinberger, Latour). These ideas link to the concept of the posthuman (Stiegler, Hayles, Haraway), non-human semiotics (Uexkull, Hayles, Sebeok, Cariani), studies of encounters and serendipity (Morizot, Merton, van Andel) and implicit types of knowledge (Polanyi, Suchman). | of current practices by going back to their origins, and it looks at the past as a rich and relatively |
| | accessible source of difference.\\ |
| Practical work in this research project has started from the historic technologies of analog computing and electronic modeling. The medium-term goal of this is to build an analog computer optimized for the synthesis of HD video signals (a project of several years that is now nearing completion) and to make a series of moving-image works with it that give a voice to the physicality of the systems that produced them.\\ | In my reading and writing I am trying to articulate the sources of what can be perceived as an agency of machines and look at how a dialogue with machines can be a form of collaboration in which new representations appear. For this I am primarily leaning on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon and Isabelle Stengers, with frequent appearances by Katherine Hayles, Bernard Stiegler and Andrew Pickering. An important element in these reflections is the notion of abstraction as articulated by Whitehead: abstractions are not objects but decisions to focus on certain aspects of a situation and relegate other aspects to the background. This is a view on abstractions as performative, inherently ecological and non-anthropocentric, and the fundament of my thesis will be to look at machines in these terms. |
| The longer-term goal is to use the culture of analog computing and electronic modeling as a vantage point from which to explore the artistic potential of chemistry, nanotechnology and other technologies that deal with matter on the molecular scale. The newest of such technologies tend to be thought as a confluence of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information science, as a form of 'programmed matter', where new material possibilities are opened by controlling individual molecules (Drexler). As a way to formulate an alternative approach, I would like to investigate replacing the concept of 'program' with 'analogy' in these contexts, evoking a way to think accross patterns occuring in multiple situations without an underlying idea of hierarchy or control between those situations. This has clear links with the practice of unconventional computing, as a means to question and undiscipline notions of computation and information. | |
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| * exhibition of installation #71.1 during the Sonic Acts festival at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (February 2019). | * exhibition of installation #71.1 during the Sonic Acts festival at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (February 2019). |
| * artist's talk at Creative Coding Utrecht (May 2019). | * artist's talk at Creative Coding Utrecht (May 2019). |
| | * exhibition of (partially reworked) installation #71.1 at iMal in Brussels. (November 2019) |
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