MetaDe­Sign “De­sign­ing a (pos­si­bly or seem­ingly in­fi­nite) Range of Pos­si­bil­i­ties”

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné

Presentation Title:
  • MetaDe­Sign “De­sign­ing a (pos­si­bly or seem­ingly in­fi­nite) Range of Pos­si­bil­i­ties”

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Panel: The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné

    Al­though sell­ing or ex­hibit­ing ideas as a work of art – a prac­tice ini­tially de­scribed as Con­cept Art – has be­come com­mon prac­tice, the re­sult­ing arte­fact is often con­strained in space and time, ma­te­ri­al­ized by traces, act­ing only as clues that can be only truly and sub­jec­tively cap­tured by mem­o­ries. Sub­cat­e­gory of the afore men­tioned prac­tice, Process art be­longs, as its sched­ul­ing is sug­gest­ing, to the per­for­mance cat­e­gory, as a Rube Gold­berg ma­chin­ery can­not pos­si­bly ac­quire eter­nity and not even pre­tend or fake it. Enter the realm of Sys­tem Art, de­sign­ing and link­ing processes while build­ing a lex­i­con, ef­fec­tively and prac­ti­cally end­ing up in not only cre­at­ing the music but the or­ches­tra and the in­stru­ments which go along with it. Sys­tem Art can be cat­e­go­rized by an­a­lyz­ing the sys­tem’s in­puts and out­puts, from the self con­tained al­go­rith­mic ma­chine that be­longs to gen­er­a­tive sys­tems to the hy­per­linked glob­al­ized and re­al­time-ex­pand­ing con­nec­tive sys­tems.

    It does allow for in­creas­ing com­plex­ity through the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of pa­ra­me­ters, his­tor­i­cally link­ing it­self to the con­cept of “Oeu­vre to­tale”, at least through the con­junc­tion of media, where data can flow un­ob­structed thanks to dig­i­tal­iza­tion. Method­olog­i­cal by na­ture, Sys­tem Art does bor­row in­dus­trial meth­ods and an­a­lyt­i­cal ap­proach, both in con­cep­tion and pro­duc­tion, only for­giv­ing about de­on­tol­ogy or ef­fi­ciency as it does not want to be true as sci­ence or pri­mar­ily prof­itable. It does spread the deeply human need to un­der­stand, con­trol and tres­pass tech­nol­ogy or as the cy­ber­neti­cist from the 60’s would put it, “aim for an un­re­stricted co­op­er­a­tion in be­tween ma­chines and minds”. Still in its in­fancy, its sta­tus pro­gressed from “utopia” to “prospec­tive pro­to­types” and to “ar­tis­ti­cally and tech­ni­cally ap­proved” in the last few decades. This pre­sen­ta­tion will cover some “his­toric ref­er­ences” and “the­ory one-lin­ers” and mainly a few ex­am­ples ex­tracted from the re­cently re­leased mono­graph of LAb[au], or­ga­nized by sys­tem type and praxis, com­ple­mented by some artist’s works ex­hib­ited at Me­di­aruimte, LAb[au]’s cu­rated art­space in Brus­sels, Bel­gium, cov­er­ing an ever broader scope of ac­tual prac­tice and con­sid­er­a­tions in Dig­i­tal Art.

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