ConsecutiveMatters (a.k.a. jonathantdneil.com)

‘Information Architectures’ just finished last night at The Drawing Center.  Here’s the official write up that went out:

The Drawing Center is pleased to present Information Architectures, a series of talks and discussions in which leading philosophers, architects, designers, editors, and artists consider how information is diagrammed, modeled, structured and otherwise disseminated in the expanded field of drawing.

As artists, designers, and intellectuals are increasingly regarded as “content providers” within the broader spectrum of our cultural interests, it seems increasingly necessary to consider not simply how certain forms-or “formats”-give this content shape, but how the entire form/content divide may be rendered irrelevant, or obsolete, by the mutability of information itself. From this perspective, drawing is not seen as an ancillary medium but rather as a privileged theoretical and practical tool with which to work out the tricky business of in-form-ing.

The series was organized by myself and Brett Littman, and over the course of the last three nights, six very talented and interesting people gave presentations on their work.

On Tuesday we had artist Danica Phelps and philosopher Alva Noë; on Wednesday, artist Nathan Carter and editor/designer/architect Jeffrey Inaba presented; and last night, my friend Peter Macapia and the formidable Alice Aycock spoke.

Instead of offering any kind of afterthoughts on the three evenings (except to note that I think they went very well), I’m going to post the videos of the talks.  (Unfortunately, our camera died at the beginning of last night’s talks, so I’m going to have to cook something up for Peter and Alice’s presentations.  We have the podcasts, so perhaps with their permission I’ll lay that over their slide shows and capture it in Flash.  We’ll see.)

Some thoughts on the recent visibility of what we might call “aesthetic darwinism” now up over at Artworld Salon .

About ten days ago I gave a talk at an SVA ATOA panel on which I was to speak on the waning influence of art critics as compared to the rise of curators and collectors.  Shortly I’ll post a revised draft of that talk on my ‘Essays and Talks’ page, but here I want to return, if however briefly, to something I broached toward the end that talk, which, for me, is the importance of the concept of “emergence.”

I was reminded of this today by an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes that challenges the conventional wisdom of “market equilibrium” when it comes to thinking about just how we find ourselves faced with the current financial shit show.  The author of the piece essentially espouses the practice of agent-based market modeling, which “builds” or “grows” models of market behavior, rather than working from first principles–e.g. equilibrium–and then deducing from there how things “should” work.  In discussing a Yale economist’s model of credit levels and market stability, the author offers this key passage:

…the model also shows something that is not at all obvious.  The instability doesn’t grow in the market gradually, but arrives suddenly.  Beyond a certain threshold the virtual market abruptly loses its stability in a “phase transition” akin to the way ice abruptly melts into liquid water.  Beyond this point, collective financial meltdown becomes effectively certain.  This is the kind of possibility that equilibrium thinking cannot even entertain.

What is being described here, of course, is emergence–that is, the emergent behavior (which can tend towards order or disorder depending upon which direction one is moving) of a collection of independent “agents.”  These can be people with individual economic interests or, as the ice-to-water example demonstrates, even atoms or molecules.  What matters here is that emergence is opposed to a kind of reductionist thinking which believes that if you understand the behavior of a single agent (homo economicus for econmics; a point particle for physics) then you can understand everything.  (The billions of dollars spent on the LHC at Cern is a large and expensive demonstration of the power of this kind of reductionist thought).

Now, why might the concept of emergence be important for art, or for art history, criticism and theory no less?  It seems like a silly question to be sure.  After all, we’re talking here about economics and physics, fields which always seem to bear a bit more urgency for everyday life than do the arts as we confront them today.  But here are some initial thoughts: in terms of history, the concept of emergence recasts our understanding of the shift from modernism to its subsequent iterations (postmodernism or what have you) as a shift away from aesthetic reductionism.  Understanding those subsequent iterations, then, would benefit from an understanding of emergence in all of its varied interdisciplinary manifestions.  (That P. W. Anderson’s “More is Different,” perhaps the seminal text on the dialectic of emergence and reduction, appeared at the very moment–1972–as debates were raging over the fate of modernism in the arts, gives the concept a very attractive historical specificity as well.)

In terms of criticism, emergence would require that we begin to look at entire populations of agents and objects rather than continuing to focus on those agents and objects alone.  This may seem anathema to what art critics do, which, on the standard thinking, is to write about, assess and judge works of art.  But it should come with little suprise that I find this notion of criticism obsolete.  It is “art writing,” not criticism, and yes, it has its place and function, but we should not fool ourselves that it is “critical” in any rigorous or robust sense of the term.  Though it takes literature as its object, Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005) offers a promising example of how an emergence-based criticism would look in practice.

But if we are faced with confronting individual agents and objects, which is to say art works and artists, emergence offers us not only a framework but an incredibly versatile conceptual tool with which to approach the job of building and defending arguments about the work at hand.  I have tried to do this through a comparison of certain of Tara Donovan’s sculptures to installations by Sarah Sze.  Some, but by no means all, of Donovan’s work not only illustrates certain principles of emergence but also restages the negation of artistic subjectivity–think John Cage–which played such a large role in the demise of modernist aesthetics.  Sze, on the other hand, offers only the “appearance” of emergence–in the form of complex, artificial, biomorphic “worlds”–without any of the underlying dynamics, and so puts into place an updated but no less mythological, and outmoded, image of the artist as Creator.

Finally, from a more purely theoretical perspective, emergence offers us a way out of the genesis/structure aporia that runs through philosophical phenomenology (Husserl) and structuralism (Saussure) to deconstruction and beyond.  The figure of the “symmetry breaking phase transition,” which is central to emergence, is a figure of the pure “event” which arises not in spite of, but as a fundamental feature of, a given dynamic system, be it physical, economic, social or historical.  Of course, the work of Gilles Deleuze has probably done most to stir this pot, which is why thinkers such as Brian Massumi and Manuel Delanda have gone very far in articulating general theories of emergence.  Nevertheless, one cannot begin to understand the full ramifications of this powerful idea without the incomparable efforts of Stuart Kauffman.

If this isn’t the best defense of Facebook, I don’t know what is:

Edge: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS A Talk By Clay Shirky.

If there is a problem here it’s that the notion of the “cognitive surplus” that Shirky promotes privilege the idea of pure production over consumption or, more favorably in my view, observation. Shirky likes very much the idea of people doing and making as opposed to watching, and I think that’s a good point; but isn’t one of the issues that we run into the stratification of these kinds of making and doing? It’s a different kind of sociability, to be sure, but the original technology for that sociablity was the city itself, and we have yet to perfect it; in other words, gin might still have a place in the system, even if TV doesn’t.

Great behind the scenes look at how David Byrne’s Playing the Building was fabricated, courtesy of Rhizome and Justin Downs.

This short piece by George Dyson from Edge.org is one of the more interesting things I’ve read on the possibility of artificial intelligence and the troublesom metaphor of the brain as a massively parallel computer.

The estimable E. O. Wilson, in a recent piece for the New Scientist, offers what is to my mind an essential tripartite distinction between religion and science:

In the more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition. The dominant one, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - sees humanity as a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as father, judge and friend. We interpret His will from sacred scriptures and the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities.

The second world view is that of political behaviourism. Still beloved by the now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is largely a blank state devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and primitive bodily urges. As a consequence, the mind originates almost wholly as a product of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based “human nature”, people can be moulded to the best possible political and economic system, namely communism. In practical politics, this belief has been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure.

Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world’s population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin”.

Too often are the failures and atrocities of communist history laid at the feet of those who hold to an atheistic worldview, even if that atheism is simply a byproduct of a more firm commitment to what Wilson calls “scientific humanism.” But I believe that it is this division between scientific humanism and monotheism which is the dominant ideological struggle of our time, and it is one which requires a significant rethinking of the multiculturalist positions (or ‘postmodernism’ more generally) which, to be sure, forged great gains over the past thirty-five years, but which, as Wilson points out, may be seen as a variant of “political behaviorism.”

To push this further, the ideological lines that supposedly disappeared sometime around 1989 or 1991, those dates which mark the end of History for Fukuyama (or the end of Art for Danto), have been redrawn, not between civilizations, between East and West, between Islam and Judeo-Christianity, between Islamo-fascism and Liberal democracy, but between religion and science, with humanism–that means the Arts; for what better testament to humanist values can there be?–firmly on the side of the latter. By which it follows that a commitment to humanism, to human achievement and creativity, without recourse to a belief in supernatural agency, is the banner under which our art–our contemporary art–must march.