In Berlin at Transmediale

I'm starting to gather together impressions and notes from my recent trip to Berlin. The first stop was a crowded Transmediale. Inevitably my view of such an extensive event was partial and the impressions and ideas form a subjective viewpoint. It is interesting though to trace through connections and resonances and riff on their implications. The umbrella theme for Transmediale this year was ‘Reality Addicts’. Reality addicts we are told, among other things

love reality... culture...music... machines, images, words and people... are dependent on manifold realities... enjoy paradoxes... celebrate technical defects... play with the almost possible... subvert the technological paradigm...

as a way of exploring “...how art and society are changing under the influence of media and technology which become more dominant in our everyday lives” Transmediale is no longer concerned with ‘media art’ but ‘art and digital culture’. There’s a fine distinction in there perhaps, but with such an ostensibly wide brief it is probably just as well that the festival didn’t attempt too narrow definitions. The theme becomes a non-theme or an ante-/post- theme: we might pick on parallel practices or contradictory positions, divergence and convergence, it’s all good, it seems, because it’s all ‘real’. This at least is a way of acknowledging that media art, digital culture, call it what you will, has inevitably become a wide field, the only field perhaps in contemporary art that ‘post-medium’ has a specific range of common concerns and media technology (often, but not necessarily, specifically or identifiably digital) but the widest variety of practices and theories.

By upping the 'reality' quotient Transmediale largely dispensed with the old digital media occasional obsessions with the virtual, the immanent – these seem to have become encouragingly unfashionable - and engaged more with immediacy, direct experience and material culture. The centrepiece Smile Machines installation exhibition, while patchy, was nonetheless interesting and entertaining, because of course Reality Addicts also like a laugh! The exhibition included a range of works intended to simultaneously raise a smile through its playfulness and “...expose the power of the media by derision and critique” (Smile Machines curator Anne-Marie Duguet) and traced uses of technology from video to the sculptural to the interactive, from Nam June Paik’s TV Rodin, through Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation Wonder Woman, Michael Snow’s remake of his eighties film So is This as the three monitor tri-lingual, That / Cela / Dat to more contemporary works such as Christian Moller’s Cheese and Jodi’s Max Payne Cheats Only Gallery.

The Smile Machines exhibition suggested a diversity of coexisting regimes of engagement and interaction but some of the concepts artists involved suggested something less playful lurking beneath the work. The Media Addicts 1 conference panel suggested that it would discuss how media transforms reality. Jordan Crandall spoke of the ‘state of readiness’, the affect, the vibe between bodies that can be sensed in a room; that the power of media subsists in the transmission of effects, like music, preconsciously rather than rationally through perceivable meaning, we are suspended in a ‘what will we do next’ state, with a disposition to act in the potentiality of states, like anxiety. In spite of purporting to describe a new state, it seemed all very abstract in a vaguely post-Deleuzian way, suggesting a reductive notion of an history-less audience, not influenced by previous encounters with media artefacts, or that their consciousness, awareness and embodied memory gives itself up to some kind of ineffable cognition suspending immanence: "...we are talking about incorporealization not representation. Implication, not objectivity. Bodily intensities, not linguistic mediation. Motivating power, not meaning or rational logic."

Simon Penny was exclusively concerned with modes of machine presentation and he outlined an evolutionary trajectory through four stages; starting with media works with a linear script, then computer based interactive works that required simple dynamic behaviour such as keystrokes or mouse clicks, then real-time sensory data through interactive behaviour of the user and a machine in an environment (such as his Petit Mal piece in Smile Machines). He spoke of how the computer automotive model rejects ‘passive perception’, and represents a fundamentally different neurological learning process and traced the relationship between ‘preconscious’ learning reactions on a sliding scale from physical athletic training, simulated military training, gaming and interactive art. He described the nightmare scenario where computer gaming was a common activity among the perpetrators of mass shootings in US high schools, where the intended victim was perhaps a girlfriend or teacher but the shooter just kept on shooting everyone in their sight. This he suggested was due to conditioned behaviour, abstract and repetitive, learned from the shoot ‘em up computer games where you don’t stop shooting until all the opponents are dead. He also related this to the processes used in military training. This is behaviour shaped in immersive situations transferred to the real world. His suggestion that this is abstracted and pre-conscious is somewhat undermined by the specifity of the almost exact correlation between the artificial and real situations. However, give him the benefit of the doubt on this one for now.

Penny goes on to suggest that interactive art works operate in the same way, relying on a learned response to environmental stimuli. Because the ‘user’ is ‘trained’ through interaction which results in a ‘feedback loop’ between the user and artwork, this media work is ‘more powerful’, and conventional critiques of representation is rendered inadequate. This of course is the sort of work he is doing thus implicitly placing him at a higher stage of evolution (ironically the older Petit Mal work was quite cute and clunky, presumably because it represented an earlier evolutionary stage of artificial life). Such post-Darwinistic technological determinism left me feeling rather depressed, not least because of the blinkeredness of the theory and also because of the apparent lack of a critical distance. It was as though Penny had decided that this was the way to make art because it represented the way things were going in terms of human/machine relations. When presented with the concern that wasn’t it a little worrying that he was making works which at best mimicked, or worse extended these practices, he seemed unable to reflect on the implications of the effect of the works on the viewer/user.

Apart from reservations about basing a media art practice around ideas of power and behavioural manipulation deliberately extending processes that have the potential to turn people into serial killers, I had serious doubts about Penny’s lazy assertion that the conventional linear time-based media experience is passive. In Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, Warren Neidich develops a biological theory of perception, which suggests that the most basic cognition operates at a neural level, the human brain is never passive but relies on constant stimulation to learn and to construct its own reality from cinematic images. Neidich’s ideas are necessarily a theory in progress, suggesting how things might happen based on ongoing neurological research. It shares with the Andersons' cognitive theory (discussed a while ago over on Brut Smog the Andersons' being particularly opposed to the implicit passivity of the 'persistence of vision' theory), the idea that the perception of moving images is far from a passive experience, but engages the viewer in the active construction of images. Neidich suggests that this manifests itself as physical changes at the neurological level as the brain learns and adapts, constructing its perception of reality. Apart from refuting the ‘passive viewer’ notion, in some ways this, suggests that Penny’s behavioural practice may be less ‘powerful’ than he claims: in Neidich’s formulations the cinematic is often experienced as more ‘real’ than lived experience as it is a more active and heightened cognitive experience. But worse is the implicit intention of Penny’s practice. While we are still discovering exactly how the brain perceives, retrospectively as it were in the case of film and cinema, why would anybody want to produce artworks that explicitly and deliberately work with processes which, by his own admission, have the (proven?) potential to effectively brainwash the user into dangerous acts.

I needed to find a way away from such reductive neo-fascististic control freakery. I found it in the garden....