Moving into the Garden

“Neo-fascististic” (see last post) may be a little strong, but to take one element of culture and posit it as the only valid development of specific cultural forms presumes a political fait accompli. Simon Penny seemed to be presenting a construct whereby media and technology in art, determined by developments in “consumer security culture”, has reached a point where other media technology based artforms are anachronistic. The proclaimed redundancy of the old paradigm of the ‘passive’ viewer’s reception of a single and materially ‘non-interactive’, most often ‘linear’ artwork, and the new age of the viewer as an integral and physical agent in the production of the artwork, is something of a smokescreen. What it masks is the fact that there is still ultimately an artist figure there making the decisions, the interactor can only work within the parameters programmed by the artist. To me it seems that Penny is still working within modernist paradigms of evolution and enlightenment, he has installed himself as one of the authorities and represents the very latest in the evolutionary development, ironically a very linear way of thinking. This is not an argument against his particular achievements and the particular qualities of his artworks, but against his position as representing the only game in town when it comes to the way to do art now. It is not surprising perhaps that Penny is an Australian, emerging from a country in which technological and cultural development have gone hand in hand for some years: a technocratic determinism informed by government cultural agendas and industry, which ignores or attempts to set the agenda for the ‘evolution’ of what actually grows out of the broadest cultural activities. Of course an ‘interactive’ art practice is one of these activities but other practices, which might equally be considered as having currency, lacking the modish veneer of cutting edge technological advances and not speaking the new regime's language of interactivity (a Holy Grail for approved Australian media arts for some years) became marginalised, starved of funding and critical attention. (Apologies for all the ‘scare quotes’).

So it was refreshing to have Hilary Koob-Sassen around a couple of days earlier to present another way of thinking about things. I wrote about Koob-Sassen’s work a while ago, in the context of a screening at the Whitechapel. In that entry I concentrated on the formalistic aspects of his work, and indeed that was the main context for that screening. However at Transmediale the context changed the way I read it and I was able to more fully appreciate the scope of his project. The video exhibited here was Future Garden Structure.

While the formal elements, the lyric/song format of the text performed by his band The Errorists, the layering of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ images, are particularly structured and resonant in themselves, they are used to elaborate complex multi-layered concepts which counter notions of modernist linear development with an ecological analogy, in this case based on gardening and a microbiological appreciation of the internal workings of the organic (human) animal (which as the song in the video states is “...delightfully unfascististic on the inside...”). I hope I’m doing these concepts justice, but I’m sure Hilary will pop up and correct me if I’m not! In the talk afterwards he spoke of two materialisms, that of modernity and that of gardening. He also suggested that the body is a perfect model for global organisation in that it represents the coexistence of multiple economies with mutual benefits. (In this he was positioning himself as the "contra-nutter" to David Icke. Tim Blake’s video Fear and Control in the same programme gave Icke a platform to deliver a talk about his extraordinarily paranoid mother of all conspiracy theories which suggests that everything in the world is, and has always been, controlled by an Illuminati, a secret society behind the activities of the church and most western governments and can be held responsible for the assassination of every free spirit from Jesus Christ to Princess Diana...). Koob-Sassen talked of elaboration rather than evolution and of the possibility of super-humanity; his ideas both in person and on-screen, while apparently eccentric, expressed with breathless enthusiasm and parenthetic complexity, suggest a refreshingly new and undeterministic model for cultural and political organisation and make the self-reflexive modernism of the techno-interactive crew appear like anachronisms.

In a later conference panel session Mistakology Norman White spoke of how increased function in terms of computers does not necessarily lead to more usefulness, how leading edge technology doesn’t lead to a qualitative increase in the work and that there is more opportunity in experiments that go wrong. At one point a questioner asked him if this wasn't "counter-intuitive" when related to computer programming. What a puzzling question. What could be more intuitive than accepting the 'hidden intention' of a mistake when working in an experimental practice? Such a relaxed and accommodating approach to the relationship between art production and media technologies, fits well within a future garden analogy in which political and cultural development is based on growth, coexistence and interdependency and less on dogma, competition and paranoia. Or as Hilary Koob-Sassen poetically puts it:

THE PARACULTURE seeks proposals for THE TRELLIS ECONOMIES: Actual structures in the MATERIALISM OF MODERNITY which will steer the elaboration of Modernity’s inherent (apocalyptic) eschatology, towards a very specific (fruiting) end-point: towards the production of an interior structure-a TRELLIS- on which the MATERIALISM OF GARDENING can manifest THE WORLD ORGAN ECONOMIES. (from the text on the “mouse coffin” box Koob-Sassen gave to the audience, which formed a multi-dimensional polemic which I think might be titled ‘Super Humanity in the World Organ Economies’)