This essay focuses on the concept of error as a suggested aesthetic for contemporary computer arts. It works mainly on the thoughts of Liu and other influencing theoreticians, and presents their stance towards the future of contemporary society of information. It also works on the idea of “destructive creativity” as viral, in relation to the early concept of creative destruction.
In The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu analyzes the concept of “knowledge work” within a contemporary society. His critical analysis is based on the future possibilities for both arts and humanities, and inquires into the notion of “destructive creation” as a new governing aesthetic of the information age. He starts his argument with describing some of the characteristics of this specific net art movement:
Aesthetics in the age of knowledge work is now being defined by several contenders for a dominant ideology that have not yet fully articulated themselves or negotiated their intramural relationships. (…) I mean by this the aesthetics of mutation and remixing that recreate through new technologies something like the art of quintessential hybridity and chance (…). (Liu, 2004: 324)
After placing the idea within a specific environment, Liu focuses on the very definition of destructive creation. According to the author “destructive creation” [is] the critical inverse of the mainstream ideology of creative destruction”. He also adds “the most austere and terrifying implementation of such an aesthetics is what I alluded to in my introduction under the name viral aesthetics” (Liu, 2004: 325). As the author narrows down the definition, he then calls forth the idea of a viral destruction of informationalism as the first link between “coolness” and “destructive creation”:
The most avant-garde arts of the age of knowledge work break out of the confines of the arts to perform “destructivity” in corporate and other dominant social sectors directly. (…) the idea of “auto-destruction” is transmitted into domains of society external to the arts as “viral” – that is, as a destructivity that attacks knowledge work through technologies and techniques internal to such work. The genius of contemporary aesthetics is to introject destructivity within informationalism. This, we may say, is very cool. (Liu, 2004: 331)
After positioning the main idea within the context of informationalism, he moves to applying it to the postindustrial concept of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1975: 82-85):
(…) Destructive creativity is only the most sublime of the contenders for a new governing aesthetic responsive to the postindustrial ideology of “creative destruction”. (…) Destructive creativity is the most “virulent” of the new aesthetics designed to propose an alternate vocabulary of creation/destruction (disturbance, chaos, play, transformation) intended to reconfigure “creative destruction” into a vision not just of global corporate culture but of a flourishing multiplicity of cultures. (Liu, 2004: 370)
Following, he moves back to the concept of knowledge work as a field for auto-applying of the new technology-based culture of cool. He believes that “all these struggling aesthetics are attempts to install within the life of knowledge work an “ethos of the unknown” able to mold “cool” – the popular form of such ethos – into more experimental, expansive, diverse, active, and aware forms” (Liu, 2004: 370-371). This is followed by a summary, in which Liu proposes a solution for the humanities – applying the techno-artistic ethos within information technology, therefore redefining cool, and finally moving to a new age in humanities:
The adequacy of such future aesthetics of the information age, clearly, will henceforth merit reflection, not just in respect to the ordinary generations of cool that the neo-avant-garde will mirror, amplify, and help educate. (Liu, 2004: 371)
Closing his argument, Liu points out the critical point of his conclusion by saying that destructive creativity may therefore reinforce the relations between arts and humanities, and their audiences:
Perhaps of special interest to humanities scholars, such artists are “relevant” in a way that does not necessarily surrender critical perspective. However contrarian or “shocking” the arts may be, they often have far greater appeal to audiences and donors than the professional humanities. (Liu, 2004: 322)
As Liu focuses on the future possibilities of the information driven society, Kelly presents an approach that might be seen as more ‘down to earth’. In his analysis of cracked media, working on theories of Serres, Adorno and Attali, he comes to an argument where the idea of destruction can be seen as giving a beginning for the creation of new meanings and sounds. According to Caleb Kelly:
“Noise … does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the system in which it is inscribed … long before it was given theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages.” For Attali, noise creates meaning through the interruption of the message, and through the freed imagination of the listener within pure noise, “The absence of meaning is in this case the presence of all meanings.” For new meanings to be created a crisis or catastrophe must occur, or perhaps an accident, that will focus the elements of chaos into a singular focused emergent meaning. (Attali in Kelly, 2009: 81)
While working on mainly digitally generated music and its cracked media devices, Kelly’s theoretical stance can be seen as a description of nowadays circuit benders, with all the noise following the artistic practice as well as the serious stance towards the power structure of the music industry. His approach can be perceived as a link to what is argued by Liu – a situation in which a new for of expression and ideology arises from the ruins of the actual:
Noise need not be seen as disturbance ; it need to be excess or transgression. Noise is the backdrop to all communication, but in those instance when the backdrop is brought to the fore it is simply not disturbing or blotting out any information; it is not a break in communication, but instead becomes the content of communication itself. (Kelly, 2009: 82)
Approaching the topic of error within different industries than music, it is important to recall www.jodi.org, a pioneer net art collective specializing in software, video and game art. According to Cramer, jodi works can be described as follows:
Even where www.jodi.org doesn’t randomize its own transmission by unstable addressing schemes, it reads and behaves as if it contained intact data disturbed only by faulty net transmissions or computer crashes; but in reality, the line noise is mocked up within the data itself. (…) jodi’s disturbance is not done in hardware with only partly predictable results, but is a clever simulation of unpredictability done in software. (…) They inspire and liberate the viewers’ imagination all the while locking it into deception, mazes and dead-ends. The naïve Cagean ontology of chance is replaced with a tricky rhetoric of simultaneous anarchy and entrapment, a neo-baroque conceit and Discordia concors of surface chaos with inscribed discipline, and vice versa. (Cramer, 2002)
Looking back at Liu’s description of a “flourishing multiplicity of cultures” within a society of information and the above description of jodi given by Cramer, one could say that this art collective is a living example of his idea. Still, Liu’s idea of a new aesthetic governing the society via reflection, amplification and education is brought down by Dirk Paesmans. According to the collective:
(…) net art is a victim of its b-status. It is treated as group phenomenon, as a technically defined new art form. That is something that we have to leave behind as soon as possible, because that is the standard way to do these things: A group creates a hype. They call it mail art or video art, and it’s doomed to die after five years. (Paesmans in Interview with Jodi, 1997)
Even though Liu’s idea of change within the society of information is in a way overthrown by Paesmans, other influencing theoreticians reinforce the criticism of the questioned idea to an even further extent. According to White:
There are certainly situations in which repetition and the related performative moments can be a research and political strategy. Nevertheless, the ongoing viability of such instances remains unclear. According to Christine Ross, the recent trend among media artists to focus on “insufficiency” and “fallible corporeality” indicates the limits of the performative as a political tactic. (White, 2006: 113)
After questioning the power of contemporary media/net artists, White claims there is another problem hidden within the aesthetics of failure:
Despite critical and theoretical arguments about the political effects of failure, this strategy also presents some problems. Spectator’s increasing recognition of net art and the growing interest of many traditional art institutions indicate that the aesthetic of failure will continue to become more stylistic. (White, 2006: 113)
In response to Liu’s concept, White claims that the possible changes (as in the analyzed example of avant-garde reforming the cool) will not happen that drastically, and they will keep forming within the world of technology based Internet art. Finally, even though the general contradiction of visions, White comes to an agreement about the culture of remix/deconstruction/chaos as a governing aesthetic:
The challenge for net artists, software producers, technology critics, and other spectators may be finding new critical strategies rather than relying on repetition to highlight the ways that technologies have been constructed. Perhaps with such effects and aesthetics, spectators can continue to read carefully as well as differently. (White, 2006: 113)
To sum up the above revision of theories in relation to the questioned idea of Liu, it is most important to recall the following notions. Liu presents the concept of knowledge work and its direct relation to the rise of information technology within a contemporary society. Within those environments he sees another rise - a mixture of cultures and styles, living and constantly shifting chaos. He perceives the socio-political features of hi-tech “cool”, and applies a concept of destructive creativity – a reverse concept to Schumpeter’s creative destruction, out of which he formulates suggestions of improvement for both humanities and arts. Some of the analyzed theoreticians would agree with Liu – Caleb Kelly believes that new can only arise from the devastated. Others would not agree: jodi.org a famous art collective described by most of the authors, as well as Michele White, would present a much more critical stance. Paesmans believes in short lifespan of net art projects and claims death of each and every one of them within five years of its presentation. White on the other hand perceives problems avoided by Liu, and suggests finding new critical strategies.
Bibliography and Readings:
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 2-26.
Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, ‘Glitch’, in Matthew Fuller
(ed.) Software Studies: A Lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008,
pp. 110-119.
Michele White, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: Confusing Spectatorswith
Net Art Gone Wrong’, in The Body and the Screen: Theories of
Internet Spectatorship, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 85-
113.
Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Studies Manifesto (2009/2010).
Florian Cramer, ‘Discordia Concors: www.jodi.org’, Nettime (2002),
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
9708/msg00112.html
Tilman Baumgärtel, ‘Interview with Jodi.org’, Nettime (1997),
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
9708/msg00112.html
Caleb Kelly, ‘Recording and Noise: Approaches to Cracked Media’,
in Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009, pp. 1-82.
Alan Lui, ‘Destructive Creativity: The Arts in the Information Age’,
in The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 317-371.
Joseph Schumpeter, ‘Creative Destruction’, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975) [orig. pub. 1942], pp. 82-85:, retrieved from http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/liu/english25/materials/schumpeter.html , 16th Feb 2011;
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