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Subject: Verena Andermatt Conley q&a with Josie and Pauline part1 From: pauline@metamute.COM (pauline) Date: 21 Aug 1997 12:40:09 +0200 * * * * * First stage of conversation between Verena Conley, Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Josephine Berry. Verena Andermatt Conley has written widely on feminism, technology and art. Verena tried to come to the Documenta, but wasn't able to in the end... Since she is curently staying in the National Superior Forest in the US, we thought it was a very apt situation in which to continue our conversation with her about our theme, technoscience, and related matters. This conversation will hopefull continue over the next couple of days. All sessions will be posted to the newsgroup. Questions for dx: I am sitting here in the Superior National Forest, overlooking a river on which the Voyageurs used to canoe. There are bears, moose, wolves, coyotes, beavers in overabundance, eagles and many other species. I am working on my laptop to get the answers to your questions back to you. If my solar panel were hooked up I could even talk to you over the computer. Clearly, the wilderness too has become part of the electronic "revolution." I have a local paper in which I read on p. 1: "Restoring Minnesota." "Each year millions are spent restoring natural resources that have been degraded or have vanished." This is the American story: first you destroy it, then you try to rebuild it. Bigger and better. A copy of Time Magazine tells of El Nino and climatic devastation. The article reduces complexities to simple "facts." In the US, ecological issues are studied in isolation and subordinated to business and profit. So, on to your questions about nature, technology and art. 1. At the end of your essay in Digital Gardens you say: "Humans, at least some of us--have unprecedented chances to rediscover through sophisticated technology, a reenachanted nature, in movement, unpredictable, not existing just to be mastered." How does our highly invasive manipulation of the natural world at atomic and molecular levels, for example, relate to this statement? A: When I wrote my essay, a year or so ago, I was very much taken by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger's Order out of Chaos (1984; La Nouvelle Alliance, 1979). This book's theses were appealing because they showed how advanced technologies and computer screens can lead humans to discover many things about nature that could not be observed with a human eye. The discoveries take place in a virtual universe. At the same time, the discoveries show that nature does not follow cartesian laws of subject and object. It cannot simply be mastered. Some caution is necessary. I think these theses are widely accepted. Yet, at the same time that nature is being manipulated, and that intervention takes place at the very level of the living, which in turn brings about entirely different ways of knowing it, but all the while retaining a lot of uncertainties. So, for example, while many scientists will privately acknowledge that they believe in climatic changes, they will not do so in public because they do not think they have sufficient evidence. My point is that uncertainty prevails at the same time that there is more and more intervention, and that much advanced knowledge reveals uncertainties. Q: With new understandings of the working of chaotic systems came a destabilisation of our belief that we could master nature. A: I think that humans know more and more. There is, one can say, little enigma left. At the same time, one cannot entirely predict. An understanding of the functioning of nature is important and fascinating. Yet, scientists are constantly revising their findings. Because of technologies, we have new knowledge which enables humans to prevent as well as intervene but without the old cartesian sense of mastery. Q: How do you think these findings impact on the above? A: These findings are not neutral. They are always ideologically charged. It depends on your point of view. If you believe that technology will take care of it, then everything is just fine--like life in American magazines. If you are more ecologically oriented, you will take the findings to make adjustments in the ways you live and consume. Q. Do you think we have transposed our desires to master systems from the natural to the technological? A: There are still those who want to master both. It has been shown very well by culture critics such as Paul Virilio and others how the transportation revolution changed our relation to time and space in the 19th century and how the electronic revolution changed it in the 20th. Everything is simultaneous. I can sit several thousand miles away from you and talk to you. Virilio is more paranoid. He thinks that teletechnology is a form of fascism (See his Art of the Motor). Cybernetics are based on information alone. He shows their origin in fascism. Information compresses time and space. It ejects humans from the habitable space, so to speak. To pure information, devoid of human traces, he opposes writing, in the strong sense of the word. I don't think that cybernetics are just fascistic. I am more inclined towards Gregory Bateson's theories of cybernetics as programs and ideas. Yet I agree with Virilio when he says that technologies as speed are a form of war. It gives an advantage to those who have it and is used in order to dominate others. Technologies are often first developed by the military. But technologies can also be used as prostheses with which we get to know the world and ourselves. Computer-aided subjectivities can help get out of scientific and enclosing paradigms. Curiously, everything now is called a system: There are weather systems, solar systems, protection systems, informations systems, love systems, freight systems, pest control systems, forest management systems, highway systems. Jack Burnham in Beyond Modern Sculpture (1969) shows that the sculptural object is replaced by the sculptural system and that the notion of system follows what used to be called the capitalist economy and what now have become "free market democracies" where you enter a system and do not own an object. To buy a car, is to enter into a system, etc. By the way, GOD in the US is an acronym for Guaranteed Overnight Delivery!! Q. You are clearly not a fan of Baudrillard's assertions that we are receding from the time/space continuum into the "non-space" of electronic culture. Perhaps because he is extreme in his description and neglects to talk about the mix of space and non-space that we experience in our position on the cusp of new and old worlds. How does our ability to work upon the non-space of the gene which later impacts upon the real space of the flesh affect our relationship to space? A: I am not against Baudrillard. To the contrary, I think his theses are brilliant. He had just become a bit too cynical but seems to be revising this position lately. I think that the anthropologist Marc Auge shows well how we live in a mixture of continuity/discontinuity. However, Baudrillard's analyses of the disappearance of a symbolic in any society dominated by structural laws of value is very true. The portrait over the mantlepiece is not that of your ancestor but one you bought at the antique store color coded with your interior (system)! What does this say about art? That it is recuperated by the market and has no other values. For Baudrillard, there is no way out except at the level of form. We can dream that art's experimentation with new technologies can provide such openings. Isn't that what dx tries to do? Rather than putting us on the cusp of old and new, we can say that we are at a point of articulation similar to that of the introduction of writing and the invention of the printing press but that the changes are more global. Is new always better? That's what the market would like to make us believe. We will see... Q: How does the increasingly likely possibility of "coding" humans on a genetic level--or at least making serious interventions in their genetic makeup affect man's relation to the technical? A: (As I am answering this, the eagle swoops down on the river and carries off a little duck). It glorifies it. Gene therapy will undoubtedly be used. To what extent, we will see. Right now, it makes good headlines and has people up in arms about moral issues. I think it would be terrific if you could replace a gene of someone who will have Alzheimers, etc. But how widespread will this be? The ethical issues are less religious but raise the question of availability. Will you have to be rich to have access, or is it open to anyone? Most people do not even have access to basic medical care at this point. Will it be used to police people? Q: Do you think we are becoming increasingly aware of our symbiosis or do you think we are becoming ever more dualistic in our separation of the natural and the artificial as we see "essential nature" slip ever further from view? A: This is a very general question. In ecological matters, which for me are natural, social and mental (the three cannot be separated but are linked transversally) we cannot go back to dreams of harmony and equilibrium. Intervention is complete at all levels. The theories such as those of Prigogine and Stengers have given us the expression of far-from-equlibrium conditions. It's more a question of adjusting and tinkering and experimenting, of knowing that A will not simply control B, but that all terms change. "Essential nature" is a rather vast term. My relation to nature may not be quite the same when I am in Boston, where I live, with its cute new England houses and shops or when I am here in the North Woods where people are still struggling to keep nature at bay. It think we are, to repeat, at a point where we can intervene through technologies as never before and, also, we have a different understanding that makes us see nature as not to be simply mastered. Nature has been reassessed and we appreciate it differently. And who is we anyhow? The representative of Earth First will have a different appreciation from that of the CEO of Shell Oil or of a disempowered person in a city slum or in a forest. Q: Why have you become interested in the possibilities open to artists to reenvisage the relationship between the technological and the natural? A: I am interested in experimentation and invention. Art has always had a relation to nature. It tried to imitate, represent, and so on. Technologies are, to repeat, prostheses. They afford us with multiple possibilities. In the city of bits, there are new artistic media that can explore other relationships between nature and culture but also between humans themselves, humans and animals and vegetals. The fabulous developments in technologies (that can be seen as a subheading of machines) does in no way obliterate the distinction between nature and culture but it changes the relationship. The city of bits affords myriad possibilities to artistic media. Changes in the relation between nature and culture do not presuppose necessarily a message in art either but, rather, open onto new perceptions. Art has always dealt with nature. Computer aided subjectivities provide great openings away from the trodden path of self and other. This does not mean that art necessarily has a message. The artist may indeed have a morbid fascination with him or herself and disregard the world, enclosed in their own narcissism. Others may be open to the world. I prefer the latter. Q: In the exhibit, Digital Gardens, to which you contributed you use the metaphor of the garden for our cultivation of the world outside of us and our deliberate use of artificial structures to mimic and represent our changing view of nature. Do gardens in general and specifically the "gardens" presented by this exhibit lead to the conclusion that nature is only ever cultural, or do they give a view onto nature's self-constituting character outside of reach of the cultural? A: The title for the Exhibit at the Powerplant in Toronto, Canada, to which you refer was coined by the curator, Louise Dompierre. I like the title because it holds in suspension two seemingly incompatible terms. "Garden" is already a cultural and cultivated form of nature. It is not brute nature. It also has, for me, echos of Foucault for whom "gardens" are one of the spaces of discontinuity in society. Gardens, for me, are therefore not simply inscribed in a continuity. But they are not agricultural. They evoke something singular, that is, artistic rather than scientific. A garden does not have to be in a physical space. It can be a mental space. That space, or territory, is less extensive than intensive, part of a mental ecology. The artists on exhibit at the Powerplant (Rosemary Laing, Mat Collishaw, Doug Buis, Gregory Crewdson and Janine Cirincione +Michael Ferraro) all used multimedia and new technologies for their works that complicated the relation of their work to nature. Yes, I think nature continues to exceed the cultural. Paradoxically, as there is less and less of it, there is also more and more! Q: Much of the terminology you use is similar to Suzi Gablik in her Reenchantment of Art in which she tries to make a case for a more engaged, socially participatory art, one that does not critique from a distance but changes social structures from within. Do you see any similarities between the ways you view the possible functions of art and the way she does? A: I do not know Suzi Gablik and therefore cannot tell you. To create is not to militate. To create can be a form of resistance. In fact, it is. To invent is to trace new maps, to make openings. To militate is done at a different level. But art, in a strong sense, can provide criticism and openings in society. Art as invention can provide openings for other relations to nature, the world, the body.To change social structures from within, yes, I would not disagree. I am not sure art alone brings about social changes. Artists can function transversally with other people who intervene on human subjectivity, architects, educators, fashion designers, and the like. Q: Both of you seem to have more sympathy for work that has a synthetic function of sorts. In her case, even a "spirituality," a healing function. Do you not feel that art's role could be overmystified. A: I do not, to repeat, know Gablik's work. As for myself, I am not for healing or redemption but for production, eperimentation and enjoyment. Enjoyment as joy, that is, rather than jouissance--bliss--, ethics (force) not morality and moralizing. People, artists, group together because of similar affects. They inhabit similar territory. As Bateson reminds us, bad ideas are contagious too. We never really know until later and decide what it is we think we have to do. No, I am not into mystification. There is an awful lot of it right now in the US. I think it's a reaction against the voids left by the absence of symbolic registers and the all-pervasiveness of material culture. Mystification is very popular in New Agism and the academy. Art as people, Lifestyles. That's intellectual hoodwinking and generally bad art for me. Uncertainties do no mean that we know nothing and cannot do anything, far from it. Q: It seems, judging from you interest in Guattari who also suggested that the sphere of art was unique in its capacity to take chances and meld spheres of action and inquiry that you have not succumbed to the immanent cynicism about art's own institutionalizing structures? It would be interesting to hear your view, for example, on the functionalism of the white gallery space, or any comments on work made outside of it. A: Yes and no. Guattari, like many French intellectuals like to think that artists have a "radar" that is more perceptive than common mortals. Their beliefs may go back to Freud who put artists ahead of scientists bound to objective truths and less open to experimentation. Hence the belief in the avant-garde. Have the avant-gardes died? Can new technologies contribute to reviving them? We shall see. Art may be able to open spaces that are currently closed by technological society in the service of profit alone. Art is not just contemporary. There is also past art. The museum is not simply a dead space but quite mobile. We can hang and unhang art. For this, see Jean-Francois Lyotard's recent provocative reading of Andre Malraux. Maybe there are personal spaces where we can escape the cynicism of the art world as outlined by Baudrillard but also Lyotard. To come back to your gallery.yes, of course, there is that sterility of an artifical environment, of the space of pure white that does not exist anywhere else. I would love to comment on work outside of it: Here, in the surrounding forest, there is Indian art and chainsaw sculpture. This art imitates and denatures nature. Birds, eagles, pelicans of sculptures and totempoles have bright colors, the kind you do not find in nature: bright yellows, whites, pinks. They too, like Rosemary Laing's works in Digital Gardens remake and refashion a nature through culture... -- '' ' ' ''' ''' '' ' '' '' '' '''' '''''' ' '' ' Content Converted : http://www.documenta.de/workspace Content Continued : http://www.icf.de/workspace News Server : news://www.icf.de/ Mailto : workspace@documenta.de Hybrid WorkSpace 16.Jun-28.Sep.97 Orangerie/Kassel '' ' ' ''' ''' '' ' '' '' '' '''' '''''' ' '' '