The field of new media art needs a new paradigm to articulate its critical potency as it outgrows the frames of artistic criticism formed around the production of tangible forms, events, concepts and relations, and moves into methodological and technical areas akin to science, technology and political activism. Not by chance, an art that has untapped critical capacity emerges at a time when scholarship, faced with issues of vastly distributed, large-scale and complex natures, needs a new form of cultural response to push it into new forms of organisation. Distributed Critique is the name of an approach to collaboratively analyse new media art’s relationship to the non-art world. It is inspired by some specific “problem artworks” I encountered through The New Networked Normal’s Freeport online platform (2018), which also manifested as exhibitions in Berlin and Salford, where I advised on the discourse programme.
This pamphlet was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts. It was developed though two workshops I ran with Daphne Dragona, attended by several other people with experience in arts participation. The workshop attendees were: Nini Huang, Lauren Velvick, Bani Brusadin, Jennifer Booth, Annie Goh, Desiree Coral Guerra, Rubbia Ullah, Dannielle Braithwaite Shirley, Jessica Armstrong, Mark Wright, Andy Robertson, Zoyanda Street, Jen Southern, Emilie Reed, John O’Shea, Natallia Nenarokamava, Gabrielle and Zarina from The White Pube, Donna Holford-Lovell and Michael Johnson. Many thanks to them for their contributions. Thanks also to Gaston Welisch for the diagrams.
In these workshops we used system diagrams inspired by ‘distributed computing’ (a method for doing computing tasks across multiple machines in different locations), machine learning, and ecological systems thinking, such as permaculture, as a method for modelling and re-modeling symposia. Building on the conversations in these workshops, what follows is a discussion of the challenges offered to symposia, by Covid-19, the climate crisis, globalisation, and the complex knowledge environment of art in a post- digital age. I also discuss the valuable exchange of energies, information and forms of collectivity in symposia, and how to refit these exchanges to the current situation. I finish with a practical proposition for supplementing or replacing the traditional notion of a symposium with a perma-symposium system inspired by computing models for combining deep neural nets.
The major issue I identify is that new media art processes, objects, and methodologies have become increasingly complex and “hard to grasp”. This problem is, in fact, an opportunity that can ‘spark a [new] public into being’, inviting us to rethink symposia and similar discursive activities at arts festivals towards the kinds of collectivity the world needs now.
One solution I proposes is to move away from the energy inefficiencies and inequalities of the annual symposium model, towards the idea of a “perma-symposium” which reflects the closed loops of permaculture and natural ecologies, rather than the media ecology of ‘products’ with shelf lives, ‘launches’, ‘drops’, and built-in obsolescence. Nathan uses a variety of systems diagrams to pose and model different kind of approach to gathering, processing and storing the kinds of knowledge made in digital and new media arts.
This phase of Distributed Critique was an art & science research experiment conducted on the occasion of an exhibition called Weather Engines, which took place at Onassis Stegi in Athens in 2022 co-curated by Daphne Dragona and Jussi Parikka. The experiment addresses a need to reconsider the role of the audience in the growing field of art-science – and in doing so, to redress the balance of knowledge sharing, encouraging more ideas to flow from art into science disciplines.
The work is documented and theorised in a paper written by Jones and Dragona: Essay for Leonardo_accepted-manuscript
Funded by ESRC Impact Acceleration Account with Lancaster University.
This paper [accepted Leonardo Journal, March 2024) explores the proposition that experience of art can contribute to scientific discourse on climate issues, especially at the convergence of physical and social sciences. Drawing from an experiment conducted during the Weather Engines exhibition in Athens (2022), it highlights how specialist audiences, notably scientists, engage with contemporary art in their specialist area. The study reveals that scientists discovered novel insights within artworks, and propose innovative interpretations of the work. A distinctive metaphorical structure played a crucial role in shaping scientists’ perceptions, fostering fresh perspectives and uncovering layers of meaning ‘general audiences’ would not perceive.
Festivals contradict the model for the world that we might want after the perma-crisis. They are events planned for a short period of time, for participants and audiences that travel for them from different parts of the world. AND has led conversations about the format of a festival, regards its carbon footprint – and how festivals can change towards better models. AND is also a festival strongly attached to a specific site everytime addressing strongly the local community and town/city that hosts it. These impulses of locality and sustainability are key to conversations about the post-permacrisis world.
Can this festival also become a paradigm for a more concerted perma-action rethinking how teams operate and are networked, in particular how art+science+social collaboration is thought?
This project proposes a long term parallel programme for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival. We will form ‘think tanks’ of scientists and other specialists, and invite them to help interpret the festival’s public output. The intention is to enable the think tank to develop on the knowledge contained in the festival commissions and curatorial process in the arts, and connect it to research cultures in the disciplines represented in their grouping.
This impact project involved AND directors and artists in conversation with Nathan Jones, and resulted in a series of diagrams by designer Thom Isom. The diagrams will be used to inform the future academic-creative collaborations between AND and universities.
Funded by ESRC Impact Acceleration Account
with Lancaster University