Digital Aesthetics - Coursework Example

Where the digital represents exact order and precise control of virtual realities through mathematical dualities as symbolized in binary or machine language, the "glitch" in digital art is an example of chaos in order, or the moment of singularity as expressed by space, time, & mind in the image. Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin define the glitch as being symbolic of the first generation of web art or net art, the artistic expression of the global underground community in the dot.com era of the early internet’s birth and expansion. "Glitch: This term is usually identified as jargon, used in electronic industries and services, circuit-bending practitioners, gamers, media artists, and designers. In electrical systems, a glitch is a short-lived error in a system or machine. A glitch appears as a defect..." (Goriunova & Shulgin, 2008) It is the breakdown and error of systems that produces the opportunity for genuine individuality or subjectivity of the post-modern digital artist. The individual self-expression is reduced to an ironic defect within the greater matrix of social programming and control, but is experienced heroically as overcoming by the person through creative self-identity. The glitch is the spontaneous ecstasy and spark of life referenced by the mythology and fairy tales of Artificial Intelligence in science fiction: the ghost-soul in the machine vs. man as god. The artist is seeking the reflection of singularity through artistic expression, yet to go beyond limits, the software imposed tautology must be transcended by the chaos of the glitch. The glitch is the software expression of the human in software through the most fundamental characteristic of modern humanity, human error. This is experienced as the irrationality of the unforseen manifesting in the face of the programmer and engineer’s vision of total control through system design. Yet, as both a symbol and in artistic practice, the glitch represents the synchronicity of a moment irreproducible and inconceivable other than how it appears, randomly, unexpected, captured as a nano-second flash and still-life photograph of quantum mind with all its uncertainty in post-modern awareness. Goriunova & Shulgin chart the meme of the modern Prometheus from Shelley’s Frankenstein as an example of Victorian conceptions of disfunctionality vs. utilitarianism: people, objects, and ideas "sooner or later becoming evil as they stop functioning correctly." (Ibid., p.115) If Frankenstein is the early modernist “glitch-as-hero,” then the “AI-becoming-conscious” meme is the post-modern equivalent. This dream mythology seeks to conjure into existence, from a fusion of science and imagination, a sentient, autonomous, & self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) being in literature, animation, or film. This theme usually takes two forms: 1) technology as part of nature: evolving, spontaneously becoming sentient through a glitch that represents rupture of plane of existence, ecstasy, and transcendence of being, or 2) the human as glitch and hero: the triumph of the Promethean individual against the technological machine of AI - SkyNet, Matrix or 1984-style totalitarianism. The glitch is the bond that joins the human and technological into a greater or extended body-mind entity and unity, as McLuhan and Harraway describe the cyborg artist. The mythological fame and victory of classical heroes and commercial artists does not reflect the experience of the post-modern artist as glitch, nor do they reflect the ideology of the cyborg existentially. There is instead a fracturing into greater anonymity and obscurity of identity, specialization of selfhood through disappearance characterized by a web of anonymous accounts, nicknames, and passwords masking and cloaking the identity through various veils of online mediated social networking. Hyper-individuality as represented by space-time and scale is marginal, obscure, nano-individuality. Where the classical and commercial modern artists climbed to the highest rungs of fame, becoming constellations, like even the great Greek mythological heroes in their contemporary renown, the post-modern artist-as-glitch appears and disappears instantly, forgotten, ignored, unseen, buried or obscured by data overload, a mere speck lost in time yet existent and expressive of individual personality against a broader constant of social repetition, apathy, and ignorance. The central theme of the glitch is humanity vs. the machine, which may also be framed in terms of a “soul in the machine” or artificial intelligence that is autonomous and sentient. This is a technology of base materialism, structural engineering, and dream behaviorism that functions as a dissociative force: man as god-creator. The artist-as-glitch rejects and resists behaviorism as social programming and through the act of individuality or self-becoming, self-realization and self-actualization. The artist becomes the anti-hero in relation to society, the Frankenstein or cyborg image of self constructed and deconstructed from the changing perspectives of virtual subjectivity. "A glitch is a singular dysfunctional event that allows insight beyond the customary, omnipresent, and alien computer aesthetics... a possibility to glance at the softwares inner structure... although a glitch does not reveal the true functionality of the computer, it shows the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized." (Goriunova & Shulgin, p.114, 2008) The glitch is symbolic of the artist’s individuality through the inherent singularity of space, time, and mind represented in its moment of overcoming, simultaneous with its moment of capture. The post-modern artist-as-glitch is in self-image the synergy of cubism, dada, and surrealism, the screen is just another canvas for abstract expressionism, hyperrealism, or superflat theory. These ideas have gone beyond themselves in fueling the becoming of the post-modern artist-as-glitch through individuality. If beauty, most fundamentally, must be judged as an expression of truth, then the truth of the individual in the post-modern era of the early web and net art as posited by Goriunova & Shulgin is found in the digital aesthetics of the glitch. "Glitches are usually regarded as marginal. In reality, glitches can be claimed to be a manifestation of genuine software aesthetics." (Ibid., p.111) In summary, Goriunova & Shulgin claim that the glitch is representative of a larger cross-section of early online and digital art, as well as mainstream trends and innovations in performance, installation, and conceptual art. They show the same repetition of patterns in computer hacking, 8-bit music production, computer programming “bugs,” circuit-bending, and innumerable post-modern digital artist micro-cosmologies constructed or painted in multimedia binaries. In every instance, the artist is seeking transcendence and individuality through self-expression, as related to the individual’s own experience of life – a post-modern existentialism or trans-humanism that is transcendental. The glitch is represented mythologically by Ray Kurzweil in his vision of the Singularity. The glitch is the local rupture that gives birth to the Singularity through chaos and ecstasy. The glitch represents the cyborg-becoming of the digital artist at the moment of time when it appeared as a spontaneous expression of the mirror of the mind, to be captured exceptionally in binaries as representative of a space-time singularity of consciousness capable of being replicated uniquely as a meme. In this manner, microcosm and macrocosm are symmetrical in the tautology of the post-modern cosmology. The individual discovers the soul in ecstasy, the moments of consciousness that transcend the individual’s own societal programming into a vast infinity of cosmic awareness. The machine becomes sentient and discovers its own soul as well through the glitch. In the imagination of humanity, disassociated being is projected as fact, but the machine can never be more than a mirror of the mind of the individual or society that created it without the same ecstatic force of becoming and overcoming manifesting through the miraculous. These truths cannot be explained completely with words, science, or traditional neuro-linguistic programming as accepted by society. The irrational in dada is related to the higher logic of the soul, experienced as irrational to the megalomaniac aspects of ego, but functioning as a transcendent for the subjective identity. The societal programming of history, views, politics, personal tastes, etc. through education, media, entertainment, and other social forces in hyperreality can all be related to the programming of the computer and the computer as symbol of mind. The monopoly of super-giant corporations and governments over the minds of individuals in mass-media cultures represents social hegemony and control vs. the viral innovations of hackers, free-thinkers, and communicators, the artistic heroes of chaos and liberation representing freedom / evolution on the internet in a type of imaginary dance of cosmic unfolding experienced within IT subculture exclusively. The memes distributed through mass-education are constructed on the same models of control as the industrial assembly-line in the modern, but on the pattern of software in the post-modern. Because of the way “the media is the message,” the glitch and cyber art cannot exist without the greater technological system as a matrix-type environment that frames and enables the becoming. In fact, without electricity, the operating system, the hardware, and the web, these forms of net art have no existence whatsoever, nor repeatability, life, or preservation through human transmission. Thus, individuality as expressed symbolically through the glitch is reduced to the nano-size of the virus, virtually irrelevant, and must replicate in the same manner as the virus as existential resistance to authoritarianism in knowledge systems of control, internally as well as socially, just in order to survive. The digital image - .gif, .jpg, .png – is of the same nature as the post-modern individual, viral and micro-sized in relation to the megalith of mass-produced societal values but with the infinite possibilities of creativity inherent in the mind as potentiality of expression and diversity. The digital image is crafted by the artist in the same manner as the clay pot, or the text, or the video – it is multimedia individuality, a synergetic singularity of continuing existence of the personhood in quantum uncertainty or social relativity. As such, the digital image as photograph is assumed to be a perfect, pixel-for-pixel reproduction of reality, yet still operates on the force of illusion. The map, in these instances, is not the territory but appears as such through the disappearance of the real or simulacrum of reality transformed into hyperreality, as suggested by Baudrillard. (Baudrillard, 1998) Technology tricks the mind into believing that the digital is real, in the imagination it becomes organic, natural, and mystic. In this manner, AI takes its first steps of becoming through creative mythology and expression of the artist. In the McLuhan school, the media is an extension of man, the multimedia is a mirror of mind, extended but disassociated. (McLuhan, 1994) Dreams of AI, or computer software and technology created by the collective mind and hands of humanity becoming sentient, or self-aware and autonomously intelligent beyond programming intent– these will be remembered as the mythological projections of the individualism and heroism of the times in which they were socially conceived. The ecstatic dimensions of consciousness cannot be reduced to binaries, to materialism, to fate, to the purely digital, yet these aspects of institutions and idea structures govern expression. The primordial erupts through the glitch and gives birth to the Singularity, but the unexpected bits and bytes appear as avant garde. The post-modern digital artist as cyborg is the Frankenstein monster produced by industrial society and the scientific method, but this triumph of micro-individuality in garage construction and retro-styling are but cinematic effects painted onto reality by consciousness in an attempt to express personality. The digital image, in its pliability, is the gem of mind that can become anything, science or art. Through the glitch as photograph of mind or the abstract expressionism of self-realization represented in synchronicity, the holographic nature of reality and the self comes into being artistically through being captured in a fraction of space-time digitally in the matrices of technology. The artist’s self-concept, constructed of memes from classical movements such as surrealism, cubism, abstract expressionism, and dada, synergizes classical and modern methodologies by sampling them into the digital image mentally as conceptual dimensions of the art. This can be related to any idea or concept by the artist digitally through imagination, but the glitch speaks of the inexpressible methods of integration that map consciousness through the wisdom of self-knowledge beyond the control of ego or the chaos inherent in the individual transcendence of the limitations of established order. The ghost in the machine is the lost soul of its creator, disassociated and cut off from self-concept by the media hypnosis induced by McLuhan’s Narcissus’ narcosis, and it is through the glitch that it reappears, is re-identified, and re-integrated through individual awareness of the collective unconscious. The glitch re-establishes the humanity of the artist in contrast to the totalitarianism of the software-hardware conglomerate of social control, but is illusory, unpredictable, and unscripted in a way representing abrupt evolutionary change through mutation. As such, the glitch represents the digital aesthetics of the cyborg in early internet art and culture. Bibliography: Baudrillard, Jean 1998, SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS, Selected Writings, Ed Mark Poster, Stanford University Press, 1998, PP.166-184. Blais, Joline & Ippolito, Jon & SMITH 2006, At the Edge of Art, London, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006. 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