The Regressive Sublime
Reflections on computer art
Chris Horrocks, 1998
Programming Note: Chris Horrocks has been my Art History professor during my time at Kingston University, and we’d kept in touch during my subsequent time at The Jan van Eyck Akademie. One of the first times I ever spoke publicly, was for a cultural institution in Amsterdam called Stichting de Geuzen, where I connected the history of video games to my current practice at the academy. For the event, the organizers invited me to have a writer I respected, produce a piece on the topic, and also connect it to my work. The piece was printed out at scale, and pasted to the walls of the gallery where I spoke (there are some pictures towards the end of the page). I’d always wondered what had happened to this text, but I recently rediscovered it, hidden away on an old CD-ROM and able to be unearthed through the magic of emulation software.
How does the concept of art change when its practice takes place within and between computers? Can we still name the agent of this practice an artist? Why use the word art at all?
I am curious to know, like Marshall McLuhan, what would take place if art were suddenly seen for what it is: "exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties."
What happens, then, when we adopt the specifications of "experimental art" to prepare ourselves for the trauma which technology and information will bring? McLuhan suggests that such experimental art (and computer art seems relevant here) can provide such resistance to the impact by providing a set of rules or procedures which negate it. He therefore characterises art as a 'counterirritant'. However, McLuhan continues: "But the counterirritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit."
This is true of Duchamp, whose most famous irritant (Fountain,1917) pre-empted and prepared us for the coming impact of mass production, universal aestheticisation of the environment and the end of art itself. However, the victory was shortlived, as Duchamp inadvertently substituted a far more virulent strain into the culture: the renunciation of art, a strategy which has since become as common as flu. Pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, postmodernism and posthumanist art are its mutations. Art, in short, refused to disappear; and no matter which attempts are made to deconstruct art as value (by parodying originality, referentiality, etc.) the result is that art is maintained and its extinction is deterred.
There might be another route, and perhaps computer art (an endearingly anachronistic term) has a role. Joseph Weizenbaum, in Technology at the Turning Point (1977) says that the computer comes along just in time, allowing us to avoid revolutionary change by shoring up existing institutions and practices which might have collapsed under the weight of existing data. The computer rather than facilitating change - and this includes aesthetic revolution - absorbs it.
In other words, the computer could be seen to prevent structural transformation in the economy of art by absorbing it as information. Where art can no longer attempt to convert itself into the everyday, as political or aesthetic revolution, it must develop along other lines. We have seen art fail spectacularly in the past to merge with industrial technology; think of the revolutionary purpose of Constructivism, the nihilist desire in machines of Tinguely, the technological utopian strands of Paik's robots and screens, and the masochistic contortions of Stelarc.
Art still survived in these cases, so why should computer art, and in particular interactive computer art, be different?
I think the answer might lie in the changing role of the artist. Freed from the demand of history (including art) they are no longer subjects - conscious, free, autonomous, disobedient, revolutionary, and dialectical agents. They have in the first instance become the most resistant of objects. We see this in the prevalence of artists who refuse meaning, responsibility, and embrace infantilism, autism, passivity and stupidity. They are acquiring for themselves the regressive techniques which, as McLuhan might say, provide a counterirritant to the "next blow", whatever way that coming trauma might manifest itself. This is the artist-as-object, and is still close to the likes of Warhol; but qua object this artist still presumes a subject, or a space in which alienation and reification still suggest emancipatory potential. Yet what if there were a further stage, where the artist is both/neither subject and object: what if there were the artist as a thing or an it?
It seems that the contradiction of the artist-as-thing actually producing another object is one than cannot easily be dispensed with, unless of course the immersion of the artist into a space where differences between subject and object, artist and work are effaced. These 'artists' form a kind of regressive avant-garde: as autistic producers and consumers, somewhere between the screen and the self, neither an object of history nor its subject, these people are an advance guard for the inhuman universe towards which we are all heading.
Playing art as a game of feedback, inside a screen, between computers, and in a state of digital immersion (in effect, nowhere) is an escape of a kind for artists, but the price for leaving behind art is for the artist to become a thing, or more accurately, an 'it'. This is especially relevant in Matthew Shadbolt's work, where the artist is 'it' in a networked game: as a moving target of sorts. This kind of play is a 'counter irritant' that could be called the 'regressive sublime', where the elevation of art into pure light (and a game-playing sense of thrill/terror) is also a reversion of the artist to a virtual adolescent, who anticipates the coming trauma by avoiding it. The escape here is very close to escapism, where the psyche, to use McLuhan's phrase, is less rearranged than dissipated. These new artists have found a medium that suits them, particularly given the fact that computers themselves have no interest in what is historically round the corner; their apocalyptic refusal to recognise the year 2000 as numerically possible is one such example, as is their inability to make distinctions between what is art and what is a game.
Time to play.
