Carolyn L. Kane

‘Programming the Beautiful’ Informatic Color and Aesthetic Transformations in Early Computer Art

Color has long been at home in the domains of classical art and aesthetics. However, with the introduction of computer art in Germany in the early 1960s, a new ‘rational theory’ of art, media and color emerged. Many believed this new ‘science’ of art would generate computer algorithms which would enable new media aesthetic ‘principles to be formulated mathematically’ — thus ending the lofty mystifications that have, for too long, been associated with Romantic notions about artwork and art-making. Although, as German computer artist Herbert Franke noted, ‘Traditional aesthetic modes of expression are of little avail to the artist who works with technical systems, particularly computers’, I argue herein that the shifts in aesthetic theory brought about by the introduction of computer art are more complex than a clear-cut subsumption to mathematics, information theory or cybernetics. While the ‘Programming the Beautiful’ project that began in Europe in the 1960s — the three-fold rationalization of the artist, the artwork and color — has been largely realized, nonetheless, today we find ourselves seeped in the neo-Romanticization of new media art, the reglorification of the role of the artist, and new digital color — ironically, the exact opposite of what the project for rational art initially sought.

Speaking Into the iPhone: An Interview With John Durham Peters, or, Ghostly Cessation for the Digital Age:

Conducted by media scholar, Carolyn L. Kane, this interview was recorded on Saturday morning of April 25, 2009, in an empty classroom at MIT, during the MIT6 Media in Transition conference, using Ms. Kane’s iPhone. The morning before, John Durham Peters gave his lecture, “What Ever Happened to Loneliness?” The interview also occurs in honor of the 10th anniversary of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, a text that bridges European, Canadian, and American communications scholarship within an intellectual framework of lost loves and uncanny ghosts. This 2009 interview extends the discussion to more recent issues of loneliness in light of social networking technologies, critical methods, and coping strategies for the information age, the ghosts of digital media, and the present, past, and future of media studies and archiving in the United States.

Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965–1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovations to Media History

ABSTRACT AT&Ts Bell Laboratories produced a prolific number of innovative digital art and experimental color systems between 1965 and 1984. However, due to repressive regulation, this work was hidden from the public. Almost two decades later, when Bell lifted its restrictions on creative work not related to telephone technologies, the atmosphere had changed so dramatically that despite a relaxation of regulation, cutting-edge projects were abandoned. This paper discusses the struggles encountered in interdisciplinary collaborations and the challenge to use new media computing technology to make experimental art at Bell Labs during this unique time period, now largely lost to the history of the media arts.

The Tragedy of Radical Subjectivity: From Radical Software to Proprietary Subjects

ABSTRACT Considering the aestheticization of post-World War II research in cybernetics as part of a cultural shift in art practices and human and machine subjectivities, the author brings these spheres together by analyzing encounters between the experimental artists and researchers who wrote for and edited Radical Software in the early 1970s, including Harry A. Wilmer, Gregory Bateson and Paul Ryan. She then connects their experimental uses of video feedback (a central tenet of cybernetics) to new and increasingly pervasive human-machine subjectivities.

The synthetic color sense of Pipilotti Rist, or, Deleuzian color theory for electronic media art

Electronic artist Pipilotti Rist’s colorful and sensuous video installations enliven the new media landscape and offer a fresh paradigm for conceptualizing color in electronic media art. This article traverses this landscape in Rist’s work by way of Gilles Deleuze’s equally unique and idiosyncratic color theory. While Deleuze articulated his color theory in terms specific to painting, his theory was nonetheless structured out of analogies to inorganic, electronic, and synthetic, machine systems, and thus it is highly compatible for discussions of color in electronic aesthetics. This article explicates Deleuze’s argument that color is a form of haptic sensation that is not nostalgic, nor purely meaningless, but rather offers fresh affects, erotics, and sensorial possibilities that balance meaning and chaos, and affect and logic. The article concludes that the much-needed continuation of color philosophy within new media art is broached through Rist’s synthetic, yet lively artwork.

The Toxic Sublime: Landscape Photography and Data Visualization:

If the cliché about garbage – ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ – is true, its inverse, unfortunately, is not. Heaps and masses of garbage brought into direct view still somehow manage to escape acute recognition, let alone social responsibility or global political activism. This article investigates this trend as a growing problem between the human world and representation. Focusing on historical and contemporary landscape photography, the article questions whether data visualization trends, particularly those that attempt to visualize the post-industrial consumer landscape, help or hinder our capacity to understand our environment, and possibly even ecological endeavors. The article charts the history of photography’s landscape genre, mapping the contours of a shift from the classical ‘nature’ aesthetic, to an industrial, post-industrial, and eventually a mathematical aesthetic contingent on emergent techniques and data visualization in the attempt to depict ever amassing magnitudes of environmental despoliation.

GIFs that glitch: eyeball aesthetics for the attention economy

Abstract The most valuable gift you can give someone is attention. But does this same rule apply to the nonstop demand for attention marshalled through Internet technologies? Driven by an insatiable appetite for profit, scientific research in compression techniques are used to reduce data and economize signals to questionable extremes. Given this awareness, does one comply, paying attention to the point of exhaustion, offering endless hours of eyeball attention re-tweeting, re-blogging, and ‘liking’ so someone else may reap profit, or does one tweak the circuit and rewire the rules of the game? A number of contemporary artists have gravitated to the latter, reconfiguring otherwise functional Internet tools and interfaces into error-laden ‘glitch art’ and animated Graphic Interchange Format (GIFs). While these new glitch genres appear to offer nothing but meaningless fragments of polychromatic noise, they do in fact raise valuable questions regarding the material and economic logic of the Internet, normatively concealed from end users. I argue that certain uses of animated GIFs and glitch art offer an emergent visual rhetoric of anti-communication that marks, echoes, and offsets the progressive rationalization of aesthetics in modern culture and media.

Review: David Golumbia The Cultural Logic of Computation Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 ISBN: 9780674032927

In a recent Tom Cheney cartoon in The New Yorker, three exhausted cavemen stand inside a cave with a set of tally marks etched on the wall behind them. Holding an authoritative staff, a fourth caveman looks in as another turns to him and the caption reads, ‘It will take longer than we thought to go digital.’ The belief that digital computing brought about a revolution in the late 20th century – creating an open, democratic ‘global village’ based on sharing – is effectively dispelled as a myth in The Cultural Logic of Computation. At the same time, given the ubiquity of computers in everyday life, these mythologies are often difficult to see. ‘Computers’, David Golumbia explains, ‘come with powerful belief systems that ... obscure their real function, even when we say we are acutely aware of the consequences of our technologies’ (p. 13). The very definition of ‘computation’ raises a red flag – suggesting not only that ‘human minds are computers but [also] that mind itself must be a computer – that our notion of intellect is, at bottom, identical with abstract computation ...’ (p. 7). The conflation of humans and machines may seem outrageous but, for many it is meant literally. Such conflations, Golumbia shows, find their origins in rationalist theories of the subject, dating from the Enlightenment and the ‘project of instrumental reason’; Hobbesian theories of the ‘free’ individual who possesses the ‘right’ to calculate ratios (p. 10); and Leibnizian claims that ‘Calculation ... [could] perfectly represent the relationships between our thoughts ...’ (p. 15). In the 20th century, linguist Noam Chomsky and followers (primarily Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor are discussed) further cemented the relationship between mind and computation. According to Golumbia, Chomsky, ‘more than any other figure ... defined the intellectual climate in the English-speaking world in the second half of the 20th century’ (p. 31). While this may be a tad generous, Chomsky’s insistence that that individual human brain was akin to a computer and that ‘the most fundamental human phenomena – cognition and language – can effectively be reduced to computation’ (p. 33) generated much financial support (from the US Department of Defense; p. 85) and intellectual