Schloss Dagstuhl

I'm off to Germany soon for a seminar on "Computational Creativity" at Schloss Dagstuhl in Saarland, Germany. Schloss Dagstuhl is a conference centre set up to hold conferences in computer science, though this particular conference crosses over into the arts and philosophy. The topics up for discussion centre around creative behaviour in artificial systems; the systems may operate autonomously or with guidance or collaboration from a human artist. A particular focus is on systems that are modelled on evolution in nature, and there is already quite a long history of "artificial life art", surveyed in the book "Metacreation" by Mitchell Whitelaw. There is also quite a long history of computer programs that can improvise music in concert with other (human) musicians.

The seminar is shaping up to be pretty exciting, and some well-known people will be there. The web page for the seminar is here.

Galanter's complexist manifesto

I recently came across an article by the generative artist, writer and academic Philip Galanter: an admittedly manifesto-like piece in which he proposes what he calls "Complexism - a new science-friendly paradigm for the arts and humanities".

Galanter discusses modernism and postmodernism in the context of complexity theory from science. He sees post-modernism as offering a corrective to some of the unfortunate aspects of modernism, but now post-modernism has fallen has fallen victim to its own problems. Galanter's Complexism is intended to reconcile the two via the theory and practice of complex systems, and he presents the following table:

Modernism	Postmodernism	Complexism
Progress	Circulation	Emergence and Co-evolution
Fixed	Random	Chaotic
The Author	The Text	The Generative Process
Authority	Contention	Feedback
Truth	No Truth	Incomplete truth known to be not fully provable
Pro Formalism	Anti Formalism	Form as public process not privilege
Hierarchy	Collapse	Connectionist networks

There is a lot to be unpacked here. Galanter expands on the table in the 20 pages of the article, which is online at http://philipgalanter.com/downloads/complexism_chapter.pdf. He has also started a blog in which he intends to further develop these ideas, at http://www.philipgalanter.com/complexism/index.html.

I am certainly pleased to see work like this proceeding beyond the now sterile debate of modernism versus postmodernism, and especially work that deals seriously with some of the extraordinary advances in scientific thinking of the last half-century or more.

Art Incorporated

I have been reading a small book by Julian Stallabrass, who lectures at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The edition that I have is entitled Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction, (one of a series of Very Short Introductions from Oxford University Press) but it was first published in 2004 under the title Art Incorporated, which better reflects its contents. The book discusses the period 1989 to about 2002, covering the collapse of the Communist states in Eastern Europe and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole superpower, the stockmarket crash of the late 1980s, the boom in the 1990s and the dot-com crash of 2000. The book contains a sustained discussion of the relationship of the art world to globalisation, neoliberal ideology, rampant capitalism and consumerism, with reference to a substantial number of individual artists and artworks.

A few quotes from the book:

"Art prices and the volume of art sales tend to match the stock markets closely, and it is no accident that the world's major financial centres are also the principal centres for the sale of art."

"Corporate culture has thoroughly assimilated the discourse of a tamed post-modernism. As in mass culture, art's very lack of convention has become entirely conventional."

And, even more strongly:
"The daring novelty of free art - in its continual breaking with conventions - is only a pale rendition of the continual evaporation of certainties produced by capital itself, which tears up all resistance to the unrestricted flow across the globe of funds, data, products, and finally the bodies of millions of migrants."

In the context of the proliferation of bienniales in the 1990s:
''Just as business executives circled the earth in search of new markets, so a breed of nomadic global curators began to do the same, shuttling from one bienniale or transnational art event to another ..."

"[A bienniale] performs the same function for a city ... as a Picasso above the fireplace does for a tobacco executive."

In discussing an exhibition of Chinese art in Hong Kong in the context of globalisation, making the point that the welcome for "exotic" artists in the international art scene is very selective:
"... such works [in more traditional Communist and realist styles] were genuinely different from Western productions and therefore invisible to the global art system".

And a rather depressing conclusion:
"To break with the autonomy of free art is to remove one of the masks of free trade. Or, to put it the other way round, if free trade is to be abandoned as a model for global development, so must its ally, free art."

Despite the conclusion, I found the book refreshing!

"Silence Sound" at Frankston Arts Centre

There is a big group exhibition coming up at the Frankston Arts Centre under the name "Silence Sound". My video Triangular Vibrations is included.

Opening: Thursday 30th April 6pm.
Frankston Arts Centre (Cube 37)
37 Davey St, Frankston VIC 3199

Exhibition: 28th April - 23rd May.

http://artscentre.frankston.vic.gov.au/

Visual Music Marathon reprise

In 2007 Dennis Miller organised a Visual Music Marathon in Boston as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Now the whole Marathon is on again in New York, at the Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, New York City, on April 11th, 2009, form 10am to 10pm. My piece Dissonant Particles is included, in the first hour. Details of the Marathon are at http://www.2009vmm.neu.edu/.