Patterns of Mediation, or The Work of Art in the Age of Computational Distribution
The specific relationship between artistic practice and the community can be appropriately addressed from the standpoint of the framework of an Artist as a Formal System (AFS). Proposed by the writer and artist Alexey Vanushkin, AFS aims to understand the role of artistic practice by focusing less on its content and more on the infrastructural quality of the relation between the artist, the work of art and the community. Presenting art as a means of mediation between the members of its audience, the role of the artist in AFS becomes to reproduce artistic practice in the form of a pattern, which is recognised and adopted in society as a publicly shared experience. Such interpretation is valuable in that it is focused on the performative aspect of production, and therefore can be applied to computational art, where the practitioners use high-complexity software systems to co-author the work with the machine or otherwise displace or substitute their productive role.
Art is not an object, but a discrete pattern of mediation
Within the AFS notion of a pattern of mediation both the pattern and the mediation are equally important. The pattern in artistic practice is a recognisable routine which is used to identify and maintain the boundaries and the choices the artist makes about both internal and external boundary conditions. Internally, the patterns are the means of individual expression, such as skills or materials used in the production of artwork, and the external are the audiences and the social context in which the artwork exists. The mediation here appears as the artistic use of the means of individual expression to identify the boundaries between the internal activity of the artist, who organises the practice in a specific way, and the external realm of ideas that the society has about the practice. Since the artistic event is performative and public by its nature, the process of negotiation is always made explicit to the audience, which effectively creates a new channel of communication between and within the artistic communities of practice and their audiences. While being quite abstract, such a definition of artistic practice does not deal with any features characteristic of particular kinds of art and therefore is appropriate for addressing its meaning for the community in a general sense.
Recognition of patterns: problem space
The boundaries of pattern recognition are flexible, yet enforced by the momentum of practice. This means that whatever is contained within the boundaries that the practitioner creates, can be defined as a topological space limited by the material and symbolic conditions of production, defined in AFS as Search Space. This notion should be viewed together with the notion of a problem space, first discussed by the organisation and cognition theorist Herbert Simon. “Every problem-solving effort, - he writes - must begin with creating a representation for the problem—a problem space in which the search for the solution can take place.” (Simon, [1969] 2019:108.) What this implies is that the problem is not answered by the activity of problem-solving, - despite the name, - but instead gets transformed in response to the application of the method, and the search for the solution continues. After the event of problem solving the problem itself becomes more clearly defined, and the boundary becomes more pronounced. This enables the practitioner to create a new and more specific representation of the problem and to adjust the tools to address the problem in a more instructed fashion once again. The problem space develops as a domain of the possibility of solutions through the ongoing series of iterations of problem-solving.
The problem is not answered by the problem-solving activity but instead gets transformed in response to the application of the method, and the search for the solution continues. The problem space develops as a domain of the possibility of solutions through the ongoing series of iterations of problem-solving.
Production of patterns
Computational art is different from mechanical art in that it is capable of folding the infinitely complex abstraction layers within itself. While mechanically produced artwork is conditioned by the arithmetic relation within the limited means accessible to the mechanism, its computational counterpart has no limit to how many underlying sub-computations each computational event may have. As we saw earlier on ACD, the code is placed in black boxes within black boxes, producing uncertain yet creative results. Due to such complexity, computational artistic production creates a different channel of community involvement, not accessible in the age of mechanical mediation.
The differences are twofold. The first is in the artistic activity that continuously modifies the pattern arrangements to improve on the existing status quo by recombining existing components to achieve the maximisation of the audience’s affective response. The absence of physical limitation in computation creates a context of exponentially increasing bandwidth and, simultaneously, a qualitative change in responses. For example, in mechanical production, the responses to the 19th-century lithograph, and the 20th-century photography and film were equally limited by the specific production techniques and the physical distribution. In computational art, the production system does not constrain the practitioners in terms of individual expression and allows them to create static and moving imagery, sound, text or programming code, as well as to broadcast it with considerably lesser effort.
Second, there is a change in value. In the widely referenced 1935 essay ’The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, the philosopher Walter Benjamin argues that once the mechanical reproduction of an artwork becomes possible, its cult value, - or the aura of its authenticity - is getting replaced by the exhibition value, which is based specifically on the mechanically reproducible qualities of the work. To anthropologist and historian Jos de Mul, for the practices situated within the computation-based production and distribution, the notion of value in the artwork changes once again and presents a manipulation value, defined by the accessibility of the work via the communication channels. This includes accessibility in the widest possible sense, including the ownership rights, such as the use of NFTs to represent artworks, which allows the investors to increase liquidity by the diversification of the portfolio. As the curator and cryptoeconomist Shermin Voshmgir explains, in the pre-token economy, the intermediary, - a dealer or an agent, - is necessary to create a sense of trust between the exchanging parties. In the token economy, the artwork comes in the form of an abstraction, which enables new forms of investment, such as fractional ownership. In this model, the sales are regulated via a smart contract, - a piece of software which distributes funds based on the business logic of a particular market relation. The smart contract makes it possible to buy and trade the fractions of the otherwise undivided art piece without the need for trusted intermediaries. (Voshmgir, 2020: 158, 398.) To explain this in terms of Benjamin and de Mul, once the computation enters the processes of production and distribution, the exhibition value of an artwork transforms into the manipulation value, in the sense that the piece becomes available to all sorts of manipulation, including negotiation of its financial aspects, by being manifest in a new abstract layer of representation, such as via the tokens.
Summing up, computational art forms, like mechanically reproduced ones, are present to their audience as a shared experience. Yet, due to the recombination capacity and its manipulation value, computational forms are involved with their practitioners and communities in a qualitatively different way.
References
- Benjamin, Walter. 1969. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.
- de Mul, Jos. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination,” 2009.
- Alexey Vanushkin, “Artist as a Formal System: Towards a General Theory of Art,” &&&, 2022.
- Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (1969; repr., Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019).
- Shermin Voshmgir, Token Economy: How the Web3 Reinvents the Internet, Second edition (Berlin: BlockchainHub, 2020).