— Symbiogenic Experience

In an earlier post, I discussed the concept of ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and what I see as its ontological resonance with cybernetics, particularly its ontology of “unknowability” . I argued that certain interactive arts practices, that I refer to collectively as the “emergent arts” bring these ontological visions “down to earth” so to speak, by amplifying our experience of them. I would like to continue that discussion a bit here.

What I am trying to do is take Merleau-Ponty’s conception of ambiguity and use it as a sort of umbrella term to describe the experience of encountering and interacting with all these emergent, complex processes that artists are exploring and how this idea of ambiguity is akin to a co-evolutionary dynamic that these processes are part of. In other words symbiogenic experience is ambiguous. In Merleau-Pontian terms these are experiences featuring systems and process that are constantly in flux, in development and indeterminately present. They may cause us to react or reflect in different ways to similar situations, perhaps due to various contingencies connected to those situations. An experience may even be “overdetermined”, meaning it has contradictory significance for us while still functioning as a coherent whole . In this sense ambiguity is really a form of openness to alterity and change.

To understand symbiogenic experience one must come to grips with this ambiguous experience with nature. I will argue that the interactive artworks that I collectively refer to as the emergent arts intensify this experience and will investigate how reflection over time will lead to diverse, even contradictory characterizations of experience but which may lead (I assert) to a sort of accretion of a general (though still ambiguous, incipient, something you can’t quite “put your finger on”) feeling of embeddedness and co-determination with an increasingly technologized environment.

In the common meaning of the term, ambiguity has of course, a very lengthy tradition in the arts, along with surprise, wonder and metaphor. In his 1970 paper “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems” , art theorist Jack Burnham provides vital insight on the impact of intelligent systems on the arts when he notes that the emerging expansion of the art experience brought upon by the then nascent field of interactive or technology-based art “encourages the recognition of man as an integral part of his environment”. Burnham stated his belief that “the ‘aesthetics of intelligent systems’ could be considered a dialogue where two systems gather and exchange information so as to change constantly the state of the other” (emphasis in original). This idea of an artwork as establishing a dynamic, emergent interplay with human participants is not only common today but is often the central concern of many interactive artists. In particular, concepts such as emergence, autonomy and self-organization that were not in the vernacular of the arts, or art theory and criticism in Burnham’s time, but which nevertheless resonate with his ideas of a mutualistic and autopoietic art experience, are claimed by many contemporary artists who work in the area of artificial life (a-life) as one of the central concerns in their work. These concepts (and by extension the concept of interactivity) — are threaded through the material practices of cyberneticists like Gordon Pask and many interactive artists. I propose that the strangeness and indeterminacy of the dynamic interactions present in these works evince and amplify a sense of incomplete knowledge of an increasingly complex world, full of interacting emergent systems; the totality of which is just beyond the grasp of our comprehension but which we nevertheless adapt to via constant interplay and shifting sets of embodied relations. A phenomenology of emergent arts practice, when read through the lens of neocybernetic theory functions as a way of “naming” (in the sense of reifying as way of generating new concepts and modes of thinking, or updating old ones) the indeterminate complexity that concepts like emergence, autonomy and self-organization come from and may suggest conceptual markers from which to construct new models and modes of analysis.

More to come.

Works Cited