— Symbiogenic Experience

One of my dissertation chapters will be a taxonomy of interactive artworks and art practices that thematize reciprocal interplay (and even co-evolution) of humans and machines and give an intuitive sense of connection or enmeshment with intelligent technological systems. Generally speaking this taxonomy focus on artists and art projects that contain aspects — such as particular technologies, approaches or general themes — that I consider relevant to human-machine co-evolution and symbiogenic experience in the interactive arts.

As if have researched and thought about this I believe that I am beginning to get a sense of what these artworks are and how they relate to my conceptual framework. What I would like to do here is continue this development by proposing a connection between cybernetics and Merleau-Ponty’s ontology by reading these works through the lens of each. While the bulk of the phenomenological and cybernetic analysis will be done in another chapter of the dissertation, I think it is important to lay out the parameters, or the lens through which the taxonomy has taken shape thus far. Allow me to make some of these links briefly and then present a rough sketch of my taxonomy.

A common thread running through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is the concept of ambiguity. This refers to anything that is undergoing development or is continuously open to determination. Experience has this quality, as it is composed of things that have dynamic and flexible, rather than fixed, essences. Since our perceiving bodies are not completely present to consciousness, we are incapable of detached, disembodied reflection upon our lived relations, thus engendering a certain sense of indeterminacy. Similarly, Andrew Pickering notes how cybernetics showcases an “ontology of unknowability”, a vision of the world as full of emergent systems always in dynamic interplay with one another. Both Pickering and Merleau-Ponty valorize reciprocal couplings, rather than a dualist split, between people and things. They present us with a world of co-emergent, co-evolving systems too complex to fully apprehended or objectively explained. A world that is in a perpetual state of becoming, characterized and brought via emergent relations of complexity.

This complexity is brought into high relief via the direct experience of certain interactive or “new media” artworks. In my dissertation, I expand upon Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ambiguity and argue for its ontological resonance with cybernetics through a consideration of various interactive arts practices, including recent work of my own. There is an inherent strangeness and unpredictability in these works and the material practices employed in their construction that I believe has not been fully appreciated. These works, which utilize nonhuman entities such as artificial life agents, living systems and quasi-organic materials, can be said to thematize a certain dynamic of co-evolutionary interaction with an increasingly technologized environment. The emergent relations that unfold in these works may serve as avenues of exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas and may also be useful as ontological grounding for (re)establishing a discourse between systems theory and the arts. In addition, reading neocybernetic emergence and the material practices of cybernetics through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, may guide our understanding of both the making and experiencing of what might be called the emergent arts.

In my next post, I will start to develope my taxonomy by laying out the key characteristics of what I call the emergent arts.

More soon.