Gillette

2/23/81 Re: Sort-Crossing and Bricolage

"Every message is made of signs: correspondingly, the science of signs termed semiotic deals with those general principles which underlie the structure of all." - Jakobson

". . .Human beings communicate by non-verbal means which must consequently be said to be either non-linguistic (although the mode of language remains formative and dominant) or which must have the effect of 'stretching' our concept of language until it includes non-verbal areas, in fact such 'stretching' is precisely the great achievement of semiotics." - Terence Hawkes

". . .in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chains of signified in such a way to counter the terror of uncertain signs."-Barthes

"What semiotics has discovered is that the law governing or, if one prefers, the major constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e., that it is articulated like a language."-Julia Kristeva

Teleconference as Small Group

[An aside: Thus far Brendan's text assumes the characteristic identity of the cybernetic adept. It has pointed out and defined the cybernetic controls lodged in the value system created by this exchange. The bricoleur accepts and adopts these definitions, in the main; where he feels an urge to add or (presumes to) modify a definition he will enter into the glossary of terms next to the existing definition(s).]

Taking the cue from Kristeva's "major constraints affecting any social practice," teleconferencing is a novel social practice. It is, for that matter, creating artifacts and clues to its own branch of micro-sociology. As social practice, teleconferencing seems unique in its wobbly balance of oppositional dynamics. It is as if perched between gemeinschaft (the primary face-to-face community of "home" and "family") and gesellschaft (the impersonal, bureaucratic society, or socio- technological order). The gemeinschaft-gesellschaft divide is a logical type of social relationship designed to embrace any society from the tiniest village to post-industrial society. Teleconferencing (in this sense) is anomalous and unique in that it involutes the primary face-to-face sense of community through the medium of an impersonal (remote) technology (a small group defined as not more than 15 in this instance). The very fact that the product is text printed on a scroll only adds to and encodes the sense of social anomaly. The social engagement is prototypical in its combination of intimacy and opacity of digital remove.

Accordingly, Parsons fits all social relations into the following (paraphrased) categories:

1. 1. norms or standards which may be "universalistic" or "particularistic".
2. 2. statuses which can be achieved via work or education, ascribed or assigned.
3. 3. roles which may be specified, like that of teacher (or moderator), or diffuse, like that of father (or adept).
4. 4. emotions which are neutral or impartial, affective or partial.

Harithas

2/25/81

I must confess to having certain expectations about the teleconferencing process itself, involving its potential to enhance and expand whatever input. Before I get into this, we need to understand its potential for making art. Is "computer space," for example, analogous to that of the primed and gessoed canvas which symbolizes the essential coherence and purity of consciousness. Is it like the space of the cathode ray tube read as sanctified ground. In forms as secular as Pop and video, the obvious commercialism notwithstanding, the context is procedural. The results may be different from their commercial counterparts, revealing themselves through symbolic forms and/or rituals unique to art.

O'Regan

3/4/81 A Scroll to the Scholar

Twixt cathode and canvas lies an invisible rub, a roomy space with great delusion, deluge, delinquent derivations of mindscape removed from skeletal coordinates--a floating place where too much may seem unforbidden but not all permitted. The output is structured, but the interior free for the wandering. Some fear to wander, others suspect the wanderer! Imagine it axonally, synaptic flash and all! Consider it neuronally, blind alleys appall! Behold Akasha! More words than brains can hold. The empirical residue has evaporated.

Harithas

3/15/81

I would like to begin my formal relationship with the teleconference with a statement about what I shall attempt to contribute to it. Following my last entry, I wish to further clarify my ideas about the relation between the computer process and art. I wish to isolate and explore the mental process and images which belong to such aesthetic formats as Surrealism, Expressionism, Pop, the media-derived forms of the past 10 years, in order to see if and how they can be communicated through the teleconferencing process. For example, a "Surrealist" analysis may involve a factual description of a particular location derived from a geographical survey, a textual account of a mythological event, and a synthetic or unrelated sound tract. This may be conveyed as pure narrative, also as random collage such that all elements are present in discontinuous relationships.

Steven Poser

3/16/81

The mixed quality of participation and observation of communication in teleconference suggests the analogy of a field of particles (as units of display, transmission, retrieval) that expand in density and elongate in time with instantaneous access to the past, a self-correcting universe moving from chaos to order.

In real time, the conference occurs to me as another place to be--contemporaneous and parallel, but allowing for travel back in time, thus historical as well. Question What is special about teleconferencing, and why is that interesting? I would adopt this provisional policy: a natural bias against unmotivated jargon, "unearned" theoretical machinery, the appearance of meaning. My first problem was discovering how to talk, how to establish an implicit etiquette of discourse. I have more sympathy now for what Frank is up to. But that doesn't eliminate the need for consensus about unifying issues.

At this stage it would forfeit any possible outcome to be seduced by surrealist practice which would allow the conference to take on the figure of an exquisite corpse. Perhaps collaboration on the glossary will become the dominant subtext or repository for some emergent definitions.

3/24/81

I would like to test some hunches and make explicit my own interests in our exchange. I put them in the form of two substantive theses:

1. That there are very strong conceptual ties between a philosophy of mind and a philosophy of art and thus between the questions of "what is thinking?" and "what is art- making?"

2. That insofar as cybernetic concepts and models bear on the recasting of old problems toward the development of a new philosophy of mind (and/or epistemology of the organism, e.g., suggesting a direction or the evolution of consciousness), they are inherently and immediately relevant to the question of what art is, ought to be, and can be. And thus go to the heart of what aesthetics is supposed to be about. (Cf. Frank's glossary entry on aesthetics)

I believe that in some refined version of their intended meaning all these things are true and near the collective heart of the matter.

Is our subject the means of communication and how the conference is to be conducted? Then we are courting reflexivity, recursiveness and self-scrutiny which may deter more than help our purposes. We may get fixated on the idea that the conference is immediately an embodiment of a collective mental process, made possible by a new instrument of communication technology.

Are we engaged in creation of a collective artwork or not? If the conference proceeds on the level of ideas, it is a collective inquiry, not a collective artwork. If the resulting document is a kind of literature, that's fine; but how do we proceed as participants? The problem is this: We are using a new means of communication which allows for unprecedented modes of interaction and exchange, accelerated by speed of access and retrieval, unbound by constraints of time and space. Are we to take that as our subject and develop its epistemology and pragmatics; or do we take the technology directly into the context of art, art-making practice, and the nature of the museum?

Perhaps it is only a matter of emphasis. I don't propose to make hard distinctions, but we must discriminate between two descriptions of what we're doing:

A) talking about the aesthetic implications of these kinds of systems, and

B) talking about the implications of these kinds of systems for aesthetic theory.

Our agenda is at stake here. By the first description, we ought to talk about the formal, technical, and conceptual nature of the medium of the teleconference as well as telecommunications and "systems theory" along with associated pragmatic dimensions (political, psychological, etc.) in this domain.

By the second description, we should be immediately interested in the question of whether such systems give shape and access to information in ways that are relevant to thinking about art, the creative process, the nature of the museum. My feeling is that we are shooting for the second, and picking up whatever we need from the first, almost by necessity. The sense of a collective manifold of input and response (the manner in which we have chosen to conduct the conference) guarantees that the medium will be an aspect of its own subject.

O'Regan

4/6/81

Steven's last message asks legitimate questions but sets up curious circularities of argument. It is legitimate to ask: Is our subject the means of communication? This translates to: Is the only thing we are trying to do is engage in discourse about the process of teleconferencing and the conduct of a "electronic discourse" about the nature of electronically mediated communication?

I hope not. It is one of our problems to get beyond being hypnotized by the details and fascination of the process in order to create collective understanding and agreement about how it can impact on or be a part of the art-making process. For those who have a high level of independent familiarity with the uses of these systems, for the purpose of communication and interaction designed to achieve other goals, such discourse would rapidly take the form of discussion on the construction of appropriate means for turning this medium into a tool suitable for the creation of art--either in forms familiar to us or unknown.

Since we are at this learning stage with the present participants, there has to be a period for the mutual creation of metaphors to guide use of this system. Given the present level of familiarity with these kinds of systems, it seems inevitable that there must be a period of Type (A) which must precede a period of Type (B).

For me, however, the goal leads toward the following:

The initiation of a collective, electronically mediated mental process to explore the aesthetic implications of this form of communication. This activity should be conducted simultaneously with several different inter-disciplinary groups, with carefully defined overlap among them. This process stands or falls on the ability of different groups to participate in the collective nature of the medium past the point of initiation.

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