Medium specificity

Matthew Fuller and M. Beatrice Fazi - Computational Aesthetics

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• published: 07 Dec 2013
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Goldsmiths Department of Art MA Lectures 2013-14 Matthew Fuller and M. Beatrice Fazi 28 October 2013 Computational Aesthetics In this lecture we will propose some means of understanding the aesthetics of digital art. Our contention is that an aesthetics of digital art is, at a primary level, a computational aesthetics. In order to advance this claim, we will draw largely from a recently co-authored paper, entitled 'Computational Aesthetics', to appear in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Digital Art (ed. by Christiane Paul). The notion of 'computation' is for us an idea that is wider and more powerful than the informational technologies that it subtends. Computation, as a force and as a method, exceeds the bounds of its instantiations, whether artistic or not. In those instantiations, however, it has profound consequences that are as yet under-recognised. For digital art, it thus becomes key to ask what computation's modes of existence and degrees of agency are, and what relation these modes entail to other aesthetic investigations of the digital. The lecture will address these questions by discussing computation as a technique of abstraction and of action. Computation has its own logic, limits, and capacities for expression and construction that manifests as mechanisms of ontological and epistemological production. We will suggest that the medium specificity of digital art is indeed the specificity that we see pertaining to this art's primary computational character. The investigation of computational aesthetics, it will be proposed, requires us to address procedures and machines that aim at the state of being universal, and to ask ourselves how such generality may amplify a gesture in art and a functional operation alike. Computational aesthetics is an aesthetics of the discrete as opposed to the continuous, the finite means of which do not preclude, indeed perhaps hinge on, the possibility of endless iteration and repetition. This aesthetics thrives on a conjoint condition of both concreteness and ideality, in which the ability to construct machines, relations and entities of logical equivalence subtends many of its effects and capacities, not only in networked means of communication and transmission, but also in its modes of structuring and producing the real. Matthew Fuller is author of various books including 'Media Ecologies, Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture' (MIT), 'Behind the Blip, Essays on the Culture of Software' and 'Elephant & Castle' (both Autonomedia). With Usman Haque, he is co-author of 'Urban Versioning System v1.0' (ALNY) and with Andrew Goffey of 'Evil Media' (MIT). Editor of 'Software Studies, a Lexicon' (MIT) and co-editor of the journal Computational Culture (http://www.computationalculture.net/), he is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software and works at the Digital Culture Unit, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. His work with YoHa, 'Endless War' a durational data-processing of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diaries is shortly on show at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark and the 'Evil Media Distribution Centre' exhibition, responding to the book 'Evil Media', is currently at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. http://www.spc.org/fuller/ M. Beatrice Fazi is a researcher, writer and lecturer. At present, she is completing a PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths (University of London), where she is also working as Associate Lecturer. Her doctoral thesis addresses the aesthetic dimension of digital computation, exploring the centrality of abstract entities and processes to the construction of experience. Her research interests include digital aesthetics, continental philosophy, computation, cybernetic culture, and media theory. She has published articles and reviews on questions pertaining to the intersection of philosophy, science, technology and culture. Her present work investigates the limits of formal reasoning in relation to computation, and addresses the ways in which these limits shape the ontology of computational aesthetics vis-à-vis cultural and scientific notions of incompleteness and incomputability.