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<title>soundtoys.net artist: lewis sykes</title>
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<title>The History of Convergence, The History of Electronic Music</title>
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<content type="xhtml" xml:space="preserve"><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">What is All The "Noise" About? - A Reflection on Jacques Attaliís Essay on the Political Economy of Music

Introduction

In 1977, Jacques Attali published his &#039;Bruits: essai sur l&#039;Èconomique politique de la musique&#039;. It was translated into English in 1985 and is now in it&#039;s sixth printing. It&#039;s considered a seminal text in the field.

My motivations

I&#039;ve been actively making music and working with music technology since 1974 and have experienced first hand the ongoing impact of digital technology on music production. I&#039;ve also been involved in the &#039;music industry&#039; through running my own independent record label.

Music has always been a passion for me. Itís a powerful and fundamental force that has impacted on me personally as well as shaping my own contribution on the local, national and even international level.

I&#039;ve worked with up-to-the-minute music hardware and software - some of the most cutting edge, commercially available technology ñ and used it to make music in a creative, dynamic and intuitive way. In fact, making music using a computer is so ënaturalí to me that I&#039;ve never really considered it a programming task - like working with Lingo in Director. It wasn&#039;t until the MA that I began to realise I was in fact a programmer ñ itís just that my first programming language is MIDI and my software interface is E-magic&#039;s Logic Audio Platinum.

As such, I am particularly interested in the ideas Attali promotes and explores through &#039;Noise&#039;. It gives an authoritative academic voice to many of my own notions about music - it&#039;s function, form and ongoing development - that I&#039;ve intuitively felt but not fully rationalised. My own ideas were reinforced by reading &#039;Noise&#039; and given a form and substance that has helped me shape my thoughts and formulate more questions.

The focus of this essay

Attali raises many provocative questions through &#039;Noise&#039;. Of particular interest are his notions of music as prophetic - a herald of times to come - and his assertion that we are moving into a new epoch of music - the so-called &#039;age of Composition&#039;.

24 years after Attali first published &#039;Noise&#039;, this essay aims to restate, reinterpret and explore his ideas by looking at examples of contemporary developments in music and music technology in an attempt to discover if the ideas expounded by Attali have been realised, by whom and in what ways.

Specifically, it aims to focus on the initiatives of musical entrepreneurs and collectives - such as ColdCut - successful artists, producers, DJs, record bosses and inventors - Pirate TV - a Ninja Tune supported Internet TV station and antirom ñ interactive design practioners of the mid to late 90s - as case studies in the field.

By looking at the work of these musical innovators it&#039;s hoped that the essay will be able to answer the questions: &#039;Does music continue to herald times to come as Attali suggests?&#039; and &#039;Is the age of composition underway and what&#039;s it like so far?&#039;

Attaliís central argument

The sleeve notes of the Wildlife ëSupersamplerí, an enhanced CD released in 2000 and featuring interactive musical toys developed by antirom between 1997-99, state the case clearly:

ìAttaliís central argument is that music is not simply a code ñ ë... the principle of giving form to noise in accordance with changing syntactic structuresí ñ but that it is also an economy, and that moreover ñ ëthe political economy of music is not marginal, but premonitory. The noises of a society are in advance of its images and material conflicts. Our music foretells our future.í

Music ñ or noise ñ in Attali is a harbinger of new forms of political economy. He proposes that each development in the wider economy is preceded by a similar development in the economy of music. The next stage in the progression ñ composing ñ will usher in a revolutionary new practice of music among the people, and presumably (although Attali is short on detail here), go on to overthrow the tyranny of commodity exchange a bit later.î 1

Music as prophetic

As Barbrook says, ìIn his seminal text &#039;Noise&#039;, Jacques Attali celebrates the prophetic power of music. What is pioneered first within music-making is later adopted as the political economy for the whole of society.î 2 Using Attali&#039;s perspective one can look to history and find numerous examples that support this notion.

As early as the fourteenth century and certainly by the sixteenth century, the jongleur, the free craftsman who performed for all - lord and peasant alike, had been banned from the courts and been replaced by the mÈnestral - a professional musician bound to a single master. Music started to use an increasing number of instruments and the techniques of written or polyphonic music spread from court to court. 3 Music became a commodity; it acquired a use-value and entered into exchange. The musician became one of the first producers and sellers of signs.

The first concerts to draw a profit took place in London in 1672. 4 Musicians emerge as a class with power based on commercial exchange and competition. They signify some of the earliest examples of the economies of sign and exchange, which characterises the entire economy of the competitive capitalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The royaltyís collection agency, the Union of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers, established in France in 1850 was the first institution of its kind anywhere in the world. 5

The advent of recording at the end of the nineteenth century led to the stockpiling of music and the development of the phonograph record ñ a material object of exchange and profit. Music became an industry and its consumption ceased to be collective. 6 The constant turnover of hit records in the 1920s prefigured the mass consumerism of late-twentieth century Fordism.

Attali postulates, "If the political organisation of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely embryonic in the music of the eighteenth century." 7 By concurring with Attali and seeing music as prophetic, as a herald of times to come, we can ask the question, ëSo what might contemporary developments in music tell us about the future nature of our society?&#039;

Attaliís stages of music

Attali suggests that the simultaneity of multiple codes, the variable overlapping between periods, styles and forms prohibits any attempt at a genealogy of music or a hierarchical archaeology. He feels that what must be constructed is more like a map ñ a structure of interferences and dependencies between society and its music. 8 He traces the political economy of music as a succession of strategic orders, stages or usages of music by power - the stages of Sacrifice, Representation and Repetition.

In Sacrifice, music is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt by ritual power to make people forget the fear of violence; in Representation it is employed by representative power to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commerce; and in Repetition music serves bureaucratic power to silence those who oppose it, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises.

As a note here, Attaliís notion of music as symbolic death in Sacrifice is a difficult concept to grasp. Perhaps Attali refers here to the intuitive, base response humanity has to music and rhythm ñ itís as if weíre hardwired for sound. Few activities stir such depth of emotion and passion as music ñ itís akin to the sensate physicality, rhythmic motions and intense pleasure of sex and orgasm ñ the ëlittle deathí.

Each stage reaches a point of saturation or exhaustion that forces them to transform into the next, thus Sacrifice led to Representation and Representation led to Repetition. Itís the later stages of Attaliís proposed map of the political economy of music that has the most relevance to this essay and is expanded on below.

By the beginning of the 18th Century music becomes a spectacle attended at specific places: concert halls ñ a confinement made necessary by the collection of entrance fees. In this age of Representation the value of music is its use value as spectacle. Musicians are producers of a special kind who are paid in money by the spectators. Music became a commodity, a means of producing money. It is sold and consumed.

Marx himself provides a good analysis of the creation of value in Representation. ìA singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. When she sells her song, she is a wage earner or merchant. But the same singer, employed by someone else to give concerts and bring in money, is a productive worker because she directly produces capital.î 10

By the beginning of the 20th Century, two factors made the rise of Repetition possible: the exhaustion of the representation of harmony and the invention of recording technologies. Initially expected to serve no more than a means of preserving Representation, recording technologies instituted mass production. While in Representation the commodity was the spectacle of the performance in Repetition the recorded music became the thing to be consumed. Today Repetition is based essentially on control over distribution and of the production of demand and not the production of the commodity.

In analysing the shift between Representation and Repetition Attali states that "once again music was prophetic: it experienced the limits of the Representative mode of production long before they appeared in material production".

In Repetition, record manufacture heralded, through its abuse, a new social system, a new economy and politics. This raises some important questions. What lies in store for us as a result of the invention and subsequent subversion of two mould breaking discoveries - digital audio - the infinitely reproducible and ultimate mould, and the Internet - the uncontrollable means to distribute it globally?

What will happen to the &#039;record&#039; of the age of Repetition and what will supersede it? Will these changes in the way we engage with and respond to music have as much impact on our future society as the invention of the record had for its time?

As Barbrook says, ìAccording to Attali, each epoch of music-making creates its own specific social, technological and aesthetic forms. For instance, twentieth century music developed some apparently unbreakable paradigms: stars, fans, record companies, copyright laws, pieces of plastic, top 40 singles and experimental albums. Yet, at the beginning of a new century, these fixed Fordist forms are being superseded. What began with a few skilled DJs mixing vinyl now involves almost everybody with access to a computer and the Net. This new situation won&#039;t just create new social, technological and aesthetic paradigms for music making. As in the past, music is pioneering a new political economy for the whole of society. Napsterisation is a prophecy of the peer-to-peer future.î 11

A crisis of proliferation

At the time of writing ëNoiseí, Attali postulated that Repetition was creating the necessary conditions to lead into the next stage in the development of the political economy of music ñ and that there existed in embryonic form the possibility of a fourth kind of musical practice which heralded new social relations based in freedom and opposing normality ñ the age of Composition.

Susan McClary, In &#039;The Politics of Silence &amp; Sound&#039;, her Afterward to &#039;Noise&#039;, states, ìAttali&#039;s use of the term &#039;Composition&#039; returns us to the literal components of the word, &#039;to put together&#039;. Attali wishes to remove this activity from the rigid institutions of specialised music training in order to return it to all members of society. For in Attali&#039;s eyes, only if the individuals in society choose to re-appropriate the means of producing art themselves can the infinite regress of Repetition be escaped. For the most part this music is far more vital than the music of Repetition, which has deliberately and systematically drained itself of energy.î 12

I for one am happy to concur with McClaryís model of an epoch exhausted. That Repetition is ailing, gradually seizing up with a &#039;crisis of proliferationí; no longer able to guarantee the &#039;production of demand&#039;, gradually loosing its efficiency and winding down, is in a way quite a relief. For me, much contemporary popular music seems tired and grey. The music industry is going through the motions - the domination in the charts of formulaic, manufactured pop (and in the TV programme &#039;Popstars&#039; a bizarre celebration of this very manufactured quality) - the indubitable MTVisation of American R&amp;B into our national charts alongside the inevitable band-waggoning of UK Garage all illustrate the fact.

Even in the usually innovative area of club music there seems to be a lack of ideas - the revival of trance as a happening scene only five years after it first emerged and the still total domination of house in club land - a music genre now in its 15th year - all point to a &#039;crisis of proliferation&#039;.

It is easy to be cynical about Attaliís propositions and what appears to us now as outmoded political and art theory ñ utopianism from a bygone era of New Left rhetoric. The idea that where music leads the rest of the economy will follow seems too far-fetched. And yet... is there any sector of the economy which fears the structural transformations brought about by home PCs and the spread of the Internet quite as much as the music industry does? As we are seeing with the current litigation battle between the Majors and Napster, the music industry is absolutely determined to retain its control over the copyright and distribution of music. Is it really that far fetched to suggest, as Attali does, that musical practice was the first to develop a political economy of the immaterial and is the first to face the challenge of an economy without quantity?î 1

Defining the age of Composition

To explore more about the implications of this new age of music, it&#039;s necessary to draw out what Attali means by Composition.

Composition is defined by Attali as ìdoing solely for the sake of doing. Playing for one&#039;s own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A concept such as this seems natural in the context of music, but it reaches far beyond that, it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having...î 13

For Attali Repetition is also silence - inspired by Situationist Guy Debordís seminal text The Society of the Spectacle. It is the centralised political control of speech. It is the very process of industrialisation imposing silence and dominating men by organisation and the mass repetition and distribution of uniform models. It gives the false illusion of choice for the consumer because it predetermines what the user can hear, and therefore is a means of social control. Composition will re-establish the communication amongst people ceased by the silence in Repetition. If the silence in Repetition was caused by the order imposed by the industrial mode of production, Composition will question the distinction between worker and consumer. Music will not be made to be represented or stockpiled, but for participation in collective play, in an ongoing quest for a new, immediate communication.

Attali suggests that this is a truly revolutionary approach, ìThis constitutes the most fundamental subversion we have outlined: to stockpile wealth no longer, to transcend it, to play for the other and by the other, to exchange the noises of bodies, to hear the noises of others in exchange for one&#039;s own, to create, in common, the code within which communication can take place." 14

This ënew music... on the riseí, is one in which there is no exchange and no alienation ñ nothing but pure use value. Not music as commodity but as gift. A practice of music where there is no distinction between artist and audience and where íplaying for oneís pleasureí is the only goal.

He also suggests a prophetic vision of the transition between Repetition and Composition. ìÖthe very death of exchange and usage in music, the destruction of all simulacra in accumulation, may be bringing about a renaissance. Complex, vague, clumsy attempts to create a new status for music - not a new music, but a new way of making music.î 15

Composing for Attali is a form of musical practice in which musical production and musical consumption are dissolved one into the other and become inseparable. It involves a redrawing, or an erasing, of the line that separates the labour of production and the labour of consumption. This has a strong resonance with contemporary ideas about new technologies, and the novel cultural forms that can develop out of them. So is Attali right when talking about Composition? Is this utopian future possible?

Heralds of the age of Composition

Since the first publication of &#039;Noise&#039; there have been numerous developments in music that support Attali&#039;s notion of the age of Composition.

Susan McClary asserts that through &#039;Noise&#039;, Attali locates musical social significance in its channelling of noise and violence. Punk burst onto the music scene in England in the late 70s with precisely the motivation suggested by Attali at his most optimistic and with the mixed results he also realistically anticipated. Many groups were formed by people who&#039;d never played an instrument before but who intended to defy noisily the slickly marketed nonsense of commercial rock. Punk bristles with genuine sonic noise and conveys the energy of its social and musical protest. And its style incorporates through its fashion and art, features that also qualify as cultural noise.

In the mid 80&#039;s, the genuinely new musical form of Hip Hop grew out of the violent and noisy reality of life for Black youths in American city ghettos. Using record decks and a mixer, they borrowed from and re-contextualised the sounds and grooves of previous generations of black musicians ñ using classic soul, funk and jazz records - and voiced the reality of their own lives over it. The exponents of Hip Hop elevated the deck and mixer, the mechanism for playing the simulacrum of exchange in the Repetition economy, to the level of an instrument - which is indisputable when you see the skill and dexterity displayed by great Hip Hop DJ mixers and scratchers. The irony in subverting both the sign and machinery of Repetition is obvious.

The &#039;jackdawing&#039; of sounds and grooves so fundamental to Hip Hop was furthered with the advent of relatively cheap, commercially available sampling technology. Taking a James Brown grunt, mixing it with a Miles Davis trumpet sample and stretching it make the piercing blare in Public Enemyís ëRebel Without A Pauseí. As Public Enemy say, "We believe that music is nothing but organised noise. You can take anything - street sounds, us talking, whatever you want - and make it music by organising it.î 16

It&#039;s approaching 15 years since cheap samplers first emerged in the UK, radically simplifying music production for the untrained masses and in the process spawning no less than two new musical revolutions (Hip Hop and House). And ColdCut, a.k.a. Matt Black and Jonathan More, started out (and remain) as central figures behind the expansion of both scenes. Whether remixing Eric B and Rakim&#039;s &#039;Paid In Full&#039; or discovering Lisa Stansfield and Yazz, ColdCut wrote their own templates, many of which now find fruition in their acclaimed indie dance label, Ninja Tune.

As Matt Black says ìSampling is now a very widely used tool in the production of music. In fact there is probably not a record in the charts in any country today that does not use sampling in some way. Hence its use in music production appears to be legitimised even though there was considerable opposition to it when the technique was first introduced. If one agrees that sampling is a tool in music production, all tools are legitimate." 17

The music industry have, perhaps not surprisingly, responded with considerable opposition to these musical trends because they undermine and subvert the principles of the Repetition based economics of the industry.

Even for the genuinely innovative Ninja Tunes, who proactively trail blaze many of the new developments in music technology, there&#039;s a tension, perhaps even a hypocrisy, in being both the traditional Record Label selling Records according to the traditional model of Repetition and in actively promoting the tools and attitudes of the age of Composition.

Matt Black explains ìI do believe that there is such a thing as a currency of ideas and I earn a living trading in that currency. However, it&#039;s not possible to own ideas in the same way that someone can own a record. I think that to a certain extent, by sampling you are stealing someone&#039;s ideas. When James Brown named a track &#039;Funky Drummer&#039; and created a drum solo in the middle, he didn&#039;t do it by mistake. In some ways the whole track revolves around that section. Saying "I&#039;m just taking a small piece" isn&#039;t really justification. However, James Brown himself has seen what we do with samples and he&#039;s a great enough artist to let other people feed off his energy and, in return, he gets the love and respect of a new generation influenced by his music." 18

The technology of Composition

Attali suggests that the age of Composition is heralded by the development of new, technologically democratic, music making tools. "If Representation is tied to printing (by which the score is produced) and Repetition to recording (by which the record is produced) Composition is tied to the instrument (by which music is produced). We may take this as a herald of considerable future progress, in the production and in the invention of new instruments." 19

Like the ages of Representation and Repetition before it, Composition needs its own technology. Recording was intended as reinforcement for Representation, but it created an economy of Repetition. Similarly, the technology upon which Composition is based - digitised audio and the Internet - was not conceived for that purpose.

Attali also suggests "these new instruments, will find usage only in the production, by the consumer himself, of the final object. The consumer will become producer and will derive at as much of his satisfaction from the manufacturing process itself as from the object he produces." 20

Attali&#039;s line of thinking does seem to be prophetic. There has been a huge expansion in music making tools available to musicians and non-musicians alike due to the developments in computing and software design.

Susan McClary states "Noise&#039; poses so many provocative questions that to try to respond adequately to it would require.. new modes of creating, distributing and listening to music.î 21 15 years on from her response to &#039;Noise&#039; those new modes of creating, distributing and listening to music have become actuality.

New instruments

Attali notes that the process of inventing new instruments, after a pause of nearly three centuries, is gathering speed again. Such instruments are rarely traditional, based as they are on digital recording and synthesising technologies. In their innovation, diversity and ease of use, they hold out the promise of unprecedented new social and aesthetic formations.

The advent of computer based sequencing software, digital recording, loop based music production tools, stand alone &#039;grooveboxes&#039; and sequencing samplers have all aided the democratisation of music making. Attitudes to music have also shifted through the rise of DJ culture and the increasing availability and popularity of musical games and toys.

Matt Black concurs, but with a reservation ìPlaying with sound is fun and people should try having a go and if they do have a go enjoy themselves and do mess around with other peoples sound if you want. I think people should be aware that sampling is very easy and making an original composition is very difficult. I think sound is free, but if you have a hit record with it and money becomes involved, then you will have to pay money for the use of the material that you have borrowed. That&#039;s only fair. If you&#039;re just using it for your own purposes for play, then I think you can get away with a lot. That&#039;s why ColdCut say &#039;Let Us Play&#039;!î 22

In the late 80s ColdCut pioneered the use of samplers and other affordable music technology and combined them with the art of DJing. Through the early 90s and their Hex project they experimented with applying these ideas to visuals and interactive multimedia via VJing, games, music CD-ROMs like Digital Dreamware, and art installations for Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA and the Barbican. These were perhaps some of the most successful early experiments mixing technology, music and art with the idea of interactivity and attracted a good deal of attention from the art world, though the commercial sector was slow to catch on to the significance of this direction. In 1996 ColdCut teamed up with Camart to develop a MIDI controlled AVI player, Vjamm. ColdCut with Hex first used early versions of Vjamm on the 1997 ëLet Us Playí audiovisual club show.

Vjamm is simply a new kind of instrument that lets the user play with audiovisual samples ñ AVI clips. Itís like a piano for sound and vision. With the addition of real time functions like speed slow up, slow down, reverse and loop, the user has a lot of control. The very fast response of the program and the inclusion of MIDI support means that rhythmic audiovisual collages ñ whole video pieces where the sound and visuals are perfectly in sync ñ can be constructed. ColdCut hoped that by releasing the Vjamm software they would catalyse AV collage as an emerging pop DIY art/tech/appropriation/info tool, and help reclaim a medium which is ripe for remixing: television.

Of course, making music has always involved interactive technologies and new developments in these technologies have always given rise to new ways of composing and performing. One of the most exciting of these new modes of creating music in recent years has been interactivity, developed since the mid 90s by interactive design practioners such as antirom.

As the sleeve notes from the Wildlife ëSupersamplerí state ìThe music has been disassembled into short samples which the player reassembles into a new musical experience in real time by interacting with the mouse and or keyboard. Authorship is therefore shared between the wildlife artists who played and recorded the original music, the antirom designers and programmers who selected and cut the samples, designed the graphical interfaces and programmed the engines, and the player who puts it all back together again. There is no provision to save the resulting sequence ñ each interactive is designed not as a composition tool, but as a simple and intuitive musical tool, to be played and experienced in real time.î 23

Interactivity gives rise to a new type of representation in which doing is added to looking and listening and reading. An interactive representation is essentially a game (i.e. process), rather than a sign (i.e. product). Interactivity creates new kinds of relations between audiences and artefacts. An interactive music piece, for example, might encourage the user to play with and change the music itself, becoming composer, performer and audience all at once.

New means of listening

Within cyberspace, market competition is disappearing for entirely pragmatic reasons. Instead of the fixed divisions between producers and consumers of Repetition economics, the Net encourages people to create and swap music and other digital information. While commodified information is closed and fixed, digital gifts are open and changeable. The rise of the ëgift economyí fostered by the Net can be seen as another herald of the age of Composition.

The Internet and associated developments such as Napster, MP3 sites, Internet radio stations and streaming technologies have revolutionised the distribution of music and are beginning to affect the way people listen to music too. As McClary says, ìAt the very least the new movements seem to herald a society in which individuals and small groups dare to reclaim the right to develop their own procedures, their own networks.î 24

This is particularly true in the UK that seems to have a veritable proliferation of Net based radio stations. Pirate TV respond: ìHere in UK we have a long and honourable tradition of ëradio hammingí and pirate broadcasting... We have ourselves passed many weekends broadcasting our own radio station from the roof of a squatted studio. Now, thanks to Internet, we can share our planet&#039;s culture, a new global pirate medium that has true freedom from censorship and enforced play lists.î 25

And they have seized these opportunities: ìThe channel [Pirate TV] was born out of the excitement of early London pirate radio days, frustration with the dumbing down of legal stations and the straightjacket of commercial television. ColdCut has consistently been about pioneering new methods and materials for artistic expression. Having the foresight to see the Internet as the medium of true free expression, they made a showcase for the creation and display of quality zentertainment free from the financial and creative restraints of the industry. PTV is one channel on a global station, broadcasting on what is quickly becoming the all encompassing entertainment system - the PC.î 26

Any one with a computer and an Internet connection can now make, distribute, share and swap music. But the potential of this transformation within music making has to be understood.

As Matt Black says, ìIf you sample the whole of a Beatles&#039; chorus and stick a big beat under it and have a hit, they&#039;re gonna sue your ass. You&#039;ve taken too much and been too greedy and you haven&#039;t actually added anything of yourself into the idea. It&#039;s like putting an old idea into cellophane wrapping. Generating a new idea involves the hybridisation of material. Ideas should collide, bite, and have sex with each other in the same way that genetic DNA does. Can you measure the depth of an idea? One useful index is to measure how much of your own original material has been injected into what should be a new and exciting offspring, a new organism.î 27

What does the burgeoning of new instruments, as great as that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that announced the industrial revolution, foreshadow?

Conclusions

It is hard not to share Attaliís excitement at the prospect of new musical practices and new musical economies, which have the potential to elide the difference between musician and non-musician, performer and audience, and which makes Russoloís old dream of arte dei rumori (ëthe art of noiseí) a real possibility for the future.

But this raises many issues. As Barbrook points out, ìWe need to examine the impact of this transformation within music-making - and its consequences for the rest of society. Since copyright laws and technological fixes can only slow down this process, we need to concentrate on analysing the emerging social, technological and aesthetic paradigms. The spread of new music technologies reflects the emergence of new methods of making music. However, when peer-to-peer computing becomes ubiquitous, how do musicians get paid for their work? How do people receive acknowledgement for their ideas? What happens once the existing legal and economic structures of music industry are no longer viable. Can the copyright laws be updated for the new situation? Can music exist as both commodity and gift? What will be the sounds of the age of composition predicted by Attali?î 28

As Attali himself surmises on the means to realise the transition to the age of Composition. ìComposition appears an abstract utopia. There is only one way (to realise it) - recovering in the units of production and of life, in undertakings and collectivities, some meaning for things. Neither will there be Composition if it is not clearly willed as a project to transcend Repetition, in other words, if the State does not stop confusing well being with the production of demand. The State can play a positive role only by encouraging the extensive production of means of doing rather than objects, the production of instruments rather than music. In this case the transition is very different from the two previous transitions - [Sacrifice to Representation and Representation to Repetition] it is not in the interest of the economic apparatus.î 29

On a personal note, I think itís truly exciting to reflect on Attaliís ëNoiseí - a 25-year-old political economic theory - and find many examples of contemporary music development that seem to support and vilify his reasoning and predictions. Whatís more, I find it empowering to be working with the pioneers of this new age and to consider myself part of this process - an agent of change that encourages the coming of the age of Composition.

However, in light of Attaliís own reflections on the means to realise the transition and my intuition that the music industry will fight tooth and claw to maintain its economic status Iíd advise you to not hold your breath.


Notes:

1. Sleeve notes, Wildlife Supersampler, Wildlife Records, Cat. No.: WILDCD1, © 2000
2. Richard Barbrook, net.music Cybersalon and symposium proposal, Jan 2001
3. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg. 15
4. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg. 50
5. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg. 78
6. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg. 88
7. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg ? (canít find this again)
8. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg 19
9. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg 20
10. Karl Marx, Vol 1, Appendix
11. Richard Barbrook, net.music Cybersalon and symposium proposal, Jan 2001
12. Susan McClary, The Politics of Science &amp; Sound, Noise, pg 156
13. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg 134
14. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg 143
15. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg ? (canít find this again)
16. Matt Black, Zebra Magazine, Melbourne, May 2000
17 David Toop, Ocean of Sound, Serpent&#039;s Tail (1995), pg123
18. Matt Black, Zebra Magazine, Melbourne, May 2000
19. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg 144
20. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg 144
21. Susan McClary, The Politics of Science &amp; Sound, Noise, pg 149
22. Matt Black, Zebra Magazine, Melbourne, May 2000
23. Sleeve notes, Wildlife Supersampler, Wildlife Records, Cat. No.: WILDCD1, © 2000
24. Susan McClary, The Politics of Science &amp; Sound, Noise, pg 158
25. PirateTV interview in La Spiral ñ an eZine for Digital Mutants @ http://laspirale.org/pages/afficheArticle.php3?id=64&amp;#9001;=en
26. PirateTV interview in La Spiral ñ an eZine for Digital Mutants
27. Matt Black, Zebra Magazine, Melbourne, May 2000
28. Richard Barbrook, net.music Cybersalon and symposium proposal, Jan 2001
29. Jaques Attali, Noise, pg. 146</div></content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>But Is It Art? An essay on the impact of computers in art.</title>
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<content type="xhtml" xml:space="preserve"><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Introduction

In researching the history, influences and early development of the current avant-garde net.art movement, I uncovered a significant amount of material about the development of its precursor, Computer Art, as a distinct and significant movement in its own right.

This pre-history of art on the web presaged much of the contemporary debate and turned out to be an interesting place to explore in its own right, spanning as it does, both a period of time symbolic of social change, transition and transformation - the 1960s - and new discoveries in technology that created a radically different way to view and produce art.

This essay is an overview and exploration of the Computer Art movement and the impact of the computer in the production, creation and delivery of art prior to the popularisation of the Net.

My motivations

I&#039;ve always been interested in the place where art and science meet - music technology, computer aided graphic design, animation, film and video have been active interests since my teenage years. I find the apparent tension between the creative and the technical, the intuitive and the logical fascinating.

More recently I&#039;ve become increasingly involved with computers in my own creative endeavours. I find this &#039;meta-tool&#039; - a tool that makes tools - simultaneously liberating and restrictive. I am a cyborg - enmeshed with the machine - and I&#039;ve become totally dependent on it. Yet if I were to describe computers using the &#039;compressed conflict&#039; of semiotics they would be &#039;infuriatingly helpful&#039;. This ambivalent mixture of dependency and frustration raises questions for me that I&#039;ve tried to explore a little through this essay.

Computer Art, like my primary interest, music technology, seems to me to be a &#039;new frontier&#039; in the ongoing development of human-computer interaction. It&#039;s a place where the varied and multifaceted nature of that relationship is contemplated, stretched and tested. And in many more ways than just the technical - Computer Art explores issues of aesthetics, creative process and authorship amongst many others.

The focus of this essay

Jasia Reichardt&#039;s book, The Computer In Art, (1971) provides an insight into early experimentation in this area. Barely in its infancy the Computer Art movement was already diverse and multifaceted. Her summation, review and critique of the work and the artists and programmers who produced it is not only sometimes amusingly anecdotal or occasionally comically naÔve but frequently disarmingly prophetic.

This essay attempts to pick up some of the stands explored in The Computer In Art and follow through on the motivations, methodologies and experiences of these early pioneers by looking at the development of Computer Art in the 30 years since Reichhardt wrote her book.

Computer Art is a now a significant movement with many artists working in distinct sectors. In an attempt to limit the scope of this essay the focus is on those significant developments in computing and the exploitation of these developments by selected computer artists. What is described here is not the work itself, but rather the artists&#039; expressed motivations coupled with an overview of the methodologies they employ in using computers in their work.

This essay then, is a summary of the developments and motivations of the artists working at the forefront of this radical art scene and information, thoughts and reflections on its significance.

Cybernetic Serendipity

A notable landmark in this process occurred in 1968 with the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition that was held initially at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and later toured Canada and the US ending at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Jasia Reichardt, then assistant director of the ICA, curated the show.
The exhibition included work by Charles A. Csuri, an artist and computer graphics pioneer and now Professor at The Ohio State University; the successful Fluxus artist Nam June Paik; and artist and writer Paul Brown who reflects:
"For me the Cybernetic Serendipity was a singular point of transition. Previously I had seen artworks as objects. Now they became processes. Cybernetic Serendipity had a profound effect on a number of young artists and we gradually began to discover each other. Together we began to learn the skills of using computers. In those days it meant programming in FORTRAN and Assembler, punch cards, paper tape and experiments with building digital circuitry. This was long before "user friendly" appeared." 1
Cybernetic Serendipity was not an isolated event, however, but part of a nexus of exhibitions, meetings, publications, groupings of artists who in this fast changing world were bringing different approaches to art, science, technology and society.
A sign of the times
1968, the year of the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, is also the year most emblematic of the 1960s clash between State and the anti-modernist revolution of the political vanguard of the Sixties, the New Left. As Lisa Haskel in her essay, Time Machine (1998) (presented at the symposium Dialogues with the Machine held at the ICA in 1998, marking 30 years since the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity) writes, "These events [May 1968] showed the irreconcilability between the &#039;traditional values&#039; of centuries-old ruling elites, the politically-driven, 1950&#039;s discourses of post-war optimism and reconstruction with the new social values they embodied, and the fragile groupings working toward a non-capitalist alternative." 2

This period saw the end of Modernism and the transition to the emotional emptiness of Post-modernism. Despite the New Lefts&#039; beliefs that their socialist agenda and experimental art would radicalise the consciousness of the people their efforts at community art initiatives such as the radical &#039;free radio&#039; movement failed. They were unable to translate their essentially elitist brand of anarcho-communism into a truly democratic cultural revolution. The lost utopia of May &#039;68 and the ultimate defeat of the New Left were subsequently superseded by the insuperable rise to domination of the conservative neo-liberalism of the Californian Ideology.

But after years of post-modern apathy, Nineties intellectuals are rediscovering the joy of aestheticising the revolution. By separating Sixties anarcho-communism from its specific historical moment, New Left vanguard politics can re-emerge as the hip avant-garde style for the Nineties. And though its language is idiosyncratic the theory-art and anarcho-communism of Deleuze and Guattari has emerged as &#039;holy texts&#039; of this cultural avant-garde. 3

As Barbrook says, "The avant-garde tradition of cultural experimentation is now at the centre of socio-economic development in the advanced countries. A minority of dedicated and talented artists can benefit the majority of the population by inventing new aesthetic forms, especially using digital technologies. Within an information society, &#039;all power to the imagination&#039; becomes more than just a utopian slogan from May &#039;68." 4

Lisa Haskel, with a focus on art and technology, concurs, "..looking through the admittedly distorting lens of archive research has revealed surprising similarities and subtle differences in the polemics, practices and pre-occupations of artists working with technology in the 1960&#039;s and the 1990&#039;s. For me, these parallels - and perhaps it is the slippages that are more interesting than the similarities - speak about context; they form a dialogue across time on the topic of technology as a transformative force in society, the role of the artist in social change, and the constant conversation between artistic production and the discourses and images of popular culture, mass media and world events" 5

Developing technology

From its inception in 1956 through to the early 1990s and beyond Computer Art represented a truly new development in art - the exploration of human-computer interaction. And its impact has been widely felt if little acknowledged.

Computer Art forged the development and refinement of both the computer hardware and software that we take for granted today - from graphic plotters and printers to contemporary drawing and painting packages. It pioneered the application of mathematics and programming as tools to describe, generate, animate and manipulate images - helping to develop and refine vector graphics, the digitisation and manipulation of photographs and three-dimensional modelling and ray-tracing. But its most profound and prophetic advancements are surely its use of the computer as a real-time medium via cybernetics and the development of interactive systems.

Much of what was learnt through these artistic explorations has now become everyday reality for hundreds of millions of PC users. What was once revolutionary has become banal. That is the significance of these developments. They have created the tools with which everyday people can express themselves. They have advanced the democratisation of art and design in a similar and parallel fashion to the music technology of contemporary music production.

What&#039;s more, the development of these tools in parallel with the growth of the Net has created a phenomenon of worldwide significance. The rapid growth of the Net is the most dramatic manifestation of the increasing importance of cultural innovation. Far from being the &#039;holy idea&#039; of avant-garde intellectuals, anarcho-communism is now the mundane activity of ordinary people within cyberspace. As Barbrook says, "As access to the Net spreads, the majority of the population are beginning to participate within cultural production. Everyone now has the opportunity to express themselves in all sorts of ways, including aesthetically." 6

The influences on Computer Art

According to Frank Popper who published Art of the Electronic Age in 1993, there are at least seven different sources from which contemporary Computer Art has drawn its inspiration. The interplay between technical and aesthetic factors of photography and cinematography; the intellectual and informational aspects of Conceptual Art as well as its environmental dimension; the electrical and later electronic characteristics of Light Art; the physical mechanistic movement of Kinetic Art; the significant programming of early Cybernetic Art; and the participatory nature of environments or installations - those both optical and conceptual; and those more or less about creative participation leading to interactivity. 7

This included the work of the early Modernists movements of Futurism, Dadaism and Constructivism as well as other work of the pre- and post-World War II period. A number of artists in East and West Europe maintained an interest in Kineticism as a practice that implied the unification of art, science and society. Light and movement were the key &#039;materials&#039;; changing and developing mechanical and electrical systems were the underlying means.

The auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger was notable in its approach to technology that was profoundly critical while still engaging with its processes. "Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies. Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method and timing of the disintegrative process." 8

The sense that science and technology was having a profound effect on society and the environment was affecting the practice of many 1960&#039;s artists and activists associated with the "underground" - cultural practitioners more directly identified and related to the political activism of the time. From the experiments in form and material "Event-Structure Research" to the regular happenings, light shows, performances and concerts in the basement of "Better Books", the activities of the London Arts Lab, new materials, the social value of art and the divisions between "high" and "low" culture were constantly explored.
Paul Brown compares Computer Art with previous &#039;revolutions&#039; in art history. "As a historical model for this revolution we need look no further than the small group of artists who constituted the Salon Des Refuses in 1863. Though the work was scorned by the cognoscente these artists, the Impressionists and Post Impressionists, effectively wrote the agenda for Modernism. An agenda that would mature and emerge 40 years later in the opening decade of the 20th century and which defined that arts for that century. Meanwhile on the fringes, an international celebration of new media arts has emerged and over the past 30 years grown in strength. It&#039;s my opinion that it constitutes a global Salon des Refuses. Furthermore I believe that it&#039;s likely that it is this often marginalised group that is writing the agenda for the creative arts for the 21st century and the new millennium." 9
Computer Art is now accepted as a definitive art form, with distinct origins and a well documented range of work that covers the wide range computer-assisted pieces still on traditional supports, the great variety of animated paintings and digital images in general, as well as the expanding areas of sculptures and installations in which the computer plays a decisive role.

The origins of Computer Art

The origins of Computer Art, or analogue design as it was then called, can be traced back to 1952 when Ben F. Laposky, in the U.S.A., used an analogic computer and a cathode tube oscillograph for the composition of his Electronic Abstractions. The same year, Herbert W. Franke created his oscillograms in Vienna.

The first &#039;computer graphics&#039; were realised in 1960 by K. Alsleben and W. Fetter in Germany and in 1963 by the Boeing Company in the U.S.A. who first coined the term in creating animations for simulating landings and testing cockpit design.

In 1965 the first works produced on a digital computer appeared - executed independently but almost simultaneously by several artists: Frieder Nake and George Nees in Germany and A. Michael Knoll, Leon D. Harmon and Kenneth C. Knowlton of the Bell Telephone Laboratory, New Jersey. Harmon and Knowlton produced their first computer graphics in 1967 - a 12ft long nude made up of alphanumeric characters.

In an issue of Art Journal devoted to the subject of art and the computer, Margot Lovejoy makes a powerful plea for the importance of photography as the basis of Computer Art and argues that photography&#039;s role in the development of both Modernism and Post-modernism has provided a paradigm for gauging the function of electronic media in relation to art. She reiterates the viewpoint of Walter Benjamin, which places photography in a pivotal position in the collapse of the aura of the original and unique art object.

The advent of new electronic technologies - first video and then digital imaging - accelerated the changes initiated by photography so that now much of the history of photography is being replayed with greater speed and fewer detours. The photographic paradigm, in conjunction with the further dissolution of rigid distinctions between art and non-art communication systems, "has dumped computers right on the artist&#039;s doorstep" 10

The significance of Computer Art

Reichardt contends that most art movements are remembered for the relatively few great works that are associated with them and the exceptional individuals who brought them about. Those trends or movements that show a current preoccupation but fail to produce works of great quality leave an incomparably lesser trail. But she also argues that Computer Art is an exception. "The fact that Computer Art has produced nothing so far that can be called a great work of art does not detract from its importance as the means of reformulating the boundaries and definitions of creative activity as a whole." 11

Cybernetic Serendipity validated and recognized the combination of binary technology and art. Computer artists, in seeking a way of reconciling technological, aesthetic and artistic factors, have progressively placed increased emphasis on such global problems as the relationship between the artist and the art work, on the one hand, and technology, the environment and the general public and culture of mass society on the other.

Many computer artists are trying to come to grips with the opposition between mind and the machine and are seeking means of transcending it by an artistic act combining reason with imagination.

Timothy Blinkly contends that the computer in art should not be treated principally as a new medium, but rather for its &#039;conceptual&#039; content. "From a historical point of view, if Modernism was mainly concerned with new media and the idea of progress, and Conceptual Art can be regarded as acting as a kind of watershed between that and Postmodernist pluralism, Computer Art can be understood as continuing all three strands, retaining an aloof concern with media, a conceptual orientation and a preoccupation with interactivity." 12

Computer Art has been revolutionary in both the sensorial and intellectual spheres. A new appeal has been made not only to the visual but also to the other senses, developing the research begun by Optical, Kinetic and Participatory Art. On the other hand, calculated and programmed art combined with the achievements in Conceptual Art have opened up the enormous possibilities of Computer Art in the area of full interactivity, by using the computer not only as a tool or medium but as purveyor of abstract information and as a generator of virtual realities in cybernetic space.

It is in this area; the interactive category that many new combined technical and aesthetic developments can be expected. The artistic and functional autonomy of the image and its instantaneous transmission in real time opens up new avenues that confirm the specifity of Computer Art and its claim to being an entirely new medium or genre establishing an interface between the real and the virtual.

But understanding its unique cultural role requires an appreciation of its fundamental differences from traditional media like painting, sculpture, photography and video. As Popper postulates, "Functioning more like characters of an incorporeal meta-medium, computers breed what have been come to be called &#039;hypermedia&#039;, which reside in a paradoxical virtual reality where all properties exist as numbers. Hypermedia only purports to be what we know as media; they transcend their forebears in ways that give them an almost preternatural pliability involving magical metamorphoses and effortless interconnectivity, and making them capable of introducing radically new art forms." 13

For artists such as Michael Bret the computer gave artists a &#039;meta-tool&#039;, a tool which is used to manufacture tools. With such apparatus, visual artists no longer need to focus on the production of a work, but on the process, which generates it. And they no longer need to be interested in the physical characteristics of the object, but in the laws that enable the object to appear and exist.

This represents a paradigm shift in approach to art, hinted at through the Futurist, Dadaist, Constructivist and Surrealist Art movements of the early twentieth century, explored more fully through experimental Kinetic &amp; Light Art, but not fully realised until the advent of the computer. As Paul Brown surmises "All this distraught and defensive rhetoric emerging from the cultural mainstream in regard to new media serves to inform us that something very interesting is going on. Something worth cultivating and which may well be the seed of an emergent culture." 14

The aesthetics of Computer Art

Although the range of aesthetic intentions in Computer Art is vast, it&#039;s possible to group the multifarious manifestations of the work into two principal categories - the visual and the interactive. This covers a variety of computer works, ranging from single images to installations.

Herbert W. Franke was one on the first to be interested in Computer Art. According to Franke, the evolution of Computer Art illustrates the fact that electronic systems have their own principles which can be explored, understood and elaborated on through aesthetic programmes that enable the discovery of new avenues of creation and visual technical means comparable to that available for music.

According to Franke two trends led directly to Computer Art: that mathematics allowed the description of projects and results, which include a number of artistic styles from Constructivism to Op Art; and what he calls &#039;Apparative Kunst&#039; (Complex Machine Art) - leading from the kaleidoscope to works based on photomechanical transformation and picture processing. For Franke, drawings generated by computer make the study of the creative process, its principles and its laws, indirectly possible, but they also encourage interactivity between the work and the spectator.

George Legrady feels the influence of computers on art could be much more subtle. He observes that in digital processing, as in other forms of communication, the technological components of hardware and software are structures that shape and impose a form on the information they process, even though these mediating structures are usually understood as transparent or &#039;value-free&#039;. 15

Using the computer in art

Leslie Mezei, professor of Computer Science at Toronto University felt the computer would never replace the traditional media of pen and brushes, but could transcend them by offering the convenient introduction of modification. While Katherine Nash, Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico believed the computer would inevitably become the artists&#039; tool in the future.

Nak June Paik, the Korean artist living in New York concurs enthusiastically. "The cathode ray tube will replace the canvas. Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk. There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one television screen, just think of the variety of images you can get. It&#039;s so cool. It&#039;s like going to the moon." 16

But not all early computer artists were so convinced. Frieder Nake, who during the 1960s produced in Stuggart some of the best and most intelligently conceived computer graphics to have been done anywhere had deep reservations and concluded that much work done with the aid of computers didn&#039;t justify, by the results produced, the use of a tool so complex.

Twenty or so years after these early experiments, contemporary artists are still using the computer only as a tool, as a canvas or a very elaborate palette with which to &#039;paint&#039; using a variety of methods. At most the computer is regarded as an assistant.

Jack Youngerman used computers as a design tool and discovered that many of the time-consuming studies he did by hand before beginning a composition could easily be carried out using a computer. Youngerman puts a simple theme through many variations and the computer acts as a sketchpad that can electronically alter colours and compositions.

David Em uses the computer as a design tool to produce illusory three-dimensional imagery. Yet as fantastic as his visions may appear, and as high tech as his artistic implements may be, Em thinks of his work as paintings in the traditional sense.

As early as the mid 1960s, Michael Noll of The Bell Laboratories pointed out that the computer could be used to great advantage for producing the sort of art which like Op Art, has a mathematical component, or like permutation or serial art, depends on the making of versions based on set parameters - and contemporary computer artists have explored this area.

Amongst them Manfred Mohr, who has developed a computer programme based on his research in fractured symmetry. His work begins with an algorithm, not with visual ideas. The computer transforms the programme into signs which Mohr samples, checks, improves and changes until he is satisfied with the final result. When the development of the algorithm is finished a plotter draws the realisation of the programme onto paper or canvas. Mohr sees himself as an artist who uses mathematics only as a vehicle to realise a vital philosophy.

Vera Molner, a pioneer of Computer Art and others such as Dominic Boreham and Beck and Jung, developed a computer graphics method where the artist looks for creative inspiration from the computer - the image is conceived and treated for the computer that almost creates it. Their works are objects to be contemplated and reflect the artists&#039; view that technology is only a means and cannot replace the content of their work. For these artists science acts like a creative tool.

Molner holds that at least for her, the computer can serve four purposes. The first is its technical promise - it widens the area of the possible with its infinite array of forms and colours, and particularly with the development of virtual space. Secondly, the computer can satisfy the desire for artistic innovation and thus lighten the burden of traditional cultural forms. It can make the accidental or random subversive in order to create an aesthetic shock and to rupture the systematic and symmetrical. Thirdly the computer can encourage the mind to work in new ways. Molner considers that artists often pass too quickly from the idea to the realisation of the work. The computer can create images that can be stored for longer, not only in its memory but also in the artist&#039;s imagination. Finally, Molnar thinks that the computer can help the artist by measuring the physiological reactions of the audience, their eye movements for example, thus bringing the creative process into closer accordance with its products and their effects.

Tom De Witt can be considered a pioneer in &#039;virtual space&#039;. His Pantomation technique involves computer analysis of photographically recorded images, capturing surface co-ordinates of three dimensional objects and drawings that can then be manipulated.

For De Witt an important feature of Computer Art is its non-materiality since its &#039;works&#039; are abstract algorithms or databases. He regards it above all as &#039;Dataism&#039; - a term and an art opposed to the iconoclasm of Modernism in general and Dadaism in particular. Dataist works are not singular art objects but algorithmic procedures and digital databases that have a symbolic description. Dataist artworks can appear to exist in three dimensions and move in the time dimension, but they may be entirely synthesised.

Artists like Harold Cohen go a step further and develop programmes to be followed by the computer, without themselves necessarily having any idea of what the final result will be. Such a use of the computer changes the strategy of image making and opens up questions of the extent to which the computer actually creates art itself. The computer is no longer simply a tool but becomes a creator.

The creative potential of computers

Reichardt contends that Computer Art is the last stand of Abstract Art and has brought about the possibility of unidentifiable and impersonal abstraction - even to the extent that those who have programmed the computer have on occasion failed to recognise their own output.

Many computer artists concur that the computer can have a far more significant role. In her early 1990s theoretical writings in the area of Computer Art, Christine Tamblyn argues that computers were designed to augment mental processes as opposed to being manual or visual aids. She opposes the traditionalist attitude that ascribes the use of computers to simulate aspects of Modernist painting, drawing, printmaking or photography and supports the Post-modern attitude represented by computer artists who extend the purview of Conceptual Art.

Michael Bret says that while traditional tools enable visual artists to work only on objects, the computer gives them access to the processes and sources of creative activity. Similarly, Roy ascot, maintains that new techniques developing out of the convergence of computing and telecommunications - laserdisc, computer animation etc. - must be regarded as more than new tools since they invite new relationships among people in the creative process and they imply a new visual language.

Popper contends that the computer is not a tool of the familiar sort used in the manipulation of media. It can simulate an extravagant variety of practical, as well as fanciful, tools supporting multi-faceted hypermedia; but it ultimately challenges the tools/media distinction. It is both and neither, because the arena of its activity is abstract information and not concrete materials.

Innovation through Computer Art

A significant amount of the Computer Art work produced, and that described here, has generally dealt with fixed or animated work, including mathematically calculated two and three-dimensional images, produced with the aid of computers on traditional supports such as paper, canvas, textiles or in the more recently developed media of photography, film and video.

While these developments have undoubtedly produced a range of engaging and challenging work, I would contest that the innate potential of computers that ultimately challenges the tools/media distinction, as suggested by Popper, lies in works of Computer Art sculptures and installations.

The Tokyo Computer Technique Group established in 1967, felt that one of the major underlying possibilities of Computer Art was that the &#039;artist&#039; actually designs a system - a method of producing a given repertoire of forms and generating patterns. The artists&#039; work consists largely of envisioning possibilities rather than producing individual works. It is the program itself that is the work of art.

In his computer animations, William Latham wants to add a new dimension to computer graphics, or &#039;computer sculpture&#039;. In The Evolution of Form (1990) the key images were created with the &#039;Evolutionary&#039; interface, developed in collaboration with the scientists Stephen Todd and Peter Quarendon, which combines chance mutations and artistic choices and use three-dimensional textures, ray-tracing, and multiple light sources. According to Latham they "developed a new Art evolution Programme called Mutator. Thanks to this programme artists decide from an aesthetic point of view which forms to retain and which to destroy. It&#039;s sort of natural selection controlled by the artist." 17

Michael Bret, of the Paris University Research Laboratory, has created a semi-abstract language in his subtle computerised animations of the one million-pixel surface. Bret&#039;s &#039;Anyflo&#039; system of three-dimensional animation and synthesis uses his own concept of Procedural Art. The computer is more than just a tool for him; it is a &#039;meta-tool&#039; that is used to manufacture tools. With such apparatus, visual artists no longer produce a work, but the process that generates it. And they are no longer interested in the physical characteristics of the object, but in the laws that enable the object to appear and exist. By simulating the creative act, i.e. manipulating a model, the visual artist can explore all its potentialities and change them at will.

Of this type of work, i.e. sculptures and installations - there is a further sub division - one where the computer is the support of the work itself - no longer only as a representational or interactive intermediary - but the medium handles a collection of images or controls their manipulation.

Edmond Couchot realised The Bird&#039;s Feather in collaboration with specialist in flight simulation (SOGITEC), which is a three-dimensional image that can be transformed in real time through the computer by means of the spectator&#039;s breath. In the 1990 version, I Sow to the Four Winds, Couchont made an impressive demonstration of subtle interactivity. In the piece a large dandelion head movers very slowly on a screen under the influence of a light &#039;virtual&#039; breeze. When the spectator breathes on the screen, the pressure of the air detaches clumps of seeds that scatter and softly fall. The spectator can continue to blow nothing remains to dislodge. Then a complete flower appears on the screen and the game, always different, begins again.

Couchant offers the following explanation: "By digital processing the image decomposes itself into its ultimate constituents - pixelsÖ it confers on the properties of the traditional image - photography, cinema, television, paintingÖ the fluidity of numbers and language, the capacity to respond to the slightest demands of viewer to the most unexpected. The digital process of decomposition makes the image unstable, mobile, motile, changeable, penetrable." 18

Conclusions

The potential of these new technologies to engage people in creative endeavour and exchange and to challenge our preconceptions about art and the creative process is enormous. But what are the ways ahead?

As Lisa Haskel questions, "Is this fascination with the relationship between art and technology a phenomenon that is bound to appear, disappear and resurge with regular pendulum swings, or else perhaps within predictable social and political conditions? Or is science and technology now such an integral part of everyday life that its role within the arts can only now grow exponentially?" 19

Perhaps Paul Brown right when he suggests, "Over the intervening 40 years since Cybernetic Serendipity the field has matured and it&#039;s my expectation that in this opening decade of the 21st century that we will see the first blossoming of a new paradigm for the arts emerging from the studio&#039;s of our youngest artists. Artists who were not even conceived in 1968. They will show us what the new media can do. This 40-year hiatus from 1962 allows the technology to develop and mature. But far more importantly it enables this new generation to emerge and inform us all. It&#039;s also a generation who&#039;s minds are not steeped in metaphors for the media paradigms of the past and who will be able to recognise and express the true nature of the media of the future." 20

Or as the Editorial of Wired Magazine, December 1997 asks, "Can we build a new kind of politics? Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies? Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings?"
 Is the last word with Barbrook, "At the end of the millennium, three centuries of capitalist industrialisation are culminating in the emergence of digital anarcho-communism. The New Left no longer want to change the methods of production. Instead, its philosophers call for the replacement of disciplined labour by spontaneous desire: the &#039;refusal of work&#039;. The proletarian had been turned into the artist. When working people finally have enough time and resources, they can then concentrate upon &#039;...art, love, play, etc., etc.; in short, everything which makes Man [and Woman] happy. 21" 22

The future&#039;s bright, the future is digital.

Notes:

1. Website: Brown, P 30 Years on - Remembering Cybernetic Serendipity,
"http://www-ctiad.adh.bton.ac.uk/ctiad/outline/OUTLINE6/general/brown/brown.html"
2. Website: Haskel, L (1998) Time Machine, "http://mediaartprojects.org.uk/timemachine.html"
3. There are many web sites promoting the teachings of the holy prophets, such as Web Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari Homepage; How To Make Yourself a Plane of Consistency; The Deleuzeguattarionary; and WWW Resources for Gilles Deleuze and FÈlix Guattari.
4. Article: Barbrook, R (2001) The Holy Fools
5. Website: Haskel, L (1998) Time Machine,"http://mediaartprojects.org.uk/timemachine.html"
6. Article: Barbrook, R (2001) The Holy Fools
7. Book: Popper, F (1993) Art Of The Electronic Age, Thames &amp; Hudson Ltd, p. 28
8. Article: Metzger G (1959) from the Auto-destructive art manifesto, published in SIGNALS, Sept 1964.
9. Website: Brown, P. (1998) Emergent Culture "http://www.paul-brown.com/WORDS/EMCULT.HTM"
10. Book: Gips, T Computers In Art, ibid, p. 231
11. Book: Reichardt, J (1971) The Computer In Art, Studio Vista Ltd, p. 8
12. Book: Popper, F (1993) Art Of The Electronic Age, Thames &amp; Hudson Ltd, p. 121
http://www.paul-brown.com/WORDS/EMCULT.HTM
http://mediaartprojects.org.uk/timemachine.html
http://www.paul-brown.com/WORDS/EMCULT.HTM

Bibliography

Book: Reichardt, J (1971) The Computer In Art, Studio Vista Ltd

Book: Popper, F (1993) Art Of The Electronic Age, Thames &amp; Hudson Ltd

Website: Haskel, L (1998) Time Machine, < http://mediaartprojects.org.uk/timemachine.html

Website: Csuri, Charles A. HYPERLINK http://www.aec.at/prix/kunstler/Eccsuri.html

Website: Brown, P 30 Years on - Remembering Cybernetic Serendipity, <HYPERLINK http://www-ctiad.adh.bton.ac.uk/ctiad/outline/OUTLINE6/general/brown/brown.html

Website: Brown, P. (1998) Emergent Culture HYPERLINK http://www.paul-brown.com/WORDS/EMCULT.HTM

Website: Brown, P opening address to Constructs and Re-Constructions exhibition of Ernest Edmunds http://creative.lboro.ac.uk/eae/exhibition/paul.html

Website: Cybernetic Serendipity back to Timeline http://www.badmindtime.com/tools/Timeline%20Project/AVM/WebPages/webpage1.htm</div></content>
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