Just a small thought, to ginger up the whole discussion about analog(ue)/digital

We tend, understandably perhaps, to think of the digital as something that supersedes the analog(ue). Historically speaking there was analogue technology and thus analogue art, craft and so on, and then, with the advent of the computer and digital technology, there came the possibility and after that the realisation of digital art.

But it is also obvious that the analogue only exists once there is the digital, inasmuch as we can only think of the analogue in differentiation to the digital. Of course technologies and forms of practices that we now understand as digital - for example clocks - existed before digital technology, but, at the time they emerged, they would not have been thought of as existing on a digital/analog divide, simply because that differentiation did not exist.

A similar issue may be seen at play in Walter Benjamin's mechanical reproduction essay, in particular the point I believe he failed to grasp, that the aura and all the attributes he ascribes to the non-mechanically reproduce or reproducible work of art only emerge when there is mechanical reproduction. Before mechanical reproduction the idea that a work of art should be distinguished by its unique position in time and place would not have made sense.

Thus the most radical idea we should perhaps engage with is that of the analog and analog art.

TTFN

Charlie

Sent from my iPad

On 3 Mar 2011, at 00:46, "Mat Trivett" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> This is the first time for me posting on this list, so excuse my naivity. I think for me the Laboratory Life project/exhibition/residency/laboratory/workshop/experiment is really interesting. Unfortunately I didn't get to make it down but friends and collaborators of mine did. I feel that there is a disconnect between the realms of the digital and the analogue in the way that so called 'digital art' is viewed by institutions and funders and therefore framed to the viewer or audience.
>
> I think a lot of artists and curators don't necessarily work with digital technologies but possibly more with the lexicon and protocol of digital technologies, the language of network culture as the basis for their work. With laboratory life, this blurring of disciplines and egos relates in a way to the ways in which digital technologies are changing the ways of making. Closer to our biology, closer to the language of the internet and of the media used to make work.
>
> Last year during the premiere of the British Art Show in Nottingham (UK), I was involved in a similar project commissioned by Sideshow (the fringe to BAS7) titled LAB (as was the moniker under which we worked) http://wearelab.org/ it reflected a desire to borrow from hacking culture and open-source dynamics to explore new models of the 'making' you describe. What might laboratory practice look like across a range of media? How might a lab be different from a studio or a residency? What does this collaborative process or online processes like the wiki look like in real world scenarios? We are currently attempting to archive the various conversations, experiments and micro-projects that emerged from this messy process.
>
> There have been various projects both individual and collaborative that formed as a result of this cataclysmic process. What was called LAB is now called The Institute for Boundary Interactions Andy I would really like to speak with you more about your practice and furthermore about Laboratory Life.
>
> What space is there within 'digital art' structures for projects or artists who utilise this language of networks in the real world or across worlds? What happens when the media is human and not digital at all but more about connecting things? Connecting people, sharing knowledge and creating structures for sharing knowledge borrowing from the successes and failures of the 'many minds create knowledge' adage?
>
> There is one question that I am really interested in, in my personal practice currently of how might we understand vernacular or heriditary knowledge in the connected world? So relating back to the topic...how might analogue knowledge be digitised or conversely how might digital knowledge (semiotics) be humanised? How might 'networked' knowledge be generational?
>
> Mathew 'Newbie' Trivett
>
>
>
> On 2 Mar 2011, at 22:44, Ele wrote:
>
>> Hi Andy,
>> This sounds a truly rich and exciting experience. The fluid and improvised nature of the experimentation sounds like it really worked too. It seems to reflect an integrated approach to making using whatever materials necessary (reminds me of the art school breaking down media specific art disciplines to just be Art). But did the project also rely on some in-depth subject-specific knowledge too?
>>
>> But do feel free to put those rehearsed debates aside. Were there over-arching lines of enquiry that emerged? Ideas, concepts, critical frameworks that worked across the board?
>>
>> I've just been to a talk by Boris Groys on the contemporary nature of the contemporary art musuem based on the questions of time based art similar to those discussed on this list over the last ten years (the loop, the original, hot and cold media etc). And I was reminded of McLuhans claim that every new media investigates the aesthetics of it's preceding media (or something like that). Perhaps this can be apparent in art exhibition making too. In that each generation of curators adopts the curatorial critique of the artists before them(?) Groys argued that the truly contemporary work emerges at the point of exhibition. And your description of the provisional nature of the 'workshop lab in public' or 'lab as exhibition' seems to keep the contemporaneity of the work alive in a particularly strong way.
>>
>> It would be interesting to hear of other examples of this involving different kinds of making?
>> Best
>> Ele
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On 2 Mar 2011, at 17:52, andy gracie <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> hi all
>>>
>>> I'm Andy Gracie, and i'm excited to be invited to join in with this discussion.
>>>
>>> I'm just nearing the end of a thrilling two weeks in Brighton, where I was leading the 'laboratory life' project with Lighthouse and The Arts Catalyst. This project was based on the Interactivos model devised by Media-Lab Prado in Madrid and featured 5 lead artists whose practice engages with science, and 17 collaborators drawn from various artistic and scientific fields.
>>>
>>> I think that the things that have been going on here reflect pretty much all of the themes that have been outlined for this discussion. We have had home made performative human centrifuges, challenging probes into the legality of our own bodies and those of the people being used as human test beds, dressmaking with micro-biological dyes, realtime scientific interpretations through automatic drawing, the construction of a functioning and operative sterile laboratory using items from hardware and gardening stores, and hacker/craft constructions of astrobiological simulators with custom bred fruit flies. The fact that all this was being carried out under the intense scrutiny of the public eye ensured that the performative and challenging aspects of each project were to the fore.
>>>
>>> One of the beautiful qualities of all this inter-disciplinary, hybrid, analogue meets digital, craft meets bioart, function meets theatre process was that it was completely and utterly fluid and improvised. And all completely complimentary. I like to see it as evidence that it is when we decide to push the analysis of media and approach to one side we can really begin to let our hair down and generate ideas, projects and collaborations that produce results that are always fresh, always innovative and always thought provoking.
>>>
>>>
>>> best
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> andy
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ||||<web>|||||::: hostprods dot net
>>> ||||<blog>|||||::: hostdev dot wordpress dot com
>>
>
> Mat Trivett
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>
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