Artwork as Interface (original) (raw)

Artwork as Interface: by Peter Samis San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Artworks are highly coded power objects. At best, they serve as windows onto profound and unspeakable experience; at worst, they’re simply “wall obstructions.” In this paper, two issues will be addressed: • What do artists, in their role as extremely subtle information designers, have to teach us about how deep knowledge is conveyed? What do their visual strategies teach us about interface? • How can a digital program be designed that respects the properties inherent in each artwork, and yet harnesses the power of multimedia to make connections across space and time?

Artworks as informational systems

2016

Can we effectively describe artworks in informational terms? This paper discusses this question and its ramifications by analysing Mikhail Volkenstein's (2009) characterisation of art as 'informational systems' and contrasting it with contemporary understandings of information and aesthetics. Overall, the paper argues that contrary to Volkenstein's description, the kind of information conveyed by artworks is not only of an aesthetic kind, since artistic value depends on various other (cultural and economical) aspects. Nonetheless, it concludes that Volkenstein's description of artworks as 'programs' that not only convey but also generate information is a powerful metaphor for addressing current developments in artistic practices.

Landscapes of Feeling, Arenas of Action: Information Visualization as Art Practice

Leonardo, 2008

Discussing his recent artworks alongside those by Abigail Reynolds, Lucy Kimbell and Christian Nold, the author examines emerging phenomenain the digital and wider fine arts whereby information visualization practices are approached as creative media. By laying bare points of convergence and divergence between artisticand scientific approaches, the article develops a number of arguments thathow how the pictures produced by information visualization may be reframed within wider aesthetic and critical frameworks. Thus the author explores how models of image production derived from processes of scientific inquiry expand possibilities for the visual arts to develop new types of hybrid images that consist of data grounded both in material realities and in symbolic and aesthetic elements.

Informing the Everyday Interface: Exploring User-Content Relationships In Interactive Art

Citeseer

The relationship between interface and content helps to formulate the user experience. The term interface here refers to the way people access systems which in the context of this paper, are not limited to hardware such as mouse and keyboard, or to graphical user interfaces (GUI's). The interface has a significant effect on how the connection between the user and the content manifests and is traditionally seen as mediating this connection. This paper seeks to explore this relationship in instances where the user has a 'thick' relationship -meaning one with an increased personal or subjective association -to the content. Content (sometimes known as data) is, according to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, "that which is contained", in this case by a socio-technical system. In such systems, it is the interface that allows us to access, share, manipulate, generate or communicate with or through it. This paper explores complex content-interface relationships by looking at interactive artworks, commonly designed to be explicitly subjective and personal experiences. In doing so we ask whether use in an art context can inform the development of everyday systems where users have a personal or 'thick' relationship to the content, such as when choosing search terms, generating personal content through communication tools such as SMS and email, or when considering context aware or pervasive computing.

Informational Aesthetics—What Is the Relationship between Art Intelligence and Information?

Proceedings

The author examines the notion of informational aesthetics. The origin of aesthetics lies in Epicurus’s notion of aesthesis and the integration of artistic activity within ethics and the ‘good life’—as in the aesthetic theory and practice of the East. The debasement of the word ‘aesthetic’ reflects the increasing alienation of beauty from imagination. The fragmentation of art now packaged as media objects in our digital world is the legacy of this alienation. The author retraces the history of the concept of information aesthetics developed in the 1960s by Birkhoff, Bense and Mole and which sought to marry mathematics, computation and semiotics with artistic activity, based on Birkhoff’s aesthetic measure, and to bridge the gap between science and the humanistic imagination. The failure of the cognitive school is attributed to the limitations of its data-driven view of art itself as an affordance of perception (Arnheim). The roles of algorithmically generated art and of Computationa...

Postdigital Art: building appropriable information apparatuses

Re-new 2013 Proceedings. re-new digital arts forum. ISSN 2245-7801

The interface is leaving the desktop, making it possible to access information everywhere and in everything, through the developing systems of ambient informatics and ubiquitous computing. This new interaction paradigm is being debated: it increases our collective intelligence but at the same time can be a perfect accomplishment of the Control Society. The aesthetics of matters-of-concern replaces representation for the tracking of the process that gives form to our reality in each moment, while Postdigital Art produces works capable of merging virtual and physical spaces. Both these related fields show and articulate the complex informational system embedded in our reality making it appropriable and subject to profanation. This visualization operation displaces the capacities of the system of ubiquitous computing, from perfect control to an increasing capacity of individuals to intervene and perform in their environment by interacting with it.

Book Introduction - Art as Information Ecology

Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics, 2021

The introduction to my book, published by Duke University Press, 2021 Back cover blurb: In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art, but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode-information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from an artwork with each encounter. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation, as a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the artwork of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld, driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates. PRAISE: “Masterfully intertwining aesthetics, information theory, and entropy concepts, Jason A. Hoelscher offers an insightful account of the accelerated transformations of art practices in the 1960s. Art as Information Ecology will open new pathways toward a better understanding of the complexities of periodizing contemporary art at a time when artworlds are in more intense communication with other systems. This ambitious book is bound to create ripple effects.” — Cristina Albu, author of Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art “In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher digs deep, looking into contemporary artworks in very different ways than ever before: from the premise that art can be a foundation of information that is like a multilayered cake, impossible to finish. I applaud Hoelscher for his in-depth, intense, and focused look into how art is a base for information systems that carry beyond the work themselves.” — Sharon Louden, artist, educator advocate for artists, and editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books THOUGHT IN THE ACT A series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi Jason A. Hoelscher is Associate Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Georgia Southern University. ----- For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount, please visit the Duke UP website and enter the coupon code E21HLSR during checkout

Can Art Provide Knowledge? On the Cognitive Value of Images

New Theories, 2022

The question of the relationship between art and knowledge and whether and in what sense art can be regarded as a form of knowledge has been addressed from different perspectives but it still does not have secure grounds in contemporary aesthetics. The argument involves rather skeptical attitudes – from Plato to Kant and throughout the dominance of positivist tradition in Western philosophy in the first half of the 20th century – as well as cognitivist approaches, such as James O. Young’s view of art as a source of knowledge, which has the capacity to provide both propositional and practical knowledge. The “linguistic turn” in contemporary thought and the ensued iconization of language in western culture led to the identification of cognitive potential with discourse, resulting in inequitable disregard of sensory awareness and turning the human experiences and cognition into the product of language. The submission of iconicity to semantics and reducing the pictorial to interpretable text without sensory significance led to the questioning of the cognitive aspect of visuality. The hermeneutical perspective, drawing upon Michael Polanyi’s view of all knowledge as established in relation to tacit thought, considers art as embodying tacit knowledge and emphasizes the importance of the inherent inexhaustibility of meaning in art that can contribute to the inquiry. Recognizing that knowledge is not always reducible to language, such perspective liberates knowledge from the dominance of the propositional and provides further insights for the phenomenology of art as a creative practice. No doubt that the ways of representation in arts are fundamentally different from those in the sciences and both realms contribute to knowledge in radically different ways. However, while the ways to explicate how art can enhance the faculty of judgment and practical knowledge might be relatively obvious in literary works, the question of how visual works can provide the same kinds of knowledge is more ambiguous. Consequently, the question of epistemic potential of visual representation is even more challenging. Image as a system constructed according to the immanent laws with its own iconic sense - which determines its difference from reality as well as from discourse – challenges perception, because a conceptual, abstract tendency of perception is incompatible with a sensual particularity of the image (Boehm). At the same time, it allows a multiplicity of experience made possible by simultaneity inherent in the image provided that we understand the act of seeing as comprising simultaneity and consecutiveness as well as the unconscious, pre-conceptual processes. It is the expressive potential of the pictorial and the specificity of art as an experiential and perceptual modality embodying representational meanings that distinguishes it as a distinctive form of knowledge. In an endeavor to defy the approach of semiotics and the epistemology of science that insist on amodality of knowledge and its dependence on discursive context, this paper rejects the reducibility of knowledge to language and embraces the approach that advocates „disestablishing the view of cognition as dominantly and aggressively linguistic“ (Stafford). Keywords: Visual art; pictorial representation; art and knowledge; aesthetic cognitivism.