cyberaesthetics – some basic theses

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 8 / 2014 Augmented Reality Studies ISSN 2299-906X

Source of Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/14827514086/

Piotr Zawojski

Cyber Aesthetics - Some Basis Theses


Piotr Zawojski

Cyber Aesthetics - Some Basis Theses

Abstract:

Referring to Sidey Myoo’s motto - „There is one human and there are two worlds” - I would

like to suggest a different perception of hybrid reality in which our doubled or multiplied

“self” in a natural way experiences “multiple realities”. Cyberaesthetics is not only an

aesthetic phenomena with the prefix “cyber”. Separating a phenomenon of cyberculture

sphere from phenomena of new media sphere is a mistake. Therefore I try to think about

cyberculture and cyberaesthetics in terms of their mutual relations with the world of new

media. This is integrative and not oppositional thinking. Cyberaesthetics is an attempt at

describing the way in which new media shape and co-create cyberculture. And the latter is

expressed in new media art (cyberart).

Tags: Cyber Aesthetics, Cyber Art, Cyberculture;

PIOTR ZAWOJSKI Assistant Professor at Department of Film & Media

Studies, The University of Silesia, Katowice. He also work

at Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. His research interest

focus on the theory of photography, film and cinema, new

media, digital arts and cyberculture. He is a chief of Film

and Media section at polish cultural quarterly Opcje. He is

also an essayist, reviewer, film and art critic. He is a

member of International Association for Aesthetics and

International Association of Art Critics (AICA).


...intro

1. Referring to Sidey Myoo's motto - „There is one human and there are two worlds”1 -

I would like to suggest a different perception of hybrid reality in which our doubled or

multiplied “self” in a natural way experiences “multiple realities”. Leon Chwistek's

theory of “multiple realities”, which implies multimodality of our “self”, can be

considered a starting point for the discussion. The theory can be treated as a pendant

to Witkacy's concept of “self” - which implies “plurality in unity”.

2. Cyberaesthetics is not only an aesthetic phenomena with the prefix: “cyber”.

Separating a phenomenon of cyberculture sphere from phenomena of new media

sphere is a mistake. Therefore I try to think about cyberculture and cyberaesthetics in

terms of their mutual relations with the world of new media.

This is integrative and not oppositional thinking. Cyberaesthetics is an attempt at

describing the way in which new media shape and co-create cyberculture. And the

latter is expressed in new media art (cyberart).

3. Cyberart still needs to be defined. Or, perhaps, if not defined, it needs to be

constantly re-defined – and this should set the route to prolegomena which are the

foundation for cyberaesthetics.

4. Only dialogue may enable this process. This is why we participate in the dialogue –

or precisely – polylogue discussion, for example on the web. Taking into account

references to the “philosophy of dialogue” is crucial. Dialogue on the web is the basis

for the philosophy of dialogue, of “interfaceology”, which is an interpretation of

“interfacing”.

1 See: http://www.ostrowicki.art.pl


5. Web aesthetics (and cyberaesthetics) must be an aesthetics of a multiplied dialogue

in cyberspace. Of course, the web should be understood in the whole complex

dimension in which this notion can be understood.

From the technological, through the human (anthropological) perspective, to the

cultural and philosophical aspect of networking. Web aesthetics and aesthetics on the

web, the web as a metaphor, but also as a real structure, the web as a challenge and as

a space to be managed – these are the issues which require attention. Being netizens

– who extensively colonize (and are colonized by) the hybrid, yet, at the same time,

integral doubled (or rather multidimensional) reality – we are responsible for

developing a formal language to describe art in the era of bio-techno-logical systems.

So, let's create a “web aesthetics” as a contemporary version of aesthetics being the

first domain of knowledge providing insight into our ontological and epistemological

entanglements in the world of web practices.

...and further...

What is the place of art in cyberspace and cyberculture? Writing about “the work of

art in the age of digital reproduction”2 Charles Alexander Moffat states that works of

art will not be experienced in galleries because instead spectators will admire artists'

performance – both: the ancient and the contemporary ones – in cybergalleries.

There is no convincing reason for such thinking, yet, on the other hand, there is no

doubt that cyberspace has become a place where a huge number of images (or rather

their digital reproductions) is collected, and for many spectators it is the only possible

2 See: Charles Alexander Moffat, The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/contemporary/The-Work-of-Art-in-the-Age-of-Digital-Reproduction.html


way to experience classical paintings, sculptures, photographs and also video films,

documentations of installations, performances or concerts.

Placing Leonardo da Vinci The Last Supper on the web by the HAL9000

company3 might assume the proportions of a symbol. The photograph of the fresco

located in the church of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milano was taken with the

resolution of 16 billion pixels and with the help of contemporary most advanced

photographic equipment by Nikon and the cutting edge optics relying on the

technique of panoramic photography. In order to achieve an excellent quality of the

digital image, 1677 photographs were taken and subsequently turned into one

digitalized image. Spectators may enlarge the image on their computer screens by

using the zoom feature – which means that they are able to see even the tiniest

elements of the fresco, something they would have never been able to see standing in

front of the work in the della Grazie church.

It would be absurd to claim that watching da Vinci's masterpiece in cyberspace is the

same thing as watching the original. However, the digital replica of The Last Supper

may be an ideal addendum and extension of the physical existence of the work of art.

This slightly anecdotic event can be a perfect introduction to the reflexions upon the

very complex stories of traditional art facing new situations resulting from digital

breakthrough in culture, but it can also encourage various (re)interpretations of the

state of the art in the age of digital media.

As a result of cultural transformations a number of new forms of electronic art and

cyberart have been created, simultaneously, digital tools have enabled the earlier

unknown, because technologically impossible, methods of representation, promotion,

3 See: http://www.haltadefinizione.com


distribution and they have given the opportunity to develop completely new research

methods, for example, for the analysis of the structure of images. The digital copy of

The Last Supper will not substitute the original, although it presents researchers and

common spectators with totally new possibilities of monitor perception. Thus, new

perspectives of viewing the history of the traditional (let's say, pre-digital) art with

the use of “digital glasses” have emerged and they are different from the ones we have

known so far.

Media art seems to be one of the key issues of cyberculture – both in terms of new

technocultural tendencies being manifested in society defined by using new computer

technologies (not only, though) and in terms of playing a special role in the process of

(self)defining of a new cultural paradigm. Cyberculture finds art to be a perfect

medium in which fundamental characteristics of culture of the age of information and

communication are revealed. Before we begin to discuss digital aesthetics, we should

probably move back to the most basic questions: what digital art is and how it differs

from analogue art, because if we acknowledge that the digital does exist, then,

obviously, the analogue paradigm should be, in a dialectical way, placed at the

opposite pole.

It is worth remembering that the very “digital art enables analogue processes

occurring in nature being represented digitally”4. The words come from Peter Weibl's

manifesto published as a supplement to the catalogue of Ars Electronica festival in

4 PeterWeibel, On the History and Aesthetics of the Digital Image, [in:] Timothy Druckrey with Ars Electronica (eds.), Ars Electronica. Facing the Future. A Survey of Two Decades, Cambridge MA, London 1999, p. 51.


1984 (nineteen eighty for) – as the author himself claims the term “digital art”5 was

used in the text for the first time. The very term is highly ambiguous, all the more that

it has undergone a specific form of evolution: from the commonly used at the turn of

the 60s. and 70s term computer art, through multimedia, hypermedia art, to digital

art and cyberart.

At the same time, the term new media art has been quite commonly used and the

term digital media art – less frequently. Christiane Paul, taking into account those

terminological ambiguities, writes: “The notion of “digital art” is used to such diverse

objects and artistic practices that it is impossible to define it by a homogenous set of

aesthetic terms”6. A little further Paul explains the reasons for such definitional

problems: “Defining and categorizations might be helpful in identifying basic

attributes of a given medium. Yet, at the same time, they pose a threat of constructing

pre-definitional limitations in explaining and understanding of works of art,

especially when they are constantly developed as it is in the case of digital art”7.

One more aspect emerging from the discussions on digital media art should be added

to the above doubts – a fundamental issue of the basic distinction between the art

which uses digital technology as a specific tool for creating traditional (analogue)

artistic objects such as photography, sculpture or music, and the art which uses

digital technology as an immanent feature of a medium, that is the art which is

5 See: Peter Weibel, Ars Electronica. Between Art and Science, [in:] Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schöpf, Gerfried Stocker (eds.), Ars Electronica 79-99. 20 Jahre Festival für Kunst, Technologie und Gesellschaft, Linz 1999, p. 72.

6 Christiane Paul, Digital Art, Thames & Hudson, London 2003, p. 7.

7 Ibidem, p. 8.


created, stored and presented in a digital format. And, moreover, which uses

possibilities of interaction, co-participation and co-creation

I ask myself the next question: about the role of an aesthetician in defining and

recognizing digital art – ergo, while giving consideration to the object of my

reflections which is still in statu nascendi. I try, simultaneously, to take into account

the specificity of the aesthetic reflection whose subjects are the activities and objects

realized by means of digital technologies. The state of being formed has a double

meaning here: firstly - an “object” of digital art is in the state of permanent formation,

it never really undergoes “coagulation”, and secondly – broadly defined digital art is

in the process of being born, constituted, in the process of searching its own territory

– as it would be a simplification to locate it solely in cyberspace.

Contrary to appearances, the subject of digital aesthetics within the cybercultural

discourse is not so obvious. I use the phrase “contrary to appearances” because one

may say that the situation is very clear in this case: everything that has a binary

digital record as its ontological basis that was positively verified by an aesthetician or

a theoretician – as including artistic and aesthetic values – is digital art. However, it

seems that the obviousness of such a statement is an undue and highly unjustified

simplification.

Digital media art is an art which makes an interface a basic category not only in the

sense of a “medium” enabling contact between the user and (most often) the virtual

work of art, yet also one of the fundamental categories of a new, media oriented

aesthetics. The case of database which has become one of the most important issues

of media aesthetics is similar. An ideal proof of the significant role of a database as a


research problem can be found in a joint publication (edited by Victoria Vesna)

which, in a sense, proclaims a new scientific discipline – “database aesthetics”8.

Besides, it has its continuation on the web where one may find additional

publications and, most of all, various artistic (although not only) projects using

databases as a fundamental constitutive element and, at the same time, exploring the

issues of the need to constantly develop methods of selection and material

organization in the age of information flood of data9. Clearly, it is the Internet which

is a special sphere and medium predestined (pridestend) to use database strategies.

As Victoria Vesna, an artist and theoretician, and an editor of the above mentioned

publication, writes: “Artists using Internet as a medium are particularly interested in

creating new kind of aesthetics which encompasses not only aspects of visual

representation, but also invisible aspects of organization, searching for information

and navigating them”10.

An important subdiscipline of aesthetic studies has emerged recently. It is treated as

a kind of centre of various trends and explorations within digital media aesthetics. It

is “aesthetic computing”. Although it may seem that “aesthetic computing” is a

phenomenon strictly connected with the digital breakthrough and with the

emergence of the world wide web which redefined the whole range of phenomena

resulting from the expansion of technoculture based on the domination of a

metamedium – the computer – one has to be aware of the fact that those processes

began in the late ‘60s. 8 See: Victoria Vesna (ed.), Database Aesthetics. Art in the Age of Information Overflow, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London 2007.

9 See: http://victoriavesna.com/dataesthetics/

10 Victoria Vesna, Introduction, [in:] Victoria Vesna (ed.), Database Aesthetics..., op. cit., p. XIII.


Since 2002 workshops devoted to the aesthetic computing problematics initiated by

Paul Fishwick, Christa Sommerer and Roger Malina have been organized in German

Dagstuhl (near Wadern in Germany). Dagstuhl is an academic institution where

Leibniz Center for Informatics is located. Early computer art, while studying the

possibilities of hardware, software and cybernetics, brought about the transgression

of boundaries between cognitive and material aesthetics. The participants of the

above mentioned meeting and later research and publishing defined aesthetic

computing in a brief manifesto. They referred to artistic practice and theoretical

concepts deriving from the area of new media art research. Generally speaking, they

emphasized the question of “applying theory and artistic practice to aesthetic

computing”11.

Writing the preface to the joint publication on the issues which was the outcome of

the above described initiative, Paul Fishwick tries to outline a program for the future

in the form of three fundamental questions faced by aesthetics attempting to apply

traditional categories and new aesthetic notions to digital art.

* Firstly, a question of expanding traditional definitions of aesthetics to include the

context of issues connected with digitality.

11 Paul Fishwick, Aesthetic Computing Manifesto, „Leonardo” 2003, vol. 34, no 2, p. 256. In the later introduction to the collective work author states that aestheitic computing should take the such issues as: 1: presentation of programs and data structures taking into account the cultural specificities; 2: inclusion of artistic methods to typical activities using computers, such as scientific visualization and 3: improve emotional and cultural level of interaction with the computer. See: Paul Fishwick, An Introduction to Aesthetic Computing, [in:] Paul Fishwick (ed.), Aesthetic Computing, op. cit., p. 6.


*Secondly, the question of the role of values, subjectivity and emotions in

mathematics and computer science as the elements which enable sustaining the

balance between the form and function – needs to be addressed.

*And thirdly, we need to answer the question on how effective social structures –

where artists, designers, mathematicians and computer scientists could co-work

directly or by means of web – can be created12.

Paul Fishwick has been working on methodological and theoretical basis of an

aesthetically oriented research on phenomena included in the sphere of art as the

result of using computer technologies, but also of activities transgressing art which,

however, can be analysed from the perspective of “broadened aesthetics”.

Programming is the example of such an activity. Using various programming

languages programmers apply their own “handwriting” while creating algorithmic

structures which have aesthetic potential themselves. Simultaneously, the aesthetic

dimension of programming is revealed at the level of the effects of specific procedures

application and it can be easily observed, for example, when we watch two- or three-

dimensional data visualizations. Moreover, instead of programming art we should

frequently refer to art of programs whose visual architecture may enchant us with

their beauty. And I am not talking only about fractals, although evoking them in such

a context should be obvious13.

12 Paul Fishwick (ed.), Aesthetic Computing, op. cit., p. XVI.

13 About „programming as a form of art” says interesting Roman Verostko, one of the pionieers of the algorithmics art, i.e. “algorist”, which use to the cyberartist who use in their work algorithms. See: Roman Verostko, Algorithms and the Artist, http://www.verostko.com/alg-isea94.html. A kind of summary of many years of experiences (theoretical and practical) of this artist ist the text:


... and so on...

Thus aesthetic computing seems to be the area of inter- and transdisciplinary

confluence of different research procedures, disciplines, particular issues and

attempts at a global perception of cyberart functioning in cyberculture. To be more

specific. To globally perceive a certain type of cyberart which is based, in the creative

process, on algorithmic patterns. Cyberart which uses the achievements of

programming languages. Applies mathematical and computer procedures as systems

of tools facilitating creation, or conditioning it. As tools which constitute basic

equipment of artists who cooperate in different areas with representatives of

numerous scientific, computer and cognitive disciplines.

Epigenetic Art Revisited: Software as Genotype, [in:] Gerfried Stocker, Christine Schöpf (eds.), Code – The Language of Our Time, Hatje Cantz, Osterfildern-Ruit 2003, p. 156-161.


Cyberaesthetics – Some Basic Theses / P. Zawojski, CyberEmpathy: Visual

Communication and New Media in Art, Science, Humanities, Design and

Technology.

ISSUE 8 / 2015. Augmented Reality Studies.

ISSN 2299-906X. Kokazone.

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http://www.cyberempathy.com/

cyberaesthetics – some basic theses

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