Towards Bio-Arts and a Future Digital Media Culture

Perth.
The second day of PerthDAC is about to start, and the first speaker today is Allison Kudla, who is interested in biological agency in art. This links to a suggested shift from simulation to emulation art, a form of art which uses physics and natural phenomena in artworks and embraces the universe itself as an operating system. Emulation is understood here as a perfect simulation, indistinguishable from what it represents; this is well understood in the realm of software, but what does it mean if the universe itself is posited as an operating system? Such questions also relate to Plato's theory of forms, in which artists represent the explicit material manifestation of forms (rather than the implicit form itself). But where can new or latent forms, or further refinements of forms, be found?

Emulation art begins to answer such questions - it sees conventional, simulation art as only a first step towards emulation, akin to an architect's draft or predictive analytical model. Emulation art, by contrast, aims to invent, engineer, and create the form itself, thereby opening up new opportunities for human development and knowledge which transcend the conceptual stage. This, then, also requires a much greater knowledge of a wide range of technical disciplines of the artist, including for example control theory (concerning the behaviour of dynamic systems) and general systems theory (applying theories of interactions within biological systems to all other systems). Allison applies this to the biological realm in her own practice, focussing on biological processes and cycles of life and death in plants - her work develops responsive systems where plant growth and lifecycles trigger and are triggered by technological systems.

Up next is Brian Degger, and he begins by noting the unavailability of high-end technologies to many artists, even though art and technology are closely, historically intertwined. Today, however, many artists are left behind by technological developments, but there are a few leading lights whose work operates at the nexus of art and technology - such artists use new technologies for reasons of novelty and precedence, topicality and relevance, and the opportunity to bring their own ideas to the ongoing processes of technological development. New technologies are often unstable in their early phases, they are expensive and time-intensive, they are unique and/or tightly controlled by their creators, or they are otherwise closely regulated because of their still-emergent, still-experimental nature. There are economic and physical, intellectual property, and regulatory aspects which may restrict artists' access to new technologies, in other words - this is especially strongly felt in bio-art, as the technologies and materials for biotechnological work are often tightly policed. Attaining the permits to exhibit bio-art may be particularly difficult.

New technologies may include especially the material sciences, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information science; each of these are increasingly interesting for artists operating in the art/technology space. But such art also has a long history, stemming back for example to calls in the 1880s for visual artists to better understand the colour paints they were working with. One of the major modern-day projects was Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), another is the UK-based initiative Blast Theory which began in 1997 and explores mixed-reality gaming as a social activity, a performative event, and a spectacle - including for example through the I Like Frank locative gaming project in Adelaide which utilised a prototype 3G network. Another group is the Mixed Reality Lab in Nottingham, which includes computer scientists, ethnologists, and sociologists and works especially in the realm of interaction studies and human-computer interaction.

Beyond this, bio-art covers aesthetic and physical aspects and explores biological materials as new components in artistic practice - for example using living surfaces to coat artefacts, developing growing artworks, and following scientific methods in artistic practice. The Symbiotica project at the University of Western Australia is a particularly good example here. On the other hand, the Brussels-based FoAM group operates independently from technology partners and has set up its own legal and technological framework for participating artists. Whatever the specific setup, however, such projects enable artists to act as equal researchers alongside technologists.

Finally, we move on to Christy Dena. Her interest is in particular in the future of digital media culture, and she notes first the range of media platforms and products now available to us, and the increasing trend towards media convergence which Henry Jenkins has also identified. We are moving away from a focus on new media to a more holistic view of all media in combination, then - a transmedia perspective, in Jenkins's words. Transmedia may operate in a series (self-contained), serial (not self-contained), flexi (series + serial), and event realm (a single story or game played out in a tightly interwoven fashion across transmedia platforms). This is no longer simply a commercial process, but artists themselves are now also highly involved.

Why does this take place? On the one hand, we are undergoing a process of demassification as the range of media platforms increases and audience attention is distributed; on the other hand, there is also a horizontal integration of media industries, a form of economic convergence. Media use is shifting towards multitasking, and many media designers and artists are now harnessing such tendencies, leading to a development of more polychronic cultures and the rise of transliteracy amongst media users. One concept here is mono-polymorphism - managing complexity by a dual process of unification while maintaining the integrity of disparate parts, by shifting the boundaries of the abstract unifying principle. A work of art, in this context, can be described as unity in variety. Technological convergence, then, may lead to the development of mutable hardware, and an embrace of ubiquitous computing and universal connectivity, as well as the increasing combination and mash-up of existing data, information, and even physical materials.

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