Paradigm Changes in Media Art: Research Project Description (Abstract, long version)

This research investigates media art through practice based and theoretic research. At the centre of this investigation are seminal exhibitions in the history of media art as well as my own curatorial practice. The thesis proposes that paradigm shifts in media art and society are closely linked and that studying those paradigm shifts through the chosen exhibitions provides insights into the interlocking dynamics of art, technology and social change.

The term media art is used as an umbrella term that describes artistic practices making use of and simultaneously critically interrogating electronic and digital technologies. Media art had important forerunners in the shape of the historic avant-gardes in the early decades of the 20th century. Some genealogies of media art go back even further to include moving sculptures (Burnham 1967) and projection apparatuses (Zielinski 2002). This research however, will focus on the time from the 1960s till today, when media art first emerged within a comparable socio-historic context, and then in the 1980s and onwards, when it became a recognised genre within the arts and started to form its own institutions, practices and discourse. At the core of this inquiry are the multi-layered relationships between paradigms in media art and and the overall historic development. The hypothesis is proposed that media art can be understood best by investigating its relationship with the leading techno-economic paradigm of a specific period.

The notion of the paradigm has originally been introduced by Thomas Kuhn (1962) to explain the structure of scientific discoverie., The way this term is used here is based on its adaptation by the so called innovation school in economics. Freeman and Soete (1997) argue that there are intrinsic links between business cycles and innovations which do not only stretch over 10 year business cycles but do also cover so called 'long waves' or 'long cycles' of on average 50 years. According to Freeman and Soete contemporary capitalism didn't just develop through one long continuity from the early industrial revolution till today but through successive industrial revolutions whereby each instance of a new succesfull technologic revolution formed a distinct techno-economic paradigm. The paradigms are defined by a combination of so called paradigm shaping or lead technologies and the new business models and ways of organisation they enable. Following this interpretation, we are now going through the fifth techno-economic paradigm whereby information and telecommunication technologies are the lead technologies.

The conceptual approach of Freeman, Soete and others (cf. Perez 2002) is of particular interest for this study insofar as, from an economic point of view it understands technological change as endogenous to economic development, while traditional (classical, neo-classical) schools in economics only considered inputs and outputs such as labour and capital, while all other things - including technology - were seen to be exogenous to economic relationships. This viewpoint is inspired by the work of the economist Josef Schumpeter who drew on earlier work by Marxist economists such as Kondratieff and Trotzky (cf. Mandel 1975, Goldstein 1988). The view held in common by those authors is that technological innovation plays a strong part in shaping techno-economic paradigms. This author adds that media art as an avant-garde art form is involved in the innovation process itself as well as in the interpretation of its social meaning and thereby contributes to the creation, dissemination and communication of paradigmatic ideas and techniques. By investigating media art through its relationship with the respective techno-economic paradigm, new avenues for cultural critique are opened up, a critique which benefits from being historically grounded and supported by a thick web of contextual relationships which this work aims at bringing to the fore.

The approach of the innovation school in economics is complimented by further theoretic schools which are used together to develop a theoretic framework for the research under the keyword of "technopolitics". Those theoretic schools are: world systems theory (Wallerstein, Arrighi, Arrighi and Silver), regulation school (Aglietta, Lipietz, Boyer, Jessop, Hirsch), autonomous Marxists (Negri, Lazzarato, Mazzarati) as well as Marxist feminists (Federici, Werlhof, Mies) and (feminist) science studies. The idea is that a comparative reading of those theories provides an understanding of the technological, economic and political dynamic forces behind the most recent and the current paradigm, Fordism and Post-Fordism. The history of media art is then studied according to four case studies, an undertaking which proceeds within the delimitations and structures of the technopolitical framework. The four case studies which form the body of this work are centred around the exhibitions or rather exhibition based projects New Tendencies, Cybernetic Serendipity, Software, Ars Electronica and the Waves exhibitions. The literature on media art, the exhibitions in question, the artists and curators involved, the ideas of artists and of contemporary theorists in areas such as cybernetics, communication studies, media theory, etc., in short, what belongs to the content of the exhibition also forms another important part of primary literature. Methodologically this means that the case studies are firmly embedded in the socio-techno-politico historic famework, but it also means that the perspective on the relevant aspects of the respective paradigm is developed from and through the exhibitions. To my best knowledge such an integrated approach has not been applied to the study of media art before so that new knowledge can be expected to be generated by this work.

Theoretic introductions

World systems theory tries to understand how the capitalist economy world economy, which came into existence between 1450 and 1550 in Europe, reproduces itself. World systems theory studies the changing patterns at the centre of the world-system, the alternation of periods of hegemony and competition between core powers. There are reasons to suspect that the struggle for control of the world market is connected with the existence of longy cycles in more purely economic terms (Gordon 1980). This approach also studies the internal dynamics of the particular form of hegemony in economic, technological and militaristic terms - the structural mechanisms by which the system reproduces itself but also the structural contradictions by which it undermines itself (Wallerstein 1980, 167). The latter means also to concentrate on the organisational responses of the opressed strata, the politics of the antisystemic movements that have grown up in the course of the histprical development of the capitalist world economy (Wallerstein 1980, 168).

Marx inspired critiques of the political economy traditionally focus on relationships considered "central" to the way the political economy works, such as the 'contradiction' between capital and labour, whereby the social relationships contained in those terms remain abstract. Regulation school economics (cf. Aglietta 1979) looks more closely at how a particular 'mode of regulation' achieves a balance between capital and labour, production and consumption, so that the tendically unstable system of capitalism achieves at least a temporal stability. By looking at how the variables in ecenomic relationships play themselves out, so to speak, 'in the real world', regulation theorists open the door for the arts to become part of the analysis and not just an afterthought or merely 'superstructural' phenomena. One key area in which art and culture are involved is the production of consumption norms relevant for the realisation of effective demand, as well as the development of a 'functional aesthetic' which provides the blueprints, prototypes or models for future industrial products. Regulation theory also provides clues for an analysis of the relationship between states, markets and artistic production on a structural level. [Being mainly concerned with developing economics as a science those clues remain few and far between, but there is an upside to that: those clues can be developed and new cross-connections can be made, without adhering to the strict terminology of regulation theory, yet benefitting from its solid 'scientific' economic outlook not usually found in art writing].

Autonomous Marxists started in the 1960s to develop a critique of contemporary capitalism which was closely aligned with grassroots workers' struggles of the day, mainly in Italy. In the late 1970s autonomists were among the first to notice a change in the strategies of capitalism to employ the desires and lingustic and communicative capabilities of workers for the production of surplus value. Their analysis gained more valency during the 1990s when, with the rise of the net, linguistic production (Marazzi 2008) and the flexible personality (Holmes 2001) became more widely recognized as the new ideal type of (self-)employed cultural worker in the New Economy. Autonomous Marxism is particularly useful for the study of the digitally based New Economy and of new Post-Fordist regimes of work encapsulated in the term 'immaterial labour' (Lazzarato 1998). The 'autonomist' perspective sheds light on, firstly, the response of capitalism to the challenge of the workers who tried to break out of the Fordist paradigm, and secondly how that response response through organisational and technical change helped usher in the new paradigm of post-Fordism and the digital New Economy.

The perspective of Marxist feminists forms an important corrective to the approaches summarised above by asking how forms of non-wage labour such as the unpaid work of women is at least as important for capitalism as the relationship between capital and wage-labour. This critique is developed alongside 'world-systems' theoretic lines, insofar as historic work shows that the repression of women was not an event of secondary importance but part and parcel of the historic process of the development of capitalism. Moreover, those processes were not only historic but continue to form an important strategy of the capitalist world economy in what is called 'continued primitive accumulation' (Federici, Werlhof). Such a viewpoint has been extended to a critique of patriarchal science developed by Marxist-feminists strands of science studies who have made important and unique contributions to the overall field of science studies (Haraway, Hayles).

The exhibition as a medium

Four case studies form the body of this work, the exhibitions or rather exhibition based projects New Tendencies, Cybernetic Serendipity, Software, Ars Electronica and the Waves exhibitions.

New Tendencies (NT) was the name of a series of exhibitions and conferences held in Zagreb, Croatia between 1961 and 1973. The first three occurances of NT, from 1961 to 1965 form the first case study and respective chapter. The second phase of NT from 1967 to 1973 is grouped together with Cybernetic Serendipity, London 1968, and Software, New York City 1970, to form the second case study and chapter. The Ars Electronica festival, founded in Austria in 1979, is at the focus of the inquiry for the third case study/chapter, with particular attention given to its instances in 1989 and 1995. Waves, held so far in Riga, Latvia 2006 and Dortmund, Germany 2008, forms the fourth and final chapter. I will now very briefly explain why those events are grouped together this way.

NT, phase one (1961, 1963 and 1965) was held in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, at a time when the paradigm of Fordism had reached a mature stage in the USA and other countries of the core. Yugoslavia was in a phase of catching up modernisation, having successfully achieved a first phase of industrialisation, now trying to switch from investment in 'industries that build industries' to consumer goods, food and agriculture. NT, phase one, can be interpreted as both, an expression of Fordism and as an attempt to overcome some of its limitations and rigidities. While the artists involved were not yet working with computers (a tiny minority did, but they are the exception) they anticipated a lot of future developments, in particular the opening up of the artwork towards audience participation, the characterisation of an artwork as being 'programmed', that is, defined by a set of rules applied repeatedly to create certain patterns or results, and the notion of art as visual research.

The second case study focuses on an early peak of computer art expressed by the manifestations in the exhibitions Cybernetic Serendipity, Software and NT 4 and 5 between 1968 and 1973. Those exhibitions mark an early high-point of computer art, when computers first became accessible to artists and the public was confronted with this entirely new way of making art. This second case study therefore serves to highlight the peak and crisis of Fordism. While still informed by a sense of optimism and progress typical of Fordist modernity, the digital artists of the late 1960s also had to deal with the dark side of technologies emerging from the military-industrial complex and the strong social critique from various directions ('68 and anti-war, critical theory, New Left). This case study and historic period is congruent with the crisis of Fordism and the birth of a new paradigm for which we can use a number of terms almost synonymously, be it Post-Fordism, the post-industrial society, information society, network society or neoliberalism, each term highlighting different emphasis given to specific aspects of the emerging new paradigm.

The key point, however, is that there is a new paradigm developing from inside the old one. This notion of the double-paradigm is developed by Freeman and Soete (1997) and Carlota Perez (2002). The argumentation is that when a paradigm reaches maturity, productivity slows down. This motivates key protagonists - inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - to look for new sources of growth. Such a new source for economic growth was found in the microprocessor, produced first in 1971. Thus, while Fordism, based on mass production of cars, oil as an energy source and new materials summarized by the term plastic, kept going after 1971, albeit in a stage of perpetual crisis, from within this paradigm a new one based on chips and telecommunications was developing. The artists, curators and theorists involved in the period covered by the 2nd case study were at the cusp of this transition, they saw that change coming and struggled to interprete it as well as shape it through their contributions.

The third case study, while looking at Ars Electronica as a whole, from 1979 till today, in particular highlights the years 1989 and 1995. The argument put forward is that 1989 is an important date both in historic-political terms (fall of the Berlin wall and iron curtain) and also the beginning of a sea-change in media art. Media art in the 1980s was still in a pioneering phase, a minoritarian discourse and practice, far from being a homogenous field, carried forward by dispersed actors, geographically separated and improvising with the tools and technologies available to them. By the end of the 1980s festivals such as the Ars Electronica provided a focal point for the emerging communities and discourses. The 1980s had also seen the introduction of home computers and cheap or affordable electronic and digital equipment (video cameras and editing suits, samplers). the availability of those technologies broadened the scope of actors participating in media art. The exclusivity of computers in the 1960s and 1970s had elicited collaborations between artists and research institutes without which artists would not have been able to carry out work in that metier. The 1980s enabled a new generation of artists, informed by a post-punk and DIY spirit and with antagonistic social ideas to lay their hands at those technologies and enter the field. Points of reference were not only the fine arts but also underground pop culture, industrial culture, neo-Situationism and the notion of free media - grassroots community media activism opposed to the media monopolies and oligopolies of that day and age. Those developments coincided with a strong push for the 'information society' coming from above. While the information society had been a promise or even 'prophecy' in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the 1980s it slowly became a reality, accompanied by discourses which moved from the ivory tower of academia to the popular press and best-selling non-fiction works. The outcome of this process was highly uncertain, it was not yet clear which features of the information society would become dominant. Ars Electronica in 1989 came at the peak of this development, bringing together a range of highly diverse practices.

Between 1989 and 1995 media art consolidated into a recognizable discipline of the arts, creating and strengthening its institutions and creating a discourse which for a short time almost became hegemonic. Innovation school economists date the beginning of the information age proper in 1993. This is the year when the Clinton administration starts to build a 'national information infrastructure' by privatising the internet and creating a global, yet US-dominated 'information highway'. In 1993 also a new expansionary cycle starts in the US economy, soon to go by the name of the New Economy. My argument is that it makes sense to pick out the years 1989 and 1995 because it is during those years that the world economy and political systems re-adjust themselves. The hegemony of the US which had been seen to be threatened militarily (Vietnam) and economically (Japan and Germany overtaking the US in the 1980s) was revived during the 1990s. The new paradigm leading technologies had been invented and were dominated by US firms and public institutions.

The research undertaken looks at how media art contributes to the creation of the paradigm of the information society through its works and discourse, but also, at the same time, how media art manages to establish itself as a field by drawing on the discoursive force field of the information society. The key category of that period is that of 'interactivity' understood as interaction between humans and computers through sophisticated interfaces and new programming techniques. Further important terms are 'immersion' and the supposed 'immateriality' of the new 'virtual worlds'. It is suggested that postmodern media theories (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Virilio) and the techno-imaginary produced by creative computer scientists and adjacent fields mutually reinforced each others basic assumption that the future would be 'digital'. That bundle of discourses and practices not only stimulated each other but gained further valency by seemingly being confirmed by the rapid growth of the web, computers spreading through firms and households to become near ubiquituous in rich countries, and by the rise of an information economy which was understood to be increasingly based on 'intangibles' - not the production of consumer goods out of raw materials but 'immaterial' goods such as information, knowledge, intellectual property, brand name, design and 'image'. Those factors conspired to give the impression that the economy had become 'weightless'. The investigation focuses on deconstructing this assemblage of ideological and material forces which formed the specific expression of the information age during the 1990s. In the 1990s the information age (Castells 1996, 2001, 2010) became recognised as the new techno-economic paradigm and media art tried to benefit by portraying itself as its most adequate art form. In the process, media art also inherited the ideological baggage of the information age, aka neoliberalism. While this led to some short term gains in terms of the ability to build or enlarge institutions, in the long term it led to the crisis of media art, a crisis which is still unresolved today.

The exhibition Waves was conceived as a reaction to that crisis and those tendencies in media art, which emphasised 'interactvity' and 'immateriality'. The proposition was made that a look at the materiality of media art might reveal new insights and provide a research path to a 'bottom-up' theory of media art. This research process has led to the notion of 'materialisms' in the plural. The inquiry considers both the materiality of electromagnetism as well as materialism as a methodology. A key 'materialist' methodological choice was to look at labour to understand paradigm change both in the arts and society. There are several reasons for that. One is that the 'crisis of the work of art' noted by Bürger (1974) is constituitive for avant-garde art movements. This crisis is permanent, there is no return to the object (even if objects do play a role). The second reason is the hope that by putting labour centre stage the objectification and fetishisation of theories can be avoided. Labour is understood not as an individualistic activity but as part of a social relationship characteristic for a specific period, 'regime' and social stratum. The third reason is that in the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism forms of labour traditionally associated with artists - self-defined, self-motivated, altruistic, flexible - have moved to the centre of societal interest. Thus, while labour is not the topic of the work, labour as a methodological choice provides an anchoring in reality, a sort of middle layer going transversally through all investigations.

As a summary we can say that the case studies 1 and 2 provide insights into Fordism and its crisis. Case study 3 provides insight into the making of the information age and which part media art played in it. Case study 4 shows an attempt of breaking through the dominant patterns of the information age through curatorial practice as a research process. Case studies 3 and 4 together provide insights into Post-Fordism.

The work yet to be done is to go into the detail of the case studies and thereby gain a better understanding of media art both in Fordism and Post-Fordism. The chosen exhibitions/case studies serve as a 'medium' for understanding paradigm change whereby the framework of technopolitics gets tested through its application to a case study, i.e. period in time or stage of development of Fordism, Post-Fordism. It can be expected that new problems will arise from this application of theory and example.

Returning to this notion of the exhibition as a medium, we also need to ask which specific tasks the exhibitions in questions have set themselves and how they tried to achieve them. Most of the chosen exhibitions were more than just that, they were 'projects' with ambitious social goals and or specific epistemic functions. Those exhibition-projects (usually combined with conferences, workshops, publications) were conceived and created as vehicles for gaining a better understanding of the world - a world under the influence of the same paradigm shaping forces that this study seeks to investigate. The selected exhibitions allow to zoom in at particular moments within the trajectory of the respective paradigm and thereby show clear links between techno-scientific and sociocultural currents of the time and specific expressions in art and theoretic discourse.

An online open source content management system, thenextlayer.org, has been installed and used to develop the tools of intellectual labour especially with regard to new critical and collaborative practices. On this platform a project and working group called Technopolitics has been started. The study of Technopolitics is largely congruent with the 'framework' of political and techno-economic paradigm change described above. While the study of technopolitics gets developed collaboratively on thenextlayer.org, the PhD research is a specific application of this framework to a specific question, that of media art, carried out by the author. The chosen methodology is about mapping out a subject in a new way rather than creating a specific "theory" of it. This methodological invention already shows great potential for providing new insights in the relationship between art, technology and social change. Part of the methodology is also to create timelines, diagrams and other forms of visualisations which show the congruencies, continuties and discontinuities of different layers within the overall developments.

Diagram A: Technopolitics, four meta-categories and their descriptors. The categories and keywords describe the research-matrix according to which the paradigms are sought to get understood.

Diagram B: Timeline from Fordism to Post-Fordism, key strands of technopolitical development, schools of thought and art movements. The keywords of diagram A form the implicit subtext which influenced the choice of keywords in this diagram, but the current applicatrion is neither rigorous nor deep enough.