Chapter 2 section 4 Art Agents: Cybernetic performance and art with robots

Domestic Tension occurs as performance art. It's antecedents are perhaps best exemplified by the works of such extreme works as those of Vito Acconci, Chris Burdon, whose performance, "Shoot!" strips down the mechanics of projectile themed performance to its brutal basics, and arguably Mathew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, which combines elements of platform style video games with machismo driven elements of digital Role Playing Games. When Barney's central character, played by a young and handsome Matthew Barney himself, climbs the interior of the Guggenheim museum in New York, and cavorts with nude women, in a surrealistic environment, I sense much of the same impulses that drive the Duke Nukem series of games, albeit with a much more developed theoretical rationale.

Domestic Tension has none of the glamour of the Cremaster Cycle, nor the short, sharp imperative of Chris Burdon's "Shoot". Burdon's work lasts for only about a minute. The performative element is only really from the time his friend aims at Burdon's arm, until about seven seconds later Burdon has ordered "shoot!" the friend fires and a bleeding Burdon walks unsteadily past the camera. The film is the only record of the performance, and the performance would have only been available to the small audience gathered there at that moment. This contrasts with the interactivity of Bilal's performance, and the ostensive elements- what sociologist Bruno Latour labels that which does not dissipate versus the performative- such as ongoing discussion as people review the youtube blogs that Bilal published during the performance, and the excerpts from chatroom blogs that he published in his memoir about the performance.

Perhaps the most salient point about Bilal's performance is the role of robot as a participant in the performance. The paintball gun was the crux of the performance. Without it, creating a sense of menace, the performance was emotionally void. Moreover, the specifics of the paintball gun versus a painting, were that its relationship with Bilal developed over time in a specific shared space, as opposed to the brevity of Burdon's "Shoot" or with Goya's works which were displaced substantially in time and space versus the events they addressed and the artist and audience they involved. After all, a painting could only be viewed in one space and were created several years after the conflicts they depicted. They could not affect an audience virtually in the same way that an internet performance can spill out from the space in which it occurs. Goya's painting, and Burdon's film of his performance, lack the obvious effect of agency deployed by a remote controlled, internet mediated paint ball gun.

My intention is not to evaluate different media, but to observe how a cybernetic paint ball gun might appear to have greater agency than a painting or a film. This appearance is suggested by Bilal saying that he felt lonely when the gun broke down during the performance. It is important to remember this performance was 31 days long. Burdon did not express similar emotions towards the rifle he was shot with. Even though we know that paintball guns are not imbued with intentionality, we still appear to be able to think about them as having a character. This suggests that although it is easier to imagine a moving, three dimensional object as having agency(a discussion I will elaborate in Chapter 4) would can ascribe a parallel agency to any art work. however, at this point, I want to simply consider some artworks that thematically resemble Domestic Tension i.e. The Eighth of May, 1808 and "Shoot!" but also contemporary artworks that utilise robotics and cybernetics as a means to expression.

More crude, and violent robots were the massive robots use by Mark pauline and other members of Survival Research Laboratories. These robots often used fire as well as battering attacks to create performances critiquing technological domination and the use of violence in governance(1). Chris Csikszentmihalyi produced his robot Hunter Hunter(1993) which was automated to load and fire a 9mm round towards a loud noise(2). Other Robot art works that suggest Domestic Tension include Epizoo created by Marcel.li Antunez Roca and Sergi Jorda. This performance consisted of a robot that deformed and manipulated the body of Antunez according to remote commends of the audience(3). Edaurdo Kac's robot Ornitorrinco has performed in several different events, exploring telepresence in multiple cities during one performance.(4)

The use of weapons, telepresence and robots have now several generations of deployment in contemporary art practice.

                           
(1)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001 7: 87
(2)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001 p.100
 
(3)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001 p.103
 (4)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001
 

Validation and recognitions

After pondering several terms: gesture, performance, agency, boundary object; several theoretical positions- actor-network theory, Gell's anthropology of art, boundary object theory, and phenomenology; and several scholars- Bart Simon, Bruno Latour, S.L. Star &J.R. Griesemer, Husserl, Alfred Gell and Carrie Noland; I have come full circle in re-encountering thinking that inspired me two years ago. As I began to think about the relationship of digital games to art history, I was at once encouraged by my friend, mentor and M.A. Supervisor Jean Bélisle to focus on the facts, before embarking on theories.

But the facts I had found were much inspired by a presentation on gestural games (think the Nintendo Wii, and now the Xbox360 Kinect) that Bart Simon, a sociology professor gave regarding how game players emulate and simulate movements far beyond the needs of a game. In that respect, he was very much engaged in his talents as an ethnographer. These talents would be embraced and expanded in the work of Shanly Dixon, a childhood friend and now expert in the field of childhood, cyberculture especially as regards girls and games. These people began to drive my thought towards space, and the sense of movement and embodiment that I saw as being significant towards drawing out the connections between artistic production, gamic experience and the embodied drive through space that occurs between and around these two realms.

As I have explored the problem of agency as dealt with by Alfred Gell, the British Anthropologist and the theorists of Actor-Network Theory, such as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon  and John Law, I came full circle to a scholar whose writing originally inspired me in her approach, but also her subject matter: Carrie Noland. A professor of Italian and French at UC Irvine, her essay about gesture and meaning in the artistic practice of Bill Viola gave me the impetus to start thinking about how to draw together the disparate thoughts I had about artistic practice, digital game aesthetics and the exciting discussion around gestural games that was emerging around the TAG(Technoculture Art and Games) Research Center of Montréal's Concordia University that had just been founded by Lynn Hughes, a design professor and Bart Simon, whose work had shifted from the sociology of science into video Game Studies.

This field excited me for both intellectual and pragmatic reasons. I see it as does Lynn Hughes among others such as Henry Jenkins, as a contemporary mode of performative artistic practice, rather than mass media.It is a wide open field, with much room for new thought. Looking at it from a phenomenological perspective, as arises from my undergraduate interests in Heidegger and later, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Noland's essay(1) seemed to cover everything that I thought was relevant, save digital games.

So it was with great pleasure that I have discovered that her recent book(2) attempts to reconcile theoretical problems with ANT and the controversial theory of agency advanced by the late Alfred Gell. That fact that we have both trod along parallel paths has encouraged me to believe that I might be thinking usefully about the problems that I have chosen to grapple with. The problem of how artistic practice is deployed or deploys through bodies moving in space, and how phenomenological insights can be gleaned from these considerations as we consider how meaning is realised through motion, and agency can be characterised without demanding intentionality be assumed.
____________________________________________________
(1) Noland, Carrie "Motor Intentionality: Gestural Meaning in Bill Viola and Merleau-Ponty" in Postmodern Culture vol 17 #3
(2)Noland, Carrie. Agency and embodiment : performing gestures/producing culture. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2009

Chapter 4 Section 4- Art Objects at the Boundary

The boundary object is in its original formulation an object that can act as a point of communication between two groups. In the previous section I argued, following from the work of Actor-Network theorists and the work of Alfred Gell, that art objects have agency. Here I will discuss how this agency is expressed when disparate groups gather and communicate through such an agent. I will also consider the physical and metaphorical sense of the boundary as a spatial term, which will lead to the next section's discussion of spatiality.

The origin of the concept of the boundary object arises in a 1989 paper by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer where they discussed the interactions of amateur and professional zoologists at the Berkley Museum of Zoology during the early half of the 20th Century(1). Their work extends its analysis from the concept of interressement developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. As Star and Griesemer describe interessement as that which entails different groups, for example scientists and non-scientists 'translating' their concerns so that these can be shared by other groups, thus retaining them as 'allies'(2).  In contrast to their characterization of Latour, Callon, and Law's work with it's emphasis on how one group "funnels" the interests of others to support it's particular concerns, Star and Griesemer allow for multiple negotiations between networks of interested groups(3). This negotiation was called translation, as in the meaning and message conveyed from one group in a network to another were shifted sufficiently to be understood and embraced by another group without betraying the original concerns expressed the group seeking to 'funnel' the exchanges in the network towards a goal or objective.

The role of the boundary objects in achieving those goals is to be "objects which both inhabit several
intersecting social worlds...and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them"(4). Star and Griesemer explicitly critique Latour et al's concept as failing to address the multiple interests at play in a museum setting- they point point out that

"There, several groups of actors -    amateurs, professionals, animals, bureaucrats and 'mercenaries'-    succeeded in crafting a coherent problem-solving enterprise, surviving multiple translations."(5)

The application of boundary object theory to contemporary art history becomes more apparent when we consider it was initially deployed to try "to understand the historical development of a particular type of institution:natural history research museums"(6). In this case the natural history museum they were examining originated as a research museum, unlike many others which Star and Griesemer describe as originating as a popular attraction that subsequently reflected a growing professionalization in the museology of natural history(7).
                                               
(1) Star, Susan Leigh & James R. Griesemer. "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39" in Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Aug., 1989), pp. 387-420 


 (2) ibid p. 389


 (3) ibid p. 390

(4) ibid p. 393

(5) ibid p. 392

(6) ibid p. 391


(7) ibid  p. 391


 Albertsen, Niels.& Bülent Diken "Artworks’ Networks Field, System or Mediators?" in Theory, Culture & Society 2004 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 21(3): 35–58 

Rodriguez, H. "Technology as an Artistic Medium" in 2006 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics October 8-11, 2006, Taipei, Taiwan 

Berner, Boel. "Working knowledge as performance: on the practical understanding of machines" in
Work Employment Society 2008 22: 319


 Vandenberghe, FrÈdÈric. "Reconstructing Humants: A Humanist Critique of Actant-Network Theory" in
Theory Culture Society 2002 19: 51

Chapter 5 Section 1 Introducing a Conclusion

In his book We Have Never Been Modern, sociologist Bruno Latour notes how the AIDs virus "Takes you from sex to the unconcious, then to Africa, tissue cultures, DNA and San Francisco" but note how experts from a variety of fields discussion the virus within vary narrow delineated disciplinary categories without acknowledging, indeed explicitly asserting these categories(1). Within these delinations we can see two of Henri Lefebvre's three spatial domains; perceived space, conceived space and a specific type of lived space(2). In this case Latour's experts create a conceived space that derogates the common sense lived space, and ultimately serves to neutralise the imaginery space of of lived(3). Latour argues that "retying the Gordian Knot" severed by expert knowledge restores the complexity hidden by such expert arguments(4). It is here that Bilal's Domestic Tension succeeds. By exploiting the agency of art objects- the robotic paintball gun, the gallery and the artist himself- he creates boundary objects that work together in a particular fashion to cross disciplinary walls that differentiate nations, citizens and disciplines. His use of virtuality within and without a gallery setting allowed his work to engage an audience otherwise unlikely to explore a gallery space or engage in a dialogue with contemporary performance art. If Lefebvre wrote that space was a production of the society, then Latour theoretically breaks down the walls that define that space and leave it open for the particular agency of art works that Gell asserts and describes. Bilal's work embodies that theoretical model as it redefines perceptions of galleries, art objects and performances and the audiences and artists that result in a new possibilities of lived spatiality. By using the perceived space of the FPS digital game and the conceived space of the art gallery and the internet, he has connected people through the agency of the performance as boundary object.

Within the context of modern Geopolitics, Domestic Tension explores a particular response of one artistic to a moment, a tragic moment in a greater conflict. With the death of his brother, and his death leading to his father’s death a few months later, Wafaa Bilal offers a subjective response but it is a response that leads to much broader implications. In one direction, it explores and catalyses a “hi-art” response to a “low-culture” phenomena- performance art and how it deals with digital games, especially as an online social sphere. At the same time, Bilal’s performance allows people from a broad range of social background to experience the possibility of physically harming another via remote control. In this respect, domestic tension begins to offer an experience that is already common for many in the technologically advanced militaries of North America, Europe and Asia– the experience of committing a violent act from a place of comfort.
Some Chatroom messages expressed doubt as to whether the performance was ‘real’ as I noted in the review of video footage in Chapter 3 of this thesis. People in their homes fired the paintball gun, then questioned whether it was loaded, or that Bilal was actually the only person playing Bilal. His response was that it was not important to the success of the performance whether or not the scenario he portrayed was real. His gauge was the responses of those viewing the performance, especially via the internet. Contrast this response, of those questioning the reality of the performance with U.S.A.F drone operators expressing faith in their orders to strike at people 15 000 kilometers away, confident that what they see is what they are told it is.





                                                          
(1)Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter, trs. Harvard. Cambridge,Mass. 1993. p.2
(2) Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space
(3) Latour, Bruno ibid p.3
(4) ibid p.3