Data Saturation in Cross-Disciplinary Art
Framing as an aesthetic criteria has emerged from the 20th century media practice of working with partitions, fragments, multisamples, and frames, (exemplified by the commercial, the audio loop, the film shot, and so forth). Advances in editing software have enabled the fragmentation of digital file to occur down at the levels of the tiniest pixel, frame, or multisample. For Deleuze, the montage was a means of releasing the appearance of time from the movement-image. Stockhausen generated entire soundscapes from singular patterns of electronic pulsations; utilizing their pulse-patterns as cyclic material that could be subsequently looped and transposed to other frequencies; this action resulted in the creation of singular timbres.
Typically, the creator of a work of art implements a top-down design; that is, the creator defines the whole shape of a work of art beforehand, then begins partitioning the work off into smaller sequences, movements, or edits. The privilege with which technology has gifted the contemporary artist is the ability to work from the bottom-up, rather than from the top-down. This is not to say that the artist is only just now blessed with the ability to work with the conception of an isolated fragment of a larger image (for example, a flower petal, rather than a flower) or an analogous fragment in any other discipline (a word, or a harmonic interval, a close-up, etc.); with the aid of modern developments in software, the artist can now begin working with not only the frame or partition as a generative material, but with that initial detail that will eventually reveal the form of the whole. Beginning with a kernel of some type (a series of pulsations, a shot, a number sequence, or even raw data) the artist can implement a bottom-up design paradigm; creating the micro-details of a work of art firsthand. After individual components are built from scratch, the components can be unified into a larger creation; with multiple creations being unified further into a specific body of work.
This would inevitably lead to—and, in some disciplines, it already has lead to—the development and normalization of a type of hebephrenia in aesthetics. This state is beyond abstraction (which has concerned itself since its inception with working from a preconceived whole). Working from raw data—so to speak—will lead to chance juxtapositions of imagery, sounds, and symbols—ideally organized with the aid of computing technology. What we are to eventually witness as a culture is the inevitable decline of the artist as an exponent of a singular and clear-cut style of expression; and the inevitable reassignment of the role of the artist to that of producer of cross-disciplinary statements and non-statements, each with their own singularity of form and content. Working within the framework of the preconceived formulation of a definitive narrative structure—or the limitations of a hierarchy of elements—has now passed into obsolescence. What needs to be explored is the emergence of singularity within the actual creator, who can now serve cross-disciplinary roles within himself (author, composer, visual artist, computer programmer, and so on). In fact, the notion of the collaborative effort—the art collective—is not the signifier of the emergence of a new art movement; this collective effort is an indication of the saturation point of obsolete capitalistic modes of production having successfully infiltrated the artistic studio (i.e. construction sites, production lines, industrial fabrication, and supply-purchasing). The banal progression typical of outmoded capitalist production—from concept and form; down to partitioning and sequencing; and the final procession to the arrangement of objects within those preconceived partitions and sequences (the forms of which already exist and are often immediately recognizable to the spectator)—is obsolete in the sense that the art installation has become another matter of over-saturation and marketing-cannibalism, rather than a matter concerned with aesthetics and forms.
There is a lesson to be learned from Stockhausen’s concept of the morphology of time. Stockhausen’s utilization of microcosmic time-structures that reflect the macrocosmic whole of a work is something that needs to be revisited in a cross-disciplinary aesthetic environment. A luxury of computing technology is that of data bending, creating a radically inclusive utopia of interchange and manipulation of file formats between editing platforms. The results of the data bend are often unpredictable and serendipitous; however, the process of data bending reveals the nature of code and computing technology; which is that the machines are functioning in a realm of pure abstraction, which is alien to humankind, and it is humanity that has superimposed the sensate inventions of text, image, audio, video and the accompanying rules of those playing fields over the raw data of the indifferent machines. Stockhausen recognized the potential for working from kernels, from formulaic microcosms; the next step in aesthetic evolution would involve crossing the streams between artistic disciplines at both the microcellular and macrocosmic levels.
This type of work goes beyond mere mixed-media or the act of transferring the structure of one medium to another; what needs to be explored in addition to the crossing of disciplines is the mixing of forms. This has been explored by an artist such as Matthew Barney—who has worked in sculpture, film, and drawing—towards the creation of a stunning mythology. The contemporary mixing of forms would now involve the mixture of individual approaches to—and formulations of—aesthetic criteria; which would extend beyond the mere radical juxtaposition of genre that was seen in postmodernist music, such as ‘hip-hop’ and microtonal serialism, for example. A mixed-form work of cross-disciplinary art would include a composition generated from serialist theory and aleatoric operations applied to a series of miniatures for traditional hip-hop instrumentation of turntable and digital sampler; this composition would serve as the score to a stop-motion animated film made from sequentially applied glitches of stills generated from 2D and 3D art as source material. One could then take the score a step further by re-editing the material for digital sampler with sound material culled from the procedure of data bending the images into waveforms. The resultant narrative would be of no importance due to its inevitable nonexistence and irrelevance; what would be significant would be the mixture of audio processing and mathematical forms with chance forms; juxtaposed with the electronic forms of stop-motion animation and glitch; and the forms of traditional media such as painting, drawing, and sculpture—all of which could be further integrated into a larger whole, designed with the utilization of a bottom-up paradigm.
Working with the saturation of data (as opposed to the saturation of physical resources and capital), would enable the artist to treat all elements as an infinite series placed inside a vacuum, subject to endless mangling and manipulation and distortion and abstraction—resulting in a complete aesthetic promiscuity; radical in its inclination towards the negation and obliteration of conventional narrative and coherence; leading towards the eventual implementation of a hyperreality that would blur the hypothetical boundaries between mythologies and form. The beauty of data saturation is its relative freedom and accessibility, which renders everything—and nothing—to become its own instrument, its own frame, its own image, its own sound, its own emotion, its own experience, its own obscenity, its own intrusion, and its own grotesqueness—with the requirement that it is first reduced to code, reduced to a pure state of abstract nullity or abstract validity, completely void of aesthetic subjectivity.
Typically, the creator of a work of art implements a top-down design; that is, the creator defines the whole shape of a work of art beforehand, then begins partitioning the work off into smaller sequences, movements, or edits. The privilege with which technology has gifted the contemporary artist is the ability to work from the bottom-up, rather than from the top-down. This is not to say that the artist is only just now blessed with the ability to work with the conception of an isolated fragment of a larger image (for example, a flower petal, rather than a flower) or an analogous fragment in any other discipline (a word, or a harmonic interval, a close-up, etc.); with the aid of modern developments in software, the artist can now begin working with not only the frame or partition as a generative material, but with that initial detail that will eventually reveal the form of the whole. Beginning with a kernel of some type (a series of pulsations, a shot, a number sequence, or even raw data) the artist can implement a bottom-up design paradigm; creating the micro-details of a work of art firsthand. After individual components are built from scratch, the components can be unified into a larger creation; with multiple creations being unified further into a specific body of work.
This would inevitably lead to—and, in some disciplines, it already has lead to—the development and normalization of a type of hebephrenia in aesthetics. This state is beyond abstraction (which has concerned itself since its inception with working from a preconceived whole). Working from raw data—so to speak—will lead to chance juxtapositions of imagery, sounds, and symbols—ideally organized with the aid of computing technology. What we are to eventually witness as a culture is the inevitable decline of the artist as an exponent of a singular and clear-cut style of expression; and the inevitable reassignment of the role of the artist to that of producer of cross-disciplinary statements and non-statements, each with their own singularity of form and content. Working within the framework of the preconceived formulation of a definitive narrative structure—or the limitations of a hierarchy of elements—has now passed into obsolescence. What needs to be explored is the emergence of singularity within the actual creator, who can now serve cross-disciplinary roles within himself (author, composer, visual artist, computer programmer, and so on). In fact, the notion of the collaborative effort—the art collective—is not the signifier of the emergence of a new art movement; this collective effort is an indication of the saturation point of obsolete capitalistic modes of production having successfully infiltrated the artistic studio (i.e. construction sites, production lines, industrial fabrication, and supply-purchasing). The banal progression typical of outmoded capitalist production—from concept and form; down to partitioning and sequencing; and the final procession to the arrangement of objects within those preconceived partitions and sequences (the forms of which already exist and are often immediately recognizable to the spectator)—is obsolete in the sense that the art installation has become another matter of over-saturation and marketing-cannibalism, rather than a matter concerned with aesthetics and forms.
There is a lesson to be learned from Stockhausen’s concept of the morphology of time. Stockhausen’s utilization of microcosmic time-structures that reflect the macrocosmic whole of a work is something that needs to be revisited in a cross-disciplinary aesthetic environment. A luxury of computing technology is that of data bending, creating a radically inclusive utopia of interchange and manipulation of file formats between editing platforms. The results of the data bend are often unpredictable and serendipitous; however, the process of data bending reveals the nature of code and computing technology; which is that the machines are functioning in a realm of pure abstraction, which is alien to humankind, and it is humanity that has superimposed the sensate inventions of text, image, audio, video and the accompanying rules of those playing fields over the raw data of the indifferent machines. Stockhausen recognized the potential for working from kernels, from formulaic microcosms; the next step in aesthetic evolution would involve crossing the streams between artistic disciplines at both the microcellular and macrocosmic levels.
This type of work goes beyond mere mixed-media or the act of transferring the structure of one medium to another; what needs to be explored in addition to the crossing of disciplines is the mixing of forms. This has been explored by an artist such as Matthew Barney—who has worked in sculpture, film, and drawing—towards the creation of a stunning mythology. The contemporary mixing of forms would now involve the mixture of individual approaches to—and formulations of—aesthetic criteria; which would extend beyond the mere radical juxtaposition of genre that was seen in postmodernist music, such as ‘hip-hop’ and microtonal serialism, for example. A mixed-form work of cross-disciplinary art would include a composition generated from serialist theory and aleatoric operations applied to a series of miniatures for traditional hip-hop instrumentation of turntable and digital sampler; this composition would serve as the score to a stop-motion animated film made from sequentially applied glitches of stills generated from 2D and 3D art as source material. One could then take the score a step further by re-editing the material for digital sampler with sound material culled from the procedure of data bending the images into waveforms. The resultant narrative would be of no importance due to its inevitable nonexistence and irrelevance; what would be significant would be the mixture of audio processing and mathematical forms with chance forms; juxtaposed with the electronic forms of stop-motion animation and glitch; and the forms of traditional media such as painting, drawing, and sculpture—all of which could be further integrated into a larger whole, designed with the utilization of a bottom-up paradigm.
Working with the saturation of data (as opposed to the saturation of physical resources and capital), would enable the artist to treat all elements as an infinite series placed inside a vacuum, subject to endless mangling and manipulation and distortion and abstraction—resulting in a complete aesthetic promiscuity; radical in its inclination towards the negation and obliteration of conventional narrative and coherence; leading towards the eventual implementation of a hyperreality that would blur the hypothetical boundaries between mythologies and form. The beauty of data saturation is its relative freedom and accessibility, which renders everything—and nothing—to become its own instrument, its own frame, its own image, its own sound, its own emotion, its own experience, its own obscenity, its own intrusion, and its own grotesqueness—with the requirement that it is first reduced to code, reduced to a pure state of abstract nullity or abstract validity, completely void of aesthetic subjectivity.
