Digital Art: Implications for Design

This essay will focus on the frequently parallel, and sometimes convergent, ideas in the fields of science, art, and design.  Though it seems as though calls for art and technology to join forces are finally being answered, it becomes more difficult to separate the art from the design when their technological mediums are so similar, (”calls for” them to “join forces” here refers to many of the authors we have read this semester, including Ed Shanken’s “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” and Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 1950).  Since, as a class, we learned about Digital Art from the ground-up, we could not focus on certain sub-genres of digital/new media/internet/etc. art for very long.  One such avenue is design: is it a bridge between art and technology?  What does it have to do with art?  Are art and design mutually exclusive? 

The connections between design and scientific collaborations, therefore, seem to have been lost in the shuffle.  These intersections become evident in Hal Foster assertion in his essay “Design and Crime,” in Design and Crime and other Diatribes (New York: Verso, 2002), that the distance between design and technology has decreased.  Foster states about the evolution of this relationship:

After the heydey of the Art Nouveau designer, one hero of modernism was the artist-as-engineer or the author-as-producer, but this figure was toppled in turn with the industrial order that supported it, and in our consumerist world the designer again rules.  Yet this new designer is very different from the old: the Art Nouveau designer resisted the effects of industry, even as he also sought, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘to win back [its] forms-modern concrete, cast iron, and the like-for architecture and art.  There is no such resistance in contemporary design: it delights in postindustrial technologies, and it is happy to sacrifice the semi-autonomy of architecture and art to the manipulation of design, (17-18).  

Writing in 2002, Foster’s statement that the designer takes precedent over the “artist-as-engineer” may have applied at the time.  However, as history has shown, different social constructs, political climates and cultural trends couple with technological advances to push forward the acceptance a cooperation between artist and/or designer with science and/or technology.  In fact, these trends can be seen throughout history in the museum exhibitions that highlight one or the other set of pairings (David Raizman, History of Modern Design, Prentice Hall, 2004, p.206).  

Three such exhibitions that represent different time period, and therefore a variety of couplings, are the MoMA sponsored, Organic Design in Home Furnishings (1940); the exhibition curated by Jack Burnham in 1970 at the Jewish Museum in New York, Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art; and the exhibition in the MoMA that lasts from February to May of 2008, Design for the Elastic Mind.  The 1940 exhibition that went on in the midst of World War II reveals a heightened interest in design for the middle class of America (Raizman, 232-233), Jack Burnham’s exhibition reveals a more siphoned off, yet still important rise in interest of computer technology as it related to artistic production in the 1960s (Edward Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” 2001), and this year’s exhibition at the MoMA reveals connections among all three fields: art, science and design, (Paola Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind, 200 .

Design, industry and the middle class were the focal points for the 1940 exhibition.  The winners of that particular exhibition’s contest for best design was Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames who worked together to create an armchair made of molded plywood and foam upholstery with fabric (seen below).  The MoMA became a taste-maker at this point in the middle of the twentieth century, and they advocated standards based upon “suitability to purpose, material, and process of manufacture,” (Raizman, 232).  This exhibition illustrated a response in design to the technological advances and the limiting resourcefulness that came to fruition in large part because of World War II.

Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, armchair, molded plywood and foam upholstery with fabric, 1940. MoMA Organic Design for Home Furnishings Exhibition,New York.

During the following decades, scientists and artists alike explored computer technology to a great potential.  Many of them wrote essays about their interests that helps us today understand a rich and diverse discourse that surrounded combining the forces of art and science.  Roy Ascott, in the 1960s, wrote about teaching art courses as you would learn science–in a multi-faceted and versatile manner that would encourage a more well-rounded artist (Roy Ascott, “The Construction of Change,” 1964).  Also in the 60s, scientists like Ivan Sutherland and Douglas Englebart made giant advances in creating what we now acknowledge as basic computer interface components, (Douglas Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, 1962, and Ivan Sutherland, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System,” 1963).  

Ideas of artistic and computer innovation collaborating for the betterment of society surfaced during this turbulent decade of civil rights activism, anti-war protest, and assassinated heroes.  Breaking the surface into a full museum exhibition however, concepts of artistic collaboration with and/or critique of software technology were realized in the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970 called Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art.

This exhibition focused on the materials and concepts of technology and science by examining their visual forms from an aesthetic vantage point, while also commenting on the possibility to apply science and technology in order to create on an artistic level, (Shanken, 12-13).  Three decades passed since the MoMA focused on the middle class, function, taste, and aesthetic, and museum exhibitions certainly reflected the changes in society. No longer was the main concern focused toward consumerism and taste level of the middle class.  Instead, this exhibition reveals, not only the idealism surrounding a possible artistic and scientific cooperative force, but it also critiqued how technology was being used in society by showing alternatives to those, typically, hierarchical one-way authoritative frameworks (Shanken, 14).

It would be another three decades before an exhibition at the MoMA would finally interlace the concerns addressed in the 1940 exhibition about design and function, as well as issues raised in the 1970 exhibition about an artistic critique of technology and science into one dynamic and interactive exhibition of their own in 2008.  Design and the Elastic Mind, curated by Paola Antonelli, “highlights current examples of successful design translations of disruptive scientific and technological innovations, and reflects on how the figure of the designer is changing from form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinarily dynamic reality,” (Paola, Design and the Elastic Mind, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008, 17).  

So why did this take such a long time to take place?  In their introduction to Joseph Weizenbaum’s “From Computer Power and Human Reason, From Judgment to Calculation,” in their text, The New Media Reader (Cambridge:MIT, 2003), Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort state that, “The concern that machines will take over not just the jobs that provide us income, but also the cognitive and emotional functions we closely associate with humanity, is a particular worry of the computer era,” (Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, 367).  This assertion of the general public’s fear of technology combined with an artistic reaction which identified technological advances with wartime action in the early 1970s at the end of the Vietnam War.  The cultural climate of that period gave way to a more activist artistic movement that focused less on technological innovation, and more on conceptual arguments revealed through a pluralistic artistic decade.

However, artists explored digital art and new media technologies, according to expert and author Christiane Paul, during the 1980s and 90s, during which time the artistic medium “evolved into multiple strands of practice, ranging from more object-oriented work to pieces that incorporated dynamic and interactive aspects and constituted a process-oriented virtual object,” (Christiane Paul, Digital Art, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003, p.21).  These characteristics of interaction, process-orientation, and virtuality combined with sharp critiques, database visualizations, and explorations into nanotechnology in the MoMA exhibition this year.

Examples of what Antonelli describes as “critical design”- design that challenges narrow assumptions given to the role of products,” whether they be environmental or strictly personal-are what I found to be the most representative of a cooperation and reliance on art, science, and design.  Hussein Chalayan’s Mechanical Dress, for instance, is a critical piece that can remind the viewer of different architectural designs.  When the model walks, the dress responds to her arm movements by the electrical nodes that are sewn into the fabric.  This can also serve to translate the original architectural notion into a more environmentally aware one.  I personally, was reminded of the Hearst Building in New York City, the first Green Architecture sky scraper to be built there.

 

Hussein Chalayan, Mechanical Dress, digitally printed cotton, metal plates with Swarovski crystals, organza, electric mechanisms, and electronic circuits, 2006.

 

 

Another aspect of the exhibition’s importance lies in its showcase of artistic exploration and scientific innovation in the realm of nanotechnology.  Scientist Hugh Aldersey-Williams, in an essay entitled “Applied Curiosity,” written in the exhibition catalogue, lamented over the fact that designers Charles and Ray Eames lived a few miles away from Nobel Prize Winner and physicist Richard Feynman never met.  Summarizing briefly why the Eames’ could have helped Feynman visualize the great advances he made in quantum physics, Aldersey-Williams asserts that it is the artist and the designer who can work with scale and visualizing the invisible to a degree that the potential for scientific advancement through artistic visualization is greater than ever, now that the implications of nanotechnologies are better understood, (Aldersey-Williams, “Applied Curiosity,” Design and the Elastic Mind, 46-55).  His lament over Eames and Feynman and his notion that artists have a power over visualizing scale are justified, almost eerily so, in that he reflects on the Eames’ 1968 eight-minute film Powers of Ten, which was a single zoom shot, calibrated according to the level of magnification seen at any instant through the camera, expressed in exponential powers of ten.

Charles and Ray Eames, Image stills from Power of Ten, film, 1968.

These three exhibitions illustrate that social and cultural determinants act with the technological and scientific advances to forcefully negotiate the roles of science, art and design.  It seems, with the latest MoMA exhibition, that a balance between these forces may have produced a very fruitful combination of fields which, until recently, have isolated themselves in an almost elitist manner.  These relationships have historically (modern history that is) proven to be short-lived and unacknowledged.  Possibly, with their ever increasing interest in digital art and new media technologies, artists may convince the scientific world of their abilities to communicate on a technologically savvy level.  Add that to the scientific community’s acknowledgment of possible short comings (i.e. visualizing the invisible), and we might be in for a profound new movement in art and science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Life, A Critique…

 

THIS IS ME! (Avatar in Second Life: Amarie Jejcies)

Our final class was held in Second Life.  There were no assigned readings for this experience…Yes, we were told to research the artists whose art we were scheduled to view while there, but there were no scholarly or academic essays that accompanied this experience.  This was a good thing.  Experiencing Second Life for the first time is something that should not, in my opinion, be based on anyone’s preconceived notions on how we should think of this simulated world.  Parameters have not been delineated…virtually, ethically, legally, or critically.  

This is new.  (Well, for most of us in this course it is brand new.)  So why should we automatically limit this experience by reading what others have critically said about it?  The uncertainty of planning for and of successfully navigating Second Life-a novel and certainly untraditional setting for an art history course-can, in my opinion, make for an interesting comparison to our original questions and insecurities concerning the history of and multi-faceted definitions of digital art.  However, that initial feeling of unease and skepticism is where the comparison ends. While Digital Art’s history, influences, implications, and theoretical foundations have been clarified during the course of the semester, the importance of Second Life has yet to be determined. 

Conceding the fact that Second Life could embody what Christiane Paul, in her book Digital Art (London:Thames & Hudson, 2003, 120-121) a “community of interest” in a “global platform for exchange,” a.k.a. the Internet; Second Life seems to be a framework more for escapism or even capitalism than for discourse.  It may be a convenient place to hold a meeting or a gathering, but, as for spontaneous collectivism or activism that could translate into the physical and political realm, this world of simulation seems to avoid critical discourse (at least on an artistic level).  Of course, I am limited in my view by my limited time there; however, as an art historian, I like to think that artistic production in a particular culture or context, conveys an underlying concern, critiques a fallibility, or even idealistically portrays the culture or context in which it finds itself.  I must say, I hate the notion of “art for art’s sake.” Unfortunately, that was what I feel the class “experienced” in our final class.

My Avatar in Elros Tuominen’s gallery found at: (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hwanung/39/247/600) 

The term art is in quotations here because in this new universe of the avatar, of the simulated, of the participatory world of second chances, second interpretations, of second lives; in this world, artistic production is as novel as being able instantly teleport anywhere at any time.  What does this novelty mean?  It means that artists are exploring new and, for the lack of a better term, uncharted territory. It means that artists (at least the ones whose art we saw) can get away with being more interested in the medium (as net.art was in the early 1990s-see Alexander Galloway’s essay, “Internet Art,” found in Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 2004) than the content of their work.  However, unlike net.art and its determination to exploit the limitations of the network framework that online surfers found themselves in during this period, Second Life/purely digital Art does not critique the digital format-negatively or positively.  It seems to be fascinated with itself-the type of narcissistic art that does not even seem to claim existentialism as a foundation on which to fall back.

Though some may argue that works like that of Tuominen’s comment on the purity and permeation of the digital medium itself (hearkening back to Marshall McLuhan’s now-famous essay “The Medium is the Message,” from Understanding Media, 1964), I would have to counter by asserting that Second Life is not outside of what Hans Magnus Enzenberger termed, the consciousness industry, (Hans Enzenberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” 1970).  

Enzenberger’s argument against McLuhan that, within this consciousness industry art should work at the point of the media–its most vulnerable level–applies to the art within Second City because of its unprecedented placement as a digital medium inside a digital world.  It is made of exactly the same stuff that everything, from the avatars to the water, are made from:digital technology.  Artistic production has never been on this digitally leveled playing field.  This placement calls for responsibility.  It calls for artistic intrusion.  It begs artists to incite discourse about this world.  

Unfortunately, “artists” like the ones we saw last Thursday, are having fun with graphics.

Who knows though, hopefully I have not explored enough to see what I expect to see from artists.

 

Reading Response: Sherry Turkle, “Video Games and Computing Holding Power”

In “Video Games and Computing Holding Power” (1984), Sherry Turkle interviews video game players (all young boys) about their relationships with the games they play.  She analyses the role playing aspect of the games, the intimacy levels associated with video games, the nature of the games themselves, and ultimately the power a video game can have over a person.

This essay is interesting especially because of how she was able to assess so many of the same relational characteristics between gaming and the viewer that are even more prevalent today.  The young boys she discusses here seem to be marginal in that they escape from the real world into their video games.  Today, I think it is interesting to note, video games are much more a part of the real world.  It is as normal to “escape” into a video game now as it is to go to school.  The implications of this essay written more than 20 years ago are much more widespread now, considering the proliferation of these games…even on an international level.

Reading Response: Lev Manovich, “The Forms” and “The Database”

In the book, The Language of New Media (Cambridge:MIT Press, 2001), Lev Manovich wrote two chapters that I will comment on in this response: “The Forms” and “The Database.”  

The most interesting, and I think overall, point in “Forms” is that Manovich calls for the analysis of the aesthetics of information access as well as the creation of new media objects that “aestheticize” information processing.  This, he terms “info-aesthetics,” (217).  One can clearly see the aestheticization of information processing in such database artworks like Josh On’s They Rule (2001) and Antonio Muntadas The File Room (1994).  Both allow the viewer to interact with information in a way that virtually maps out relations of CEOs, in the case of They Rule, and the relations among different corporations and conglomerates, as in The File Room.  The critical aspect of these works, as I have mentioned in an earlier post about the MoMA exhibition, fall short of engaging with the viewer on a clear level.  One can take what one wants from works like these.  I am not sure if I would rather a stronger statement by the artists in these cases.  Or at least a way to respond.

In “The Database,” Manovich describes the two ways in which we view the world, really, as either narrative or database.  He also argues that new media favors a database format as opposed to the narrative.  Databases are becoming more pervasive and even covert in our society, and artists are now using them to assert their ubiquitousness and to critique that exclusively, or they are using this format to critique the corporations and government entities that use them for their own advantages.

Reading Response: Alexander Galloway, “Internet Art”

This chapter in Alexander Galloway’s book, Protocol-How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT Press: 2004), describes the difference between net art (Internet art of the Network) and software art.  Galloway delineates the difference in these two phases of Internet as being based in the nature of the art itself.  He states on pate 232 that “Not only did whole new aesthetic sectors open up for art making…but also the nature of Internet art itself shifted from being defined by the limitations of the network to being defined more by the commercial interests of the software industry.”  Christiane Paul in Digital Art also describes Etoy’s Toywar as one of the many manifestations of the new Software art that is now more determined to critique the corporations and Software companies by becoming a real world stakeholder in the economical and political spheres.

This newer transition of mindset that seems to embrace the concept of “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” empowers artists to explore that which is not yet overly regulated territory (like the Internet) in order to critique and/or hinder underlying hierarchies of corporate power.  More power to them, I say.

Digital Art and Design: MoMA Exhibition Fun

This is an informal essay about an exhibition that I attended this Spring in New York.  Please refer to later essays in the “Essay” category of this blog for further artistic analysis and formal research.

Earlier this semester, I went to New York and visited the Museum of Modern Art. I love the second floor (the Contemporary art exhibits) and the top floor, which has revolving exhibits. This spring, as a revolving exhibit, the MoMA showed “Design and the Elastic Mind.” This exhibit showcased works of art and design innovations that utilized new technologies and digital elements in the same ways as the artworks we have studied this semester in the course.

I was first struck by the level of interactivity the exhibit encouraged.   Christiane Paul, of course, categorizes interactivity and participation as two of the distinguishing characteristics of digital art (Paul, Digital Art, 21).  To clarify my earlier statement, I was not surprised that the works of art incorporated interactive elements that encouraged participation, but I was a bit fascinated with the level of comfort the general public seemed to have in the exhibit.  Up until that point in the Museum, people had respected the MoMA’s library-like atmosphere and, for the most part, passively looked at the modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures.  But, as one moved slowly up the last set of escalators to the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, the sounds of laughter and conversation came spilling out.  (And it wasn’t coming from the cafe).  Children and adults alike were captivated by this section of the museum which, unlike the lower levels, seemed as if it were meant for discussion and participation

The following images are scanned from the catalogue that I bought while at the exhibition. The catalogue was published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on the occasion of the exhibition, February24-May 12, 2008, which was organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator and Patricia Juncosa Veccihierini, Curatorial Assistant in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design.

This is a scanned image of Shadow Monsters (page 25), a work by Philip Worthington completed in 2004. It is an ongoing example of “interactive design” that is based on custom-designed vision-recognition software (specifically Java, Processing, BlobDetection, SoNIA, and Physics Software). The work is supported by a computer, a camera, a projector, and a light box. This software is programmed to recognize body shadows and gestures, and it responds by producing its own shadows that create monsters and sounds that morph as the person change positions. See below to see a video of people interacting with it.

Experiencing it was almost as fun as watching the children and their parents interact with the shadows. It also reminded me of software art and interactive installations that the class has studied including certain Myron Krueger works, like Videoplace, (1975) because, like Krueger’s installation, the technology responds to the presence of humans and alters the installation’s visual aesthetic as a result.  In his essay, “Responsive Environments,” Krueger states that the importance of a work lies in its composition of relationships between action and response.  He then goes on to say, “Response is the medium!” (Krueger, M., “Responsive Environments,” 1977).  The implications of this exclamation, though made more than three decades ago, currently manifest themselves in artworks like Shadow Monsters.

Another work that I enjoyed while at the MoMA’s exhibition this spring was the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) work Architecture and Justice from the Million Dollar Blocks project (2006).  This information visualization work was begun by Laura Kurgan at the Columbia University SIDL and helped by the Justice Mapping Center.  They look at the home addresses of the people incarcerated as a result of crimes and determine how many people from these neighborhoods are in jail and also how much money states are spending to incarcerate them.  Their results are visualized on a map like the following.

The darker colors of this map reveal the areas where the most people are incarcerated.  They are termed “million dollar blocks” by the SDIL because that is how much it costs for the incarceration of these people.  It also, according to the project’s members, shows the disproportionate number of prisoners coming from a very few neighborhoods in the country’s largest cities, (Peter Hall, “Critical Visualization,” in Design and the Elastic Mind, 2008).

Architecture and Justice reminds me of so many of the database works of art that we have reviewed as a class this semester, however, I think it goes beyond works like They Rule by Josh On in 2001 and The File Room by Antonio Muntadas in 1994 because it does not stop by making implications.  SIDL’s work reveals the data to the viewers, not as raw data, but as a charged and calculated statement based on quantitative data.  The viewers are not meant to have fun building their own maps or to discover hidden factoids from this work, they are meant to look at data that has not changed on any fundamental scale, but that has been visualized differently.  That is what makes this piece critically engaging.

Finally, a lesser politically charged work that I enjoyed while at this exhibition was Hussein Chalayan’s Mechanical Dress from the One Hundred and Eleven collection (2006).

                                                               

This dress is made of digitally printed cotton, metal plates with Swarovski crystals, organza, electric mechanisms, and electronic circuits.  As the model moves her arms, the dress responds to her by expanding or retracting.  According to the designer, the work is a metaphor for the need to have fewer, more elastic objects in our lives.  The curator of the exhibit notes that it could inspire nanodevices and building facades alike, (Paola Antonelli, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” Design and the Elastic Mind, 2008, 24).

As far as nanodevices are concerned, I cannot make any intelligent comments because of my lack of knowledge in this scientific field.  However, I have seen first hand architectural constructs that seem to follow this less is more idea as well as the notion of elasticity.  I had the opportunity to tour the construction of the new Hearst Building in New York City a few years ago before it opened for business.  The construction manager spoke with me and my friend about the building’s surface and energy conserving qualities and technologies.  The panels on the outside of the building are what, to me, link the Mechanical Dress to the Hearst Building because they are really solar panels that adjust to capture the optimum energy from the sun, thereby energizing the building.  This response, in my opinion, parallels that of the dress to the model.  Building is to Nature as Dress is to Human…very cool.

 

 

Philip Worthington, Shadow Monsters, 2004-ongoing

This is a good video because it shows how viewers interact with the work at the MoMA. It gets a little crowded, but it is still fun to watch. A description of it is in the post, “Design and the Elastic Mind” posted above.

Reading Response: Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head

Julie Clark’s essay, “Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head” published in 2005, discusses the idea of consciousness by analyzing Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head exhibition. Stelarc asserts that complex behavior is possible without consciousness. The head, according to the artist, only becomes intelligent by interacting with other bodies.

Clark goes onto discuss the various concepts of life, such as metabolism, and recognition, and expression of pathos: all of which appear to be absent in the Prosthetic Head.

While this work does invoke an active-active relationship with the viewer, there is still, in my opinion a control that the artist inflicts onto this head. I guess the environment from which it may learn is determined by the artist in a way that is limiting to the head’s interactions. And also, why just a head? This automatically places the robot in a demeaning position in regard to the mobile and larger viewers. I have to say, I don’t get it. It doesn’t seem to me to be anything more than a narcissistic (the head looked like him) artist playing god with technology.

Reading Response: Cyborg Manifesto

Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” written in 1985 appropriates the idea of cyborg and integrates it into a socialist-feminist manifesto which calls for affinities among women instead of identity and argues for pleasure in blurred boundaries of definitions along with responsibility in reaching their definitions.  This can be applied to the way in which women think of themselves, and it can also be an approach that we take toward understanding and co-existing with the robots and cyborgs that are already prevalent in society, albeit invisible.

Though this essay is not a very easy read, it is nonetheless remarkably clear in its conveyance of Haraway’s frustration with certain radical and Marxist feminisms, and it also efficiently describes the ways that communications technologies and biotechnologies are both motivated by “the translation of teh world into a problem of coding.”  This mutual motivation is a connection between two fields that can both be used to recraft our bodies (as cyborgs, as well as, for Haraway that is, to enforce new social relations for women world-wide.)

Finally, Haraway fuses the myth of the cyborg with feminist identity theory by using Lorde’s character of Sister Outsider as the central figure in her cyborg myth, which serves to act as a metaphor for this new cyborg female to survive, “not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”

Her call for people to not demonize technology, to deny totalizing universal theories, and to take responsibility for the social relations of science and technology speaks to those of us today who are struggling with ideas of coexisting with robots, and/or fusing with technology.

Reading Response: Ascott and Shanken

We had a pop quiz on this material, so I initially felt that posting a response would be redundant.  However, I realize that this blog is supposed to filter to fellow students thereby resulting in my thoughts transgressing to their monitors and perhaps their own thoughts.  Even though it doesn’t seem that the class blog is very successful in connecting students with other students, I’ll still give it the benefit of the doubt and post my responses.

Roy Ascott’s, “The Construction of Change,” and Ed Shanken’s, “Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics, and the Art of Meaning” both discuss the implications and possible ramifications of Cybernetics and telecommunications.

Roy Ascott writes in the 1960s about approaching the teaching of art in the same manner you would learn about cybernetics.  Cybernetics, according to Ascott, comprises many different sciences and learning it would enable one to learn about those various sciences.  Teaching art is if it were cybernetics, would allow for students to learn about the various ways of thinking about art by forcing them outside their comfort zones into the many different mediums and methods of artistic production.

Ed Shanken, dives right into the exploration of cybernetics by discussing the fears and implications of telematics and telerobotics.  He focuses on issues of agency in humans versus telerobots, and also describes the relationships of telematics with humans as active-passive or active-active.  The implication of the active-passive relationship is clear: it informs our desire to control.  Active-active relationships, according to Shanken, would insight provocative and new ways to co-habit with robots that could fundamentally change the already broken structure of society.