An Interview with Joel Slayton, by Ryan Griffis

+ Commissioned by Rhizome.org +

An Interview with Joel Slayton, by Ryan Griffis

An artist, writer, researcher, organizer, and educator, Joel Slayton
has contributed to a host of collaborative cultural ventures. As a
professor at San Jose State University, he directs the CADRE
Laboratory for New Media <http://cadre.sjsu.edu>, an
interdisciplinary program in the SJSU School of Art and Design
dedicated to the development of experimental applications involving
information technology and art, and is the Executive Editor of SWITCH
<http://switch.sjsu.edu>, CADRE's on-line journal of new media
discourse and practice. He currently serves on the Board of Directors
of Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and
Technology) and as Chair of the Leonardo-MIT Press Book Series
<http://lbs.mit.edu>, and most recently is Academic Chair for the
ISEA 2006 Symposia/ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the
Edge <http://isea2006.sjsu.edu>. Slayton's creative work includes the
exploration of theory, technology, corporate culture, and landscape
with his partners in the C5 Corporation, a hybrid form of authorship
intersecting research, corporate culture and artistic enterprise
<http://www.c5corp.com>.

RG: In your "Entailment Mesh" text, in which you discuss the art
project of the same name, you write, "The conceptual basis of this
work is centered within theoretical discourses of database and
knowledge engineering. Where as domains of cultural art production
centered as advocacy and critique are obsolete and in that the
exposition of theory has clearly situated art as code, a new
conceptual terrain for art is necessary. A terrain in which art as
information system is understood in its fullest capacity." I'm
wondering if you could elaborate and unpack some of these ideas,
particularly the shift you describe in which art can be best
understood as an "information system" while an understanding based on
notions of advocacy and critique have become obsolete. When you say
that a "new conceptual terrain for art is necessary," necessary for
what?
<http://www.c5corp.com/research/entailmentmesh.shtml>

JS: Advocacy and critique are two sides of the same coin, the yin and
yang of art contemporary art practice. I respect the intention but it
does not interest me that much. The complexities of modern politics
and their economies of attention have created a social dynamic that
demands more. More than art can give. It just doesn't have the gas.
When I implicated 'domains' of cultural art production, I was making
specific reference to those that take the easy way out. I was
suggesting, that there really is little difference of approach or
function for art that behaves this way. What I mean is it operates
like entertainment–which can be both good and evil. We all know how
the tools work to get that job done, and therefore any impact is
neutralized. Art that does this does not interest me.

This text was written in 2001 which makes it almost ancient if not
nostalgic. I hate being held to what I have said in the past. Oh
well, the necessity that I was attempting to draw attention to was
that of the nature of coding itself. I was trying to say something
about how important I felt it was we develop a theory of code.
Granted, I used the terminology very loosely and was guilty of
'advocating' myself. Caught in my own trap so to speak. That said,
the basic concept is sound. In the late 1970s, Gordon Pask and Paul
Pangaro described software for emerging knowledge through
conversational interaction in a process called DoWhatDo, a software
design that relied on relational procedures involving a network of
expert system based machines. The terminology of Entailment Mesh
referred to a mechanism of conversation for emerging a learning
procedure through an ever-refining conversational method. The point
being that this was the first process, to my knowledge, to adopt the
notion that code could be operational as a social form in and of
itself. Perhaps it was the first piece of software art, I don't know.
Anyway, I stole the terminology and used in my own work to produce a
system for mediating human conversation. All I was trying to say was
that understanding art of this type is a different thing than
experiencing the commentaries of individuals.

RG: I'm particularly interested in collaborative models employed and
occupied by artists, which has inspired a series of interviews with
various practitioners. While all of the individuals and groups I've
interviewed occupy various positions in professional, academic, and
peer networks, your range of activities is extremely broad within the
very focused "field" of technology and culture (what is generally
referred to as "new media"). This may be a sweeping question, but how
do you conceptualize your work with, to just name a few examples,
ISEA2006, San Jose State University's CADRE Lab, C5, and the Leonardo-
MIT Press book series? I'm curious if your understanding and
theorization of systems and social networking have an impact on your
"on the ground" work within these very different institutions.

JS: I assume so. On occasion I have gone so far as to describe myself
as an artist who designs collaboration models. Then I get nervous and
back off quickly as those sorts of qualifications get you into
trouble very quickly. From my point of view, every 'work' situation
is different. Art practice, critical and theoretical authorship,
publishing, teaching, business, research, family life, and my band.
Well, ex-band. We broke up, although that was part of the model, it
was still painful. Each situation is an opportunity to practice what
you preach by instantiating some manifestation of a chosen
theoretical model. In doing so I tend not to separate one instance of
collaboration from another, it is rather more like an engine with
different mechanisms referencing and informing one another. The one
thing I would say is that my interest in information mapping,
autopoieses, social networks, and emergent behavior is pretty central
to everything. C5 is probably the most obvious in that regard in
that it functions on so many levels. Oh yes, then there is the
practical issue of getting interesting things done.

RG: Could you give some more concrete form to the last point, about
"getting interesting things done"? Specifically, I think it would be
interesting to know how the central interests that you mentioned play
out differently in C5 and ISEA2006. What are the significant
differences here if one looks at both of these as designed
"collaboration models"?

JS: They are both designed as conversational systems through which
specific structures, mechanisms and outcomes emerge. I mean this in
the sense of Gordon Pask's elegant theory of learning systems. Pask
viewed intelligence as emerging from learning systems based in
conversational models of interaction and not as something resident in
the head or compiled in a box. I am no expert on Pask but this
approach made sense to me from the first time I encountered it, in
the early 1980s, and has influenced my approach to collaboration
design. The goal has never been to design for a pre-determined
outcome but rather to formulate social systems of interaction through
which determinate trajectories emerge. You don't exactly know what is
coming until it comes and a lot of it depends on having the right
players involved. On the other hand, it is not a mystery either. The
trick is centering your personal control outside of the interactions
themselves. C5 is a pretty decent example. As a model, what it does
that is interesting is situate its outcomes in the blurred territory
of business, research, and art. Exactly how it does that is directly
dependent upon contractual legal and fiscal agencies that determine
the forms of interactions between its partners. The business plan is
simultaneously a binding contract and the artwork–the creative
products: artworks, research, critical authorship–is only important
as a reflection of the interactions. I am pretty proud of that. When
C5 says it is not ironic, that is what we mean.

ISEA2006 is a different animal all together. For one, as the
organizers we inherited a system that has a tradition of open calls
for participation reviewed by an international program committee.
From the outset we decided that we wanted to find out how ISEA might
be 'organized' differently accepting these 2 factors. In December of
2005, an on-line forum was held to discuss appropriate strategies and
structures for ISEA2006 response to the symposium themes:
Transvergence, Interactive City, Community Domain and Pacific Rim.
You can probably see the first element of strategy which was to offer
up a set of thematics that require critical interpretation as to
their relational dynamics. The Forum made numerous recommendations
but perhaps the most significant in terms of your question is that
the symposium should enable conversation and discussion. Certain
decisions were forthcoming: no reading of papers, pre-publishing of
abstracts and manuscripts on-line, limiting the number of tracks,
offering of extended sessions to encourage audience interaction,
having moderators for each session, a parallel track of nothing but
artist presentations running continuously, a re:mote symposium to
telcon-in participants who could not be present, a poster session
staged in the main venue as an art exhibition, web and video
streaming, a rapporteur blogging the event, and many other features.
The International Program Committee was then able to evaluate
proposal submissions while seeing the symposium as a platform for
conversation that would take advantage of some of these mechanisms.
Once the evaluations were complete they were passed to a Host
Committee to review and structure into appropriate session
configurations and sequences. Over 1800 submissions were received for
symposium and exhibitions and over 400 artists, curators and
researchers contributed to the selection and shape of the event. The
point is that the goal was not only to produce the conversational
model in a symposium but to also use the mechanisms of inclusion and
transparency in doing so. Oh yeah, and then there is the entirety of
having ISEA2006 as the platform for establishing ZeroOne San Jose as
a new North American biennale. We'll see if this all works. Certainly
worth a try.

RG: With your recent work in C5, the autopoietic is an important
concept. (See C5 member texts such as Brett Stalbaum's "Toward
Autopoietic Database" <http://www.c5corp.com/research/
autopoieticdatabase.shtml> and Gerri Wittig's "Expansive Order"
<http://www.c5corp.com/research/situated\_distributed.shtml>, for
example.) This seems to be a way of getting to that "new conceptual
terrain" that we hit on earlier. Could you maybe discuss the
importance of the autopoietic in terms of C5's work and the work of
others that you think are significant here?

JS: Autopoieses is an important theoretical framework that has
informed much of C5's 'work.' It is a subject terrain that we are
rather passionate about. That said, C5 would never make the claim
that we produce autopoietic systems as an art form. Trying to make
something autopoietic is bit of an oxymoron. Autopoietic theory
simply provides an alternative model that addresses how self-
referential interactions emerge the world we perceive.

It is probably useful to be somewhat specific about the term because,
it is so overused. Developed by Maturana and Varela, autopoieses
refers to "the history of structural change in a unity without loss
of organization in that unity." A central component of the theory is
the notion of 'consensual domain.' Maturana refers to behavior in a
consensual domain as 'linguistic behavior.' This behavior scales
across the cellular level to the social. For example, a language
exists among a community of individuals, and is continually
regenerated through their linguistic activity and the structural
coupling generated by that activity. C5 believes that autopoiesis, as
related to data, code, software, and networks, could potentially be
realized in linguistic, consensual domains as well and that
procedural operations like searching and navigation which rely
heavily on self-referencing operate have autopioetic character. It is
all very poetic.
RG: Maybe as a closing question… Spatially-oriented practices have
seemed to gain a lot of currency in the international arts lately,
but looking through some of my own archives, it doesn't really seem
all that new of a development, with quite a few big exhibitions of
contemporary artists in the 1990s focusing on notions of site and
location, Mary Jane Jacob's 1991 "Places with a Past" at the Spoleto
Festival being a prime example. (For a review of the festival see
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res