Tandem Surfing the 3rd Wave w/ Matthew Fuller

Tandem Surfing the Third Wave with Matthew Fuller
Ryan Griffis

Matthew Fuller is an author (_ATM_, _Behind the Blip_), software artist
and educator. Together with Simon Pope and Colin Green, he produced
software projects such as the Web Stalker under the name I/O/D. He has
also collaborated with Mongrel on works like "Natural Selection" that
critically engages the often presumed neutrality of data technologies
like search engines. He is currently the Course Director for the Piet
Zwart Institute's MA Media Design program in Rotterdam, and directs,
with Femke Snelting, the Institute's Media Design Research program.

The following conversation took place during the Fall of 2004 via email.


Ryan Griffis: I'd like to start by discussing the Media Design Research
Program at the Piet Zwart Institute. Looking over the program and list
of past and upcoming research fellows (including Brian Holmes, The
Bureau of Inverse Technology, and Florian Cramer), while knowing
something of your own creative work, it seems that there is an
interesting overlap - which makes perfect sense, of course. But, how
did the program come about? Were you asked to create the curriculum
from the bottom up, essentially?


Matthew Fuller: The programme Media Design Research and the MA Media
Design was initiated by the Willem de Kooning Academy, the art school
in Rotterdam of which PZI forms the postgraduate arm. The Research
Fellows programme that you mention is basically run as standard with
this form of academic position. People are invited to make a proposal
which is then evaluated by a board. We've been lucky with the Fellows
so far, who have also included Alexei Shulgin and Lawrence Liang. If
people are interested in what they've done at PZI they can check out
material on the site. The work from Lawrence - two major texts, one on
the implications of Free software and another a user's guide to open
content licenses and issues - will be up soon after peer-review. I'd
urge people to read them when they're ready

Like the Research programme, the Master of Arts programme (equivalent
to a US MFA) also came about on the initiative of the Academy, and
Femke Snelting and I, along with others soon after, were there to start
the thing rolling and design the course. In June we just had the first
round of students from the two-year course graduating so the course has
been thoroughly road tested and also has some great projects under its
belt. If people want to check out the exhibition guide to the
students' work, it's online as a pdf.
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdma/programme/gradshow04


RG: Having taught technology-based arts myself, I'm curious about how
you handle (along with your colleagues) the different learning curves
(for cultural awareness and techie know-how) involved in such
processes. While there are such splits in many disciplines, the divide
seems especially wide in "New Media," as some recent discussions in
forums like Discordia and Nettime indicate. These discussions also
brought up questions of the role of education in creating further
dependency on commercialized technology.

MF: Yes, there are many differences to be encountered, amongst them
between different kinds of knowledge and skill. For me this is one of
the reasons that I find digital media interesting - the way that the
absolutely reductive and binary can be at once infinitely rich and
stirring. We see media design as a problematic, an area that needs
inventing, a set of permutational fields to get stuck into rather than
as a discipline to conform to. That certainly means headaches for
staff and students but it also means there's more that we can learn
from each other. And seeing as there's only six or so students per
year, for a two year course, there's enough time to make those
introductions to each other's fields and peculiar domains. This
recognition of the area as being made up by many different dynamics
also brings us into contact with students who want just that and who
also come from practice in many different contexts.

Regarding the use of commercialised technology, for us I don't want to
set up a moral position, especially in education in which the
commercial is bad just for being connected to trade. Rather it's
important to understand the question politically: what gives students
the most power, as insights, as skills that are viable for work and for
themselves. This is our role as educators, to create a context in
which one of the processes occurring is that students take power, not
simply within the confines of the school, but that they generate the
terms for doing so outside.


RG: There seem to be a couple of trends in media arts that have
surfaced in the last couple of years. For example, an intense interest
in "locative media" and the ability to tag the experience of space with
meta data, present in both Europe and the US. Another development is in
gaming, though I'm more aware of it in the US. There have, of course,
even been mergers of the two happening (Noderunner, Pac-Manhattan,
various projects by Blast Theory). Some say that these developments
come from the mere availability of affordable and accessible technology
(mobile phone cams, moblogs, GPS devices, etc), and the pull of a
consumer market that is taking over the entertainment industry. What
are your thoughts on these trends, if you even see them as trends?


MF: Trends are significant, and certainly not something that is
inherently negative. They can be seen as many people, working in
parallel to sort something out, whether it's the heavily parametered
variation on ways of wearing a certain piece of clothing that occurs in
fashion or whether its possibly more considered work in media culture,
they tend to produce a condition in which many people can interact with
a set of conditions - such as a new technology - and work out some of
its possibilities. Needless to say, with some technologies, these
waves of attention are as revealing as a wave of First World War
infantry going over the top into a curtain of machine gun fire as a
flesh feelergauge for the generals.

There is a tendency in some material that is circulated via media art
festivals, but which I don't see as art per se, more as what the Dutch
call e-culture, to work with creative prototyping. I don't see this
work as necessarily needing to work with reference to art, as it tends
to put unnecessary pressures on it. Things can just be fun, a nice
piece of work, a sharp use of a technology in an appropriate or telling
context. Art requires a more rigorous attention to perception, to its
function as a reflexive process. The work of Blast Theory clearly works
in relation to art, and one of their achievements is to maintain
collaboration with partners such as the Mixed Reality Lab in
Nottingham, serious technologists, where both parties, from what I can
tell, seem to have genuinely developed the capacities of the other. The
two other specific projects you mention, I don't know enough about to
comment.

Conversely, that work does not involve itself in the kinds of
self-questioning that characterises art practice may in fact mean it
has other things to offer. But it does mean that it also possibly sets
itself up for the danger of mobwalking right into the machine gun fire
of consumer-grade boredom.

I like the phrase used by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and others recently,
'Design for Hackability'. This seems to be a good minimum demand to
make on any media technology. By these standards, mobile phones and
other locked technologies are decreasingly interesting. By the same
measure though, the relatively open practices of W3C and others in
establishing Meta-data standards mean that there are real possibilities
here. And indeed, the question of how to couple either of these
currents of technology with an aesthetics that is productive and
disturbing is still wide open.


RG: I'm interested in the notion of "software culture" explored in your
_Behind the Blip_ and the type of work, criticism and pedagogy that you
are involved in though the MA Media Design Program and your own work.
Is there a desire to reshape the dominant culture(s) (that some may
refer to as a technocracy) to be more self-aware, inclusive and
reflexive? Or is it more interesting to create divergent, purposefully
specialized and oppositional cultures? Perhaps this question is about
working "inside" versus "outside" to effect difference.

MF: I think that it's relatively inevitable that, in shortly given
terms, when people, whether students or not participate in a context in
which they have space, time, good resources, and involvement with other
people with skills and ideas, that something will come out that is not
moulded by what might be called a dominant culture. Whether that
domination might come from a teacher wanting to produce a homogeneous
approach to software culture, one perhaps that is compulsorily
speculative, or come from the macro-to-micro scale formations that
attempt to subordinate or harness all thought, technology and
aesthetics to a mediocrely conceived capitalism, the principle is the
same. People, the compositional dynamics that they compose and that
course through them, are usually idiosyncratic enough, deviant enough
to foil or surpass anyone's expectations.

Perhaps the question is also, if we can understand art schools, other
such institutions, organisations and groups as - at their best - what
Guattari described as laboratories of subjectivation, places and
moments when technologies, ideas, aesthetics, people and practices
interact to produce something which is in excess of its 'list of
ingredients.' How can we make an account of such processes which allows
others to recognise and experiment with some of what comes out?
Perhaps we need our own earnest researcher to carry out a version of
'laboratory life'? (The title of a ground-breaking work of
anthropology/science studies in which the daily working life of
scientists is followed and recorded)

The question you pose is one which has a long history. The twentieth
century saw it disastrously posed as an opposition between reformism
and revolution, leading to sad revolutionaries and timid, if not
slavish, reformists. Perhaps as greater and more supple thought to the
ethics and aesthetics of organisation and relationality is made in the
area of art, and areas such as organisation studies become increasingly
open to multiple currents of experience (despite being a least
potentially constricted to the perpetual redesign of control), or, in
political terms, self-organising currents, such as those who, in the
London European Social Forum, become increasingly self-aware in such
terms and define themselves as 'horizontals', and in many other
contexts, we can begin (always again) to work through some of these
possibilities. Perhaps including a 'grammar' as Paulo Virno has called
it, in the areas of both education and media design?


RG: The anthropological research of science/technology, and by proxy,
all authority, that you mention is probably one of the most interesting
and important projects, in my opinion, at the moment for 'cultural
workers.' Your (non)classification of 'not-just-art,' (from "A Means of
Mutation") i think, provides some room for this kind of work to operate
on many levels. I've been especially interested in the work of
'not-just-artists' that move through the art world when it provides
convenient mechanisms for exposure and research facilities. Where do
you see the most engaging forms of 'not-just-art' coming from/going at
the moment?

MF: Perhaps alongside the recognition of, or the search for,
'authority' in scientific practices it is also useful to recognise in
it, something more positive, a thread which continues from the
enlightenment onwards which is the search for a more useful, accurate
or suggestive understanding of the world. I'd question any discipline
that attempts to unmask 'authority' without also working on itself.
Whether this is a po-faced anthropologist, reality-policing scientist
or self-righteous artist claiming access to the truth by simple virtue
of their being produced by a discipline with greater access to the
verities. Disciplines as such - and art, even as the arch
'anti-discipline,' is amongst them - are only ever a transitional
stage, providing a certain perspectival rigour or training. They
provide a motor for seeing and moving beyond themselves.

One obvious case right now is that of the Critical Art Ensemble. Their
mobilisation of amateurism, the headlong and extremely artful plunge
into biotechnology, molecular engineering and the integration of life
at the sub-organismic level with regimes of property and militarisation
is absolutely timely. It is also a kind of work that works with art
methodologies, but outside of their normalised context. To use the
term, 'not-just-art', this is work that deals with arguments about
representation and materiality, about the location and visualisation of
certain kinds of objects, with procedures of naming, positioning and
knowing, with the making of certain hitherto popularly 'ineffable'
knowledges (those accorded the status of the military industrial
sublime) palpable and usable. The work also works reflexively on
notions of truth, how it is arrived at, assigned value, made available
to different kinds of people, organisations and instruments. CAE's
work operates fully in relation to these questions, which are
aesthetic, to do with the construction and experience of perception but
also locates these aesthetics in terms of their striation by political
forces. Crucially, (and this is where perhaps it becomes 'not-just-art'
in the sense you mention) the points where such cutting up, such
marking by power, occurs are not simply taken as a boundary point - the
place where the slug of art meets the salt of reality - the place to
turn back and to put up pictures, but as a crucial knot, a nodal point
that can be mobilised by the reality forming principles of direct
action.

Clearly CAE are not alone in attempting such work. In a more sensorial
mode, Lygia Clark's work merging materials aesthetics with
'therapeutic' or phenomenal practices is extremely interesting.
Equally, you can look at projects such as the txtmob that spring out of
a bastardisation of art, engineering, and again, the idea of direct
action, that of acting without representation now in the world in a
reality-forming way.

(I was convinced about Clark's work, for instance the 'relational
objects', when I saw some documentation in the exhibition 'Phases of
the Kinetic at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2000. See Suely Rolink:
'For a State of Art, the actuality of Lygia Clark' at
http://caosmose.net/suelyrolnik/pdf/for_a_state_of_art_Bienal.pdf/ )

Recognising art methodologies as reservoirs of reflexive, critical and
perceptual dynamics that can be put into play in, that ripple into,
many contexts, not simply those of art systems per se, is in a sense, a
next step. If not-just-art allows for things to be recognisable as
working with art systems, but also outside of such a skin, we can also
see art methodologies moving outside of art systems, not reporting back
to the mother-ship but infecting and mobilising other parts of life,
realising other compositional dynamics. (Tracking and developing such
art methodologies in the realm of software is something that I'm
currently working on for a project 'Softness' with Huddersfield Media
Centre.) Partly perhaps this is to do with the massification of art
education, art as a partly commodified cultural force, partly also
because of a more general intellectuality which occurs in perverse,
non-disciplinary, but still reflexive, self-aware and
self-experimental, dynamics. Perhaps in the way that cellular automata
sometimes produce 'gliders' that move across and out from their
generative matrix in a dynamic manner, art methodologies are also
launched by art systems which are themselves unable to pre-determine
their patternings and behaviours. How can we best learn to set in play
the creation of such sensorial and subjectival gliders, self-generating
and relational patternings that spread knots, tingles and explosions of
other becomings in contexts from which they are supposedly excluded?


RG: The development of meta-data standards is something that seems very
promising to me, as it relates to a kind of 'opening-up' of information
and processes that allows for comparison and relational research. But,
at the same time, it's hard for me to not read these developments
against Virilio's conception of speed and my negative (luddite?)
reactions to the utopian fantasies of a singularity, as a primary
motivation for meta-data seems to be the 'speeding-up' and
universalization of the archive. I'm curious about your thoughts on the
desire for a comprehensive archive, a universe of 'tagged' experiences.
How do we formulate a dialectical approach that avoids the
utopia/dystopia trap, yet remains politically and structurally engaged?


MF: Well this is a key question! I dare say that simply raising such
questions, stubbornly insisting on the political and existential
dimensions of these technologies is essential in itself to forming
something of an answer. And it seems that many people working in the
area of metadata are aware of this. The richness, the
uncontrollability of life is what drives them on, that makes them
hungry to find an expressive way of coupling it with the inherently
reductive, but also manifoldly explosive powers of computational and
networked digital media.

At the same time, this is a current recursion of an old
media/anti-media problem. Does Plato call for poets to be imprisoned
for betraying the lived immediacy of language or for being a vector by
means of which the wrong things, tricky ideas, serious pleasures might
be remembered and made mobilisable?

The notion of 'The Singularity', however, that significant
computational intelligence will be developed, be networked and suddenly
cross a threshold of richness into a new level of synergetic post-human
intelligence used to express a totalisation, is a phantasm - control's
dry dream of Daddy transmuted into God, but with the twist that God is,
like Eve, 'simply' the result of man's parts, the multiplication of his
tools. Needless to say, the fear is that, instead of the reverse
transit into Eden, it is man himself who becomes the appendage and the
tag becomes a tourniquet.
Given such a scenario, what more is there to do but to sit back and
laugh?