Roy Ascott the Cybernetic Stance 67’
I enjoyed reading this piece because it was able to manifest ideas and fears I have been struggling with around the nature of art. Art is losing its physicality, its mass in the room and weight on a scale. Nothing historically takes up as much volume as the sculptor, the painter is limited to the 2D plane and while the painting is object, the sculpture is more OBJECT. It is about the evocation and response of the audience, its slowly losing what Roy termed as process art, something born from the 60s I believe has met its death in 2020. What this leaves us with is both increasingly immaterial vessels aiming to occupy mental space without having physical form.
The instagram feed, the video game, the consumption of content online, where the hell are they? And if I can find them do they have the answer for why they have so much impact on my daily life? Artists need to relinquish prior notions of art, art is no longer owned it is a cybernetic relationship. The piece of art was once viewed by the collective, now the art is the collective interacting with itself, the systems of media and content sharing. The only true equitable art I can think of that is of this time is the Meme. Death to physical galleries, death to curators let the AI we create continually serve us what we already subconsciously want. Information no longer has truths we can pick a side and find what we want in the collective to agree. By this logic is not all information without weight? Wikipedia provides the collective’s knowledge back to collective, without the bounds of capitalist systems of payment (I know they take donations to stick around, its not a subscription through).
If a peer reviewed paper is under a paywall, it is without reason to feel remorse in pirating it. As Joshua Simon put in his book Neo-Materialism “You should steal not because you are indifferent to the power of the system, you should steal to deny items value and by extension power over you life.”