Stan Wijnans

11 Multi disciplinairy and interdisciplinary collaborations

..… this [collaboration] is luckily not an institutional problem, but just the familiar one getting artists and technologists to talk to each other. Each artist and each project entails a learning process for both artist and engineer. This is well known, but the burden still falls unequally on the artists who must expose their ignorance to close scrutiny and to translate their ideas into a form the technologist can understand. The presumption is that the language and the methodologies of the technologist, because they are well articulated and successful to their own standards, should be taken on completely by the artist. Often not only for aesthetic reasons but even for practical ones this is not the path to the solution of the problems of the artist. The imposition of method on any group of artists is arrogant or naive or both. The temptation of programmers is to immediately concentrate on the issues of the translation of ideas into machine logic rather than in comprehending the idea or system of the artist (Ryan 1992:13).

The jargon used by artists working in interdisciplinary collaborations is often a mixture of art and technological vocabulary. The collective creation process often includes input and collaborative problem-solving or creative innovation by the team. Usually the artistic concept and the code are intertwined; the technique becomes an important element of the concept and the concept is the drive to develop or adjust the technology. Software- or hardware-based artworks are usually developed as a team effort where the artist works together with the technicians, designers and researchers. This requires a more prominent conceptual role on the part of the team members: not only do they bring inexpertise, they become actively involved in the conceptual design and development (Nigten 2005:5).

An emphasis on integration over fragmentation, on cooperation rather than competition, on dynamics and process in place of the static and mechanical, on nonlinear distributed interrelationships and emergent properties of collective wholes instead of linear undirectional or hierarchical control of incidental parts (Ho Mae-Wan 1991:607).

End note

Having explored various contemporary and futuristic issues related to interactive (robotic) sound performances, we can see that every aspect of the processes involved need to be considered. During this writing I have drawn some conclusions, but as an end note and final evaluation of my MA research I would like to conclude that, apart from the theoretical considerations, a practical research was executed in investigating the nature of the engagement between humans / artists and machine / computer. During my first semester project ‘Frozen White’ this was explored in an intuitive / improvised form and it was possible to find ways to gain a spontaneity within the improvisational performers within the use of definite sound transformations, instead of choosing to gain some spontaneity from the computer itself. During the dissertation project ‘Anatomical Exoskeleton’ I have seen that technology gives us a wide range of artistic choices and we have to be aware that in every new project a thorough research of the available resources, collaborations and artistic choices is unavoidable. I finish this dissertation with another definition and a conclusive writing from Roy Ascott:

Art While traditionally art was focused on the appearance of things and their representation, artists now are concerned with processes of transformation, construction and emergence (Roy Ascott 1996)

In this technoetic culture, the art we produce is not simply a mirror of the world, nor is it an alibi for past events or present intensities. Engaging constructively with the technological environment, it sets creativity in motion, within the frame of indeterminacy, building new ideas, new forms, and new experience from the bottom up, with the artist relinquishing total control while fully immersed in the evolutive process. The viewer is complicit in this, interactively adding to the propositional force that the artwork carries. It is seduction in semantic space: Barthe’s juissance all over again. And it is a noetic enticement, an invitation to share in the consciousness of a new millennium, the triumphant seduction of technology by art, not the seduction of the artist by technology
(Ascott 1990:247).

 

Ascott, R. (1990 )'Turning on Technology'. Art Journal 49:3.

Mae-Wan, H. (1991) 'Reanimating Nature: the integration of Science with Human experience'. Leonardo Journal, Volume 24:5 5 Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard university Press.

Nigten, A. (2005) 'Human factors in artistic research and development in multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations'. In: Goodman, L & Milton, K. eds. A Guide to Good Practice in Collaborative Working Methods and New Media Tools Creation (by and for artists and the cultural sector). London OHC (Office for Humanities Communication), Ch7, pp. 72-83.

Ryan, J. (1992) 'Some remarks on musical instrument design at STEIM'. Contemporary Music Review (6:1).