Dutch Electronic Arts Festival '04 (DEAF '04): Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems

Presented by V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media
November 9-21,2004; Rotterdam, NL
Festival website: http://www.deaf04.nl/

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

This year’s Dutch Electronic Arts Festival was held in the Van Nelle Ontwerpfabriek, a former tea and tobacco plant, in Rotterdam from 9 till 21 November 2004. Its main theme was Affective Turbulance, The Art of Open Systems, and it was a strikingly well organized, not too modest event with a more than local or national significance. As usual, the festival offered a wide range of activities at several venues: an exhibition, conference lectures and debates, music and performances, a workshop, and a symposium. The beautifully designed catalogue (reviewed elsewhere in LDR) comments and documents the whole event.

DEAF is a biennial interdisciplinary festival for art and media technology. DEAF'04 is the seventh edition of this international festival, and it was hosted by the worldwide renowned V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media from Rotterdam. It presented and reflected on the current state of affairs in electronic art, at the same time serving as a platform for artists to confront their work with a wide audience and as a forum for artists, researchers, and critics to exchange ideas about emerging trends and hot issues in contemporary (media) art. As such, the festivals debates and seminars were quite a success. The general theme of Affective Turbulence, The Art of Open Systems, was developed in two main threads: open systems properly and what I would call the importance of emotion and affection in human/machine hybrid environments.

Open systems have been a major theme ever since the very idea of systems emerged. From the very beginnings of systems thinking with Von Bertalanfy and the cybernetic revolution of Von Neumann through Prigogyne's 'Order out of Chaos' and the rhizome or network ideology of the 90s of last century, thinkers, artists, activists and engineers have been struggling to develop a convincing and sufficiently complex theory of open systems. Obviously, the description and analysis of hypothetical closed systems with far less parameters to take into account is mathematically and conceptually more straightforward, but it always leaves an aftertaste of sleight-of-hand and even failure to really understand what is important since we very well know that no real system is absolutely closed and closed systems are not really what matters. Open systems are alive. Living systems, whether they be chemical, astrophysical, nucleotic, social, biological, or technological, are open. Their very openness makes them interesting and dynamic and at the same time forces theorists to take systems of another nature into account. Systems analysis must be interdisciplinary for the simple reason that all systems worth studying encompass several layers of description. The key concept here is 'emergence'. Looking at the subsystems is not enough to understand the complex behaviour of the total. All major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, and social theory of the past decade or so are in some way or other indebted to conceptualising that behaviour as a result of 'blind' actions or 'simple' rules governing the building blocks of brains, machines and societies. Far from being the end of individualistic psychology, linear programming, or mechanical engineering, the concept of emergence heralds the end of a deterministic and Cartesian view of the world and the beginning of a new roadmap for the development of a theory and praxis of hybrid biotechnological environments. An important and up till recent years quite underdeveloped aspect of this exciting new programme is the role of affect, emotion or feeling. In the big building of science, emotions and affections were generally treated as waste and consequently disposed of as disturbing factors. Economics and sociology, consciousness research and psychology, fysiology and philosophy alike didn't seem to be able to come to terms with the fleeting, unstable, and unpredictable realm of the belly and the heart. Cognition and the senses over-ruled hormones. Of course, there has always been tentative speculation. Spinoza, Freud and James had some interesting things to say on the subject, but the general tendency of modern thinkers was to discard the emotional in favour of the rational. One could hypothesize that the coming of age of rationality and the scientific method prerequisite the treatment of emotions as suspect and unworthy of study for fear of recognising how big their role might be.

As author Gerd Ruebenstrunk, a psychologist who wrote his thesis on "emotional machines" described during the Affective Systems seminar at DEAF, serious research into the nature and the role of emotions has only recently taken off. Popular science writers, like Antonio Damasio and Robin Dunbar, have made the subject fashionable and respectable and many more are seriously developing promising new theories. Aaron Sloman from Birmingham and Andy Clark from Edinburgh, among others, have more or less successfully bridged the perceived gap between consciousness, cognition, and affect. But there remains a lot of work to do, and artists seem to be the natural allies of scientists to show how to do it. At the same Affective Systems seminar, artists Angelika Oei and René Verouden (NL), Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann (CA/NL) and Phoebe Sengers (US) explained how they directly included machine emotion and feelings in their multimedia environments, haptic, and hybrid interfaces and media works respectively. Owen Holland from Birmingham made in his inimitable way the reverse trip from scientific research into artistic expression.

Affective Systems was, in my view, the key seminar of the festival. The main dish, however, was the series of lectures during the two-day symposium "Feelings are always Local" where the themes of open, networked systems and feeling and emotion were connected. A quote from the festival brochure explains the first step: "In the symposium, we will on the one hand investigate how networks organize themselves from the inside out, expand, link up, and rearrange themselves. On the other hand, we will investigate how people live in networks, how possibilities are created, and things sometimes go wrong. While the first question is scientific in nature——How do networks work?——the second is political: How are the networks made manageable on a concrete, everyday level?" The second step to connect open systems and emotion was not made explicit, but taken implicitly in some of the questions the speakers asked: are imagination, resistance, violence, and cooperation in human networks similar or analogue to emotions in biological systems? And if so, are these political actions local expressions of a self-image of the network in a way that resembles the dependence of consciousness on a reflective mapping of the state of the body? None of the speakers at the symposium: neurologist Karim Nader (US), media artist Christa Sommerer (AT), biologist Thijs Goldschmidt (NL), anthropologists Christopher Kelly (US) and Arjun Appadurai (IN/US), economist Loretta Napoleoni (IT), historian Mike Davis (US), artist and programmer Alex Galloway (US) and philosopher Manuel DeLanda (MX/US) answered these questions directly but the sheer range of contributors already indicates where the answers might lay.

It is impossible in the scope of this report to cover every event at Rotterdam, but with its well-focused and groundbreaking theme and its balanced mix of lectures, debates and seminars, DEAF'04 proved to be a less conspicuous but welcome alternative to the annual Ars Electronica festival at Linz.