Timeshift
: Towards an Anthropological Perspective
The World in Twenty-Five Years
Ars Electronica
September 2-7, 2004; Linz, Austria
Face to Face: Connecting Distance + Proximity
European Association of Social Anthropologists
(EASA) Conference
September 8-12, 2004; Vienna, Austria
Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
lichtgestalten@hotmail.com
With the strapline Timeshift Ars Electronica
2004 proposed an interface to direct a
review of the past 25 years of Ars into
a prognosis for the coming 25 years or
as the outline of the symposium states:
"an overview of the way we deal with
visions and prognosis in general [to]
serve as a tool and point of departure".
Theoreticians, scientists, and practitioners
were invited to give their insights and
visions for the fields technology, art
and society. While the past 25 years of
development in electronic arts were reviewed
by several conference participants in
a very elaborate way, as for example by
Itsuo Sakane, the future seemed to linger
in the realms of dark matter, as Roger
Malina brought to attention in his treatment
of the small percentage of knowable matter
set against the vast indeterminacy of
the universe.
Reviewing the symposium and the goals
set by Ars Electronica by inducing this
year’s subject, it may seem, at first
glance, visions into the future were greatly
lacking, but on closer inspection there
were a few strands that contributed much
of value to such a perspective. Roger
Malina’s contribution in the Timeshift
catalogue synthesizes a view into the
past with a prognosis for the future.
Malina points out how the electronic arts
community, reflected by both Ars Electronica
and Leonardo, has from its beginnings
staked out the international scope, cross
cultural boundaries, and emphasis on explorations
of "identity" and cultural difference.
He sees a "timeshift" in the
beginnings of a period of social experimentation
and locally adaptive planetary cultures
and quotes artist Max Bill, who in a Leonardo
Editorial Board meeting in the 1970’s
had already identified "ethics"
as the key issue for the next 25 years.
With a rather art-historical perspective
(but a similar outcome in some respects),
Peter Weibel declares the future development
in the arts sector as a transdisciplinary
re-mapping of competences, in the way
the arts practise expands from its field
of work into new domains such as ecology
or sociology.
These and some of the following theoretical
contributions anticipated what might be
called an invigoration of "human",
in parts ethnographic, perspectives in
the previously often rather abstract discourses
on technology and art. In a slightly different
approach, one of the most visionary stimulations
at the symposium came from Roy Ascott,
advocating a stronger consideration of
interrelations of electronic art as a
combination of organic and technological
advances with contemporary research in
Quantum Physics and Biology. Toward the
end of his presentation, by advocating
the study of psychoactive narcotics such
as altered states of consciousness effected
by Ayuasca in spiritual and cultural contexts,
he anticipated a rather anthropological
aspect of several of the following presentations,
which emphasized a practical application
of new media in various cultural contexts.
In particular the Timeshift symposium
entitled "Spirit" created space
to revisit ancient mythologies and transfer
some of these aspects into a contemporary
perspective of new media and arts practice.
Geetha Narayanan, for instance, promoted
the importance of lived experience and
subjective perspective as part of scientific
discourses, and in her presentation of
new models of educational institutions
in India and a creative implementation
of technology she introduced new reflections
on terms such as humanity, wholeness,
ecology, and spirituality. Sherry Turkle
discussed the affective relationship between
human and machine in a traditional Freudian
context of psychoanalysis, her most interesting
point was, again, the emphasis on human
experience and subjective perspective.
In the symposium entitled "Disruption",
David Turnbull’s sociological research
on the integration of indigenous knowledge
into a discussion of scientific cartography
in Australia is not a new approach, but
should be mentioned here for its explicit
ethnographic emphasis. Finally Nadja Maurer
introduced her presentation under the
rubric "Topia" with a brief
insight into the discipline of comparative
cultural studies and ethnographic fieldwork,
furthermore bringing to attention a transcultural
perspective in her treatment of media
structures of communication.
These approaches ask for a consideration
of a more elaborate debate within the
art, technology, and culture communities,
and as I would like to suggest here, for
a more rigorous transdisciplinary discourse.
An event like Ars could turn more explicitly
into one of the forums to serve as a social
lever for promising technology to shape
and constitute future collaborations and
networks; a view that has been promoted
by Ars from the very beginnings of its
existence in 1979. Johan Brucker-Cohen
reiterated this aspect in his treatment
of disruption as means of productive resistance
and self-reflection, as well as Joichi
Ito with his call for practical application
of the concepts of democracy and emergence
supported by social technologies and Krzysztof
Wodiczko’s appeal to give voice to
the nameless and speechless by animated
testimony memorials, turning people into
artists in socio-esthetic environments.
Furthermore some treatments of the subject
of time, synchronicities, and relativity
contributed to a prognosis of a timeshift
and threshold into other dimensions. Two
outstanding presentations worth highlighting
were Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s
installation Listening Post, and Julien
Marie’s performance Half Step. Listening
Post consisted of an installation of 231
independent screens processing electronic
information in apparently coincidental
sequences using sound, text image and
movement. This computer-controlled audiovisual
environment reflected upon the immediacy
and dynamics of global communication through
the World Wide Web. Without being interactive
with the audience, the rhizome of dispersed
text fragments triggered and reflected
the associative networking of the spectator’s
brain activities. Bringing a historical
dimension to attention and questioning
its chronological technological developments
in visual media, Marie and Hansen and
Rubin offer an experience in form of a
crystal image in a Deleuzian sense: a
time image, neither past nor future, both
oscillating in presentness. In a more
materialist way Julien Marie merged 19th
century Magic Lantern technology with
digital technology, turning an item of
pre-cinema technology into an exquisite
audio-visual spectacle, which seemed to
fascinate both the cinephile and the new
media oriented audience. Marie’s
minuscule high-tech glass-plate projection
displays, thoroughly inspected by the
audience after the show, transmitted a
live spectacle that recovered some excitement
of the pre-cinema period and also stretched
the time-span of retrospective, in this
case from 25 to over 100 years.
Interestingly enough, immediately following
the close of Ars Electronica, another
international conference opened in Vienna:
the biannual European Association of Social
Anthropologists (EASA). This year titled
Face to Face: Connecting Distance and
Proximity, it attracted more than 1000
international cultural anthropologists——a
fortunate coincidence for those able to
attend both events since as a scientific
discipline, cultural anthropology has
been treating the topics of technology
and art since the very beginning of the
first intercultural contacts, embedded
in a social and economical research context.
The conference brought the established
discourses in the discipline of cultural
anthropology, such as culture and identity,
into a framework of contemporary tensions
and developments, redefining and transforming
them into the context of imagined or virtual
communities, creole (or hybrid) contexts
of culture and trans-national environments.
While with regard to electronic media,
the new branch Cyberanthropology (based,
amongst others, on Ars Electronica’s
last years guest Pierre Levy’s sociological
research into "cyberculture")
and Media Anthropology have been founded
in recent years; wherein more extensively
than before, human interrelations with
technology in new media environments are
being studied. With regard to film technology
some visual anthropologists such as Robert
Flaherty, Jean Rouch, or David McDougal
are well known for having been involved
in new technological developments and
the reconfiguration of filmic style in
the documentary genre throughout the 20th
century. One of the discipline’s
intrinsic predicates of participant observation
and integration with and of the subjects
perspective——an approach that
otherwise has mainly been applied by the
art community——directly matches
contemporary discourses and items in the
field of technology and culture, such
as interactivity, self-reflection and
intelligibility. In the three day conference,
topics such as global interconnections,
face-to-face interaction, compliance and
confrontation, conditions of inter-subjectivity,
identity and alterity in shifting contexts
were discussed in various subject areas
within the discipline ranging from a focus
on medicine, political science, philosophy,
sociology, methods of ethnography, ecology,
to film and new media.
Whereas the first ethnographers were missionaries
or scientists informed by travellers and
their second hand information, cultural
anthropology has developed and transformed
throughout the last century from a 19th
century evolutionary perspective into
a most vivid, politically engaged, critically
self-reflexive and inspired community.
Through involvement and integration in
various cultural fields in Western and
Non-Western contexts, cultural anthropologists
bind their empirically grounded research
into theoretical discourses to contribute
to our understanding of the very basic
questions about human life and cultural
expressions. To mention only one example
of the many workshops during the EASA
conference, in the workshop "Philosophy
and Anthropology: Border Crossings and
Transformation", Ananta Kumar Giri
quoted the philosopher and anthropologist
Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803):
"What fruitful new developments would
not arise if only our whole philosophy
would become anthropology?" Bruce
Kapferer expresses a similar argument,
defining anthropology as the practical
extension of philosophy in a passionate
response to T.M.S. Evens’ presentation
that applied Deleuze and Guattari’s
molecularist ontology in order to explain
Nuer mythology. Kapferer explains why
Deleuze has created an epistemological
break in all scientific disciplines and
emphasises his engagement with ethnographic
data and concerns. Deleuze, who has most
prominently been used and interpreted
by the arts and new media community throughout
the last decade, has found entrance into
social sciences and forms a link between
theoretical, philosophical discourses
and empirical research. There were too
many workshops taking place at the same
time to gain anything near to an overview
of the event, but certainly in this panel
and in the plenary lectures, in particular
those of the younger anthropologists discussing
perspectivism, personal belief, resistance
and conflict as inter-subjective activities,
there was a spirit indicating a——what
Ars Electronica has titled——Timeshift,
an opening up of reiterated discourses
to new perspectives.
While reception theory in new media studies,
self-reflexiveness in consciousness studies
and psychology, and interactivity in electronic
art are popular items of the last few
decades, cultural anthropology brings
a long tradition of well established methodologies
into scientific discourses that strive
for an interactive dialogue between subject
and object, science and practice or personal
experiences, playing the role of intermediary
between different cultures or cultural
fields. As both conferences, Ars and EASA,
implicitly and explicitly have articulated,
the emergence of global interconnectivity,
both in social and technological respects,
asks for transdisciplinary approaches
and collaborations. One emphasis of such
a collaboration, a spectrum of sociological,
ethnographic, and politically informed
approaches, as it has been given voice
in some presentations at Ars and as an
intrinsic matter of discipline being discussed
at the EASA conference, suggested a engaging
vision into the future.
This perspective could provide a new impetus
for the arts and technology community,
and extension of the humanities as scientific
enterprise, merging art, technology and
culture in a dialogue and promoting more
pro-active and productive exchanges for
an understanding and participation with
new artistic, technological and cultural
developments in the near future. We may
consider the at Ars exhibited Inter Dis-Communication
Machine by Kazuhiko Hachiya as a starting
point; an installation in which an experiment
was undertaken in pairs with both participants
wearing a head-mounted display and a backpack
with angel’s wings. This enabled
them to view the perspective of the other
in the display in an entirely exchanged
visual perception. It was both disorienting
and engaging and simultaneously raised
the question: Where does communion and
communication start in a worldview experienced
through the senses of the other?
Ars Electronica 2004. The 25th
Anniversary of the Festival of Art, Technology
and Society. Timeshift——The
World in Twenty-Five YeArs. Eds. Gerfried
Stocker and Christine Schöpf. Ostfildern-Ruit/Germany:
Hatje Comtz Verlag, 2004.
8th EASA conference 2004: http://www.univie.ac.at/voelkerkunde/easa/
Ars Electronica 2004: http://www.aec.at/en/index.asp
