Mandy Haponski
6.03.04

“Performance art is art where the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time in front of an audience constitute the work.”

It’s happened your whole life—he who supposedly has come to teach you does not offer much beyond a well recited version of someone else’s intelligence. If the internet is one big teacher, "In contrast to media's arrogance, they offer us intelligence." But what if it only pretended to offer you intelligence?

How does a robotic project about deception relate to the technology it employs; how does a culturally shared understanding about technology inadvertently con troll the social ability to dishevel the truth? This performative work in the dessert took upon itself the task of translating the many beauties of technology and art while secretly revealing truths about a society’s socio-cognitive structure.

The most abstract level of Edwin Hutchin’s three levels of a socially distributed computational system is the “representational,” as opposed to the “computational” and “implementational.” This is where the translation occurs between a system and its ability to be culturally understood. “The specific implementations of the tasks determine the kinds of cognitive processes that the performer will have to organize in order to do the task. The implementations are, in turn, part of a cultural process that tends to collect representations that permit tasks to be performed by means of a simple cognitive process.”

If human cognition is not merely influenced by culture and society, but is largely an entity of culture and a social process itself, then we can analyze the process of translation as a purely human condition, quite different from the technology which it aims to translate.

I would like to draw on ideas between two separate articles by Lev Manovich to answer Hutchins in relationship to this project. In the first article, he speaks about the assimilation of programming and databases into avant-garde art practices in “Generation Flash,” and in “The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art” he hints to conclude that artist abuse a standard of translation from incomprehensibly populated databases to something recognizable and aesthetically appealing/understandable to create somewhat petty work.

“Suddenly, programming is cool. Suddenly, the techniques and imagery that for two decades were associated with SIGGRAPH geek-ness and were considered bad taste--visual output of mathematical functions, particle systems, RGB color palette--are welcomed on the plasma screens of the gallery walls.”
“The desire to take what is normally falls outside of the scale of human senses and to make visible and manageable aligns data visualization art with modern science. Its subject matter, i.e. data, puts it within the paradigm of modern art.”

Between the two quotes, I can draw that the modern use of computing and art (and popularization of Flash as a college major) can do nothing but draw mediocrity to it, and as Hutchins reveals, creates a need for a socially understandable navigation through it. That the translation of this as a medium requires mapping and an implied social structure, which in turn can not push the anti-sublime or a greater than 4D space of translation.

How then does an artist push the abstract level of cognition and the desire for a more true translation: the anti-sublime, if its existence requires a socially recognizable map of your data in translation? As a social construct, its is not a task to be undertaken by one who looks for translation from society because the concept of the anti-sublime is based upon the fact that it is not a socially recognized aesthetic or easily traceable image to our 4D space.

A robot released into the dessert, a few absurd claims and some even more absurd demands of the audience. Perhaps you are beginning to wonder now what of my first set of questions: how my robotic project about deception betrays the technology it employs; and how the cultural understanding about this technology deceives the audience of the piece—now with reference to Hutchins and Manovich’s ideas about social knowledge and its betrayal to data art.

I like to believe I presented the audience members with a socially constructed map of what was occurring. I told them this piece of metal with two wheels and a microcontroller was reacting to their movements. That it would communicate wirelessly to the computer, and that the rap music that they must dance to would affect the data the microcontroller was processing. While using a sonar sensor to detect proximity is no difficult task, I found myself pulled, since the inception of my project, towards deception; as the data a group of audience members would socially construct from the map I presented them with in the beginning of the performance would reveal more to me about cognition in the wild then that of my autonomous robot.

Was the point proven to be true? —more so then I could have ever imagined. Those members who recalled all the information I presented to them, regardless of how familiar with the technology they were, translated the movements of the robot to follow the map which I presented them with. Audience members who were less able to recall the information or were not present when the information was presented to them regarding what was supposedly occurring saw less and less of what I would call the “interaction phenomenon.”

This was deception of its own technology because, while it is capable of non object orientated behavior, the performance in the dessert placed translation in the hands not of the computer but of the humans involved. In a way, I wondered if we will ever truly get along with one another.

“While modern art tried to play the role of "data-epistemology," thus entering in completion with science and mass media to explain to us the patterns behind all the data surrounding us, it also always played a more unique role: to show us other realities embedded in our own, to show us the ambiguity always present in our perception and experience, to show us what we normally don't notice or don't pay attention to.”

Maybe my project here was to emphasize the social truths by betraying the trust of the audience members, and perhaps with this I am striking only at anarchy. Yet it has revealed much more to me. Hutchins and Manovich search to revolutionize two separate fields of study, but only through the duality in each work, could I discover how to think about where exactly to cognitively take Pinky once I was in the dessert.