<nettime> Leonardo & Denzin quotations

Hi Max,

I´m sorry, I`m a bit under pressure with other things at the monent, so only short.

Thanks a lot for your deep insights to Leonardo, I´ll definitely follow your blog and the development of your thesis because it really sounds interesting. I shouldn´t have written about Leonardo himself as I don´t know much about him as I said. It was more about the era and about sketching a very rough outline about a mostly dominant epistemological movement within western thinking (in a kind of Foucaultian sense) which I think can be stated like I did, if it is only meant as a kind of background for the speculative question I wanted to state.

Of course there are many different positions within the philosophy of maths! I´ve once written a quite nerdy book about some aspects of this (mathematical/conceptual modeling of physical questions in different times) and even then I thought it´s always possible to dig deeper. So I don´t want to go too deep into that. For the more modern developments and especially for the later development of digital media the fin de siècle and the begin of the 20th century was quite important as I see it. I´m not sure if one can compare the thinking of the 15th century to that and say Gödel´s theorems were already implied there. But if you prove that it´ll quite sure get some attention!

Regarding questions about the connection of maths and consciousness I personally tend to positions like those of Penrose, Deutsch, Kauffman and so on which in a way correlate with Barad who seems to have a kind of hype at the moment. However her position reminded me strongly at much earlier discussions in quantum physics but they were not received and discussed in social sciences then. If one wants to build a bridge from that into ancient times one might also refer to Epikur but that´s quite far out and I´m not an expert on that connection. Personally I´m not a Platonist (in a wider philosophical sense) at all as I´m convinced that only bodies can be a solid basis for any kind of sustainable ethics, not ideas standing for themselves. However digitality has a certain kind of affinity to platonism one could say in view of all the information cosmologists out there today.

That brings me to your hint on Wiener´s late book. I´ve read a lot of his books but not that one, so thanks! It is a quite funny one, I’ve read it yesterday : ) Many things he stated already earlier but not in that detail as cybernetics and society developed a lot from the early days on. He is surely a visionary regarding some of the social consequences but he is also a quite ambivalent person. Funny because he states his book will be about religion in the beginning and then a third of it or so is about war, war games, war machines (good for the development of HCI) and so on :P Cybernetics as kind of his invention was born out of world war II including the theories around it like information theory. So it might be no coincidence that Wired has headlined a while ago „The government has weaponized the Internet“ ; ) However he always likes to make a point in being a humanist in his writings.

Within cybernetics there are also different positions or trends. His understanding of learning is quite crude in my eyes, there are better ones in my eyes if one wants to use that framework. I´ve just written something about that which also deals with the question of artistic subversion within that framework. It should have be released in Dec but it´s not out yet and it´s unfortunately written in german. If you´re interested I may send it to you when it is released, maybe DeepL can help.

Regarding your question about the practice turn there is e.g. the book from Knorr-Cetina et al (2005) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Some other people dropped the term too, then. But I fact there are so many turns these days that one might get dizzy if turning to all of them. But regarding my arguments that one may help to make clear another time that I likely wanted to adress the difference of art as a product defined by an art market (which often [not always] includes the personality of the artist, his or her public behavior and not seldom an idealization of art which points in a way to an ideological connotation I wanted to address). In this kinda art economic and political reasons as well as very specific subjectivization games may play a bigger role. And then there is an art in a more common sense as a practice aside from that market questions (which includes also practices of ‚non-artists‘ and events that do not necessarily show up at a market or even get recognized). The last one is maybe more an art like the indigenous woman might have had in mind. However both forms elaborate the senses, no question about that.

Then last some very noob impressions on ML because you´re so into it and maybe it gives you something to laugh : ) I really like your approach because in a way it reflects my argument – overlooking the bridge is like ‚staring onto humans, forgetting the context‘ with which they’re entangled. If the bridge was really overlooked till now this seems almost ridiculous to me because its obviously there and the bridge is an important sign in cultural history. And what strange kinda landscape that is! So, without any knowledge about that discourse I´d read the background from left to right as we´re used to read in this direction in our culture. In this case it might have a temporal association as well (past/future). Then the ‚bridge over troubled waters‘ leads out of the garment so to say, not into it. And if you only concentrate on the background then the landscape looks almost like refractured/mirrored to me, the left side and then the right side which looks in a way like a transformation to a little bit higher state. On the left I see an entwined trail looking like a question mark pointing to her heart (I don´t know if the question mark was already invented then). On the right I see that not entwined but straight bridge leading slightly upwards (with three arcs…) which has quite obviously a connection to the bright fold of her garmet. That figure look almost like a parabola which ‚comes out‘ of her heart if reading from left to right. That´s my noob statement about it – wild thinking and impressions are kinda fun sometimes : )

Ah, and before I forget, here some citations of Denzin (all chapter7). It´s a really interesting chapter and I don’t want to cast a poor light on the book or intentions at all! However the approach of the two ways and the regulation part seemed strange to me from an artist point of view although I also don’t like most of the given examples. It just crossed my path shortly before I’ve read Florian´s article and his rejection of two forms of arts (of course in a totally different context!). So I decided to state my maybe a bit provocative question…

ABR [arts-based research] both reaffirms and challenges conceptions of ethics as they have come to be reified in the social sciences, particularly through the practice of the institutional review board (IRB). … The IRB came into existence in part because of what was perceived to be ethical abuses in the practice of social science. Famous cases like the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 2007) that resulted in mental and physi- cal anguish of participants, are cited as benchmark examples of the unreflective infliction of harm. IRB review was instituted to ward off such abuses. 88

…Then some examples of artworks follow which work with irony or do not respect human dignity…

In this example, multiple violations of IRB protocol occur. The participants are subjected to a body scarring experience in order to be objectified in the artist’s research. The sole benefit to the participants is a lump sum payment that the artist intends to help them facilitate their life-threatening addiction—further placing their safety at risk. There is no attempt to disguise identity. All of this is excused because this work of fine art is intended for a fine arts audience, even though the artist claims that the art work is an attempt to bring social sci- ence issues into discussion. 90

These three examples demonstrate that modernism is based on the disruption of ethics. Through the modernist lens, convention and morality constrain the ability to think the new. Therefore, the inten- tional disturbing of ethics—breaking the rules, crossing the line—is often considered a necessity for the advancement of art. 91

By proposing that art was a realm of free play with no responsibility to objective ends (such as antecedent research questions), art was free to color outside of the lines. Any constraint was antithetical to the idea of art. This Kantian declaration remains an important underpinning to many new directions in ABR as there are now over 200 years of aesthetic theory that have elevated Kant’s original arguments as fine arts doctrine. 93

ABR as it is evolving through the Ph.D. studio practice intentionally and insistently remains outside of the ethical concerns that bind the Ph.D.in social science and ABR practices that attempt to work within the social science paradigm. Consequently, an ABR research practice through the PhD studio practice is not bound by IRB regulations; an ABR research project through a social science Ph.D. is. As a result, there are now two tracks of ABR, and the traditional norms for ethical conduct in research no longer apply to one of the two tracks. 97

All the best,

Martin