[paper for itau-ISEA-Leonardo-CAiiA-STAR conference 'invencao: thinking the next millennium', 29 September 1999, Sao Paulo, Brazil]
‘The women had gone to gather maize, but they did not succeed in finding very much, so they took a little boy with them who found a great many corncobs. They pounded the maize there and then to make different sorts of cakes for the men when they returned from hunting. The little boy stole enormous quantities of the corn which he hid in bamboo tubes and brought to his grandmother, with the request that she would make a corncake for himself and his friends.
The grandmother did as she was asked, and the children had a feast, after which, to keep the theft secret, they cut out the tongues of the old woman and of a tame macaw and set free all the macaws that were being raised in the village.
Fearing their parents’ anger, they fled into the sky by climbing up a knotty creeper that the hummingbird had agreed to fasten in position.
Meanwhile the women came back to the village and looked for the children. They questioned the tongueless old woman and macaw to no purpose. One of them caught sight of the creeper with the children climbing up it. When pressed to come down, the children turned a deaf ear and even climbed still faster. The distraught mothers went up after them, but the thief, who was the last child, cut the creeper as soon as he reached the sky; the women fell and crashed to the ground, where they were changed into animals and wild beasts. As a punishment for their heartlessness, the children, now transformed into stars, look down every night on the sad plight of their mothers. It is the children’s eyes that can be seen shining.’
[Bororo Indian myth of the Origin of the Stars’, quoted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, Penguin 1986, p.115]
cosmology
Stars according to the Bororo Indian myth (of central Brazil) are the shining eyes of heartless children looking down on the sad plight of those earth-bound. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes this as a characteristic contrast between the ‘peopling’ of the sky and the earth, operating partly on levels of remoteness (high/low proximity) and communication and non-communication. I haven’t time or indeed the expertise to explore this myth in depth but it does appear that the sky is becoming increasingly peopled (by naughty children and thieves), and those on the ground left forlorn. Mizuko Ito points out the tendency to make myths and produce stories that cast the internet in terms of dematerialised time/space, as a distinct break from materiality [Mizuko Ito, ‘Virtually Embodied: The Reality of Fantasy in a Multi-User Dungeon’, in David Porter, ed., Internet Culture, Routledge 1997]. Yet as an anthropologist, Ito prefers to ‘ground’ these claims (of new social formations) as a continuity of materiality, represented not least by the technological apparatuses and bodies at work (any anthropological method would tend to make this emphasis, as well as regard myth as an important part of social practice). For Lévi-Strauss, even occupation of real world scenarios were ‘so enchanting that they seem unreal’; made curious by a combination of ethnography and surrealism. Now and then, even on the ground, human culture and creativity transcends time and space. As for the sky, I am arguing the net artist should seek to reveal these complex material social relations of dispersed bodies interacting in networked multi-user spaces (our focus is on text-based versions, so-called chat-sites). Drawing upon ethnography in this way, cyberspace is to be seen as an ‘embodied field-site’ for the artist/ethnographer to explore. Although most internet access is a solitary activity, multi-user spaces manage to combine being alone with collectivity - Debord’s phrase ‘the lonely crowd’ comes to mind. The chat-site then is an transitional space - between the ground and sky, home and the outside world, self and other, participant and observer.
‘An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his [sic] products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works.’
[Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer’, in Understanding Brecht, Verso 1992, p.98]
net.art/ethnography
It is a ‘solidarity’ in material practice that underpins my brief talk, making reference to Benjamin’s much-quoted ‘The Author as Producer’ talk of 1934 [first presented as a lecture in April 1934 at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris]. In this Benjamin argued that social relations are determined by the relations of production and therefore progressive artists should try to transform those relations. More recently, Hal Foster has recast this tendency as ‘the artist as ethnographer’ to take account of the institutional frame (he is thinking of the art ‘field-work’ of Jimmie Durham for instance); the artist no longer exclusively working on behalf of the proletariat but in addition the cultural or ethnic other. For Foster, there is the danger of inscribing otherness if due attention is not given to the production process itself; he calls for reflexivity advocating ‘work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other.’ [Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real, MIT Press 1996, p.203]
‘The zone where the natives live is not complimentary to the zone inhabited by the settlers.’
[Frantz Fanon quote, from Jimmie Durham, Often Jimmie Employs…, 1980s, in Foster, p.200]
net.agent/subject
The significance of ‘The Author as Producer’ essay lies in requiring the artist to become an active agent, to intervene in the production process, to change ‘technique’ and transform the apparatus. On the net, the increasingly important intersection of the human subject and machine (we might call it ‘cyborg subjectivity’) is exemplified by the software agent. But does this agent act with agency? The software agent appears to be a seamless extension of user-agency, doing work, but to what purpose? But importantly, rather than simply assuming we are denied agency or that it is extended, Georgina Born suggests ‘that machines might have agency in themselves...’,[Georgina Born, ‘Computer Software as a Medium: Textuality, Orality and Sociality in an Artificial Intelligence research Culture’, in Marcus Banks & Howard Morphy, eds. Rethinking Visual Anthropology, Yale University Press 1997, p.140] and as such, offers a challenge to the distinction of human agency and automation. It is not that this is an uncommon formulation in itself, but that agency is part of the equation (especially important when you don't know whether you are talking to a robot). but that agency is part of the equation (especially important when you don’t know whether you are talking to a robot).
Clearly we can think of chat-sites as cultural systems that can be analysed. Ethnography becomes a useful reference point (the emphasis here has been, not on an ethnography of net usage which is common within the social sciences, but in seeing the agent itself as an ethnographer). Whether an agent-ethnographer is capable of the complex ‘intelligent’ operations of a reflexive human agent-ethnographer is highly doubtful but it might be capable of revealing some of the subjective mechanisms/processes at work (not least in its programming). Even if we reduce agents to mere code, they remain complex codes and the result of complex agency (collective creative labour is something worthy of ethnographic attention in itself).
‘One of the consequences of online ethnography is that these heterogeneous materialities and localities are excruciatingly hard to see, since the technically naive ethnographer participates in the same systems of erasure... And beyond these absences lie the many agents and agencies implicated in the production and maintenance of computers and computer networks...‘
[Mizuko Ito, ‘Virtually Embodied: The Reality of Fantasy in a Multi-User Dungeon’, in David Porter, ed., Internet Culture, Routledge 1997, p.101]
net.reflexivity
This line of argument clearly mirrors reflexive anthropology (such as that of James Clifford) leading to a practice that does not focus on visuality per se but on the organisation of vision, the scientific observation of culture. But science needs framing too. Bruno Latour’s analysis of scientific work emphasises the social context of its production (and seems to echo Benjamin’s thesis). The social practice of science (like art) serves to establish the myth of autonomy. Both the laboratories of art and science require a kind of reflexive field-work to fully comprehend their processes. If we extend the definition that ‘"Cultures" are ethnographic collections’ [quoting E.B. Tylor’s famous definition of 1871] to the culture of the internet, it still remains that the concrete labour of an object’s making is occluded and subjectivity is defined (against the theft of other’s property). Clearly, without due attention to detail, there is a danger of both sociological and technological determinism! What reflexive anthropology recommends is to write the observing subject (ethnographer, agent, even flaneur) into this scenario as a systematic critique of method (as an answer to a kind of imperialism of structuralist anthropology itself). I mean to add the question: what conclusions can be drawn beyond method? The opacity and ‘failure’ of practice then is accounted for by the absence of a number of factors, not least the invisibility of software code/programming and the internet itself. A conversation in a chatroom could make apparent the very processes, connections, indicate the remoteness rather than pseudo-proximity - show the precise characteristics that makes it what it is, and make some of these absences at least partially visible.