Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition Conference, Tate Britain A
Exhibiting Distributed Art
Kate Southworth delivered this paper at the Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition Conference at Tate Britain on 14th May 2010
The convenors of this conference ask:
What can new forms of research and collaboration bring to the concept and curatorship of the exhibition? Is the idea of the exhibition being distorted or creatively extended by new disciplinary practices and knowledge? In what ways do new forms of research exhibitions create new types of knowledge and experience for the audience’? (1)
It is in the context of the emergence of the distributed network form that I should like to respond to these questions around the future of the research exhibition; of the exhibition increasingly being re-framed as a research output. To begin, I’d like to talk about ways in which the material form of some artworks and exhibitions are shifting in response to the emergence of non-hierarchical, ‘distributed’ networks. In particular I’d like to touch upon ways in which distributed cultural forms are exhibited, and ways in which these informal or less formally recognised modes of dissemination are starting to be articulated as research.
Marking a shift from knowledge and organisational systems based on bureaucratic, hierarchical and centralized models of organisation the distributed network emerges as an emblem of the rapid and unprecedented changes within societies since the 1960s. The distributed network differs structurally to centralised and decentralised networks in that it has ‘no central hubs and no radial nodes’ (2) to organise communication: it is a structural form that ‘resembles a web or meshwork’. (3)
Technically, the distributed network enables open and inclusive communications between autonomous entities, and at a cultural level facilitates open, participative, collaborative and inclusive processes and practices. This is precisely the place from which notions of co- production of knowledge emerges. Yet new media theorist Alexander Galloway identifies an inherent contradiction in the network: an explicit tension between this openness and control. In conflating hierarchical structure with authority and control and because ‘networks exhibit a set of properties that distinguishes them from more centralized power structures’ (4) many (artists and theorists amongst them) imagined that distributed networks in themselves represented an organisational form that could resist control.
Paul Baran’s Centralized, Decentralized and Distributed Networks (5)
Arguing against this position, (and I would agree with him) Galloway suggests that rather than removing authority, ‘distributed networks produce an entirely new system of organization and control, that while incompatible with [hierarchical] systems of power, is nevertheless just as effective at keeping things in line.’ (6). In fact, he argues that it is precisely because distributed networks ‘create new, robust structures for organization and control’ (7) that it is imperative ‘to understand the nature of this new logic of organization’ (8). It is this highly significant shift from hierarchically ordered taxonomies and relations to those informed by the contradictory logic of distributed networks, that provides the context within which alternative knowledge systems and art forms are emerging.
Distributed art works can be digital, non-digital or a combination of both, and my descriptions should hold true for all of these. Distributed art blurs the boundaries between the roles of artist, curator and guest. There are no spectators as such. Distributed art enables the possibility of ‘artworking’ by others in their everyday lives, an importance is given to sharing knowledge and to valuing ‘different kinds of knowledge’. I would suggest that each distributed artwork operates something like an ecosystem – in all its open-endedness, unpredictability and complexity – in that the artist (or the curator) devises the rules, and considers the conditions, environment and parameters of participation that enable the work to unfold in everyday time and space. The artist (or curator), then, devises a system within which others actively participate.
Kate Southworth, 2007. Database of elements from Glorious Ninth’s Love Potion, 2005. Digital Image
At a formal level each distributed artwork is made up of elements that rather than coexisting organically all in one (9) as in centrally-organised forms, are developed individually. Importantly, no one element hasnprecedence over the others. Elements in a distributed art work might include:
Performances, encounters, the labour of others Co-curated events
Documentation of performances, processes and events
Digital or non-digital platforms – e.g. websites, gallery exhibitions, magazines Digital or non-digital databases of audio, visual and textual content (for example, audio visual artworks) Protocol
Concept
In distributed works the elements often exist across different times and places, and interaction with other elements is correlated via algorithms or protocol. Each discrete element is an independent unit that via protocol is able to come together conceptually, virtually or actually with other elements in a distributed form.
Distributed protocol is a set of rules that organises both the behaviour of discrete elements within a network or ecosystem and which mark the parameters of the content that can pass through the system. In non-digital work, the ‘content’ often is ‘the labour of others’. And in all distributed work, the relation between protocol and content is enacted ongoingly. The distributed artwork is in continuous exhibition that builds its own public as part of what it is, and which has particular spatial and temporal points of entry. In research terms, questions arise as to how to evaluate the impact of distributed exhibitions, and possible criteria might include: the number of events associated with a work; the number of online and offline visitors; the number of venues at which the work is hosted; the number of reviews the work receives. Although outside the scope of this paper, questions of how and in what way the visitor is ‘transformed’ through encounter with the work are also significant.
Because the rules that guide the parameters of participation and labour of others are elements within the work, then, by definition, social relations of some description are embedded in the work. I’d suggest that distributed art forms do not represent these relations but enable their enactment. In so doing, these artworks speak to the ethics, aesthetics and politics of protocol.
In the artwork that I make with Patrick Simons as Glorious Ninth, we are interested in the patterns, rhythms and tempos that emerge through the interactions of the different elements – whether digital or not - and the way in which the logic of the binary (digital or otherwise) can be supplemented with a non-binary spatiality and temporality.
Kate Southworth, 2005. Grid of digital images captured from Glorious Ninth generative work Flowers, 2003.
In the work we make, and working in direct relation to the network’s aggregating logic, we attempt not to incorporate or accumulate the labour of others and so, an individual’s enactment of particular elements is related to, but not colonised by the artwork.
From around 1995 until 1999 the highly conceptual phase of network art known as ‘net.art’ gave particular attention to the Internet and the properties of the web. Cornelia Sollfrank’s Female Extension (1997) is one of the most sophisticated explorations of technical and social protocols of the network.
Sollfrank foregrounds processes of making art in a network context; emphasising the ways in which such processes are structured by the materiality of the Internet. The form of the work, then, affects its meaning. Whereas this kind of distributed art worked with the technical infrastructure of the Internet, a non-technological distributed art form now seems to be emerging. Although non-technical, this emerging art form, nonetheless foreground processes of making art in a network or systems context, emphasizing ways in which such processes are structured not by the Internet but by the broader concept of the distributed form itself.
It is with reference to the work that I make with Patrick Simons that I am able to articulate my understanding of this shift. From 2001-2004 Patrick and I made artworks, that, like Sollfrank’s existed entirely online. Around 2004 – I think in direct response to spending so much time online - we became very interested in making things in the ‘real world’: digging the garden up and growing plants, baking bread, sewing. We devised and enacted a number of ‘everyday performances’ that transformed these craft-like activities from our everyday life into some other form that we were tempted to but hesitant of calling art. Over time, and as others became interested in enacting the everyday performances themselves, attention was given to finding ways of making the parameters of the performances ‘portable’. We did this through the use of protocol as a medium. The idea is that through their being described in protocol, everyday performances can be enacted, installed and performed by curators and guests at home, in galleries and in public spaces.
Kate Southworth, 2007. Performative Documentation of Glorious Ninth’s Love Potion, 2007 (Grid of digital Images).
Love potion (2005) is a distributed work with elements that include a durational performance in which curators (and also participants) grow the herb borage over several months, make a magic potion that reputedly nurtures feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and host an event at which they share the potion and distribute borage seeds to their guests. I think that Love_potion really develops up this idea that a work can be made up of non-digital discrete elements existing in different times and places brought together through protocol. It also begins to investigate how distributed work can be structured so as to enable participants to co-create and co-curate. It consists of everyday performance, documentation (and what I’ve termed ‘performative documentation), protocol, and DIY installation of generative audio- visual work. It has been exhibited at festivals and at small public and private events.
November (2006) is a distributed work whose elements include protocols, growing garlic, a performance to celebrate Halloween and the seasonal change from summer to winter. Participants grow garlic to eat during their performance and they meet on Halloween to perform readings of texts that they have found or written around ideas of darkness and death.
Glorious Ninth, November, 2006 (archive of networked performance)
Four performers enacted November on 31st October 2006 using peer-to-peer instant messaging software with webcam-enabled audio-visual exchange, and recorded simultaneously from Cornwall and London.
Cultural_Capital (2009) draws parallels between the use of bacteria and culture in traditional breadmaking, and the generative condition of distributed art. It is a distributed artwork in which a sour-dough starter is created and grown in the home, workplace or gallery; cared for by the curators. Curators document the process and the event and their documentation is included on the Cultural Capital website (http://cc.gloriousninth.net). Cultural_Capital is conceived as a touring artwork that accumulates bacteria and cultural capital from every venue in which it is installed. This work began in March 2009 and has been touring ever since. It has been exhibited as part of the International Symposium of Electronic Art at Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, and as part of the Craftivism exhibition at Arnolfini, Bristol as well as at several research and new media curating events, a community centre, a bakery in France, dinner parties, and on public transport.
Glorious Ninth’s Cultural Capital mash up at Arnolfini’s Craftivism Exhibition (2009)
Electronic Village Galleries is a work that is in the proposal stage: an experimental platform that aims to become a repository of digital and non-digital distributed artworks such as those just described. It is envisaged that co-curators in diverse localities will be to access, reframe, re-interpret and re-conceptualise the protocols and other elements, to host performances and events that specifically engage participants within their local communities. It is also experimenting with collaborative and participative ways to document and archive such work with sensitivity to the politics, ethics and aesthetics of protocol and to the actual enactment of performances and events.
Notes:
1 https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/beyond-academy-research-exhibition- symposium-audio
recordings
2 Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. (London: MIT Press, 2004), 33.
3 Ibid., 5.
4 Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, “The Limits of Networking.”
5 Paul Baran “On Distributed Communications: 1 Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks”, Rand Corporation Memorandum, RM-3420-PR, August 1964
6 Alexander R. Galloway, “Protocol.” Theory, Culture &Society 23 (2006): 318.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Joseph Schillinger, The Mathematical basis of the arts, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), 30.