In Search of the ‘Anti-Environment’: Breaking the ___________ distance
“One thing about which fish know
exactly nothing is water, since they have no
anti-environment which would enable them to
perceive the element they live in”
- Marshall McLuhan [1]
Imagine waking up to a world that looks, smells, sounds and feels the same everyday, but deep inside you know there is something strange, uncanny about this day. Or, imagine waking up to a world that looks, smells, sounds and feels different every day, but deep inside you know there is something familiar, natural about this day. We ignore these thoughts, or perhaps never have them, and carry on with our lives; yet something still stirs in the distance. What is this object, imperceptible? Our natural intuition dictates that our sense of the world is guided by our perception, which is conditioned by time and space that make up our environment. But if we cannot directly perceive this distant invisible object, then how are we to understand it? It seems today that our environment is both familiar, and strange at the same time. It is in this background of uncertain certainty that the ecological debate looms upon us today. The question then becomes, how does the fish recognize the bowl?
McLuhan’s Anti-Environment
In seeking an answer, I turn to Marshall McLuhan who in the 1960’s famously argued the need for ‘anti-environments’ as a mode of perception, since “environments as such are imperceptible.” Moreover he looked at the fields of art and science as mirrors to anti-environments. Before treading further it is important to dwell on this concept. What exactly is an anti-environment? Is it the opposite of the environment (taken in the most general sense - our surroundings), which would imply emptiness or nothing? Or, is it an awareness of the invisible nature of our environment such that it reflects a probe into the consequences of our actions that has created our present environment? Resisting the urge to contemplate ‘nothingness’ since as John Cage demonstrated even in silence there is no ‘silence’, let us consider the latter notion of making the invisible visible.
His premise was that “environments that are created by new technologies, while they are quite invisible in themselves, they do tend to make visible the old environments” [2]. To illustrate his point he observes how with the advent of written technology, Plato’s content was that of the old oral dialogue; the content of the print technology of the Renaissance was medieval writings and that of the 19th century industrial mind was the Renaissance. The Romantic Movement, whose muse was nature, arose from the machine age, and a move into the electronic age resulted in the machine itself as an art-object. Thus each new environment becomes the anti-environment of the ‘antecedent’ environment. Electric technology and the dawn of the more recent ‘computer age’ however seems to have disrupted this interplay between old and new environments, environments and anti-environments / form and content. The speed of data processing allowed us to examine the environment as it existed and changed in real-time. We were in a sense for the first time catching up with our environment. The planet itself became an anti-environment - an art object - yielding new perceptions of the contemporary man-made environments [3]. Thus reemerged nature and the human-nature dichotomy as the subject for the arts in the 60’s and 70’s. However this time around, ‘nature’ as understood in the romantic sense ceases to exist. It no longer is an attraction to its beauty, but instead one that arises out of an awareness of the destruction of its beauty. In addition, man’s relationship to the environment also has drastically changed in the age of the Anthropocene. Both these fundamental shifts will be discussed in the next section, and getting a better understanding of this relationship provides the key to begin breaking the distance (if there was ever one). This awareness of change brought about through scientific knowledge acts as the anti-environment to an environment that has existed now for a very long time. Timothy Morton, whom we will later turn to for a way to perceive such environments, dates the beginning of this new environment to April 1784 when the steam engine came into being which thus commenced the depositing of carbon in the Earth’s crust [4]. This environment despite its ever-growing presence (in the background) has remained invisible and largely still remains so except for its existence today in its anti-environmental form of data and scientific models. The anti-environments of the 60’s and 70’s were using not just content from the previous environment, but a mass accumulation of content from many such preceding environments. This is where I feel McLuhan’s notion of the anti-environment that reveals only previous environments becomes insufficient. In the age of real-time, don't we need a way of thinking, a mode of perception that reveals our environment today - one where the environment and the anti-environment coexist thereby collapsing the duality? Given the technological advances, shouldn’t this be possible?
McLuhan sees that unlike previous environments that arose from new technologies, the ‘electric environment mergers the individual and the environment’. He sees signs of this in Pop Art where, the processing of the direct outer environment and bringing it into the dialogue of art merely served to merge man with his environment in the pretence of being anti-environmental [5]. Following this logic, perhaps this began with Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades that revealed the entire sphere of an already existing environment of objects as art. Joseph Beuys later took the subject away from the object (the ready-mades), and wanted it to be in each man - the notion of ‘each man is an artist’. So in essence in one generation, art morphed into everything, and everyone morphed into an artist. Are these acts merely environmental or anti-environmental?
To create anti-environments in a technological environment requires a “technological extension of consciousness”, wrote McLuhan; in such a scenario however, “awareness” becomes immaterial and ‘futile’ [6]. The skepticism he is alluding to is that if the arts and sciences themselves become the environment under such conditions, they stop being anti-environmental. Therefore here we can see that quite contrary to Freud’s concept of the ‘unconscious’, McLuhan thinks of the environment as the natural state of unconscious awareness and the anti-environment as a trained state of conscious awareness [7]. He identifies the role of art as providing this perceptual training unlike in a preliterate society where art simply serves as a means of merging the individual with the environment [8]. Jean Baudrillard, who is seen as his contemporary, saw the art world as being consumed by the very environment, which according to McLuhan, it was trying to transcend and thus labeled art as a “conspiracy” [9]. His critique is relevant for the ecological age we live in today since it questions the importance attributed to the material object. In a ‘productivist society’ that measures itself on what it produces and its subsequent circulation through commerce, the visual art world it seems mirrors the socio-economic order of the western market society [10]. If so, artists today have a greater need to consciously step out into anti-environments in order to reveal our environment that questions, perhaps even ruptures the convention of the material object.
“The kind of product design that once produced better living precipitates vast crises in human ecology in the 1960’s” wrote Jack Burnham in his seminal 1968 essay, System Esthetics. This was perhaps the first attempt at de-objectification by recognizing the emergence of a ‘transition between major paradigms’ in art - one that was grounded in the nature of ‘technological shifts’ taking place at the time [11] - the shift of value from the object to information. However, despite the fact that we know and are aware of our footprint through increased data, man still seems to be in denial. Somewhere along this path of translation in a “hyper-technological” society, meaning gets lost in information, as Baudrillard would argue. Lets take climate change, a term that I use with caution, since it seems to externalize the cause and hence externalize action to somewhere in the ‘distance’; the same distance where these strange objects loom, to use the tone of Timothy Morton. Moreover, in my opinion it has been thrown around so often that it has lost much of its potency. This reflects Walter Benjamin’s observation where the sense of perception ‘extracts sameness even from what is unique’ [12]. In this regard, the innumerable ‘clouds’ of scientific data have only partially succeeded revealing the anti-environment.
This is perhaps why art has a greater function/responsibility in breaking these perceptions, yet many obstacles emerge in this utopian pursuit of art. The challenge lies in the ‘esthetic use of technology and information’. Has the ecological narrative in art evolved since the 60’s, or has it somewhere along the way stagnated or perhaps lost its way altogether? Burnham saw that it was naïve to think that art objects could somehow “beautify or even significantly modify the environment”, therefore by rendering form secondary, the art practice could open up to a wide range of issues including “such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the earth” [13]. But does resorting to a systems culture that attempts to push the art object into the background give us a full picture of the environment, let alone the anti-environment? We have come to realize that we have woken up in a world of strange objects - objects that are present, yet invisible except in their periodic appearances and in the form of perpetual streams of data and scientific models - ‘hyperobjects’, as coined by Timothy Morton. How do we account for this? A simple thought experiment would be to look at the excess CO2, caused by the burning of fossil fuels needed for current patterns of human consumption. Imagine that we lived in a world where this ‘smoke’, instead of disappearing into the atmosphere, lingers on as thick black clouds visible to all. I presume in such a reality the relation between humans and nature would be very apparent and the anti-environment would be the one we currently call reality. Yet we do not live in such a reality. Instead we live amongst layers of invisible environments/forms and we need anti-environments to act as a guide through the labyrinth. Therefore, I would like to revive the notion of an anti-environment as a tool to analyze the ecological predicament we find ourselves in today. The search for anti-environments acts as the scaffolding for the probe into our environment, and how art might fit into this complex interconnected system. The first step would be to expand our understanding of the environment in order to break the distance.
The Changing Nature of Nature
“Nature is an enigmatic object,
an object that is not absolutely an object; […]
it is not what is in front of us, but what bears us”
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty [14]
The inevitability of change is the only thing that remains constant in our universe, observed the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus many centuries ago, and indeed echoes true more than ever, but it represents only half the story today; the other half being the speed of change. No more so is this relevant and present today than in our environment. If we split the environment into two for the purposes of simplicity – the natural and the man-made, we find that while the natural environment dwells in a geological time-space where changes occur over millennia, the man-made environment (our urban everyday surroundings) is conditioned within a much shorter scale of human time. Therefore one would feel that an inherent spatial and temporal disconnect existing between humans and nature is inevitable. In other words, the human-nature dichotomy has always existed. However, Timothy Morton, in his book “Ecology without Nature”, sees our understanding of nature today as being a construct of the romantic period. This aligns perfectly with McLuhan’s anti-environment analysis whereby the romantic construction of nature by artists was a response to the first machine and industrial age [15]. Nature was invented in order to create an escape, an idealized space away from everyday machine environments [16]. An understanding of the environment was thus formed whereby nature became the romanticized utopian background surrounding humanity. In addition, Morton argues that the roots of capitalism first took flight in this period, and thus emerged a consumer society where it was essential to separate the human from the non-human (nature), thereby justifying its objectification [17]. Thus nature became this thing to be consumed in the distance, referring to Walter Benjamin’s idea about the ‘aura’ – “We define the aura . . . as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close [the object] may be” [18]. I see this distance as containing two sub categories - conceptual or ideological distance, and physical distance. If we continue with Morton’s logic, the romantic period formed the basis for the ideological distance between humans and nature. Over time the physical distance was also established through modernization, which first led us away from nature, creating urban concrete societies, and post-modernization intensifying this alienation through the emergence of a digital and virtual time-space.
So far we have spoken about our environment consisting of the traditional actors – humans and nature. However we still have not addressed the elephant in the room – technology and its impact on our culture. It has been, and still is an instrumental factor shaping the environment. Perhaps this is once again where McLuhan’s insights become striking in its vision. With regard to the launch of the Sputnik, which in his understanding created a new environment for the planet, McLuhan states:
“For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and Ecology was born. Ecological thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art. ” [19]
Ironically it is the same urge for the advancement in technology that caused the environmental damage in the first place that also gave us the ability to perceive this change. So to talk about the make up of our environment without addressing technology is like talking about the fish bowl containing the fish and the water without the bowl. Therefore it is no longer useful to resort to traditional rhetoric if we are to deconstruct the 21st century environment. Technological advancements have facilitated in breaking the distance between humans and nature through data processing/information (as we have seen), but it has also reshaped the distance by creating a new equation within the environment, causing more uncertainty in an already uncertain atmosphere of fear.
Firstly, it has created what Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’. They refer to things that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” such as global warming, climate change, etc. [20]. To become aware of these hyperobjects is to realize that the activities of humans have created over time ‘non–human’ objects that have grown so large that they are now dominating our world today. He argues that the ecological thought of today requires rethinking of the environment without the overly romantic idea of nature and therefore should remove this ideological notion completely. The main premise of his argument lies in mending the gap between humans and nature, which has for too long shifted accountability to this ‘thing’ in the distance. It is important to note that these non-human objects have always existed, but they have now advanced into the foreground. Thus the situation we find ourselves in today is that the background (nature) ceases to be in the background since we have started to observe it [21]. Every time we forget to switch off the lights in our house, we are reminded of global warming (whatever our understanding of it maybe). Unlike Baudrillard’s postmodern notion of ‘hyper-reality’ where the representation appears more real that reality itself, these hyperobjects despite their invisible nature and uncertain accountability are in-fact real entities in their own rights. This awareness indeed is in the right step towards breaking the ideological distance, but now the environment consists of coexistence between not only humans and nature as conventional rhetoric dictates, but also humans and non-human objects.
Secondly, the technological changes brought about recently go beyond mere spatial or conceptual notions of humans and nature as we have been discussing so far. It has altered the very fundamental character of nature itself as evident from advances in the field of Biogenetics, which is transforming life or living beings into manufactured objects thereby altering the very character of what makes us, and nature, ‘natural’. How then are we to distinguish nature from its copy/simulation? Humans on the other hand have also made a radical shift in their position within the environment through time to the current age of the ‘Anthropocene’. Today, human activity has become a dominant force on our environment. ‘We’ are now officially considered as a geological factor in the earth’s ecosystem. In a sense, we are embedded in nature, or we ARE nature more so today than any other time in history. Clearly what seems to be at stake is our most “unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our everyday understanding of nature as a regular, rhythmic process” [22]. If, as we have seen so far the image of nature is nothing more than a “retroactive projection of man”, then, as Slavoj Žižek questions, was nature ever a utopian space of blissful rhythmic ‘order’ that has only in recent times been thrown off track by humanity? Perhaps nature has always existed in equilibrium of ‘chaos’, and the only difference being that in recent times we have been able to observe these patterns through technology. Once again this reminds us of hyperobjects, that which have always existed but only recently observable. While Morton bases his views on the fact that they have emerged from the background due to human activity, Žižek questions this very assumption itself. In both cases however, there seems to be an overwhelming cry to abandon preconceived notions of nature. Instead of it being part of the solution, it seems to be the problem. Is it possible for us to un-know what we know? Or do we evolve, add, and update our understanding nature for the times we live in instead of its total abandonment? It is time for the mind to catch up with the change.
To return to the metaphor of the fish, the fish is the subject, the water determines the nature of the fish, but the bowl is what holds the water. It is what bears it. It shapes the water (nature), which in turn molds the nature of the subject (humans), but the subject only perceives the water as its true nature. So where does human nature end and the intrusion of technology into human nature begin? What is nature in the 21st century? In the pre-electric age, a metaphor to describe ‘speed’ was perhaps associated with an animal, like a cheetah. However today to describe speed is to compare it with technology. Are we making this technological speed natural, intrinsic to living beings, thereby making it an extension of ourselves? The Guardian’s description of Usain Bolt’s 200m victory beautifully illustrates my point – “on this penultimate evening in Moscow, nothing was more electric than Bolt.” If as Merleau-Ponty states, ‘nature is what bears us’, then what bears us today is technology.
Despite the fact that one could be tempted to accept the fate as Žižek and Morton see it, the very concept of nature, as we have seen is merely a representation of what nature is, and has always been an open space for ideology. So what if the idea of nature was to be extended to include technology? As such perhaps the invisible nature of our changing environment can be made visible. It seems to me that what we find ‘natural’, without even being aware of it, in the 21st century (in the sense of being comfortable with it) is the very fabric of technology. It has almost become an extension of our senses, and therefore imperceptible to our senses. In the post-modern environment this technology, as Marshall McLuhan learnt even in his time, “imposes ground rules on our perceptual life,” [23] which implies not only do we shape our environment; it shapes us even if we are not fully conscious of it. It is the latter that I am most interested in since it is this underlying perception that guides our thoughts and actions which eventually leads to the former. Therefore by including technology within the make up of the environment, can we further break the distance between humans and nature?
Fig 1: This illustration represents the changing relationship between humans and nature over time (left to right).
If we look at Fig 1, which represents at a very fundamental level (through my limited knowledge) the changing relationship between humans and nature over time, it suggests that today our environment seems to resemble a Sierpinski's triangle in order to make way for technology. Here there is no straightforward connection between the actors, thereby blurring the lines between them. Moreover, their interactions create hyperobjects that seem to belong to a higher/different dimension – one that is beyond our senses. Therefore like the Sierpinski's triangle, which mathematically lives somewhere between one and two dimensions [24], these hyperobjects also seem to exist somewhere in-between. So in that sense perhaps it is harder than initially thought to reveal or access the anti-environment today. Even when the fish (subject) recognizes the bowl (technology), the presence of hyperobjects requires us to transcend our perceptual fields to engage with them. To a limited extent technology has acted as our 6th sense, if you will, in helping us recognize the urgency required in acting towards a more sustainable planet; but can this be taken even further to break down the distance and pre-conceived perceptions of the environment? How has art used technology in shaping the ecological narrative so far?
The Skeptical Spectacle
“You ever have that feeling where you're
not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?”
- The Matrix
In light of these new developments, is art still an invaluable source of anti-environments as foreseen by McLuhan? Jack Burnham, in his ‘System Esthetics’ essay in Artforum concerned himself with the ‘esthetic art impulse’ in an advanced technological society where he was keen on moving beyond specified art objects or an ‘object-oriented’ culture that had dominated so far, to a ‘systems-oriented’ culture. In such a culture, the ‘objecthood’ of the artwork would be rendered secondary and instead a system of “complex components in interaction comprised of material, energy, and information” whose behavior will be determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control will come to the fore [25]. This was an attempt, as he saw it, to reduce the “technical and physical distance” between the artist vis-à-vis the society. Here it seems we have come one step closer, liquidating the distance, at least in the artistic output, between subject and object, humans and nature. The viewer is now forever part of the artwork as revealed in the emergence of new media art. Therefore the question at hand is not whether artists engage with technology or science, let alone with environmental concerns, but rather what they accomplish in doing so. Here I would like to look at three works - Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube, 1965, Random International’s Rain Room, 2012, and Olafur Eliasson’s Your Waste of Time, 2006 to explore the evolution of the ecological narrative over time.
Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube seems to have anticipated many ecologically oriented art practices of the 21st century by responding to ‘changes’ in the environment. It reveals an entire environmental ecology at work in the gallery space [26]. Here the temperature of the space, number of people in the gallery, heat of light, etc. all affect the plexiglass cube containing water. As these outer environmental variables fluctuate, the environment sealed inside goes through cycles of evaporation and condensation. As critic Luke Skrebowski sees this, it is a symbolic extension of Burnham’s logic - “art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” [27].
Fig 2
Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1965
This work, albeit in a very literal sense, succeeds in bringing the background into the foreground, making the invisible visible. Although there is no direct interaction between the external environment and the interior of the plexiglass cube, the water droplets perpetually trickle down its surface. More interestingly there exists great uncertainty as to which droplet is caused by what action. It is almost impossible to pinpoint. In addition, this self-regulating system functions irrespective of the presence of the artist, the viewers or even if the museum is open or not [28]. It not only displaces the artist as the sole creator of the work but also makes the environment and its subjects the agents of the artwork.
If we now consider Random International’s Rain Room exhibit, which was part of MoMA’s ‘Expo1: New York’ dedicated to environmental awareness, we get rather mixed signals. In essence, with a field of falling water mimicking rain, coupled with motion sensors that paused this downpour on sensing the presence of humans, one can already see a link between the experimental works of Jack Burnham, Hans Haacke, Les Levine, and others who were interested in the convergence of technologies and environmental systems in the 60’s and 70’s. Unlike in the past where this was a relatively new and unexplored phenomenon, today we have been living in such a technological society for sometime now where our everyday environment is ‘programmed’.
Fig 3
Random International, Rain Room, 2012 (picure from MoMA website)
In this regard, does this work not merely act as a reflection of our environment and not really an anti-environment? Perhaps the only difference is that it immerses us into an active, immersive environment. Despite the advancements in technology, and an increased database of information, the message here seems to have gotten distorted. At the very outset, the work seemed to invoke the idea of man controlling nature with technology as its instrument. It evokes a utopian future where the human subject is in the center surrounded by technologically enhanced nature – ‘nature 2.0.’ Does this not resemble anything more than a contemporary version of the romantic formulation of the human – nature dichotomy that we saw earlier?
For the same “Expo1: New York”, MoMA PS1 housed, amongst others, the work of Olafur Eliasson’s Your Waste of Time. The installation is made up of pieces of fragments of ice that broke off from Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull. The ice for it to remain in its ‘natural’ state is placed in an extremely cold refrigerated space. The space is a passive environment that is programmed for these strange boulder sized objects and not the viewer/subject who merely experiences the chilling presence of distance; the distance of 800 year old ice glaciers [29] brought so close that you could almost touch them. Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio argue that in breaking this distance that the aura of the object is lost. They equate nature with spatial distance between the object and the subject, and see technologies as breaking this distance [30]. By breaking the distance, the question becomes where does the aura go? In a ‘space-less’ time-space does the aura collapse? I think the aura still remains but gets transferred, in this case to the experience of the viewer - The experience of the ‘intimate’ yet ‘withdrawn’, to use the words of Timothy Morton, presence of hyperobjects. The aura of the work is the environment in which these blue-tinged objects loom (or is the anti-environment?), and the experience is temporarily ‘chilling’ since these ancient fragments of ice will melt after the theatricality of the exhibition and the pleasure of the viewers, away in the distant background – out of sight, out of mind.
Fig. 4: Olafur Eliasson, Your Waste of Time, 2006 (picture from MoMA website)
With regard to Rain Room, and the reason for questioning its intent is that the aura seems to have been transferred to the technology. The technology has become the spectacle, and the idea is lost in the spectacle. Thus the aura here is the illusion that technology displays in breaking this distance. The agency of the subject in controlling the environment is merely an illusion as opposed to the “experience” of doing so [31]. It must be noted that Random International themselves cannot be completely held responsible since their work has never really been about ecology. It has been more to do with creating programmed environments exploring information engineering and its subjective effects [32]. It was a curatorial re-contextualization that placed the work at the center (at MoMA instead of MoMA PS1 where the majority of the exhibit was located) of Expo 1: New York. The duality/distance that we have been trying to break throughout this essay is only reaffirmed here and maybe even strengthened reminding us of the role institutions play in framing the message and therefore shaping the dialogue.
Welcome to the Scream
“If we were in a bath whose temperature
rose half a degree an hour,
how would we know when to scream?”
-Bertrand Russell [33]
Our world today is drowned in a misty pool of endless time where we are not able to see beyond our outstretched hands. Our experience of time is limited to human-time, while the world changes in relation to geological-time that leaves us blind to the changes in our environment. Despite our lack of vision, the world carries on, constantly morphing; still echoing what the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus noted many centuries ago. Change is a function of time, and as long as there is time, there will always be change. But, from the industrial age to the technological era that we live in today, the speed of change has superseded the change itself, which has formed the stage for much of the ecological dialogue in the last 50 years or so. Technology became the facilitator of the environment, and to a limited extent the anti-environment over the course of time. However as we have seen the anti-environment cannot be reduced to merely mathematical abstractions. Therefore, despite technological advancements aiding in breaking the distance between humans and nature through data processing, it has reshaped the environment creating more uncertainty.
In regard to the ecology, where are these anti-environments that seem more important now as ever before? In this instance the crucial interplay perhaps needs to happen between government (environment) and arts and science (anti-environments) for any real impact to take place. Joseph Beuys experimented with such an ‘extend concept of art’ for social change, but I suspect his environment was not yet ready for people to accept this idea. But today, events such as the Arab spring shows that such a collaborative act can have a difference, and the question is how do we utilize this enormous collective creative force for change? However moving in this direction requires treading on a very fine line between ‘art for art’s sake’ and propaganda, which then becomes nothing more than a form of the political environment.
There are other relations/options that also exists where art returns as the anti-environments of perceptual awareness vis-à-vis the society.
It is ironic, but true, that in the age of the anthropocene, the human-animal has somehow been displaced as the sole inhabitor of the foreground, and there has emerged from the background this other non-human object thereby dissolving this duality. The Condensation Cube had managed to de-center the subject, revealing the invisible complexity of interconnected nature of our environment. Thereby the environment within the cube perhaps closely mirrors the type of anti-environment we have been searching for. With regard to the work of Olafur Eliasson we saw that art temporarily has the power to alter perceptions but it seems easier, more natural that we continue to let the environment melt in the background.
If we look at it from today’s perspective, it seems that art has not been able to catch up with the age of real time information and perhaps will always involve content from the past. In Your Waste of time, an 800-year-old glacier is the object of contemplation. The environment is our planet, and the anti-environment lies in revealing what it takes to sustain the natural state of the glacier. The irony in this is that what is more ‘chilling’ than the experience of the artwork and the fact that these glacier-al hyperobjects, displaced from its natural environment and brought into a programmed environment to witness the human gaze that will melt away, is that we are aware of it.
If we thought that the outer environment was brought into art through the likes of Duchamp, Andy Warhol and others, therefore blurring the lines between art and life in the late 20th century, then the 21st century art and reality seem to have split altogether, or perhaps the veil of technology has distracted us from the real issues. It may once again be useful to revisit McLuhan who states that in an electric environment of instant information, the distinction between mirror, and action gets blurred [Mcluhan Unboud. 4. P6] The first step then becomes to break the illusion of the illusion of technology. The times seem to call for the investigation of the unknown (hyperobjects), rather than the known (objects).
If in the past artists wrestled with the problem of the object, then in the future they will be consumed by the hyperobject (if in the present we remain blind).
So the question at hand is ‘how do we know when to scream?’ The time to scream is over, and we are now living in its echo. The new technological advancements are already creating a new unknown environment while we are still bathing in its spectacle. This is indeed what seems to have happened in Rain Room where its theatricality has consumed us and disguised the true nature of the dialogue. Today the challenge for art to act as the anti-environment then lies in rethinking the role of technology in the artwork.
References and Notes
1. Marshall McLuhan, “War and Peace in the Global Village”
2. Marshall McLuhan, “ The Invisible Environment”, Perspecta Voll.11 (1967) pp. 161-167
3. Marshall McLuhan & Harley Parker, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes.” The Man Made Object, ed. Gyorgy Kepes. New York: Geroge Braziller, 1966., p.93
4. Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects”, p. 7
5. Mcluhan Unbound, book 4, p8
6. See McLuhan [5], p.8
7. http://lightthroughmcluhan.org/environment.html
8. See McLuhan [5], p.8
9. Baudrillard, The conspiracy of art
10. Dorothea Von Hantelmannp, “How to Do Things With Art”, p 10-11.
11 Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum, September 1968.
12. Walter Benjamin, “Selected Writings: Volume 3,” 1935-1938. Belknap Press, 2006.
13. Burnham [11]
14. Paul Virilio, “Art As Far As the Eye Can See,” p. 17.
15. McLuhan [3], p.92
16. Ursula Huws, “Nature, Technology and Art: The Emergence of a New Relationship?”, Leonardo, Vol 33, No.1, pp.33-40.
17 Timothy Morton, “Ecology Without Nature”, p. 82
18. Timothy Morton, “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animal”, p. 75. See also Walter Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
19. Mcluhan Unbound, book 5 p4
20. .Morton, [4], p. 1
21. Morton [4], p.102
22. Slavoj Žižek – “Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, p34.
23. McLuhan [3].
24. MIT opencoursework
25. Burnham [11].
26. Linda Weintraub, “To Life!: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet”. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012, p70.
27. Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art”, Grey Room 30, 2008:76.
28. See Weintraub, [26], p70.
29 National Geographic - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130629-glacier-art-exhibit-moma-science-climate-change-global-warming/
30 Lev Manovich – aura and distance
31. Felicity Scott, “Limits of Control,” Artforum. September 2013.
32. Scott [31].
33. McLuhan [2]
