Originally appeared in Proceedings of Computers in Art and Design Education Conference, University of Teesside, UK, 1999, n.p.n. (ISBN 0-907550-66-5). Republished in : Bostad, Finn and Craig Brandist, Lars Evensen Sigfred, Hege Charlotte Faber (Editors). Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture; Meaning in Language, Art and New Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 199-216. Republished in Portuguese in: Concinnitas, n. 7, ano 5, Dez 2005, Rio de janeiro.
NEGOTIATING MEANING: THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION IN ELECTRONIC ART
Eduardo Kac
The words "dialogical" or "dialogism" appear oftenin literary criticism and philosophy, but very little has been said aboutthe meaning of these terms in the visual arts. When applied to visual arts,these terms usually become tropes similar to their counterparts in literarytheory, that is, metaphors to support the analysis of cultural productsthat are materially self-contained (e.g., books, paintings) and thereforeincapable of creating the living experience of dialogues. I propose thatnew insights can be gained by examining art works that are themselves realdialogues, i.e., active forms of communication between two living entities.These works can often be found among artists that pursue the aestheticsof telecommunications media. To name these works, I propose a literal useof the term "dialogism". I will present four main ideas. First,it is important to identify and articulate the significance of the fieldof practice which I refer to as "dialogical art". Secondly, thereis a clear difference between dialogical art and interactive art (all dialogicalworks are interactive, not all "interactive" works are dialogical).Thirdly, dialogical aesthetics is intersubjective and stands in stark contrastwith monological art, which is largely based on the concept of individualexpression (e.g., painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking). Lastly, becauseit employs media that enable real dialogues, electronic art is uniquelysuited to explore and develop a dialogical aesthetics. Seen collectively,these notions will inform the identification and study of what can properlycalled "dialogical electronic art".
1- INTRODUCTION
One of the most important contributions of electronic art in the secondhalf of the twentieth century is the introduction of what I call the dialogicprinciple in the visual arts. This means that dialogic electronic art underminesemphasis on visuality to give precedence instead to interrelationship andconnectivity. These two terms are not metaphors. Interrelationship andconnectivity refer to real processes that enable the emergence of dialogicartworks. Naturally, dialogic electronic art is interactive, but dialogismin electronic art must not be confused with interactivity. Many interactiveelectronic artworks are monologic, for example, a CD-ROM or a Web sitethat presents the viewer with finite, fixed pre-recorded choices. Whiledialogism in art is not exclusive to media-based propositions, as LygiaClark's relational works [1] and some of Suzanne Lacy's social projects[2] so clearly demonstrate, the creation of media-based dialogic art isparticularly important. Positioning itself against monologic ideologiesthat structure the mediascape, as exemplified by one-way television broadcasting,dialogic electronic art remains open to differentiated levels of contingencyand indeterminacy. Media-based dialogic artworks are important not onlybecause they enable new kinds of dialogues to emerge, but also becausethey remind us that it is possible (and desirable) to stimulate dialogue.Works that make open and emancipative use of telecommunications media,in association with the Internet or not, are representative of the dialogicventure in electronic art. Also significant are works that do not existas independent entities and in a direct way depend on what interactantsbring to the experience. My intention here is to propose a literal (i.e.,not metaphorical) interpretation of dialogicality in art. I wish to assertthe importance of art works in which actual dialogical experiences (i.e.,dialogues of various kinds) take place. I hope that, by acknowledging thedifferences between monologic and dialogic modalities of art, we can recognizethe unique contribution of the latter as a promoter of new aesthetic valuessuch as real-time remote interaction, intersubjectivity, and negotiationof meaning. To that end, I will discuss some key concepts of dialogismand provide examples that illustrate the emergence of dialogical electronicart since the 1960s.
2 - DIALOGIC PHILOSOPHY AND COLLABORATIVE ART
It is clear that digital technology is the language of our time, butin art it has been largely employed in unidirectional ways, in consonancewith traditional convictions about sacrosanct modes of production, display,and reception. A major manifestation of the digital revolution is the Web,the most popular of Internet protocols. However, in spite of its phenomenalliberating potential, most of what we see on the Web under the rubric ofart is as monological as painting or television. While the Internet ismade up of several different protocols, many of which enable interactionin multifarious ways, the Web itself is not conducive to synchronous two-waysocial interaction. One only needs to look at ongoing attempts to tax andregulate the Net according to local laws, as well as the attempts by majorcorporations to impose traditional broadcast models, to see that hegemonicmonologic structures lie on the horizon, only awaiting large-scale bandwidthupgrade. In any case, it is still significant that the initial impulsebehind the most accessible Internet protocol (the Web) was to produce apublishing instrument, not a dialogic medium. The prevailing monologicalmodels show, I believe, that electronic art has more to learn from MartinBuber's philosophy and interactional sociolinguistics than from computerscience.
Dialogic philosophy was elaborated by Buber [3] and developed by MikhailBakhtin within the more strict limits of the genre of the novel. Bakhtinclearly understood the dynamic and intersubjective nature of language beyondthe rigid Saussurian model. For Bakhtin, human consciousness is the semioticintercourse of one subject with another, i.e., consciousness is at onceinside and outside the subject. The novel, by its very nature as print,freezes speech rather than promotes its flow. The novel preserves imaginedinteractions on paper; it does not enable, nor could it, the truly dialogicand unpredictable nature of language as experienced in verbal interlocution.This can only be accomplished via face-to-face interactions or with two-waymedia works. Acknowledging the conceptual gap between the novel (print)and other genres (media), Bakhtin wrote: "It seems to us that onecould speak directly of a special polyphonic artistic thinking extendingbeyond the bounds of the novel as a genre. This mode of thinking makesavailable those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking humanconsciousness and the dialogical sphere of its existence, which are notsubject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions." [4]
For Bakhtin, language is not an abstract system, but a material meansof production. In a very concrete way the body of the sign is negotiated,altered, and exchanged via a process of contention and dialogue. Meaningarises along the way. Bakhtin is very clear: "the thinking human consciousnessand the dialogic sphere in which this consciousness exists, in all itsdepth and specificity, cannot be reached through a monologic artistic approach."[5] If taken literally, as I believe it should be, Bakhtin's approach revealsthe possibility of articulating artworks that give no prerogative to visualityand that reinstate the dialogic in the aesthetic experience. In this scenario,images (and objects) become one among many elements in the elaborationof dialogic situations. Visual dialogues, for example, imply the exchangeand manipulation of images in real time. In this case, we no longer speakof space as form, but instead concentrate on the time of formation andtransformation of the image--as in speech. This, of course, demands a revisionof the most entrenched convictions of what art is, from its material baseand predominant ocularcentrism to its unilateral reception, semiologicalnegotiation, distribution logic, and social meaning.
When applying Bakhtin's ideas to the visual arts, commentators, despitetheir enthusiasm for his work have been unable to show that dialogism alwayshad the potential to be more than a literary trope. [6] Because the dialogicprinciple is deeply rooted in the social reality of consciousness, thought,and communication, it is precisely there that it ought to be explored aesthetically.Allusions to dialogism in reference to wall hangings and other objectsmiss the opportunity to contribute a theoretical viewpoint to the firstactual embodiment of dialogical principles in art. The dialogic principlechanges our conception of art; it offers a new way of thinking that requiresthe use of bidirectional or multidirectioinal media and the creation ofsituations that can actually promote intersubjective experiences that engagetwo or more individuals in real dialogic exchanges. Through creative networktopologies, artists can enable the realization of experiences that I call"multilogic interactions" to take place. Multilogic interactionsare complex real-time contexts in which the process of dialogue is extendedto three or more persons in an ongoing open exchange. What one says ordoes directly affects and is affected by what the others say or do. [7]
The dialogic imagination has the potential to push art even beyond advancednotions of collaboration and participation. In the modern perception ofthe term, collaboration in the visual arts has been with us since the beginningof the century. The playfulness of strategies such as the exquisite corpseenraptured the likes of Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Yves Tanguy,and Man Ray. Breton wrote that the collective production of a sentenceor drawing "bore the mark of something that could not be created byone brain alone" and that it "provoked a vigorous play of oftenextreme discordances, but also supported the idea of communication betweenthe participants." [8] There are significant parallels between theshared authorship of the exquisite corpse and collaborative procedurestypical of telecommunications art. However, the exquisite corpse resultsin a final product perceived and presented as such. This final productclearly reveals where the work of one author ends and the next begins.The product is a fixed image that can reflect the impromptu quality ofthe process only up to a point.
3 - DIALOGIC IMAGINATION
Another important early sign of reaction against monologic ideologiesin art is Brecht's call in 1926 for radio to cease being unidirectionaland to enable dialogue and response. Brecht stated that radio should bebidirectional and that it should stop forming passive consumers and allowthem to become producers. In other words, he proposed to change radio froma distribution medium to a communication medium. Brecht argued that radioshould know "how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let thelistener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship insteadof isolating him." [9] Brecht was perhaps the first artist to understandthe importance of undoing the monologism of media and to propose dialogicalternatives to them. His 1929 radio work "Lindbergh's Flight,"still available in an original recording from 1930, [10] was revolutionaryin its time. One of the first interactive artworks, it made provisionsfor a radio broadcast to be complemented with readings by members of thelocal audience.
Out of these modernist experiments, new concerns for dialogicality slowlyemerged. In the forties, while early kinetic art had already moved sculpturebeyond fixed form, the few kinetic artworks produced then still requireda contemplative viewer. The Buenos Aires-based Madi movement produced worksin the forties and fifties with indeterminate mobile structures that weremeant to be manipulated by the viewer and which, therefore, had no finiteform. These works reflected formal concerns, but they opened up new andunexpected interactive possibilities. In these works, the unpredictablequality of the creative act was, at least partially, embedded in the materialconfiguration of a given piece, ultimately leaving the experience open-ended.Outstanding examples of these early forms of interactive art are the articulatedwooden sculptures created by Gyula Kosice since 1944, [11] and the articulatedwall paintings by Diyi Laañ, [12] Arden Quin, [13] and SandúDarié. [14] These artists proposed that art should reach beyondfixed form to engage the viewer in a process of active participation andtransformation.
I find striking conceptual connections between the ideas embedded inthese pioneering works and much of the participatory art of the sixties,when the ornamental qualities of the discrete objet d'art gave way to propositionsthat privileged challenging concepts and culturally meaningful ideas. Thisoften meant that actions were more important than products, technologicalmedia more appropriate to the Zeitgeist than precious materials, and thatlived experiences were more significant than contemplation of pictorialform. This radical change also implied the direct involvement of thosesubjects theretofore constructed as observers, echoing Bakhtinian conceptssuch as outsideness, answerability, and unfinalizability. I suggest thatthe roots of contemporary dialogical art experiences can be traced backto this arc of experimentation briefly summarized here�from modern avant-gardecollaborations, to innovative post-war interactive propositions, to thedematerialized and participatory events of the sixties and seventies. Thismakes evident, I believe, that dialogism is a natural, progressive developmentof twentieth-century art, which results from the increased dissatisfactionwith concepts of art centered on the individual and on romantic heroicmyths, as elaborated by Clement Greenberg and others. [15]
Crucial in the context of dialogic experimentation in the arts is theunderstanding that radical works of art cannot be limited by visuality;instead they are lived experiences based on contextual reciprocity (thecontext of the experience is reciprocal, i.e., it enables one to take theinitiative to interfere and alter the experience). The outdated rubricof "visual arts" is unable to express the gamut and complexityof the experiences developed within a truly dialogic framework. We areno longer contemplating the notion of the artist as the individual whoworks in isolation and who provides us, the audience, with a personal visionof an idea or emotion as embodied in a rigid material composition in asystem of time deferral. This model, which affirms the primacy of individuality,simply does not have the power to suggest alternatives to unidirectionaland conventional modes of thinking and perception. It is too far removedfrom the reality of a networked world in a global economy. A corollaryis the notion of "expression" in art, another outmoded and anachronisticconcept. It is based on the belief that a self-centered individual hasthe need (and particular skills) to externalize emotions and inner visions.This assumes that the "individual" is a discrete psychologicalentity and not a dialogical subject in perpetual negotiation with others.Everyone has emotional and cognitive needs, but it is gravely fallaciousto assume that these needs and the commercial objects that result fromtheir "expression" are the only mode of artistic thinking deservingof consideration. Or, as Suzi Gablik so poignantly put it: "Modernistaesthetics, concerned with itself as the chief source of value, did notinspire creative participation; rather, it encouraged distancing and depreciationof the Other. Its nonrelational, noninteractive, nonparticipatory orientationdid not easily accommodate the more feminine values of care and compassion,of seeing and responding to need. The notion of power that is implied byasserting one's individuality and having one's way through being invulnerableleads, finally, to a deadening of empathy." [16]
The dialogic imagination in electronic art enables us to think aboutnotions of alterity in a larger sense, beyond the specific situated conditionsof given groups and representation politics. Needless to say, the strugglefor acceptance and recognition of outnumbered groups within a given socialsystem is more than a necessity; it is often a matter of physical, intellectual,and emotional survival. However, instead of constituting specific groupsas Other, peripheral to a given dominant group, Buber's philosophy of dialogueforegrounds the simple and radical notion that I and Thou relate as subjectsthrough reciprocity and mutuality. Likewise, Bakhtin's dialogic literarytheory articulates the idea that meaning only emerges in dialogic relationswith the other. Despite the original contexts and impetuses that promptedBuber and Bakhtin to develop their work, that is, Buber's manifest theologyand Bakhtin's literary emphasis despite his strong religiosity (developedunder a totalitarian regime that suppressed religion), we must not losesight of the political statements they make. Buber makes it clear thatI-It connections objectify subjects in disproportionate relationships thatinvolve control of passive objects. For Bakhtin, monologic discourse isthat which tries to negate the dialogic nature of our very existence �always the case of political discourse. For both men these ideas were notjust theoretical exercises. The rise of Nazism forced Buber to leave Germanyin 1933. One year later, Martin Heidegger answered a phone call from theNazis and accepted their order to eliminate Jewish faculty and curriculafrom his university. Bakhtin was arrested in Stalin's Soviet Union in 1929(for expressing his spiritual connection with the Orthodox church) andexiled because of poor health. This most likely saved him from the fatethat befell his colleague Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (arrested and shotin 1938 in one of Stalin's purges).
The political dimension of dialogism is intrinsically connected to itsaesthetic potential. Buber states that the spirit is not in individualsbut between them. For Bakhtin the aesthetic event implies the dialogicinteraction of two distinct consciousnesses. Taken literally, as I wishto do here, once the premise of a dialogical aesthetics is uttered, itbecomes clear that traditional visual arts are monologic, for they offerfinite forms in unidirectional systems of meaning. One is often left tomarvel at the individual artist's idea, skill, or craft, rather than findhimself or herself in a situation in which his or her own active cognitive,perceptual, and motor engagement ignites the discovery of one's creativepotential and other relational processes.[17] Vilèm Flusser, wholike Buber left Europe fleeing the Nazis, clearly understood the relevanceof dialogics not only as aesthetic parameter but social and ethical philosophy.He stated that "what we call 'I' is a knot of relations" [18],and in a brilliant summary he gave the following examples to support hisposition:
analytic psychology is able to show that what we call an individualpsyche is nothing but the tip of an iceberg of what might be called a collectivepsyche. Ecological studies are able to show that individual organisms mustbe understood to be functions of a relational context best called an ecosystem.Politological studies can show that "individual man" and "society"are abstract terms (there is no man outside society, and no society withoutmen), and that the concrete fact is intersubjective relations. This relational(topological) vision of our position coincides with the relational visionthe physical and biological sciences propose to us with regard to the physicalworld. The physical objects are now seen to be knots within relationalfields, and the living organisms are now seen to be provisional protuberancesout from the flow of genetic information. Husserl's phenomenology is possiblythe most adequate articulation of this relational vision, and it is becomingever more adequate as our knowledge advances. It states (to put it in anutshell) that what is concrete in the world we live in, are relations,and that what we call "subjects" and "objects", areabstract extrapolations from these concrete relations. [19]
Drawing from the collective insights of Buber and Bakhtin, Gablik andFlusser, and many other authors, [20] a rough sketch of a dialogical aestheticsemerges, one that is concerned not with sensory cognition or beauty, butwith intersubjectivity. A truly dialogic art evolves its own parameters.Just as in the system of broadcast television, in which it is technicallyirrelevant if a given spectator is actually watching a program, in themonologic system of art it is irrelevant to an object if anyone is beforeit. The actual presence of individuals in space and time, remotely or not,is, of course, of great relevance in life, and so it is in dialogic art.In a dialogic context the presence of an individual has a bearing on whatkinds of experiences might unfold. Many works that try to break away fromthe monologic model find in the promise of computer-based interactivitya latent liberating horizon. However, electronic interaction has the dangerof promoting instead interpassive experiences that catalogue all possibilitieswithin a pre-established and restrictive system of choices. In this case,the interactant has to choose one option after another, being ultimatelyguided down a multioptional monologic path. No doubt capable of creatingworks of distinct cultural relevance in the above-mentioned scenario, interactiveart will only fulfill its greater potential, I believe, when it absorbsthe dialogic stimulus provided by the actual engagement of two or moreindividuals in direct dialogic situations, or in multilogic interactions.
4 - DIALOGIC ELECTRONIC ART
The dialogic model in electronic art will not be expressed via arrangementsthat priviledge teleological human-computer interfaces (unless, perhaps,if we consider "machine consciousnesss"). The a priori determinationof the behavior of the computer or the device prevents true responsiveness,surprise, and synergetic interaction. We have a lot to learn from a preverbalchild who grabs a book with the left hand, looks at you, and with the righthand stretches your fingers, only to gently place the book against yourpalm in anticipation that you will read it for her. We can expand our awarenessof the untapped possibilities of electronic art by observing the signalsgiven by a plant to a pollinating bee, and by this bee to the other beesthrough its accelerated wing beat. The lifelong interaction between a humanand her dog is also a precious education for anyone who cares to noticeits beauty, complexity, emotional charge, unpredictability, and rich behavioralnuances beyond verbal languages. Rather than reiterating what we alreadyknow about point, line, and plane, electronic art can be an art of promotingcontact between apparently disparate elements, expanding our awarenessby revealing that what may seem distant in fact plays a direct role inour local experience. Nam June Paik once pointed out Jules Henri Poincaré'sinsight that in his time we were witnessing, not new things, but new relationshipsbetween what was already there. [21] It is important for art to fosterthe cognizance that it ought to bring in dialogic contact entities thatmay not seem connected. Electronic art ought to become less "clean"and enable the coming together of antithetical ideas, public and privateplaces, artificial and natural forces, organic and inorganic matter, intellectand emotion. This might imply that electronic art cannot be exclusivelydigital. Technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the world, with itssmooth and rough surfaces, is analogue. The postbiological metaphor, forexample, reflects a mixture of organic analogue tissue and inorganic digitalcomponents and techniques, perhaps to the point of erasure of distinctions.It is exactly as a negotiating agent between the two, in the interfacebetween analogue and digital, that the new electronic art is emerging.
Electronic art is particularly well suited to bring about this change(i.e., dialogic awareness) because of the very communicative potentialityof electronic media, digital and analogue. Important albeit sporadic experiencesin the late sixties created the precedent. It was in the seventies, however,that the dialogic principle started to be addressed more directly and systematically.Robert Whitman's "Children and Communication," for example, wasrealized in 1971 in the context of Billy Kluver's and Robert Rauschenberg'sE.A.T.'s "Projects outside Art," a series designed to show howE.A.T. could contribute to areas of society beyond the fine arts. "Childrenand Communication" linked children in two primary schools in New Yorkvia telephone, fax, telex, and other devices. [22] Douglas Davis, a NewYork-based artist, working with live broadcast and cable television createdworks such as his 3 1/2-hour-long "Talk-Out!" from 1972. Thiswas a live bidirectional telecast in which callers had a conversation withDavis over the phone and on the air about what they were watching. [23]The French artist Fred Forest's contribution to the XII São PauloBienal, in 1973, at the height of the repressive military regime's dictatorship,was a bank of telephones connected to an amplifier that enabled citizensto call in and "speak freely" and be heard, at a time when publicspace and freedom of speech had been obliterated in the country. [24] Aftera demonstration with blank posters on the street, another of Forest's "actions"(as "happenings" were known in France), the artist was arrestedand interrogated by the political police (DOPS). He was set free afterthe French embassy and the organizers of the Bienal intervened. Liza Bearworked with Willoughby Sharp, Keith Sonnier, and others in 1977 to createthe first live bidirectional satellite artwork, "Two-Way Demo,"between New York and San Francisco (simulcasted via cable in both cities).[25] Absolutely new dialogic possibilities were first explored in thispiece, such as the idea of the image as a meeting place in which, for example,two dancers could interact and affect one another remotely. In 1978 Bearstarted to work with slow-scan television (SSTV), a device to send andreceive video stills over the phone. This made communications projectsmore practical than with expensive live satellite, and in the followingyear she realized the first SSTV project in Europe, between Milan, Arnhem,and Amsterdam. Works like these brought Brecht's utterances of a half-centuryago closer to our ears and elicited response. Responsibility implies boththe aesthetic bidirectionality of the art experience as well as the ethicalawareness of the social implications of the work. The eighties saw theemergence of a truly international telecommunications art movement, withartists worldwide experimenting with two-way systems and network topologiesoften based on accessible media such as SSTV, telephones, fax, and hamradio. As a result, not only countless dialogic propositions were carriedout, [26] but also the conception of network topologies was elevated toa legitimate area of artistic experimentation. This legacy finds its naturalexpansion today on the Internet, with its listservs, MOOs and MUDs, videoconferences,and telepresence (i.e., telerobotic) experiences.
5 - CONCLUSION
Telecommunications based on the exchange of audiovisual informationoffers the reassurance of the remote presence of the other (via voice,video, white board, and chat). Telepresence, as it merges telecommunicationsmedia with telerobotics and remote hardware control, allows one to havea sense of one's own presence in a remote space. These two aesthetic principlesare complementary. Dialogical telepresence events combine self and otherin an ongoing interchange, dissolving the rigidity of these positions asprojected remote subjects. Telepresence art has the potential to conciliatethe metaphysical propensity of cyberspace with the phenomenological conditionof physical environments.
Art both shares concerns with other disciplines and offers us cognitivemodels with which to reflect on social, political, emotional, and philosophicalaspects of life. The more electronic art learns from the fascinating andunpredictable qualities of conversational interaction--with its reciprocalrhythms, body language, speech patterns, eye contact, touch, hesitations,sudden interruptions, changes of course, and continuing flow--the closerit will get to engaging us in a process of negotiation of meaning. Thisis the true dialogic calling of art.
NOTES
1- For a comprehensive survey of Clark's work, see Lygia Clark, catalogueof the homonymous exhibition organized by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies,Barcelona, 1997. For an account of the significance of Clark's dialogismfor electronic art, see: Osthoff, Simone. "Lygia Clark and HélioOiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future",Leonardo, Vol. 30, N. 4, 1997, pp. 279-289.
2 - A good example is her "The Crystal Quilt" (1987), in which430 older women sat down in groups of four to discuss aspects of theirpersonal lives. See: Lacy, Suzanne (ed.). Mapping the Terrain : New GenrePublic Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Pr, 1995).
3 - Buber, Martin. I and Thou (New York: MacMillan, 1987). First publishedin German in 1923 and in English in 1937. In his excellent article on Buber'sdialogical philosophy, John Stewart clarifies ambiguous aspects of Buber'swork and offers an overview of Buber's main concerns. See: Stewart, John."Martin Buber's Central Insight: Implications For His Philosophy ofDialogue," in Dascal, Marcelo and Cuyckens, Hubert (eds.), Dialogue:An Interdisciplinary Approach (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins,1985), pp. 321-335. See also: Wood, Robert E. Martin Buber's Ontology;An Analysis of I and Thou (Evanston: Northwestern Univ Pr, 1969); Arnett,Ronald C. Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber's Dialogue(Southern Illinois Univ Pr, 1986).; Bergman, Samuel Hugo. Dialogical Philosophyfrom Kierkegaard to Buber (New York: State Univ of New York Pr, 1991);Perlina, Nina. "Bakhtin and Buber: Problems of Dialogic Imagination."Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9 (Fall 1984): 13-28.
4 - Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 270.
5 - Ibid. p. 271.
6 - In her book Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, Deborah Haynes providesa clear and important discussion of Bakhtin's aesthetics, represented byconcepts such as outsideness, answerability, and unfinalizability. Haynesapplies these concepts to the works of such artists as Carl Andre and SherrieLevine. The point I wish to make is that, while Bakhtin's ideas can beemployed as metaphors in multiple contexts, they are uniquely suited inthe analysis of works that actually embody these concepts in material form.My contention is that such works are to be found, not in the genres ofpainting and sculpture, which are irreversibly monologic, but in the fieldof electronic art, particularly in interactive telecommunications works.As Haynes notes, Bakhtin does not focus on the aesthetic object or on theproblem of beauty, but on "the phenomenology of self-other relations,relations that are embodied�in actual bodies�in space and time." ReadingBakhtin in the context of the digital culture, one can see that dialogicalaesthetics is literally manifested in interactive telecommunications worksthat explore the phenomenology of self-other relations in dispersed remotespaces and real time. See: Haynes, Deborah J. , Bakhtin and the VisualArts (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ Pr, 1995), p. 5.
7 - Ordinary examples of such interactions in cyberspace are MOOs, MUDs,chat rooms, and avatar-based virtual communities.
8 - Breton, André. "The Exquisite Corpse", Surrealism,Patrick Waldberg, editor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 95. Originallypublished in 1948.
9 - Brecht, Bertold. "The radio as an apparatus of communication",in Video Culture; A Critical Investigation, John G. Hanhardt, ed., PeregrineSmith Books, Salt Lake City, 1986, pp. 53-55;
10 - Brecht, Bertold and Weill, Kurt. Der Lindberghflug: First DigitalRecording and Historical Recording of 1930, CD, (Königsdorf, Germany:Capriccio, 1990).
11 - Kosice, Gyula. Arte Madi (Buenos Aires, Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone,1982), pp. 26-27.
12 - Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America (New Haven; London: Yale UniversityPress, 1989), p. 246.
13 - Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America (New Haven; London: Yale UniversityPress, 1989), p. 248.
14 - Borràs, Maria Lluïsa (ed.). Arte Madi (Madrid: MuseoNacional de Arte Reina Sofia, 1997), pp. 88-89.
15 - Suzi Gablik offers a sharp critique of individualism, heroism,and market-driven art and embraces a dialogical aesthetics that privilegesrelatedness and interactivity. See: Gablik, Suzi. "Connective Aesthetics:Art After Individualism", in Lacy, Suzanne (ed.). Mapping the Terrain:New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Pr, 1995), pp. 74-87; "TheDialogic Perspective: Dismantling Cartesianism", in Gablik, Suzi.The Reenchantment of Art (London; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), pp.146-166.
16 - Gablik, "Connective Aesthetics," p. 80.
17 - The point is that, in a world dominated by monological propositions,dialogical artworks are often perceived as non-art and, as a result, notrelevant. Of course, I do not believe that there is any problem with monologicalart forms. The problem lies in underestimating the significance of dialogicalpropositions.
18 - Flusser, Vilèm. "On memory (electronic or otherwise)",in Partouche, Marc (ed.). Art Cognition - Pratiques Artistiques et SciencesCognitives (Aix-en-Provence: Cypres/Ecole D'Art, 1994), p. 32.
19 - Ibid., p. 33.
20 - Tannen, Deborah. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imageryin Conversational Discourse -- Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics6 (Cambridge Univ Pr, 1990); Bauer, Dale M. and McKinstry, Susan Jaret(Editors), Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (New York: State Univ ofNew York Pr, 1991); Eisenstadt, S.N. (ed.).On Intersubjectivity and CulturalCreativity (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ascott, Roy. Is There Lovein the Telematic Embrace? -- Collected writings edited by Eddie Shanken(Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
21 - Paik, Nam June. "Satellite Art", in The Luminous Image,D. Mignot, ed., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1984, p. 67.
22 - Private email.
23 - Davis, Douglas . Art and The Future (New York: Praeger, 1975),p. 91.
24 - Forest, Fred. 100 Actions (Nice: Z'Editions, 1995), pp. 94-95.
25 - Sharp, Willoughby. "The Artists TV Network", Video 80,Vol. 1, N. 1, (18-19): 1980.
26 - Many of these propositions are well documented in Gidney, Eric.,Artists' use of interactive telephone-based communication systems from1977-1984 , Master of Arts thesis, City Art Institute, Sidney, Australia,1986.
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