Rethinking Art as Interrelation

Kris Paulsen's Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 264. $40.) and Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen's Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. 952. $50.) exist at an intersection of scholarly interest in technology and contemporary art. What marks them for joint review, apart from their appearance in the Leonardo Book Series that pioneered dissemination of work in this burgeoning area of inquiry, is their insistence on art as a category that is both related to and distinct from technology. In Bianchini and Verhagen's succinct phrasing, "It is art that is at issue here, but art within a problematic that cannot be divorced from a societal context increasingly conditioned by the exponential growth of information technology since the advent of cybernetics" (4). Paulsen too makes plain that her object domain is art viewed "through an art historical lens" (5), yet both books address what art does amidst a highly technologized present with titles that point to things that incorporate the prefix "inter-": Paulsen's "interface" and Bianchini and Verhagen's "interaction."¹

In other words, questions of mediation and relationality figure prominently here despite a difference of approach. Here/There is a conventional art-historical monograph treating a continuous history spanning 1968 to the present, while Practicable is an omnibus involving two collaborating editors, Nathalie Delbard and Larisa Dryansky, that covers art from the 1950s to the present across fifty-seven texts by no fewer than sixty-six contributors with varying disciplinary commitments. Still, both books home in on the ways people and artworks engage in mutually transformative processes with consequences beyond the people themselves, the artwork, or their interactions. The artworks that concern Paulsen involve telepresence, defined as "the feeling of being present at a remote location by means of real-time telecommunications devices" (2). Bianchini and Verhagen emphasize artworks' "capacity to accommodate the concrete involvement of their viewers and to generate an activity that may transform the works themselves as well as their audience" (1).

Broadly at issue in Here/There and Practicable is the question of how technology affects what contemporary art does in the world and what this entails for understanding how art and technology relate today.² The question of art's efficacy has been asked with increasing trepidation in recent decades, given that the answer, when faced with such enormous forces as multinational corporations, the internet, or climate change, might be very little by comparison; one cannot help but worry that contemporary art has been complicit in several deleterious processes of recent history.³ With the publication of Nicholas Bourriaud's book Esthétique relationnelle in 1998 (translated into English as Relational Aesthetics in 2002), hope for a politics of art began to reappear not at the grand scales of world history but at the microlevel of everyday life.⁴ Scholars began to examine and debate small-scale transformations of the lifeworld made by artists engaging audiences in social relationships mediated by works of art. Eventually, they began identifying ways that these encounters linked up to larger developments in recent history, either for good or for ill.⁵

Some time passed before discussion of technology entered this conversation in the substantive ways that it does in Here/There and Practicable, where it joins the microcosmic everyday of interfacing and interaction to a macrocosmic historical process like digitization. David Joselit, for instance, eventually coined the term "Conceptual Art 2.0" to highlight similarities between social media and the networked, platformed, communicative art that has proliferated recently.⁶ That move paralleled the growth of an almost entirely separate batch of scholarship attendant to technology, sensation, the body, affect, and experience in contemporary art.⁷ Unlike discussions of relationality, participation, and collaboration, this discourse tended to make technology out to be a looming imposition to which art must be adapted or to prioritize the individual user's sensorium over the society of users. Here/There and Practicable do the important work of firmly tethering discussion at the intersection of art and technology to the interfacing...