Infinity and Accident: Strategies of Enfoldment in Islamic Art and Computer Art

Abstract

Computer art and Islamic art, the two largest bodies of aniconic art, share a surprising number of formal properties, two of which are explored here. The common properties of computer art and classical Islamic art can be understood in light of moments in the history of Islamic philosophy. In these two cases, Islamic Neoplatonism and Mu'tazili atomism are shown to parallel, respectively, the logic of relations between one and infinity, and the basic pixel structure, that inform some historical monuments of Islamic art as well as some contemporary works of computer art. It is suggested that these parallels are in part a result of Islamic influences on Western modernism and thus that the genealogy of computer art includes classical Islamic art and the philosophies that informed it.

An aniconic turn is stirring the contemporary visual and media arts. Less and less is present to perception; more and more is latent, in quiet surfaces that seem to be "hiding something in the image" [1]. The latent image waits to be "unfolded," either subjectively, by the viewer, or by the force of its interior logic. Figural images are increasingly being subordinated to information, performativity, communication and other relatively nonvisual contents. This contemporary aniconic tendency, which is a general movement in the arts of information societies, occurs particularly with computer-based art. One of the origins of this aniconic tendency in contemporary art is the influence of Islamic art and thought on Western modernism.

Fascinating subject though it is, the Islamic genealogy of Western modernism is not my focus in the present essay. It does, however, inform my claim here that the parallels between tendencies in contemporary computer art and tendencies in classical Islamic art are not happenstance but the manifestation of historical connections. In turn, this Islamic genealogy of Western modernism should make it possible to examine contemporary computer-based art in light of the impressive variety of philosophical questions and aesthetic solutions found in the varied works of Islamic art of past centuries. Without suggesting that Islamic art is a monolith, I want to apply historical findings on Islamic art to questions about contemporary visual and media arts [2]. I intend to reveal a genealogical connection that has lain more or less latent since the wave of transmission of Islamic knowledge to Europe in the 12th century.

Invention, refinement and lively debate characterize the intellectual golden age of Islam, which may be dated from the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate in what is now Iraq (for convenience, I will continue to refer to the region as Iraq in this paper) in 750 to the Mongol invasion in 1258. In the new capital of Baghdad, the caliph Al Ma'mun (reign 813-833) founded the Beit al-hikmeh (House of Wisdom), a massive library and center for translation and scholarship. Especially in the first two centuries of this period, philosophers and theologians intensely argued such issues as the nature of matter, the relationship between cause and effect, and the comprehensibility of the will of God. Their arguments, while ultimately subject to the political interests of the states they served, are literally set in stone in the great Islamic monuments of their time and later eras-works that raise questions about image and latency.

Contemporary aniconic art is built not around the image, nor even the rejection of the image (it is not iconoclastic), but around an implicit set of information (for example, the database and the algorithm).The image is a selective unfolding of implicit information, and information is in turn a selective unfolding of implicit experience [3]. By the latter I mean that all information is a selective actualization of historical events-statistics reflect a selective arrangement of material experience; software reflects the labor

Fig. 1.

Mihrab, Mosque of Sultan Hassan, Cairo.

Photo © Alfred Molon

of programmers; the evening news on television is a selective presentation of certain events; even poetry is the actualization in words of a swath of material and psychic experience, the rest of which remains virtual. It may be...