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chapter six Net.art: Dysfunctionality and Self-Reflexivity m ar ie -l au re ry an Most cognitive scientists consider self-reflexivity to be a distinctive feature of the human mind. The concepts of the I, of the self, or of identity are the product of a process by which the mind looks back upon itself and tries to grasp how it relates to the world toward which it is normally directed.1 Given the fundamentally self-reflexive nature of human intelligence, it is not surprising that many of its products should display the same property. According to Noam Chomsky, human languages distinguish themselves from animal communication through their ability to describe or define their own elements and to embed their own structures recursively.2 Self-reflexivity is also found in all the representational arts, as well as in computer languages and mathematical systems. Whenever a type of sign or a medium can represent something external to itself, the human mind will find a way to redirect it toward its own capability to represent. In this chapter, I will focus on the patterns of self-reflexivity found in Web-based art (or net.art), arguably the form of new media that has pursued the scrutiny of its technological foundation the most persistently. To prepare, theoretically, the ground for this investigation, I will start by distinguishing three concepts that are often used interchangeably, especially in literary theory: the concepts of feedback loop, recursivity, and self-reflexivity. A feedback loop is a process by which the output of an operation is used as input to this very same operation. Feedback 127 128 Marie-Laure Ryan loops occur in domains as varied as the ecology (for instance, the balance of predators and prey in a closed environment), finances (the fluctuations of the stock market), mechanical engineering (the design of a self-regulating heating system or of the flushing mechanism of your toilet ), and last but not least in the relation between human user and machine in interactive computer systems. The second concept, recursivity , designates a pattern by which an object is made of smaller copies of itself. Recursion is illustrated in nature by the structure of trees (made of smaller trees) or by the anfractuosities of rocks, in mathematics by functions that generate fractal images, in optics by the images captured by two mirrors facing each other, and in computer programming, by functions that activate copies of themselves. In the cases of feedback loops and recursion, the examples I gave include both naturally occurring phenomena and human-made artifacts. By contrast, I would like to restrict the concept of self-reflexivity to products of the human mind. Self-reflexivity is the property of an object that brings attention to itself through an intentional design or through a deliberate interpretive act. On a planet without humans we would still have feedback mechanisms and recursive patterns, but we would have no self-reflexivity, because self-reflexivity is a semiotic phenomenon produced by a mental operation , while a feedback loop is a type of mechanism, and recursivity is a type of pattern. But if they are theoretically distinct, the three concepts are often deeply entangled, and it may be very difficult to take them apart. For instance, the recursive patterns that characterize fractal images are the product of a function, and this function generally involves a feedback loop. Another form of entanglement comes from the fact that recursion and feedback loops are the most efficient ways to produce selfre flexivity. A visual artwork will for instance achieve self-reflexivity by recursively embedding a copy of itself. It is also very tempting for the human mind to interpret a recursive pattern in nature as being selfre flexive, though a tree made up of smaller trees does not say anything about itself intentionally. But as the sentence ‘‘this sentence has five words’’ demonstrates, we can have self-reflexivity without recursivity. In this case self-reflexivity is not triggered by a small copy of the sentence , but by a deictic element—‘‘this’’—that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the sentence it refers to. We can furthermore give a stable truth value to the sentence, without causing this truth value to curl back upon itself, while if we try to evaluate a sentence that illustrates the Cretan paradox, for instance ‘‘this sentence is false,’’ we will create a [3.137.174.216] Project MUSE...

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