"Telematic Embrace: A Love Story?": Reading Response

Ascott believed that the creative process should and would embrace cybernetics; to co-exist and work together to inspire new directions in art and further the future of art. Many others disagreed with Ascott, believing that technology would industrialize art, creating a “utopian attitude” in the art community, and art would become lifeless, like cybernetics itself. Ascott still believed that cybernetics should be embraced and explored to create new telematic art, and that anything and everything can still be ‘art’. This can be applied to many different conceptual artists and art pieces we have discussed in class, including Fluxus, which pertains to the anti-art message, Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades that took regular objects and juxtaposed them with others to create a new meaning, and John Cage and his work “4’33” where the idea of a musical performance is turned on its side to create a new type of composition. These artists and their works all push the limits of what is deemed art and innovate instead of detracting or repeating others work.

The metaphor of the mirror in Duchamp’s “Large Glass” or “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even” is from the reflection of the viewer, and the viewer sees this as part of the installation, which leaves the meaning of the work open for interpretation to each individual. This reveals a tension in consideration with the ideas of Ascott and Shanken, as the inclusion of the viewer in the piece draws away from the involvement of cybernetics in art and that there is no set meaning to the work. “The machine-like anonymity and ambivalence of the eroticized intercourse between these aspects might be interpreted as creating a perverse tension rather than a loving embrace.” Shanken refers to Ascott’s idea of love and the embrace of cybernetics, where Duchamp’s “Large Glass” seems to welcome a machine-like resemblance of the work itself. New media artists already embrace technology, and use the mirror metaphor (e.g. Daniel Rozin’s ‘Wooden Mirror’) to give each viewer a different meaning and interpretation.