ArtAsService

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Traditional craft has never gone away, and it lives amongst the laiety, the folk. "High" art like paintings, sculptures, novels are objects, mostly created for the wealthy. Even novels historically have been read primarily by the wealthy; only recently in history has literacy gotten to the point where within Western society, many people read novels. Objet d'art lend themselves to commercialization via productization, and in this way maximize profit by increasing sales. Most such objet's have limited production runs for the simple reason to maintain artificial scarcity, and IntellectualProperty is what maintains that scarcity. The post-modern London scene at the end of the 20th century was very crass commercialist, but that movement has come head to head with the world of the DigitalNetwork.

Can art be considered a service? Are interactive art, action art, situationalism, tactical media be the forerunning of a new strain of artistic production? Museums are struggling to catch up to the curatorial demadns of hosting interactive art. While a painting is to be seen and revered, not touched, new forms of digital art are meant to cut the red velvet rope so that TheAudience can play with the art itself. Indeed, many new forms of art do not have an 'audience', but rather are about making tangible changes to real communities. They solve problems not addressed by capitalistic systems for the simple reasons that the problems are had by people without capital. Sure Bruce Mau's Massive Change looks at this problem from the view of new products for old problems, but could there be a new level of art (not a supplantive, but simply new) that serves its audience rather than titalates it?

MUDs and MOOs are services, and the "art" is simply the burgeoning potential of life. Is the art then the text on the MUD, as many literary critics have supposed, such as Aarseth on CybertextPerspectivesOnErgodicLiterature? Or is it rather the MOO itself? The masterpiece is the code that makes the change in thinking. While many art is about KuleshovEffect-esque disjunctivity, a forceful Wiki:ZenSlap to push TheAudience over the edge, ArtAsService is more about facilitating the underlying potential in the audience. We, as people, have only one purpose which is to resolve the human condition. We have struggled and we will struggle forever to find the answers to the prosaic and yet epic problem of Life itself, and this is intrinsic to what it means to be alive. Cannot an artform simply be finding a solution to those problems?

Literary theory has struggled with changing forms of storytelling as technology (CyberText even) has progressed. Epic poetry is simply the unfolded output of an algorithm inside a singer's head. They don't memorize every word, just the arc of the story, and how to tell a story. Stories were told over days, and no detail was lacking. The stories were total stories. But when printed word came about, it was no longer necessary to stream the whole story in a linear form. Rather, over time, the novel became only a set of pointwise impressions of a much larger amount of story. The job of the reader was to derive what the entire underly story was by the implications of the absences. Now, with CyberTexts, the underlying database and algorithm can be exposed along with the surface stream of text that those algorithms produce. We can explore the underlying database and even regenerate the surface.

In short, the storytelling system has become a service. We ask it for more information, and it gives it to us.

But in that it is still an object, with a single author. A fully communitarian art would not provide an answer to the question, hoping that it is correct, but merely elicit what is the answer out of its own audience. It will provide the audience with a solution to their problem, a means to their own end, without prescribing what that end is.

What is the role of a museum then? A museum freezes things. At the end of the night, even interactive art is locked behind closed doors, inaccessible. Tactical media or in situ community-development, on the other hand, lives on if even in the simply truth where it has made changes to people's real lives. In that way, it has more than just a LifeInText, but a life in life, and so perhaps that is more valuable in the end.

CategoryArt

Original verison based on random notes from the New Forms Festival, 2004. -- SunirShah

ArtAsService

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