The 13th edition of IFCA will deal with error, chance and possibility in the framework of art. We will be interested in the questions and answers that technology (that is also enmeshed with art) offers about this theme.
Computer art is an outdated term. But artists, for whatever kind of artistic expression, for practically all artistic practices at some stage of the creative process, production or expression, use a computer. The computer regime shapes our entire thought process and our perception of reality. For quite some time machines and apparatuses have not been made with the human in mind, but have, in our reversible relationship with them, changed us. Like film where the narratives are no longer just an imitation or variation of a life, but rather the reversal – following which our life, habits and activity are wooed by the characters in the film and their ways of life – occurred long ago. This is not the case only with film, but various content produced by mass media including the Internet. Something similar is happening with technologies whose novelty is wearing off and are becoming accessible to everyone. When we change technology, we change ourselves. Once we buy a computer with a dual-core processor, we will be able to have even more document windows open and, in the long term, get even more done in less time.
There are computers everywhere, or, to put it otherwise: there is a computer in everything. Everyone uses one, even if they don’t own one. This, too, is one of the reasons that the term computer art sounds outdated. Computer art actually means all art, since every artist has to perform at least part of the creative process on a computer. So, a total profanisation of technology, as well as art, that was still called New media not so long ago, has come about. It is true that the term was immediately problematic because of the word new, and indeed it has, even before we could really find a new one, become not only dated but even contradictory. Wrong. New media is not in the least bit new, but has become totally profane, everyday, even banal. When a technology loses its particularity, systemic closedness and either generally accessible or inaccessible status, when it becomes more and more a part of everything, integrated into all levels of consumption, living and production, it does not lose only its significance, but also its potential power for paradigm shifts.
Contingency or possibility thus represents the opposite of necessity, just as the error is the antipode of perfection and just as coincidence is the opposite of predictability. Three antipodes of the subtitle “error, possibility and chance” represent the contaminated core of Western social reality. The necessity of technology or the so-called ubiquity of simplification screams for an element of possibility, where, precisely through error and chance, true novelty can be realised in the sense of a technologically unperfected but much more participatory and equal society, which seems further away than ever. Considering the fact that the storied perfectionism and default predictability did not lead to that for which they exist – namely because society, like art, does not simply offer a kind world to everybody – the question of another look through the prism of chances, mistakes and available possibilities is posed. Perhaps we might even be living in the time of a great error, where we have left the chances to the new agers and we are left only with the mundanity of the materialised, automatized and digitalised everydayness. Perhaps the scope of possibility, error and chance is exactly what is needed to neutralise the yearning for the spiritual, emotional and sensorial.
