A new art is emerging that can’t be viewed directly—only lived inside, mistaken for life until it’s already happened.
A conversation on new art between d and tomismeta prompted by a public discussion initiated from a tweet by 113...
d: ive been thinking about what it would take to create something truly of the time and how we would be mostly blind to it.
tom: Yeah, I think about this a lot. Will we even be able to perceive a new form of art in the moment, to experience it directly, catching it in the act of it's performance or will we only recognize it in hindsight (and is that even a bad thing)?
d: i suspect things won't feel or look different. like the initial outputs would look familiar but would be engaging in new cultural senses and organs. and eventually we can strip away the old and engage with the new things more purely. i have no reason to believe this - it's an intuition.
d: so i think we would recognize things in hindsight. and i don't think that's bad unless you want to be an active participant in the beginning of the new newness.
tom: I love this hypothesis/framing - there’s a path forward that wouldn’t be too abrasive. Being an active participant in the newness is where I was coming from.
d: There will be pioneers from spaces outside of art. That’s why I think the prediction market bit was super interesting.
d: My sense is that performance art is the space that can hold all the strands. visual outputs are reduced to the productive outputs of an engaged community required for financial/social performance.
tom: My intuition is that a lot of new art will be performative and will be difficult to detect through traditional consumption senses (due to the scale/scope), and knowing (and/or unknowing) participants in the production of the performance will focus (consciously or unconsciously) moreso on the production than consumption mechanism/output framing. Will the artists be the orchestrators/manipulators of the performance, those that can frame it for consumption or both?
tom: I think an emergent social/financial example is what Charlotte Fang is doing with Remilia. Interestingly, you have this group of uncoordinated individuals (only through loose principles/ideals/memetic generation) producing disparate content (memes, art), participating in an 'offline' (off of the timeline) social mesh and financial exercise across fungible and non-fungible assts. Is that new art? How to do you consume it if you're not a direct participant (follow the right people, watch the right financial instruments). Should it remain largely inaccessible or should a frame be wrapped around to for consumable output for the non-participant? Is it wrong to create a lens and should it be only consumed experientially.
d: My sense is that the roles will change over time as a work progresses through “stages”. I believe some control will be diffused or handed off as I assume there will be some form of market play or some engagement with risk.
d: Maybe I’m caught up in my part of the internet though
tom: Fluidity in roles will blur the lines on those constructing the performance and the those that are experiencing/consuming it, creating uncertainty of the edges of the 'installation/exhibit'. The initiator may not be the best steward of the performance (and output) depending on the permutation/evolution that the performance takes. The interesting part to me is does the initator then construct a lens that acknowledges the performance after they let go of the reigns or constrain it to the part of the performance prior to control diffusion. The lenses/frames that can be applied are limitless.
d: i think some of the spaces of this performance will be discreteness of outcome relative to the complexity of the outcome, the alignment or misalignment of the outcome and the artistic practice, and the distribution of agency vs "ownership" of the performance. this space could produce performances more like haiku and some like epics. there can be performances nestled in broader performances.
d: and i am thinking of this in the context of remilia
tom: The palette of levers to produce an output is nearly infinite and can be critiqued across the "colors", canvases and methods used to produce the output. Boutique to industrial, simple to complex, ephemeral or with permanence, intelligent/intentional minimalism to unintentionally seeded complexity at scale. My sense is when those are mastered (to some degree) with an observing audience at some critical mass, organic and/or constructed interaction between disparate and nested performances will inevitably occur. This becomes a biosphere of performant organisms that clash, coalesce and oscillate around each other resulting another frame that can be rendered/consumed as output. To some degree what we're describing can be argued as "life" (naturally occurring performance), with intentionality being the inflection point/delineation between life as we know it and emergent new art. It's my sense that conventional framing of the output won't do the performances justice; new framing, experiential participation and holding the metaphorical looking glass become important devices for awareness, consumption and appreciation. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
tom: Unless you can become the adjacent tree. Or, deploy an unmanned drone.
d: I think to experience these performances we need to at least be those adjacent trees. It’s participatory.
tom: My sense is that there will be a cohort interest in the participatory engagement (primarily) and another cohort that desires (or can only afford—due to time/commitment to their participatory art) consumption from a degree or two of separation away. I want to be the adjacent tree.
d: I think there will also be unwitting participants.
d: What would it be to be adjacent?
d: With this framing most “digital” art will seem frail, backwards, formal play. And make that digital term inappropriate for what remilia is doing.
tom: There will be a “Neanderthal cave art” tipping/inflection point moment where we wonder at the simplicity of the output and archaic ‘tools’ used to create them. It’s not digital art it’s like collective, metaspacial art (but again, that seems to narrow for the new art category). I struggle to ‘name it’.
d: Metaspacial seems true but like you’re saying is too narrow.
d: I’ve been thinking it is hyperstitial - more like magic. And there have been hyperstitial performers before but maybe not with this set of tools, this level of intent.
d: This frame give it an output that isn’t the memes or the posts themselves. It’s everything around them.
