Anti-Automationism

My definitive artistic theme can be called “Anti-Automationism”.

The Automationism includes all kinds of art-form where theories and ways are circulating each other. For example, media-art often correlates with science technology. Since the latter guarantees some eternal development, the former always could take some new looks, then can declare their pieces are the “New” Art. This kind of correlation between Art and science technology can be definitive way, then he is an automationist.

However, what is the meaning of this “New”? They are circulating among this simple correlation with no outsides, and finally, with no encounters. Art has become just a practice of science technology. Here, no encounter means, immediately following 2 things:

1.The activity of Art itself become passive, because we don’t need to explore something new by ourselves.

2. Concept or thought becomes mere additional elements which role is just justifying the connection between their pieces and science technology which they are using.

According to the temptation of automationism, we could lose diversity of exploring and thought.

So how could we resist Automationism? I will suggest a strategy in both theory and practice.

First, we should analyze existing systems into automatic structure. This means analyzing many theories whose themes concern automatic development, we should construct only one theoretical structure which shows the most abstract aspect of Automationism. Second, we should insert new theory of subject of encounter into these theories. In each work, we would create models of only one structure which consists of Automationism and theory of subject.

In doing so, finally, we could treat these systems or theories as mere materials or models. For example, thorough reducing Deleuze’ s philosophy into Atomationism, we can treat his concept of serie as the object or material for subject of encounter.

Let's take a closer look. In Deleuze’s philosophy, We can read “Différence et répétition” as a theory of série, which consists of correlation between difference in itself and its repetition.

The difference in itself make series, but this difference itself is not included to these series.

But difference in itself make series as long as it is repeated by eternal repetition. In other words, Deleuze said that he could smash the circulation of time (2nd synthesis of time), however in doing so, he constructed huge circulation between difference and repetition. So 　his theory is simple example of automatic theories. How can we insert the theory of subject to his one? If we could insert the subject to his entire system, it should be ontological constant term. Since this subject is defined as active, which means that it should take an object, the definition of this subject is pairs of constant term and variable. Since this variable should take new object each time, variable itself should be singularizationed. This is the definition of subject both in and out of Deleuze’s philosophy.

In general, the theory of subject added to Automationism structure is singjlarizationing flat objects, not that objects themselves are singular. This matter can be called “re-discovering” or “re- encountering” of objects. For doing so, we must treat objects completely flatly. And this is the main thesis of Anti-Automationism. In practice, we should treat software, hardware, digital, analog, abstract concept, concrete proper noun and so on completely equally, then trying to reveal completely new “figure” of them via works or performances.

Here are several examples of myself.

First one is my electroacoustic piece, “Anti-Automationism” where I incorporated deep learning system into my complex Max/Msp patch and let it learn my improvisation automatically. If my improvisation is learned, what I should do is playing what has not been learned yet. In this way, I repeated letting machine-learning-system learn my improvisation and improvising so as to resist that learning. Please listen a part of it.

Next one is my live performance, “Anti-AI”. I was using deep learning system and let it learn my improvisation too, however, I treat this system and device itself as mere materials for performance. Let us watch.

My conclusions are:

- We are in more and more Automationism. One of the clearest examples is Media Art.

- Media-Art is in a circulation where art is subordinate to technology and lose diversity

of thought or concept and encounter.

- For exiting this Automationism, we must establish the alternative theory and practice named Anti-Automationism, where we should treat everything which is not limited to digital as mere materials, In doing so, we could re-find the outside and alternate history of media art.