Reconsidering Participatory Art in the wake of New Media and Web 2.0

Contemporary art practices and, in particular, practices relating to participatory, collaborative or engaged art have shown that neither the work of art nor the role of the spectator can be formally defined or fixed. One element of participatory art that had always seemingly been determined was that of a basic interaction between the work of the active artist and the spectator, whose agency was always secondary to, and determined by, the artist’s dictation of the encounter.  Their physical presence was always accounted for somewhere within the actualisation or documentation of the work. In contemporary society, the popularisation of mass media, and the powerful socialising role it performs in our everyday experience, has changed the dynamics of human communication. Machines have come to not only facilitate but actually replace human interaction and social interchange through ‘carrying out tasks which once represented so many opportunities for exchange’ (Bourriard, 2002, p.17) The popularity of new media and sites such as Facebook and YouTube, which allow users to upload their own content freely to the web, is changing socialisation, and consequently, the role of artist, the role of audience and the nature of participation. The growth of this phenomenon suggests that users are gratified by the ability to play an active role in generating content, rather than just passively consuming that which is created for them by others.

 I seek to interrogate the changing dynamics of participation on a number of levels: firstly, with the easy availability of media publishing platforms online, what does this free and infinite content mean for culture, the museum, and professional art practices? Secondly, interaction as related to actual bodily participation (for which modern art has continually striven since the seventies) versus virtual participation, which is particularly relevant to discussions of net art and other practices that try to coax internet users into exhibition spaces, making the act of using computers a public event rather than an act preformed by the user in the privacy of their own home. Finally, I want to explore how some artists and projects (for example the Learning to Love You More 2002-2008 online project by the artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher) have responded to this new wave of interconnectedness without physical interaction and whether this sounds the death knell in part for an art which acquires its value through permanence, subjectivity and presence.

In attempting to interpret the dynamic positions that participation in art has assumed, it is worthwhile accounting for the movement of socially engaged, collaborative art projects when defining the possible obstacles/opportunities presented by new media and technology. In a collection of essays on Participatory Art, Claire Bishop describes how within participatory work, social activities such as discussing philosophy, drinking beer and running a café have been appropriated by artists in their efforts to collapse the distinction between performer and audience, professional and amateur, with an emphasis towards collaboration and a collective social experience. Bishop further defines three concerns as the most frequently cited motivations for an art that has sought participation since the sixties. Activation:  the creation of an active subject, who, empowered by their experience, will determine their own social and political reality. Authorship:  the suggestion that a more democratic delegation within the creative process and outcome will lead to a non-hierarchal, optimistic social model. Community: tracing its roots in Marxist thought is a fear that the Capitalist system within which we live has produced an alienating effect, one that has created a sense of loss of social bond (Bishop, 2006, pp.10-15).  As more and more social activities move to online spaces, and artists who create interactive work have new platforms in which to invite participation, this paper will chart the changing face of participatory art through the infinite, uncensored, root like construction of the virtual environment of Web 2.0.

               In order to understand the impact upon how we now create and consume culture, we must make distinctions between Web 2.0 and its predecessors. According to media theorist Lev Manovich, there are two significant features of Web 2.0. Firstly, the shift from content created by a small number of professional producers towards a growing number of content being accessed and created by non-professionals. Secondly, the evolution of the web from being a predominately publishing medium to a communication medium (Manovich, 2008, p.68).The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has moved our social activities online, and revolutionised the way we meet people and how we communicate with each other on a day-to-day basis. Social networking has become part of our culture, and it is increasingly being incorporated into artworks, as a platform for collaboration; as a virtual space to develop online communities and encounter new art forms. What effect has this shift had for culture and the concept of the ‘real’ versus the ‘virtual’? 

Manovich is sceptical regarding the praise placed in new media’s supposed democracy and ability to connect, produce and inform. He equates the conversion to new media with the move from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Technology is a product of culture and at the same time it forms culture. ‘New media objects are cultural objects; thus, any new media object … can be said to represent, as well as help construct, some outside referent: a physically existing object...a system of categories currently employed by culture as a whole or by particular social groups” (Manovich, 2001 p.15) He states that, as with all cultural representations, new media representations are biased, constructing features of physical reality at the expense of others. New media can be seen as consisting of two distinctive layers, the “cultural layer” and the “computer layer” and because new media is created on computers, the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media, so both layers influence each other (Manovich, 2001, p.46). Thus the ways in which humans beings interpret the world is in some cases filtered through the model of how computers programme and archive information. For example, the proliferation of websites documenting illegal street art both eternalises an inherently transient art-form while simultaneously obstructing the direct encounter street art aspires to engender. Thus, the subversive disruption of an ordinary walk down a familiar street by one’s sudden encounter with a new work of art becomes neutralised and homogenised, kept safe within a digital carousel of similarly ‘subversive’ images from around the world, to be flippantly clicked upon, copied, pasted, and shared online at will. The direct phenomenological instance, whose framework had been determined by the artist, is supplanted by the spectator’s ability to regurgitate or reject the new online content.

An alternative way to appreciate Manovich’s argument is to think of the concepts of the active/passive spectator as theorised in the writings of Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle), Jacques Ranciere (The Emancipated Spectator) and further in the artistic inquiries of Allan Kaprow (Happenings) and Nicholas Bourriard (Relational Aesthetics).  Historically, the viewer was mostly conceived of as a passive recipient of aesthetic experiences. While writing about the theatre, Ranciere, using Guy Debord’s concept of the ‘society of the spectacle’, critiques the notions of spectatorship that propagate a discourse of inactivity and a historical bias set against the viewer. The theory of the active/passive, intellectual/ ignorant, he argues, must be rethought. The notion of artist/spectator presupposes stable binaries such as master/student, the intellectual/the ignorant, and reifies the distinction between those with agency and those without. Ranciere, Kaprow and Bourriard, alongside writers such as Artaud and Brecht, argued for a fundamental rethinking of the function of the spectator, with Ranciere referring to the ‘emancipated spectator’, a figure transcending the traditional frameworks and rituals of the aesthetic encounter.

He argues that the divisions between acting and looking, observation and action, have ossified into a fundamental binary, one which presupposes the domination of the actor and the subjugation of the spectator. This choice of words is not accidental, as they presuppose a larger political implication than the simple relationship of artist-spectator. Ranciere argues that a fundamental shift in perspective must take place, one in which the performer and spectator must be considered mutually reinforcing and mutually creative. The spectator serves to reify the performer’s existence much in the same way as the performer serves to reify the spectator’s concepts of reality (regardless of how challenging or comforting that reification may be). Ultimately, we must dismiss “the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection”. (Ranciere 2007, p.275)

Unfortunately, this presupposes that viewers and artists genuinely function and approach a work from the same place. All acts of creation make certain teleological assumptions in order to communicate with the audience – we cannot assume that an audience will be either willing or even able to decipher the various teleological assumptions that underline a work.

It is often conceived that the opportunities for communication afforded within interactivity and participation through the internet will lead to a proliferation of democratic and social opportunities which will, in theory, enable all users to contribute to and mould social debates on a global scale. Departed is the era of the positioned passive masses whose only connection to international relations was the one-way media of television and radio. The Internet is broadly assumed to be democratic and empowering, but there is a dangerous naivety in the assumption that the Internet has somehow magically transcended and disestablished the systems of power and hierarchy that govern the world. Speaking at the Story Conference on February 18^th, 2011, BBC journalist Adam Curtis commented that

The digital utopians took us up the wrong road in the 1990s, and still today, in the way they led us to believe that the web is an innocent world. Innocent, in the sense that it was removed from the old elite structures and the hierarchies of power in the world. (...) That it was somehow a fresh world, where together we are all connected like equal nodes in a network, and together we will create a new kind of democracy.

He added, ‘The Internet is plugged in – literally – to the architecture of power in this world, and power is exercised in all sorts of ways, and new ways and old ways, through its networks’. (YouTube, 2011)

               This position is also argued by Manovich. Having grown up under Brezhnev, Manovich writes with a profound suspicion of the way the Internet brings to reality a new form of velvet-gloved subjugation and totalitarianism. In On Totalitarian Interactivity, he writes ‘I cannot but see Internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, a complete transparency [where] everybody can track everybody else’ (Manovich, 1996, 50 lines).

             While this opinion might be based on personal suspicions and cultural differences, (those in the West who embraced new technologies as liberating and those in communist states suspicious of how those new technologies might be used to subjugate the masses,) it raises valid concerns about the nature of openness and information sharing on the web. What has occurred is a shifting of private thoughts and actions into the public sphere. As more and more people upload their intimate photos and information to sites such as Facebook and MySpace, they rely on these outward storage systems to contain their private memories. Subsequently, within contemporary mass society, there has emerged a reliance upon and trust in external platforms owned by large companies to archive personal information, thereby eradicating the need for a space that is private to hold that which is private. ‘What was private became public. What was unique became mass produced. What was hidden in an individual’s mind became shared’ (Manovich, 2001, p.61)

What of those who post creative content on the web? What role do they play in the proliferation of information, private and creative? And what does this mean for professional artists and traditional spaces (such as museums) in which to view and engage with works of art?  Web 2.0 saw the rebirth of the user, from consumer of online products and information, produced by professionals and companies, to producer of online products and information themselves used by companies and other agencies. The sociability of such exchanges means that users are central to the content and form of all resources and materials generated on the web. The users of Web 2.0 engage in an economy where they themselves are the products of exchange. The proliferation of online do- it- yourself platforms has lead to multiple amateur creative processes to the point where it is increasingly difficult to make distinctions between mainstream and alternative, high and low culture. The reality that seemingly anyone can be a producer and distributor of visual materials of all types has led to an intense “amateurization” of creative practices, the fruits of which represent a significant amount of the content found online. Juan Martín Prada notes that this is in contrast to the professionalism that distinguished the twentieth century on all levels, ‘In today’s world, that former concept of a given individual as the exclusive location of “artistic talent” and the accompanying suppression of that talent among the “great masses” no longer has any meaning’ (Prada, 2007, p.9)

While it might be difficult to maintain distinctions between high art and low art on the Internet, one might ask if this is strictly a negative evolution. Most of the content uploaded to blogs and social sites by users is biographical, subjective, and placed in the everyday. Other content can be seen as modifying and hybridising existing data, using collage and layering techniques. Appropriation has always been an element of contemporary art from Pablo Picasso’s Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Bottle (1913) to Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory (1999). For an artist working today, original creative concepts are still those that set them apart from other endless permutations on the web. Harnessing the phenomenon whereby users enjoy contributing content is something that some artists have incorporated within their practice. The project Learning to Love You More (LTLYM) is both a website and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. From 2002 until its end in 2009 over eight thousand people participated in the project. Participants accepted an assignment, completed it by following the simple but specific instructions and then sent the required report (photograph, text, video, etc) to the site for approval. The result was the possible publication of their work on-line. ‘Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments was intended to guide people towards their own experience’ (Fletcher and July, 2008). One could critique online projects such as these on questions of authorship and exchange. How can an artist claim creative rights or responsibility for content created by others?  Artists become only ringmasters, or at best editors of other people’s creative output, diminishing their own creative role.

The assumption here is one of an outmoded idea of the artist as genius, whose function is to create and inspire, to use their talent as a means of educating a viewer. But, as we have seen, the role of the artist is evolving: the artist is now one who facilitates, who acts as a catalyst for the creation of content. A project such as LTLYM resonates with the idea found in the avant-garde and contemporary art, that of the end of the division between art and life and the uncertainty in the privileging of the artist as exclusive architect. Hence, the relationship between artist, audience and new media must be understood as an advancement which is continually altered and nourished by interactivity on the web.  And the overwhelmingly positive response that the project received directs more attention to the question as to whether relational art really needs an audience physically present in order for the participation to be deemed successful or satisfying, both for the contributor and artist.

                   Alan Kaprow, in his essay Notes on the Elimination of the Audience, decided that the audience should be eradicated entirely as spectators since a group of inactive people in the space of a Happening ‘is just dead space’ (Kaprow, 1966, p.103). It seems in theory that the type of interaction encouraged by new media should spell trouble for the museum and face to face interaction, although many major museums have realised the worth of collecting and commissioning online publications and ephemeral projects. Tate Modern has an Intermedia Art programme focussed on art that engages the use of new media, sound and performance. The online pages also contain the archive of Tate's net art projects from 2000 onwards. In 2010, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired the LTLYM project, where it continues to exist online as an archive. Perhaps the Internet encourages more participation and activation because of the loss of the physical encounter. We are entering a new age with regard to participation, from electronic voting and online shopping to gaming  and tweeting your personal thoughts online from a smart phone.

 It is not surprising that Nicholas Bourriard’s Relational Aesthetics was published at a time when Internet activity and developments in communicative technology and new media were on the increase during the nineties. A comparison of Bourriard’s text and the emergence of web 2.0 is  reasonable when its main concern was ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ (Bourriard, 2002, pg.113).  . It was felt that there was a desire on the part of artists to engage with and subvert the traditional role of the spectator, but to do so through the physical plane, as suggested by the work of numerous artists such as Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Could the movement of relational art be perceived as an example of the artist trying to regain control of the creative process while still retaining the desired participation of the audience?

In conclusion, it is obvious that accounting for the changing role of participatory art as a result of new media, is one that has been unprecedented, complex, and dynamic. Critics remain divided as to whether the speedy evolution of publishing and receiving content online is beneficial for art practices. On one side there are the cautious and well founded words of Manovich and Curtis regarding the dangers of naive usage of such technology. There are those from an artistic standpoint who believe the integrity of the artwork and connection between artist and viewer has been jeopardised. Shawn Wilbur (2000 p.50) comments that the virtual is not real, and that ‘[t]he authentic cannot be engendered through technological means’. But then there are those who believe the Internet can revitalise the public sphere and community through its democratisation of information and creative opportunities. The liberation has occurred of the user, from a condition of passive spectator and consumer of cultural objects to that of an engaged and informed contributor of culture. An authentic fear exists for the death of the artist/author, the demise of a physical interaction and a cult of the amateur as a result of new media and Web 2.0. There is one element that throughout this debate remains consistent, that of a desire of artists and non-artists, both collectively and individually to communicate, to form communities, to engage and participate in creative projects together. This is now possible on a global level with the erasure of geographical and temporal barriers afforded by new media. David Rokeby summarises this idea in a paper which suggests that our relationship with technology is a sophisticated articulation of our need for a self image, a sense of self, and a connection to the ‘experienced world’,

A technology is interactive to the degree that it reflects the consequences of our actions or decisions back to us. The Internet is a medium through which we communicate with ourselves, a mirror... The medium not only reflects back, but also refracts what it is given; what is returned is ourselves, transformed and processed... [Technology] mirrors our desires; interactive technologies, in particular, reflect our desire to feel engaged. (Rokeby, 1995, p.223)

     Bibliography

·         Bishop, C. ed., (2006)  Participation, London: Whitechapel

·         Bourriard, N., (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les Presses du Reel.

·         Fletcher, H., and July. M., (2009), Learning to Love you More, [online] Available at: http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/ [accessed 10 April 2012]

·          HannibaltheHerbivore, (2011),  Adam Curtis speaking at the Story Conference - February 18, 2011, Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU8tWdaL6nc [accessed 7 June 2012]

·         Kaprow, A., (1966), ‘Notes on the Elimination of the Audience’. In: Bishop, C. ed., (2006), Participation, London: Whitechapel

·         Manovich, L., (1996) On Totalitarian Interactivity, [pdf] Available at http://manovich.net/TEXT/totalitarian.html

·         Manovich, L., (2001) The Language of New Media, Massachusetts: MIT Press

·         Manovich, L. (2008) ‘Art after Web 2.0’. In: Frieling, R. Ed., The Art of Participation 1950 to now, London: Thames and Hudson,  pp.67-80,

·          Prada, J., (2007) “web 2.0” as a new context for artistic practices’. In:  Prada, J. ed., (2007) Inclusa-net,  2007: Madrid City Council

·         Ranciere, J. ,(2006) ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ In:  Art Forum, vol. 45(7), pp. 270-281, 341, March

·         Rokeby, D., (1995) ‘Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media’. In: Shanken, E. Ed., (2009), Art and Electronic Media, London: Phaidon Press Ltd.

·         Wilbur, S., ‘An Archaeology of Cyberspaces, Vitality, Community, Identity’. In: ‘The Cyber cultures Reader: A Users Guide, Bell, D and Kennedy, B. eds., London: Routledge