brogan bunt

Currently (March 2011) have an exhibition of algorithmic drawing work at the Faculty of Creative Arts Gallery (University of Wollongong).

Loom
The title of this exhibition is a reference to the Jacquard loom.  Invented in 1801 by Joseph Marie Jacquard, the Jacquard loom was a machine for automating the production of complex patterned textiles.  In its use of punched cards to determine the pattern produced, the loom became an inspiration for the construction of the computer.  Charles Babbage attempted to apply the punched card concept in the development of the second of his two (failed) computational machines, the Analytical Engine (1837).  The novel feature of the Jacquard loom is that it separates machine logic from machine operation.  Rather than just taking raw material input and producing an identical manufactured result, the loom takes instructions that determine aspects of its underlying functioning.  In a similar manner, through the medium of software, the computer gains a flexible, generic character – it becomes, as Turing put it, the ‘universal machine’.

Two features of the Jacquard loom are relevant to this exhibition. First, and most obviously, the loom is a machine for weaving graphic patterns.  This is an exhibition about weaving graphic patterns with computer algorithms.  It is concerned specifically with exploring the possibilities of recursive geometric subdivision.  Applied successively, motions of subdivision produce complex emergent visual fields.  Second, the Jacquard loom is relevant in terms of it delineation of an intermediary space between visual concept and the process of manufacturing.  This exhibition is centrally concerned with dimensions of labour in algorithmic drawing.  People typically regard computational drawing as an eradication of proper manual drawing labour.  This is to neglect both the labour of programming and the labour of machine operation.  It can take months to design and write a drawing system and, however abstract the conception, it is still closely conceived in terms of the practical exigencies of machine operation.  The latter represents less an eradication of labour than a transposition of labour into inhuman terms.  Punched cards and software represent a zone of mediation. They structure a relation to an alien,  partly obfuscated space of labour.  This exhibition focuses on the intimate but never quite coextensive relationship between code and the space of code performance.

This is a short extract from a poem that I wrote in the late 1970s. It demonstrates two basic features of my method that remain relevant today, although I scarcely ever write poetry any more. First, the poem was typed. I have always been interested in the passage beyond the self that the engagement with mechanical processes represent. Second, the poem is informed by a strict logical procedure. I wrote one poem, then another one, then interleaved the lines to create the final poem. I can’t remember precisely what led me to this method. I had read William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, so perhaps I had picked up on his strategy of cut-up composition. For me it was a way of discovering conjunctions, abrupt breaks and curious affinities that I could never have come up with myself through straightforward linear composition. This logically articulated method became a way of shifting to another imaginative register. Its essential form is that of an algorithm – it constitutes a set of deliberate, neutrally applied steps. Here then, well before my initial engagement with computers, a fundamental interest in mechanical mediation and the poetic potential of impersonal procedure is evident. My aim is not to lay claim to any dimension of prescience or originality. The interest in mechanism and algorithmic procedure is clearly a common trope within modernist avant-garde practice. Rather my aim is to suggest that computation is only a particular form of a more general space of creative inquiry. Why is this significant? Because it indicates that a concern with mechanical agency and algorithmic process is not specific to computational digital media. However much the computer facilitates a literal engagement with machine processes and algorithmic composition, it is informed by a wider cultural imaginary.

Drawing inspiration from Sol LeWitt’s privileging of drawing concept over the material space of actual drawing, computational art typically focuses on the conceptual logic of the software program rather than the electronic space of program execution. The latter is positioned as secondary – a mere technical means. I wish to suggest a more equal and complex relationship. This is not, however, to lend the computer some awkward creative agency (or even to envisage a dimension of generative semi-autonomy); it is to consider the labour of the computer – to think through the implications of its iterative event-space. Programming itself demands thinking in terms of this labour. Creative concepts do not simply precede computation but are developed in relation to a language of data-structures and algorithms which has its basis in the possibility of non-reflective mechanical operation. Of course, the actual texture of computer labour is largely invisible – happening so quickly and at such an alien scale that there is no adequate human way of observing the process. This does less, however, to obliterate the importance of computer operation within computational art than to highlight its poignancy and power. The terrain of execution takes shape as the spatially and temporally obscure space in which the conceptual logic of the program gains concrete realisation. The two are tied together, neither subordinate to the other. If anything, in its silence and disappearance the plane of execution provides the well of darkness from which the potential for creative conceptualisation emerges.

In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. (Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in Aleberro, A., Stimson, B. (1999) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts)

Sol LeWitt’s notion of conceputal art is often regarded as a model for processes of computational art. In a well known on-line exhibition, one of the creators of the Processing software, Casey Reas, drew explicit inspiration from LeWitt’s approach. He shaped his Software Structures project (http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/) as a homage to LeWitt’s notion of wall drawings, in which short linguistic descriptions of a potential drawings provide the blueprint for any number of specific drawing performances. The computational version adds a complication. Rather than passing straight from natural language to visual artefact, the written descriptions inform the development of algorithmic constructs which then produce a variety of specific drawing instances. Here the process of programming is aligned with the conceptual artistic side of things, while the sphere of computer operation is associated with the perfunctory work of actual drawing. Indeed the work of drawing largely disappears altogether. The spatio-temporal scale of computer functioning tends to elude adequate human perception. Very typically, it is invisible and instantaneous. Computer processes appear as a form of abstract labour taking place in an alien and inaccessible dimension. But what are the implications of this? Does it mean that computational labour is unimportant, that it is entirely subordinate to some autonomous field of humanly configured conceptual creation? I argue against this view and indeed against the whole notion of the autonomy of the conceptual from the field of material, mechanical and non-conceptual being and agency. For a start, one has only to consider the structure of software to see how closely oriented it is to the demands of computational labour. Programming represents both a framing and choreography of dimensions of underlying process – it shapes elements, functions, pathways and iterative cycles. While the relation to hardware is simplified and mediated, this realm of articulation, communication, instruction and translation is utterly directed to its non-conceptual other. Paradoxically, rather than displacing the spatio-temporal dynamics of process or rendering it insignificant, computer programming provides a medium for reflecting upon its nature and possibilities.

Howard Morphy describes the technique of Eastern and Central Arnhem Land painting: “painting is seen as a process of transforming a surface from a state of dullness to that of shimmering brilliance (bir’yunhamirri)”. (Morphy, H. (1998) Aboriginal Art, Phaidon, London and New York, p.188)

He indicates a clearly defined set of steps:

1.the painting surface is covered in an overall wash (typically red-ochre)
2.the key forms are outlined in yellow and black and basic figurative elements are coloured in.
3.large portions of the surface are covered in “cross-hatched” infill with a special long brush
4.the final work involves “outlining the figures and cross-hatched areas in white to create a clear edge which defines their form.”

Stage one is a straightforward, process. Stage two depends upon high-order artistic skill and a close understanding of relevant representational traditions and protocols. Morphy notes that this stage is performed relatively quickly by “a senior person”. Stage three is the most time-consuming, demanding technical skill but less demonstrable cultural knowledge. The final stage draws the painting together. Morphy does not mention who is responsible for this stage, but it seems likely that it is closely directed by the senior artist.

My interest is in the sophisticated mediation that this artistic process enables between elements of conceptualisation and mechanical technique. The term ‘mechanical’ has to be used carefully here. It is less, in this instance, to liken Aboriginal painting to the characteristic forms of industrial production than to pinpoint a dimension of iterative, non-conceptually grounded process within Aboriginal art-making. It is not as though the work of producing cross-hatched infill does not have conceptual, aesthetic resonance, it is that it gains this resonance and this potential to shape a shimmering aesthetic surface by casting itself in terms of a repetitive articulation of time and space. The work has a ritual, performative aspect. In relation to the cross-hatching, Morphy argues that “Yolngu are not merely producing an aesthetic effect but moving the image towards the ancestral domain. The cross-hatched surface of the painting reflects the power of the ancestral being it represents, the quality of the shininess is the power of the ancestral beings incarnate in the object.” (p.189) In this sense, the work becomes a means of summoning and invocation. Slow and mechanical it shapes a real and affective alignment with dimensions of ancestral being and opens up the possibility of manifestation. From this perspective then, processes of conceptualisation and mechanical technique are mutually imbricated. The distinction between concept and technique does not take a binary shape, but is instead structured as a play of mediation within the overall creative process. Concepts emerge as much from the space of mechanical repetition, which serves as a field of intimate communication and connection, as the latter is inevitably inflected by the rich context of cultural meaning.

This example indicates other ways of making sense of the relationship between conceptualisation and practical making within art; suggesting the need to re-evaluate the non-reflective character of making and to acknowledge the dynamic exchange between silence and eloquence within art. The relation between concept and fabrication is no longer cast in hierarchical or harshly binary terms – rather they appear congruent and enmeshed.

When fully developed, technique established the primacy in art of making, in contradistinction to a receptivity of production, however that is conceived. Technique is able to become the opponent of art insofar as art represents – at changing levels – the repressed unmakable. (Adorno, T. (2004) Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, London, p.78,)

Adorno delineates a crucial dilemma, which is precisely linked to the awkward relation of artistic making to broader regimes of industrial and post-industrial making. Technique is vital to art in terms of its integral relation to processes of making and yet is inevitably informed by these broader regimes. Art’s failure to reconcile technique and aesthetics, as well as to establish adequate frameworks for making, is closely related to its critical function, which cannot permit making to attain determinate, predictable shape – which has to highlight “the repressed unmakable”. In this manner the field of making becomes strangely alienated from art. Art loses means to conceive its status as an activity within space and time. The challenge is, perhaps, to craft tentative, self-critical forms of making that position the uncertainty of making as their explicit subject. However – and this is for me a crucial problem – the space of technique cuts against the grain of any sense of purely constituted aesthetic criticality. Technique, as a motion of repetition, as something logically conceived but depending upon non-reflective manual, mechanical or electronic agency, can never be drawn entirely to the side of a conceptually-grounded aesthetics. It is worth recalling that the ancient Greeks positioned art as a form of techne, of artisinal making. The most complete break from this conception occurs in strands of avant-garde modernism that reconceive aesthetics not as a form of making but as a form of radical insight and critique. The problem here, for me, relates to the failure to acknowledge and sense the complex dialectical and intractable relation between the blindness of mechanism and the possibility of insight.

Technique is the definable figure of the enigma in artworks, at once rational and conceptless. (Adorno, T. (2004) Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, London, p.279)

[T]he political effectiveness of art ‘does not reside in transmitting messages’, but ‘in the first place consists of dispositions of bodies, the partitioning of singular spaces and times that define ways of being together or apart, in front or at the centre of, within or without, nearby or far away’ (Bourriaud, N. http://www.skor.nl/article-4416-nl.html?lang=en)

Bourriaud and Ranciere agree that art gains its political efficacy through its capacity to reconfigure the field of lived dispositions. Rather than just reflecting upon the world, art articulates and is enmeshed within regimes of spatio-temporal configuration. This suggests the need to consider not only the contours of the finished artistic work but also the space of artistic production and how it relates to other fields of labour and social organisation. If contemporary art, particularly visual art, tends to stress the conceptual character of art, questioning any sense of an intimate relation to medium and material, then how are we to conceive the time and space of artistic labour? Without wishing to return to some nostalgic vision of artisinal labour, we can still recognise the awkwardness of the current situation – the difficulty of positing recognisable spatial and temporal frameworks necessary to – and emerging from – artistic practice. In my view there is an urgent need to question the hierarchical division between dimensions of aesthetic conceptualisation and production, and to re-evaluate the nature of art-making. Rather than treating the latter as subordinate and notionally distinct from the proper space of (indeterminately positioned) conceptual-aesthetic production, we need to find means to think through the creative implications of evolving and implementing a process in space and time.

Stupid as a painter…
Marcel Duchamp

What makes the painter stupid? Perhaps it is not only the emphasis on seeing (‘retinal art’), but also upon making. Suspending the poetics of perceptual response and manual craft. Duchamp repositions the art work as a conceptually-configured, manufactured thing. In the figure of the ready-made, all nostalgia for human making is abandoned in preference for a poetics of montage and estrangement. Rather than emerging slowly from interaction with raw materials, the ready-made appears in an instant. It represents a sudden selection from the material flux and banality of already manufactured things and an equally sudden work of perverse recontextualisation. A strange conjunction emerges here between the mechanical (non-reflective) processes of industrial manufacturing and the reflective, poetics of the ready-made. Both eliminate the temporal dimension of artisinal labour.

Loom explores aspects of recursive geometric subdivision. Simple shapes are subdivided into further smaller shapes (typically triangles or quadrangles). Applied many times over, complex patterns and textures emerge.  Rather than positioning the computer as a generative creative agent, computational processes serve as mechanical means for weaving virtual cloth from simple algorithmic patterns. This is not to belittle the scope of computation, but to seek effective means to engage with its genuine power, which is for me linked to the mystery of its dumb operation – its strange invisible labour. The computer is bound by regimes of instructional necessity, however the scale and speed of its processes suggest an uncanny sense of autonomy. The paradox of computational labour is closely related to the aesthetic potential of geometric subdivision. The abstract conceptual schema – the subdivision algorithm – is never sufficient on its own. It has to be played out on a surface. It has to pass from consciousness to the unconsciousness of iterative procedure. It is precisely in the tension between mathematical clarity and repetitive, unreflective drawn performance that the terrain of geometric finitude begins to shimmer.

Art is bound by a paradox. At one level it resists taking definitive shape in space and time. Stepping outside the boundaries of ordinary, prosaic systems of understanding, action and interaction, art suggests a realm of alternative possibility. But at the same time it must inevitably take distinct cultural form in order to appear – to attain identifiable shape. Aspects of space and time are reworked then within a context that itself represents a conventional organisation of space and time. To further complicate matters, art’s reworking of space and time involves, in equal measures, conceiving the new and reshaping tradition within the context of the present. That is, art facilitates continuity as much as it does transformation. It mediates between these contrary tendencies, enabling their dialogue and mutual imbrication.

The question for me is how the work of art-making can be conceived within this paradoxical space? If it is positioned as straightforward labour then surely this undermines its capacity to unsettle the spatio-temporal organisation of ordinary work? But perhaps there is less a need to avoid the notion of labour altogether than to intimately, materially rethink it – to tease out dimensions of iteration and alterity that unsettle its social meaning. In this case it may useful to consider not only human labour but also the labour of things, of automated processes. Because if labour reduces human beings to mere instruments then it is possibly within the alienated space of the instrumental that another thinking, another order of experience, another push, pull and play of motion may emerge. But of course this is also to risk passing beyond the safety of art’s reflective return. Determining the nature of artistic labour differently may fundamentally affect the conception – and conceptual sway – of art.

In 1995 a group of SIGGRAPH artists formed an informal group, the Algorists. One of their members, Jean-Pierre Hebert, coined the term “algorist” to describe artists who wrote their own algorithms to produce their creative work. The members worked with computer algorithms – writing code to produce typically print-based computer graphic work – but they were keen to acknowledge that algorithmic composition has a long cultural heritage. It is evident, for instance, in the combinatory systems of Raymond Llull (1232-1315) and Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), the proto-computing machines of Gottfied Leibniz (1646-1716), the mathematically guided compositions of Johan Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the permutative poetry of Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), the formal constraints of the Ou Li Po (founded in 1960), and the rule-based conceptual art work of Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). It would be easy, furthermore, to describe a much wider context, pointing to all manner of cultural practices that are based on clearly articulated procedures. Although I think this effort to trace wider associations is valuable, it is worth noting some key and closely interrelated features that characterise formal computational algorithmic practice:

1. All terms must be amenable to mathematical representation and processing.
2. Algorithms are composed in formal languages which mediate between concept and electronic process.
3. The emphasis is upon defining generic algorithms, conceiving procedures in the most abstract terms.
4. Computational algorism occurs in a restricted space. It is circumscribed materially and symbolically.
5. Processes proceed in an automatic, necessary fashion.

I mention these features less to neatly distinguish computer-based algorithmic practice from the wider algorithmic context than to resist any temptation to regard computational algorism as the logical summit of the overall field. The latter represents a highly delineated space that does well to think through the implications of its limitations, which represent both dimensions of possibility and dimensions – possibly – to be overcome.

An image from Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650) depicts an automatic music machine, a kind of hydraulic organ. The notes are linked to a geared cylinder that is powered via a spinning water wheel. There are three miniature allegorical scenes on the top of the machine, each involving kinetic motion and one or more automatons. At the right a group of figures spin in a circle beneath a large skeleton. Composed as a kind of Dance of Death, the scene suggests a link between the circular motion of the cylinder and the overall fatal structure of human existence. In the middle a seated child holds a book and what appers to be a pen. The child would seem to write in the book (perhaps adding a note to a musical score) each time a key is automatically depressed. This suggests an uncanny affinity between human creative labour and the magnetic pull of the mathematically configured cosmos (which takes analogous shape in the precisely constructed machine). Finally, at the far left is a group of blacksmiths working at a forge. This is a reference to the story of how the Greek philosopher, Pythagorus, learned the rules of musical pitch by listening to the hammering of blacksmiths. This scene establishes a relation between the origins of mathematically-guided musical understanding and the advanced musical knowledge that underpins the construction of the current instrument. Additionally, the scene functions as an analogue for the invisible, mechanical labour of the machine. The various scenes work together to provide metaphors for a curious space of operation. They provide playful, allegorical vehicles for grasping the function and conceptual universe of the device. They manifest that alongside the causal relation between water, gears, cogs and musical notes there is a related need to convey the philosophical and affective imaginary that informs its construction.

The images in my Loom exhibition attempt something similar. Finely resolved geometric subdivision works to provide a non-technical means of conveying the alien space and time of computation. My images provide a means of figuring the contours of an elusive field of logical process and electronic labour.

I had always accepted the conventional view that Marx transformed Hegel’s abstract philosophical conception of human progress into a radical instrument of social critique. Marx famously took dialectical idealism and shaped it into dialectical materialism. Yet recently I came across Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (1972) which examines key writings of Hegel, System der Sittlichkeit and the Realphilosophie, that were unknown to Marx and only published (in their entirety) in the early 20th century. Avineri argues that in these works Hegel anticipates much of Marx’s critique of capitalist forms of production, except that Hegel draws a fundamentally different conclusion. Rather than imagining that productive relations can be reconstructed to fulfill real human needs, Hegel views inequitable social relations as inextricably linked to the productive forms characteristic of industrial modernity. My aim here is to briefly summarise Avineri’s account of Hegel’s argument. My specific interest is in Hegel’s conception of labour and its problematic doubling in mechanical labour.

Throughout his philosophy, from his analysis of the most metaphysical concepts (being, nothing, becoming) to his analysis of the most practical features of ordinary social existence (property, labour, money), Hegel adopts a consistent abstract dialectical schema: something discovers its other and, not content with this separation, finds means of subsuming the other within itself, only then to discover a further dimension of otherness and a consequent need for yet another motion of mediation and subsumption (aufhebung). This schema informs not only dialectical metaphysics, in which undifferentiated chaos leads through many generations of mediation to the nuanced differentiation of Absolute Mind, but also a dynamic, dialectical conception of human historical-anthropological development, in which human history begins with the struggle with nature and gradually becomes increasingly distant from nature as more complex social forms emerge.

So from Hegel’s standpoint human labour emerges logically from something more basic. A paradigmatic form of pre-human dialectical interaction is animal hunger. The (carnivorous) animal discovers its other (prey), devouring it in order to take the other into itself and make itself stronger. Avineri describes how Hegel begins with this appetitive impulse. Humans, as animals, directly consume natural things, overcoming an aspect of separation, but at the same time destroying the object that gives them satisfaction. For this reason this process ends up not being entirely satisfying. As Avineri puts it: “[It] is purely sensuous and negative. It is limited by a particular object and cannot be generalised. The consciousness of separation remains after each individual act of subsumption.” The next dialectical step then is to respond more positively to nature – to make something, to fashion, for instance, hand made goods of various kinds. This provides the basis for property.

It is with advent of property, Hegel argues, that social relations come into play. Property is only property when another person and other people recognise that the thing produced is owned by someone. Avineri writes, “property pertains to the person as recognised by others, it can never be an intrinsic quality of the individual prior to its recognition by others.” In this respect, Avineri recognises a clear distinction between Hegel’s concept of property and the view proposed within classical political economy. While the later suggests that property has its basis in individual possession (brute power), Hegel regards it as “premised on social consensus”.

It as at this point – in the manifestation and social evaluation of property – that labour comes into play. According to Hegel, labour provides the rational and ethical basis for property. It is the socially legible process through which property is produced. As instrumentally geared action, it represents a sublimation of immediate satisfaction towards a more general good – the construction of a useful or beautiful thing. Labour represents the mechanism and material form of rational endeavour. This not only shapes a domain of reconciliation between subject and object; it also establishes “the univeral link among men.” Labour constitutes a field of mutual, socially geared recognition. However, alongside the postive potential for constructive realisation and social interaction, Avineri stresses that Hegel also perceives a downside; labour, particularly in modern industrial society, is a vehicle for alienation. The positive and the negative implications of labour are in fact inextricably linked. In becoming social (and economic), in shifting from the production of individual property towards the production of general commodities, labour grows increasingly distant from any space of immediate concrete realisation or exchange. Endlessly abstracted and endlessly deferring immediate gratification, concrete labour becomes increasingly decoupled from human scales of meaningful action. The rise of industrial manufacturing processes – of machine labour and of human labour rendered machinic – only exacerbates this sense of alienation.

The labour of the machine is positioned then as emblematic of the modern alienation of labour: “[the worker] becomes through the work of the machine more and more machine-like, dull, spiritless. The spiritual element, the self-conscious plenitude of life, becomes as empty activity.” The key features that Hegel associates with machine labour are fragmentation, abstraction and inanimate action (Hegel speaks of a “life of death moving within itself”). The latter, despite its plainly human, rational origin, comes to be likened to the spiritually void mechanisms of nature:

because labour is wholly quantitative, without variety…something completely external…It only depends upon it to find an equally dead principle of movement for it, a self-differentiating power of nature, like the movement of water, of the wind, of steam, etc., and the instrument turns into a machine.

Hegel’s critique retains its relevance and force. If I wish to suggest other ways of thinking of machine labour, it is not in order to deny the real social implications of industrialisation, and of industrial manufacturing methods particularly. But the labour that concerns me appears differently. My relation to the machine dimension of labour is privileged. My view is abstract, but not altogether fragmented. I deliberately write the entire graphics engine from scratch (here obviously subscribing to Hegel’s preference for holistic labour). The doubling of manual labour in machinic drawing processes does not, however, for me produce a sense of uncanny disturbance. The motion of code bears an intimate relation to my programming activity – to my algorithms. The space of machine labour, however difficult to perceive, feels like a motion of exchange and proximity.

Given Hegel’s conception of labour as a human and socially-inclined manifestation of reason, how can machine operations be regarded as a form of labour? They appear instead as a form of dumb, unreflective functioning. The machine, for instance, can have no coherent sense of denying its immediate or particular needs in pursuit of some greater goal. It simply performs whatever task it is given without any scope for self-awareness – for the integral self-consciousness that would provide a basis for the anticipation of alternative possibilities.

There are two problems with this anthropomorphic conception of labour. Firstly, it neglects that labour already, at the outset, represents a form of alienation. It introduces a gap between the immediate fulfillment of needs and longer term, more abstractly conceived, interests. In Hegel’s terms this gap is shaped by the impulse towards rational endeavour. It is clear, however, that, while a defining characteristic of the human, reason also indicates a splitting away from the state of immediate, animal being. The human is precisely constituted by this necessary separation. Labour – human labour – in its dimension of stoic self-abnegation is a manifestation of this split. In this sense the separation of the machine – the dull, dead, spiritually vacuous motion of its instrumental functioning – is merely an exacerbation or materialisation of a tendency that will always have been ‘intrinsically human’. In this sense, the alienation of the machine is implicit within the conception of rational labour. The second problem with restricting labour to a narrowly conceived field of rational human agency is that it neglects the unreflective dimension of labour, or, more precisely, the intimate dialogue between systems of abstraction, human patterns of action and modes of unreflective mechanical agency. The rhythms, cycles and algorithmic patterns of labour broach relations that extend beyond the human as such.

In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. ¹

Sol LeWitt famously insists upon the possibility of a purely conceptual form of art. He distinguishes a space of conceptual making that is distinct from that of practical making. This represents a rejection of Clement Greenberg’s formalist conception of modern art, which insists that art has its basis in the distinct formal properties of specific physical art media. It is also a rejection of an associated notion of art making founded on values of perceptual sensibility and subjective expression. The conceptual idea is positioned as a machine that not only determines the space of execution – of material making – but also reconstitutes the nature of artistic creation as “emotionally dry” (and yet “not theoretical” ) ². The nature of this conceptual machinery is difficult to pin down precisely. At one level it appears rarefied and procedural, at another it is cast as “intuitive” and “purposeless” ³. In this sense, LeWitt’s notion of conceptual art retains aspects of formalism within the alien, awkwardly conceived space of the conceptual.

While keeping in mind that “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) represents a specific historical response to the dilemmas of formalist modernism and that LeWitt himself deliberately qualifies its general relevance ⁴, it nonetheless has proved very influential in terms of conceiving the conceptual nature of art. For my purposes, within the specific context of software art practice, it provides a standard means of distinguishing between the abstract-conceptual space of software programming and that of perceptible program output. For example, in his Whitney Museum project, Software Structures, Casey Reas explicitly places Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings as the model for his practice, enabling him to distinguish between the coding imaginary and the visual-perceptual character of any particular code-drawing instance.

There is a complete separation of the concept of the work from its perceptual manifestation. The relation between LeWitt and his draftsperson is often compared to the relation between a composer and performer , but I think it’s also valid to look at the comparison between a programmer and the entity of execution. ⁵

What interests me is the neatness of this split, the clarity of this distinction between the conceptual and the manifest. However, it quickly becomes evident that the split is more complex than a division between two orders of being. Instead a complex chain of mediation is evident. Reas, for instance, insists upon an intuitive conceptual stage prior to the work of software writing. He argues that “[t]he work develops in the vague domain of image and then matures in the more defined structures of natural language before any thought is given to a specific machine implementation.” ⁶ The stage of machine execution can also be distinguished from that of the final result – the manifest image-instance. Leaving aside the transition to natural language, we have then a minimum of four stages:

1. conceptual image
2. conceptual expression (as a set of definite written procedures)
3. machine execution
4. manifest image instance

My interest is in questioning the notional integrity, linear structure and implicit hierarchy evident in this model. Note first the paradox that the primary scene of intuitive conceptualisation is conceived in terms of the final stage of the manifest image. This seems to provide a means of preserving an intimate and properly human realm of creative conceptualisation. Its validity is established in terms of its isomorphism to the self-evident character of perceptual manifestation. Whereas LeWitt permits ambivalence, even contradiction, effectively blurring the boundaries between the intuitive and the machinic, Reas firmly distinguishes between the two. The domain of conceptual expression, of software programming is positioned as a form of alienation from intuitive conceptualisation. It manifests the underlying concept in a language that is itself, despite its abstraction, properly separate from the inner-sanctum of the conceptual. Examined closely, it is evident that the overall division between the conceptual and the manifest functions throughout, with the former privileged as long, rather peculiarly, as it takes shape as the latter.

If anything, it is the middle two steps that appear devalued, appearing both insufficiently conceptual and insufficiently manifest. It is interesting here to indicate how LeWitt’s notion of the relation between conceptualisation and making seems to change in his subsequent “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969). If “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” provocatively renders the process of practical art-making as entirely secondary and unimportant, “Sentences on Conceptual Art” allows a more nuanced and equal relationship.

28 – Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29 – The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.⁷

In these later statements LeWitt emphasises the need then to submit to the “blindness” of process ⁸. The procedural character of making is what allows the shift beyond subjective expression. It also produces “side effects” that extend creative-conceptual trajectories beyond their anticipated outcomes, opening up new conceptual possibilities⁹. It is precisely the machinic (procedural) character of the concept that allows it to engage machinic dimensions of practice. This is to suggest that the intimacy of the conceptual is immediately affected by non-subjective forces. This is the means by which it escapes expressive solipsism. Its space of intuition is irreducibly related to the blindness of process, the alterity of making.