Towards the Corruption of Computer Art

If, as the cultural Cold War demonstrated, merely being efficient is enough to align oneself with those that one opposes, then perhaps we can still be saved by our inefficiency. When Philippine contemporary art was first confronted with computer art in 1984 and none of its infallible interpreters picked up, we can say that at least they managed to spare art from further disembowelment. Such an encounter was an exhibition called “Wege zur Computerkunst” (Towards Computer Art).

“Wege zur Computerkunst” was perhaps the first public presentation of computer art within an institutional context in the Philippines. This was held in 1984 at the now defunct Heritage Art Center. “Wege zur Computerkunst” presented to the Philippine art audience works by mostly German artists hatched in the late sixties. The exhibition and the catalogue for the exhibition were compiled by German computer artist Herbert W. Franke.

Seven years later computer art produced by Filipino artists made an entry into the contemporary art scene. Printmaker Lenore R.S. Lim included computer photoetched prints in an exhibition at the Ayala Museum in 1991 and 1993. In 1993, social realist painter and printmaker Alfredo Manrique included a series of laser prints in an exhibition organized by the Printmakers Association of the Philippines at the Cultural Center. That same year, the University of San Carlos in Cebu City opened an art gallery on the Internet – a display of photos of paintings.

Early computer art in the Philippines remained within the criteria of modern and contemporary Philippine art – as an accessory to painting, printmaking and the (virtualized) art gallery. It wasn’t an autonomous technology-based artistic practice – and there was never an incentive for computer art to be so. This is not surprising because the archaic, conservative and aristocratic elites of Philippine art have neutralized all signs of disjuncture in artistic debate and discussion in the service of the global art establishment upon which they acquire their privilege as willing colonials. This, of course, is not endemic to the Philippines but is rather a global phenomenon, because the establishment wherever it is located in the world will always resist the autonomous – their tastes and pursuits will always be for the permanent, reassuring and safe. This is why I often believe that the earliest computer art communities in the Philippines were actually the first Bulletin Board Systems whose dissident system operators have always considered the computer as a dynamic social medium rather than a static image-making tool.

The purveyors of computer art in “Wege zur Computerkunst” laid down three reasons for the resistance to computer art, and by extension, three reasons why both the dominant art and the commercial art establishment are predisposed to curtail the autonomy of computer art:

First, “the rational aesthetics that could serve as a theoretical basis is only in the developmental stage; this applies especially to cybernetic aesthetics which is not based on philosophical principles but on human perceptions, thought and behavior;

Second, “equipment is lacking for the kind of visual output that would satisfy aesthetic standards. All equipment heretofore used for computer graphics was actually constructed for technical purposes;

And third, “computer art is hard to place within any traditional aesthetic framework. It has to overcome misconceptions and emotional resistance. For these reasons computer art will need a long time – probably decades – to reach the point where it can realize its full potential. It would thus be wrong to dismiss it as merely another ephemeral, modish trend.”

Although the application of machinery for visual data processing puts emphasis on a constructivist agenda, dominant art ideology gave preference to form rather than process: the use of computers for building aesthetic structures to create remarkable visual effects. In the Philippines, as in the dominant Euro-American global art establishments, it was via the sublime and dazzling digital image that aesthetic standards are satisfied. Computer art had to refashion itself, especially beginning in the md-80s when the machines became consumables, to fit within the traditional aesthetic framework, and many of its pimps and patrons proclaimed a revolution in art.

In the catalogue essay for “Wege zur Computerkunst”, one can see how computer art, as envisioned by its pioneers in the ‘60s, predicted its own corruption and disfigurement:

“The procedure is always the same: a program is written which instructs the computer to execute certain logical or mathematical catenations. This in itself is worth noting: it assumes the ability to understand the formal and quantitative structure of the desired aesthetic creation, be it graphic design, poem or a piece of music. If this succeeds, the programming languages provide a kind of universal notation.”

By its own assumptions, computer art failed to articulate relationships between process and form, because during the early periods when it was quite unclear whether or not the procedures described above could be considered art, technical developments in computers went on, quite unconcerned about such theoretical questions. It was left to the archaic art historians, their “mother goose and peter pan executives,” to monopolize the moral and cultural resource of computer art.

Perhaps contemporary art and the global art establishment have little interest in understanding or investigating the meaning and re(new)ed significance of process inasmuch as it has generated enough dogma with its binarism of concept and object.

While on an artist’s residency in Switzerland, I delivered a presentation of various computer and electronic art projects from Asia. A Polish artist, who was also artist-in-residence during the same period, criticized a digital media installation I organized with two Filipino artists in 2002. The project was called “Artifact Reassembly” and it revolved around the process of unearthing past material culture through the reconstruction of an archaeological site – but within the framework of burying present tangible and intangible culture for the reassembly of the archaeological future. The criticism was that the project was “too didactic.” Further, he flattened the activity of reconstruction as a “maquette.” And because his judgment was based solely on a visual documentation and presentation, it proved difficult to understand the significance of conceptual context, let alone process.

In the current dominant westernized culture that privileges the visual, it has been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We have also been warned that there might be more to see than to believe. However, many have been educated to abandon their calling for critical thought and dispense with the ability to think with their eyes.

If computer art and its remaining intellectuals and practitioners have to struggle with an establishment that interprets solely on what it sees, and demands (as true bourgeoisies and leisure class parasites) for the assurance of a safe and static medium, then the need to articulate alternative ways to survive is necessary which in turn enhances the value of struggle.

“The role of the academic system in supporting the spread of these conceptual systems must also be obvious to even the most casual observer. Academically trained theorists increasingly have a stranglehold on the art education, presentation and funding system -and thus ultimately on the production system. As far as I can see, the academic theorists still prefer to focus on the computer as a tool for "communication" (and the propagation of propaganda) rather than as a simulation machine which can critically model various social processes. The commercial and political influence of the (basically static) Internet remains the main academic focus – while the implications of the dynamic "simulation" (in game-playing and the socio-political-economic modeling process – linking games and scientific simulation to ancient artistic ontological and divinatory traditions) seems largely ignored.”

Computer art and especially “digital art” was declared revolutionary at that moment when it became vogue for artists to produce work that either satisfied or titillated the fine tastes of the Euro-American culturati: crisp, intriguing and tantalizing digital images, whether via PhotoShop or C++, for display and appreciation of both the contemporary art world and the commercial establishment. The high price paid for such acceptance is the confinement of the digital computer to an artistic tool that privileged form over process; the digital artists demonstrating their imaging, performative and programming prowess at the abandonment of their calling as intellectuals capable of critical thought.

This is the heritage from our concept of modernism – a game of the pupil challenging his mentor in the claim for Euro-American form and style: “the Neo-Realists “shattered [Manila’s] calm artistic atmosphere” by taking modernismo much further than Victorio C. Edades did before the war,” and “one reason a postwar generation turned to modernism was the need to break with the genteel tradition of Fernando Amorsolo that had long dominated the art scene … [and] another reason was Life magazine.”

True to the tradition of the apprentice challenging the master, literature in the recent rise of digital art is much worse: out of the bon vivant ignorance of its promoters, artists are eulogized for having “discovered the wonders of Photoshop.” In numerous and more recent instances, the digital artists themselves (and their congregations) court their own trivialization and commercial exploitation, for example in the pioneering eArt Philippines “Nude Photo Session,” which set a Philippine landmark and gravestone of Excellence in Digital Art:

“Remarkable visual artworks are often triggered by the subject, issues or themes chosen by each artist and the styles by which they are explored, so having a single subject like a nude model brought a challenge to eArt members participating in this year’s 1st Digital Art Excellence Awards. As soon as the model bares herself, each eArtist also bares their soul, demonstrating a broad spectrum of styles and techniques in capturing each model's pose.”

It is in that distance by which artists have managed to wrestle art from the dynamic systems of social organization in connivance with or subservience to their interpreters, that we can measure how much the contemporary art world and its now ubiquitous stable of digital artists continue to serve a country that survives miserably in an economic, social and intellectual black hole.

Art in the Service of (Booty) Capitalism

In late 2002, I was invited by Filipino visual artist and curator Imelda Cajipe-Endaya to participate as an artist in the third phase of the national traveling exhibition called “Sungdu-an” (Confluence). “Sungdu-an” was conceived in 1995 and is a flagship project of the Committee on Visual Arts (CVA) of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the main governmental body in charge of cultural affairs. As a national project, “Sungdu-an” has become a gathering of artists from all over the country and a leading venue where local artists, whether upcoming or established, can present thought-provoking visual artworks.

Being a resident of Metropolitan Manila, it was under “Sungdu-an National Capital Region (NCR)” that I presented my work. The theme of “Sungdu-an NCR 3” was “Making the Local.” According to its organizers, “Making the Local” brings together the different aspects of Philippine social realities that make up the artists’ works. The word “making” implies that art is dynamic and contextual, and by focusing on “local, the Sungdu-an organizers sought to question the dichotomy between “local” and “global” and attempt to rescue the connotations of “local” with an interval between poor and mediocre quality.

According to “Sungdu-an NCR 3” curator Cajipe-Endaya, the exhibition is anchored on the need to re-examine the prevailing argument that in the globalized universe, nation is a myth, and that all nations are imagined communities. In Philippine Realpolitik, nation is claimed by all—oppressive regimes, bureaucratic corruptors, people power movements, populist rebellions, fissured revolution, separatist movements, terrorisms. Yet transcending these is nation as a politico-conceptual pivot, and in the interstices of this complicated site—artists’ studios, hard disks, memory sticks, compact disks, alternative spaces, crafting communities, protest movement, street rallies, artistic collaboratives, and the gallery, —we find among Manila’s emerging artists those using history, race memory, and cultural identity as platform for visual articulation, some consciously, others subconsciously, thus serving the cause of empowering disempowered Filipinos in our increasingly globalized milieu. Situated within the complexities of NCR beyond its demographic locus, “Sungdu-an” focuses on how individual artists and art collectives struggle to rediscover the true kernel of the Filipino self—the light that awakens a strong sense of community—thus multiplying and binding selves and communities into a nation which otherwise is fast disappearing both in realpolitik and in the globalization’s virtual realm.

Basically, “Sungdu-an” was a display of how contemporary art and artists in the Philippines were supposedly crucial to social change.

In August 2003, I curated an exhibition called “Decode” for the Ateneo Art Gallery. While I was busy as a curator for this “new media” exhibition, my work as an artist was being presented at the Pasig City Museum for “Sungdu-an” which also opened in August 2003. The curatorial framework for “Decode” was an investigation of the conceptual and historical continuity between Philippine post-war art and Philippine “new media” art. I also wanted to make clear the corruption in this continuity by making reference to the exploitation of artists enamored by the wonders of their commercial digital tools. In hindsight, my participation in “Sungdu-an” also demonstrated how I compromised myself and allowed myself to be corrupted by the institutions of Philippine contemporary art: I reconstructed my work to fit within the antiquated “display cases” of museums, and within this context I mistakenly believed that art was a tool for social change.

The art critic Eric Florentino wrote in his “COW Essay”:

“Sungdu-an NCR 3 is yet another castle we build on sand. Admittedly, its curator is nurturing and steadfast, and yes, her artists are competent and reliable. But this is irrelevant, because I’m not questioning their pedigrees anyway. What I am questioning is the Philippine viability of endeavors like this, as well as our motives for launching/sustaining them in the first place. For the infrastructure supporting Meps (Imelda Cajipe-Endaya) and her artists is crumbling, and the battleground is shifting under their very noses. There is a clear and present danger that they—who are among our best people today—will merely become fodder for an obsolete cannon we insistently and sloppily aim at the wrong target. And this is demoralizing. For if this is how thoughtlessly the art community deploys the best of us, how else will it treat the rest of us?”

Florentino brazenly attacks the structural problems of the official cultural institutions and their disregard for cultural work, from “some idiot from the Department of Budget and Management [saying] that artists aren’t worth much and someone from the NCCA believed her”, to “the NCCA’s charter [that] is vague concerning honoraria, and some Project Development Officers now interpret this to allow no honoraria for cultural workers at all.” Underlying these symptoms are official corruption and capital flight, citing official corruption at 60% of current fund injection, and the boom in the luxury-goods market despite the economic slump (“the presidents of Piaget and Rado both defied a terrorism-related international travel ban to the Philippines, just to launch their new collections of luxury watches, even though their embassies were closed. And Bulgari is opening another store by yearend”). And so Florentino asks, why, for starters, don’t our cultural institutions get the government to see art as a hedge against capital flight, calling for a closer attention to the psychology of art acquisition? Florentino still believes in the art market, that contrary to artworld thought, there is still much loose money going around – it’s just not going to the arts and so the community is starving needlessly.

On a more fundamental level, Florentino was asking that there be a change in the source and nature of wealth.

Indeed, what is the use in the grand national tour and display of patriotism through the arts, when the entire official structure is corrupt, when we can’t balance economic and national security, and when nationalism is about artistic stunts and noise barrages against a globalization we never really understood?

“We bring into “Sungdu-an” the manifold voices of new art and current art making within the purview of nationalism” is the high hope of the government flagship project. “Sungdu-an” demanded a tall order while the official cultural institutions manufactured their display without constructing a support structure because “artists aren’t worth much anyway.” If the selected artists in “Sungdu-an” worked in the political and sought to challenge dominant institutions, then why are they so grateful for being selected to display their wares through an archaic official cultural institution? Why are the attacks being made within the compliance and ridicule of the institutions themselves?

Florentino prescribes:

“If we can’t give these artists the support that they need to “make a difference,” then the humane thing to do is to just send them home, like leukemia victims too late for chemotherapy, to enjoy the rest of their artistic careers in complacency and oblivion, wallowing in the contentment of cows.”

Evidently, contemporary Philippine visual art operates within the whims of the institutions of cultural power and can neither oppose nor articulate alternatives to the existing capitalist socioeconomic order. At its best, art could only make visible some vague commentaries or cynical performances. Perhaps, as Florentino hopes, at least a macroeconomic apologia for art patronage could be made, but if it were to be made within the unreformed official cultural institutions themselves, then the erosion of intellectual and cultural life would have been complete; the struggle would have been finished. Perhaps it is indeed almost finished – and without even such an apologia to speak of – because “Sungdu-an” did manage to collar the country’s best and most dissident artists without struggle or a whimper, all of us happily caged in the prestige of the “museumified” cultural institutions. It was under the banner of nationalism that we were gathered to display thanks to the orchestration of a cultural institution that practices the most nebulous and self-destructive forms of nationalism.

So I would go further with Florentino’s prescription – assuming that neither a radical change in our official institutions nor an economic ascent can transpire within our lifetimes, we must learn to stray away from home where we can question our values on national emergence without being nailed to the cross and happily displayed in a museum. But even then, there are numerous places away from home that are not much different – the Philippines being an appendage of a dominant Euro-American cultural ideology that thrives on careerism and a manufactured individual freedom under capitalism. So those who stray must be prepared to deny their desires.

The Art of the Thinking and Feeling Human

Through the “Decode” exhibition at the Ateneo Art Gallery in Manila which I curated in 2003, I encountered with an art historical impotence which I self-deceptively crafted into a mediascape of modernism ergo progress:

“DECODE is a boldly speculative and experimental exhibition. The works are diverse, from sculpture to software, and the exhibition space enfolds beyond the gallery, into the Internet. Such openness and hybridism enforce the museum’s unyielding commitment to engage distances between tradition and innovation, between human and technological complexity, between art and life media. In DECODE, the introduction of new media, not only side by side but in direct dialogue with the Ateneo Art Gallery’s permanent collection of modern Philippine art, sets the stage for an interpretive framework for an art form that is always in flux. With new media in the cradle of modern art, critical insights and connections ignite; revealing how new media takes art in new directions.”

Nevertheless, the exhibition did allow me to place a veiled criticism of Philippine art within an historical and structural context. The springboard for the exhibition itself – modern art – proposes many disquieting clues on the paralysis and subservience of Philippine art history to the envisioning of a nationalism inspired by her imperialist masters and articulated by a choir of patronizing art historians.

When Philippine modern art sat next to computer art in the “Decode” exhibition, it highlighted the static reality of art’s allegiance to precious humanism and new modernisms – the old and predictable reactionaries to the ails of the technologizing world. The mantra was that the modern artist sought to present a new reality that emerged after the ravages of the Second World War, and in contemporary times, the new modern artist sought to liberate art from commercial media. This modern artist was yearning to be of service to a revolution, but because there is no real revolution in our socioeconomic life to speak of, we invent them. The task at hand is to question the values of our inventions by placing them within a critique of development and imperialism.

One hagiographic invention is that Philippine modern art is the art of becoming human. Another hagiographic invention is that artists can oppose globalization through performance art and nationalistic exhibitions. And to question the values of such inventions is to completely change our notions and expectations of art, the artistic community and social change.

The phenomena of the modern artist in the Philippines surfaced after the Second World War under the flag of the “Neo-Realists.” Such a phenomena is dramatized in the artist’s temperament and alertness to a new form of self-consciousness and subjectivity. That to be a thinking, feeling human is to be modern:

“What is this new experience of being a subject? It is to think as a human being. I am thinking as a human being when I go beyond calculation and representation. Neither the computer nor the animal thinks. What is unique to the thinking person? Feeling. Only feeling constitute what is unique to human being. Neither the animal nor the computer feels. Feeling presupposes that I feel not only the felt but the feeling itself - that I am aware that I am feeling it, that I am affected by it. And being affected demands that I express what I experience and how I experience it. Thus I also express the “I” who experiences. Only feeling allows me to think as a human being.”

The grandness of the humanization of a prosaic technological world is as infallible as the merits of ersatz nationalism. In a country made hungry by its colonial histories for the “rediscovery of the true kernel of the Filipino self” and the meaning and experience of becoming modern and human, it would be a sin to question all articulations that feed that hunger. The cultural agenda is to educate the masses who remain baffled and intimidated by Philippine modern abstract art, and to transpose that agenda in the current perceived urgency to humanize technological art. And because to be modern is to be a thinking and feeling human, the moral demand weighs greatly upon those who dare interrogate the absurdity of this illustrious modernity.

With its shared histories within American imperialism since the late nineteenth century, the post-war modernist movement in the Philippines could be more than the “creation of a new reality” that the Neo-Realists group trumpeted after the Second World War. If the modern artist has finally grasped that the task was no longer to re-present but to present an experience, we need to ask what kind of experience or “new reality” is being created, reflected or perceived. Under the influence of the philosophy of Heidegger’s logos, our art historians have raised the modern artist’s image to the text – that “a word or a name is not merely a superfluous label pasted on an already constituted object. The name shapes the reality. It “creates” or brings about the reality. With the pronouncing of the name, the reality comes to presence. In the same way, the modern painting makes us present to the unique reality experienced by the artist.” If this was true – that the modern artist supposedly found the means to get the viewer involved in the experience that the artist is participating – then we are given the challenge to question the validity of “reality.” But when art history has managed to cultivate the indomitable class of the modern artist, how could one dare question the reality presented by their interpretations of the expressions of such masters of Philippine art? Without discussion or debate, art successfully consolidated into an impotent tool of contemporary expression.

While European modernism began around the middle of the nineteenth century, art historians peg Philippine modernism with American post-war art. It was also during the post-war period that American world hegemony occurred as Europe continued to let go of her colonies and the social significance of the European avant-garde began to decline; the ‘center’ of western art began to move from Paris to New York. In this movement, the Philippines was subjected to the confluence of her two western colonizers: the rising orchestrated identity of America as the “land of the free” and the fragmented complexity of Europe as democrats and liberals laid claim to cultural and political power. But the emasculation of Philippine art from the modern era to the contemporary is due to its subservience to aestheticized politics and the dismemberment of its history from the history of social, economic and political struggle at the global scale. When artistic commentaries on U.S. Military Bases in the Philippines are confined to exposing abuse through disturbing images, the exposure can be as safe as a store display window when artists acting as “free” intellectuals (rather than paid propagandists) served the Cold War politics which placed the U.S. Military Bases at the hems of the Iron Curtain. How can Philippine art and nationalism not aspire to align with the most powerful state (and thus the most powerful culture) in the world? Wasn’t it through American intellectual culture and academism that we forged our visions of nationalism, modernism and humanism into dogma?

The lesson is to beware of art historical eulogies and rhetorics that gloss over the complex histories within which we frame the roles and relevance of our artistic practices. If our art historians daresay that “art, like philosophy and poetry, is not a luxury,” then perhaps it would be more urgent to say so not within the pompous modernist “enterprise of becoming human” – but within the reality that human life is a social life infiltrated by conflicting interests, inequalities and imperialism.

Can contemporary Philippine art still undergo a radical reformation when “it is precisely analysis that becomes sclerotic when histories of ideas are obscured – indeed obscured in masterful ways by and with art, wherever art is regarded, as it is in the mainstream of Philippine letters throughout the 20th century, as quasi-divine act”?

The Cultural Struggle of Art and Technology in Context

Art, like technology, is contextual. Artists and their works can be found in many organizational contexts, and in any organizational context, art as social activity is governed by the theories and practices of development. Historically, the ideological position of art has been deployed in the service of the power structures it sought to oppose, and the very implementation of development has corrupted into strategic exploitation and under-development.

Artists need to recoup their roles as intellectuals through an autonomous practice and contemplation within the context of economic and cultural imperialism. Art must revive the struggle for ideological hegemony between the egalitarian and the aristocratic interests, not by noise barrages or placards, but by an auto-critique that is grounded on historical and structural contexts. Art must re-examine and completely change its role and meaning within a critique of development itself. So if one should speak of a “regeneration of digital art,” then one should at least find out what factors contributed to its decline as a potent social force for development in the first place. But the old “art and society” sloganeering is not enough – it is too easy, too artsy and at this point in the breakdown of artistic autonomy, too bourgeoisie.

“The challenge, in opposition to these specious abstracting procedures, was to formulate ways of seeing art itself as fundamentally social: its character neither "caused" nor "determined" ultimately by other systems but distinct and affective within the network of systems constituting "the relationships between elements in a whole way of life."

From periods of industrialization to the more dramatic “digital revolution” in an “information age”, there have been prophetic pronouncements of the change in our very notions of art. Such change was deemed to be profound because the “ancient craft of the Beautiful” were supposedly forged “in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours.” But the fatal expectation is that when our great innovations transform the entire technique of the arts, artistic invention itself would be affected – “the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating” – all these great innovations would supposedly change the nature of art.

And artists and their historians march into this euphoria of freedom under capitalism – unaware of the dangers of the relegation of artistic autonomy to the tastes and aesthetics of our eternal exploiters whose “power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours” (so we thought).

If artists can be deployed as Cold War intellectuals to present a convincing image of the U.S. as a free society as opposed to the regimented communist bloc, and if the egalitarian imperatives in art and politics can be deployed for conservative, aristocratic ends, then artists have lost control of managing let alone recognizing the discrepancies between their ideological positions and their artistic practice. While our art historians declare that Philippine post-war modern art is the art of becoming human, Philippine post-war economic development is the development of extreme poverty and structural inequality. If this is not apparent then it is because aesthetics has been neutralized by the dominant art establishment into a tool for appreciating beauty. But:

“Aesthetics is not about academic rules of superficial beauty, it is about the dynamic balance between apparently opposing forces. It is about the balance between the personal and the impersonal, the unique and the universal, chaos and order, intuition and rationality... It may even be worthwhile to consider the relationship between Aesthetics and Ethics… Art too is not about one thing but has many aspects, the material, the visual, the mental, the unique, the common, the individual, the social, the practical, the visionary and maybe even the financial.”

Situating such re-conceptualization of aesthetics within the dynamics of international imperialism, it is perhaps comforting and certainly ironical, that with the phenomenal physical and mental diasporas of the Filipino people, a redeeming synthesis may yet be claimed. Because in an ontological warfare and a rising concern for global security, those artists whose claim for (cross) cultural formation (and deformation) is all the more pronounced have become important global economic and cultural players. A culture that has learned to invent and re-invent itself in response to its real, imagined, virtualized and dislocated milieu has the advantage “in the goals and strategies of both new and old actors in the global arena, and in unprecedented connections among individuals around the planet.” Such balancing acts amidst accumulated post- and neo-colonial culture and identity may be deployed to “establish lines of communication among antagonistic parties, before, during and after conflicts” – but bearing in mind that where there is great hope of communication and understanding in a terrorized and insecure world, there is also great incentive for official actors to exploit channels of communication.

If artists allow aesthetics to remain within the confines of the “ancient craft of the Beautiful” or the rules of taste, then no significant analytical position within the arts as a social force will ever emerge. In a political economy of development, aesthetics is a critical mode of inquiry into the various forms of social and economic inequality that are embedded with multiple causality. To challenge the proclaimed birthright of aesthetics and art history as a history of styles is to heretically mis-read the litanies of our interpreters – from the Spanish chroniclers to their present day parrots.

A Second Look at “Creative Industries” and Development

In current global developments, artists are once again targeted not only as “free” intellectuals but this time as paid fodders for the commercially-driven canons of the latest vogue of “creative industries.” For the “developing world”, it pays to be meticulous of development and especially education, particularly in the politics of education and development where beggars cannot be allowed to become choosers.

So before our most technologically astute artists engage in the promising enterprise of the new “creative industries”, we must question the models of these ventures within the dynamics of economic and cultural imperialism.

Which political interests are motivating aid and investment in the “creative industries” in the name of empowering artists and contributing to national development? Should we allow ourselves to be led to believe that disembodied knowledge and apolitical structures are the bases of ensuring independent and appropriate development?

“In technological determinism, research and development have been assumed as self-generating. The new technologies are invented as it were in an independent sphere, and then create new societies or new human conditions. The view of symptomatic technology, similarly, assumes that research and development are self-generating, but in a more marginal way. What is discovered in the margin is then taken up and used.... These positions are so deeply established, in modern social thought, that it is very difficult to think beyond them.”

But we need to think beyond and against them, and within the approach of political economy. Development programs, whether driven by or for art and technology, must always be viewed within the dynamics of imperialism. When Philippine art lost its official patronage with the ouster of the Marcos regime in the mid-eighties, artists were suddenly both liberated and confused enough to struggle without patronage and attempt to be self-reliant. But the allure of a post-dictatorship country and the frenzy of a new government to rebuild it installed the most romantic and uncritical development and modernization programs undermining the more urgent need for internal, self-controlled and self-sustaining development. Our ambitious development policies even leapfrogged the pre-industrial agrarian economy into the “information economy.” Here is one success story:

Established in 1993 through grants from UNDP, CIDA and the Foundation for the Philippine Environment, the Philippine Sustainable Development Network (PSDN) “conducted seminars and training courses for NGOs, people's organizations, academia and even the Government, telling them what information technology was, what a modem was, what it could do for them.” Through its pioneering IT education efforts, the PSDN saw what they deemed as mission accomplished: “since Filipinos are now willing to pay commercial servers for the technologies PSDN helped introduce.” The PSDN national coordinator remarked, “I think the Philippines is in a kind of limbo right now, the only area that is progressing is IT. Why? IT enables you to learn about everything that's going on - everything. Nobody can fool you any more. We are now evaluating the niche we can occupy in the IT-aware world that we helped to create in the Philippines." Surely, PSDN helped make IT the healthiest economic sector in the Philippines, because more Filipinos are now willing to spend as much on commercial IT services as they do on food, housing and water; nobody can fool a poor consumerist society.

From colonialism to international aid and development, we succeeded in dismantling self-reliance and molded and expressed our “Filipinism” in feeble reference to western culture: “stylistically descended from the American Jackson Pollock”, suggesting “images of tumult and cataclysm reminiscent of the works of the American Larry Poons”, “while Fernando Amorsolo and the genre painter Jorge Pineda did some lithographs, there was none of the interest shown, for example, by some of the painters of the Ecole de Paris in the early decades of the century” – and our vision of glowing nationalism in a rallying reaction against it: “Much of the fire in western art has been damped down by historical precedent. Filipino artists are inhibited by no such burden of tradition.”
In his COW essay, Florentino remarked that the art community is starving needlessly because of capital flight. I would add that the art community is starving in economic and intellectual terms because we allowed its bourgeoisies to enrich themselves through the aid of the bourgeoisies of an imperialistic international economic order.

Because we allowed it, our economic structures are dependent on the capital, technology and markets of capitalist countries that exert political and military influence upon the terms of trade. Because we allowed it, our cultural expressions are derivatives of and dependent on the capital, technology and markets of capitalist countries that exert influence upon the terms of social development.

It would indeed be fortunate to take on the challenge of a “regeneration of digital art” when we have become more inclined to re-conceptualize our notions of art and technology within a critique of development itself. Only by studying interactions between art, technology and development within the international dynamics of economic and cultural imperialism, may we be able to identify new economic and social relations that arise from the use of technologies. In so doing we can examine how technologies can be useful and how they can be oppressive. Technology does not even need to be “high-tech” or “digital.” It should instead be “appropriate technology.”

Triad: Communalism, Sovereignty, Autonomy

In our art and technology development and “regeneration” programs we can analyze how development and cultural policy redresses the reality of socioeconomic inequality through a triad of communalism, sovereignty and autonomy.

Communalism demands that art should not be driven by commercial technology; otherwise artists become slaves to technology. If technology is to become a medium for artistic work, we must define, use and develop it within the artist’s expression of a fundamental freedom. Sovereignty demands the competent practice of independent political and social authority, and this is reflected in the freedom to develop, use and sustain indigenous knowledge. Technology is contextual, and our application and use of it become counter-productive when they are used (within context) to perpetuate existing (knowledge-based) imbalances. Here, we need sensitive development structures in order to see the relationships between technology in context and unique indigenous knowledge bases. But communalism and sovereignty are illusory without autonomy, and our continuous re-conceptualizations of art and technology will occur only for as long as our autonomy is formal and real. Autonomy demands self-determination and self-government, and this is reflected in the capacity to use appropriate technology.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have identified that a re-conceptualization of the role and meaning of art in developing countries such as the Philippines must take place within a critique of development itself. A simple triad of communalism, sovereignty and autonomy is one proposed means of understanding and articulating alternative concepts of development. Relevant policy and social change will not be achieved by opposing globalization through performance art or touring nationalistic exhibitions. In view of a “regeneration of digital art”, “contemplative regeneration” through the balancing act of aesthetics is proposed in consideration of the international dynamics of economic and cultural imperialism.

Endnotes

“Sungdu-an: A Confluence of Artists” by Kristine Luiz Alave. National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Feature 2002. http://www.ncca.gov.ph/culture&arts/features/features-03-04-sungduan.htm

“Sungdu-an 3: Making the Local: NCR3 – National Capital Region: Nation Concept Renewal for a Nation-in-Crisis Redeemed” by Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, from the first draft submitted to the National Commission on Culture and the Arts- Committee on Visual Arts (NCCA-CVA), February 2003.

“The COW Essay: In Search of a Macroeconomic Apologia for Art Patronage” by Eric Florentino. From the unpublished manuscript, July 2003.

“New media in the Cradle of Modern Art” by Fatima Lasay.Catalogue essay for DECODE exhibition, Ateneo Art Gallery, Ateneo de Manila University. July 2003.

“Refiguring Modern Philippine Art” by Leovino Ma. Garcia, ZERO-IN: Public Art, Private Lives exhibition catalog, 2002.

Ibid.

“The Agony of the American Left” by Christopher Lasch. New York: Vintage. 1969.

“Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity” by Marian Pastor Roces, ZERO-IN: Public Art, Private Lives exhibition catalog, 2002.

“No Carrier and other stories from Philippine BBS Culture” by Fatima Lasay. “Read_Me Software Art and Cultures,” edited by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin. University of Aarhus, Denmark. 2004.

“On the Road to Computer Art” catalogue essay for the exhibition “Wege zur Computerkunst.” Goethe-Institut, Munich, 1977.

Ibid.

Ibid.

From “The Agenbite of Outwit” by Marshall and Eric McLuhan. McLuhan Studies: Issue 2. 1996.

“The Rise of Neo-Realism” by Emmanuel Torres, from “Art Philippines”, edited by Juan T. Gatbonton et. Al. Manila: The Crucible Workshop. 1992.

Ibid.

“eArt Nude Photo Session”, from the eArt Philippines Website. http://www.eartphilippines.com/digital_excellence/nude_session.html

“The Long Revolution” by Raymond Williams. Harmondsworth: Pelican. 1980.

Quoted in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations (Trans. Harry Zohn. Edited and with Introduction by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968). Benjamin's quote is taken from Paul Valery, Aesthetics, "The Conquest of Ubiquity," translated by Ralph Manheim, p.225. Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, New York, 1964.

Ibid.

“Pollock and After: The Critical Debate” by Francis Frascina. New York: Harper and Row. 1985.

“Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity” by Marian Pastor Roces, ZERO-IN: Public Art, Private Lives exhibition catalog, 2002.

“So What is Media Art?” by Trevor Batten. 1996. http://www.dma.nl/batten/what.htm

“Culture, Identity and Security: An Overview” by Amir Pasic. Project on World Security, Rockefeller Brothers Fund. 1998.

Ibid.

“Television: Technology and Cultural Form” by Raymond Williams. Glasgow: Fontana. 1979.
“SNDP Philippines: IT Pioneer.” Sustainable Development Network Program Success Stories. http://sdnhq.undp.org/stories/philippines.html

Ibid.

“No Carrier and other stories from Philippine BBS Culture” by Fatima Lasay. “Read_Me Software Art and Cultures,” edited by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin. University of Aarhus, Denmark. 2004.

“Printmaking: Art for the Many” by Leonides Benesa (updated by Jeannie Javellosa), taken from “Okir: An Epiphany of Philippine Art” and “The Printmakers.” From “Art Philippines”, edited by Juan T. Gatbonton et. Al. Manila: The Crucible Workshop. 1992.

“Alternative Techniques” by Cesare A.X. Syjuco. From “Art Philippines”, edited by Juan T. Gatbonton et. Al. Manila: The Crucible Workshop. 1992.

“The COW Essay: In Search of a Macroeconomic Apologia for Art Patronage” by Eric Florentino. From the unpublished manuscript, July 2003.