Authors:

 Clancy, Patrick.

Title:

 "Technologies of the Avant-Gardener"

Keywords:

 Autopoietic, community, non-western art, contemporary art, heterogeneous
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Abstract:

 "All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the
spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by
deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his
contribution to the creative act." Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act,"
American Federation of the Arts meeting, Houston, Texas, April, 1957.

Duchamp's comments on the two poles of the creation of art: "the artist
on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes
posterity," point toward complex relationships between the viewer, the
artist and the work of art. These issues have become even more resonant
in the latter half of the twentieth century. Readymades, automatism,
chance and aleatory processes, machine art, happenings and interactive
installations, and more recently autopoiesis and varieties of
simulations have challenged contemporary notions of objecthood, artistic
production, and experience in western art while exploring materiality
and critically engaging a reductive transcendental perspective.

Simulation and networked virtual reality extend issues of
representation, collaboration, time and event, and imply a community and
culture that supports difference while questioning the boundaries and
limits of the experience of the artwork. The autopoietic work raises
questions about the responsibility of the artist as well as the changing
role of the artist in relation to the work of art, nature, information,
experience and science. In several ways this work shares powerful links
with non-western art and a contemporary complex of global heterogeneous
forces.
Clancy, Patrick 2gwenpat@gvi.net Photography & New Media Department at Kansas City Art Institute. Patrick Clancy co-founded Pulsa, a collaborative group of artists that helped pioneer early electronic and interactive computer art through viewer-activated light and sound installations in the mid-1960's through early 1970's. This work included large-scale environmental art, wave energies, video installations, and human interaction with machine intelligence. More recently, he has produced a series of projects called "Marginal Works" that incorporate photoscrolls, videotapes, performances, installations and photocollages. He received an individual artist's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995. His hypertext writings combine theory, storytelling and poetics and address issues of photography, cyberspace, the body, and electronic media. "Telefigures and Cyberspace" appears in Rethinking Technologies, published in 1993 by University of Minnesota Press. The Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University published another essay, "The Imaging Effect," the same year in a limited edition folio, The Simulated Presence. "The Role of the Artist in the Age of Autopoietic Simulation" was published by the International Society on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia as part of FutureFusion: Application Realities for the Virtual Age, Gifu, Japan, 1998. He is currently working on an interactive computer simulation, "The Writing Machine." This autopoietic work combines real-time information collected from a variety of sensors at a site in Banff, Alberta, Canada and personal histories written by people through the World Wide Web. Patrick Clancy is Chair of the Photography & New Media Department at Kansas City Art Institute.