+book review+

"Information Arts"
by Stephen Wilson

Stephen Wilson in his new book, "Information Arts" takes us on an
extraordinary tour of the ever widening landscape of art practice today.
The book is not only a compendium of a great range of artists works but
an equally compelling inquiry into the very role of the artist and the
context in which art is produced.

In his book published by Leonardo and MIT Press, Mr. Wilson argues that
there is an enormous value for artists to work on the frontiers of
emerging technologies, not only to produce new works and advance new
discourses, but equally to have artists probe these fields and reclaim
them from the university and corporate research departments. and through
art and cultural criticism, bring their findings into the larger
cultural realm. After all, if art is to tell us something of our
culture, and our culture is daily being impacted by advances in physics,
genetics, biology, robotics, astrophysics, artificial life,
telecommunications, digital information systems, then shouldn't such
things be forefront on the minds of artists and of the keenest interest
to the public.

Stephen Wilson who has worked as an artist and researcher for the past
twenty years presents his book as a resource in the reexamination of the
relationship between research and art, between science and art. It is
his claim that it is in the crucible, in the percept of art, that
science and technology will yield different answers, approached with
different methods as to the systems of meaning and significance that
constitute their fields proper. Under each others purview, each other's
temperament, science and art come into relief and are seen anew in a
manner most pressingly needed for our culture.

Is it the artist, or the scientist, or both, that make visible and give
shape and form to what is often not seen, mapping a space of knowledge
visually, sensually, of something there, but not quite there before? Is
each a varied vantage point on a similar set of data? Each an exercise
in modeling? In our living, are we not always concerned with questions
of nature, life, pleasure, the individual, the social body and our
conjugation to emerging technologies which forge the trajectories and
folds of our varied and interwoven cultural meshworks? Can one be a
producer of cultural materials without encountering these issues? How
might this information enter into the conceptualization and practice of
art? It is these questions that Wilson addresses in his over 900-page
exemplarily researched tome.

Part historical overview with insight into numerous disciplines of the
sciences leading narratives, part analysis of contemporary critical
practices, the book presents the works of numerous artists, overviews of
research agendas, organizing the book around categories of research
which differentiate the sections such as biology, physical sciences,
mathematics, computers, alternative interfaces, telecommunications and
robotics.

Chapter by chapter his method is consistent and extensive, for example,
biology - and the understanding and controlling of the organic world,
including our bodies which many analysts state will far out distance the
electronic and computer revolution. This field will lead to significant
cultural questions about the nature of being human and the implications
of biological manipulation.

In this chapter he presents such varied critical discourses as Ruth
Hubbard's "Reinventing Biology" which annotates essays of alternative
perspectives to the notion of scientific or medical objectivity - and
"The Making of the Human Body" by historians Catherine Gallagher and
Thomas Walter Laqueur which describes how the body has been perceived
over time by different epochs and cultures - amongst numerous other
books. After giving a sense of the currency of the discipline he surveys
the research agendas of the field (for example in medicine, drugs,
sensors and device development top the research agendas of medical
technology companies) and with these put forward he then focuses on
enumerating how artists have approached biology and medicine as emerging
technologies. Quite a tall task.

Artists working in emerging research, as well as artists as students of
the sciences, have opportunity to become knowledgeable about an area of
technology or science and then engage in much needed cultural critique.
Such critique can reveal narratives and concepts that might be invisible
to not only regular practitioners of the field but cultural critics and
the public as well. Undoubtedly, research agendas in all of these
fields raise a series of complex and disturbing questions. For example,
cultural narratives produce our experience of our bodies. Medicine and
experience of the body is not just an objective corpus of scientific
knowledge external to culture but rather a product of media and
language. This research and the sciences then is most fitting terrain
for artists to get involved with, both to comment on, and to
independently shape possible future research directions. It is this
conversation that the arts can foster and that Wilson invites us to
participate and encourage.

The book takes cues and departure from cultural and post-structuralist
studies. It looks systematically at the rhetorical techniques that
channel a field's conceptualization and the power of metaphor in
promoting some ideas and excluding others. One must understand the
discourse - the pattern of words, figures of speech, concepts, values,
symbols, texts, and visual representations - in order to understand a
phenomenon and its associated practices and ideologies. And Wilson
references a great many books and practices giving insight as to how
cultural criticism gives fore to such tools of analyses. But now
cultural criticism and critics, he argues, must give greater invitation,
encouragement, merit and dialogue to art practices engaged with the
sciences. Cultural critics need to open a space of understanding to read
the sciences as a domain proper for the arts. And the sciences need to
understand the enormous value artists can bring to the sciences. It is
this conversedness that cultural criticism lacks today.

"Information Arts" then is as much an invitation to art educators,
curators and collectors to ask the question, from whence does art come,
as it is a probing of just what art is and it's place in culture. Mr.
Wilson places this question pointedly to contemporary cultural critics
wondering whether art has become too circumscribed, and as a result, the
engagement of a much larger dialogue about our place in the
technological culture we are producing, and living in, is being made
short shrift by the tight confines of the current international art
scene. He argues that though the museum community has come round to the
net and things digital, even video games, and occasionally transgenic
art, there is much, much more out there with which they need get
attuned.

Is there more that art can engage, more questions that it can raise,
more work that it can bring to us, more insight into ourselves and our
world? - clearly and sincerely Mr. Wilson is asking these questions. He
argues the necessity and pleasure of including techno-scientific
research in a definition of art. He has given us an invaluable book
presenting such work and an invitation to engage such dialogue. It would
be exciting to take him up on this offer.