I’m delighted to announce the publication of the fourth of five installments of my editorial project, Retraction, in A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking. «Retraction 4: Withdrawal», which broaches the concept of «interpassivity» in relation to the automaton in art, presents work by Barcelona-based artists Marc Anglès, Taller Estampa, and Montse Carreño + Raquel Muñoz.
An excerpt from this week’s introduction:
« The blind, generative dimension of the automaton provides the creative act with a resource for exercising an interpassive function. In the case of algorithmic art, it might appear that one finally gets to sit back, relax, and enjoy watching the machine produce something marvelous or unexpected. But the interpassive aspect of the automaton functions quite differently. Rather than abandoning subjective agency and the enjoyment that fuels it, the interpassive dynamic transfers the most immediate experiential facet of enjoyment in the creative act to an intermediary (here, the machine) in order to introduce an obstacle between the imagined agency of “creativity” – that is, the symbolic identity of the artist or the respondent – and its manifest object of desire. The obstacle offers the potential to reveal within artistic productivity both its operative limit of enjoyment and a position of agency outside its existing coordinates. As a contemporary philosopher has written, “’Genius’ is our life to the extent that it does not belong to us.”
The three entries in this week’s installment of Retraction, in quite distinct ways, leverage the withdrawn, retractive capacities of the automaton not simply to generate new artforms but to turn the “uncreative” generative gesture of the automaton and its interpassive potential back on the artworld itself – its mechanisms, habits, materials, and public forms. The first work investigates the constitutive inaccessibility of the “technological” as a conceptual bridge for linking the cybernetic black box and the artworld’s white cube. The second work presents an ensemble of aphorisms on the subject of the algorithm that reflects back surprisingly on an epigrammatic style within the genre of literary and artistic statements. The third and final work utilizes the classificatory, normalizing, and predictive mechanisms of current digital technologies to mine the expressive material possibilities latent in the publication in which it is here being published: namely, A*Desk. »