Taxonomy of Technics: a Compendium for Art and Action

This paper sets out to problematize a specific mode of contemporary living called black-boxing, pervasive in technological and media art culture, characterized by the concealment of the machine processual core of such works, leading to the illusion of technological literacy and competence. Such an alienation state has many names. Latour finds black-boxing’s focus on the efficiency of the input-output loop making science and technology “more opaque and obscure.” (1999: 304) To McIntyre and Kapp, the black box is a symptom of compartmentalization, and of capitalist division of labour. (2000, 1961) Stiegler (2017) calls this the “proletarianization of sensibility” in the digital age -- the everyday person’s loss of knowledge (savoir), i.e. the pre-knowledge of discipline-specific knowledge. (Gutting on Foucault 251) Arendt calls the proletarianized individual the “cultured philistine,” Stiegler the “amateur” of the drive economy, whose love of art is libidinal energy, not knowledge. The artist, too, is proletarianized. Black-boxing, a feature of non-traditional art, produces the artist’s loss of knowledge as he growingly relies on packaged software. (Rodriguez 2008) The simplification of the machine process also saw user experience (UX) and interface design substitute for the democratization of technical knowledge. My critical response (2007, 2017, 2019) is to experiment with ways in opening the black box via art curatorship and art-making. In the 2-week show Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space & Time (2018-19, City Hall, Hong Kong), through commissioning works to soften the art-science divide, display and documentation strategies and media archaeology, I transformed the sheer pleasure with interactive machines into accessible knowledge via new conceptual-historical lenses.