Dysfunction and Decentralization

The glowing, green characters shift against the black background of the computer screen. The characters, unrecognizable as words, begin to form fragmented images:

A car pulls into a driveway.
A figure emerges from the car and enters a house.
A close up of what appears to be someone receiving fellatio.

***

Text flows from the sidewalk into the gallery space, fragmented bits of English and Spanish that break apart and come together in bursts of legibility.

***

Speakers mounted midway on opposing walls produce a series of bell-like sounds that shift timbre and pitch, swirling through the space. Numbers are projected on the gallery wall, filling the space, side to side and top to bottom.

Introduction

Each of the works of art described at the start of this chapter has been characterized by the term "new media art." At the outset, they seem to have very little in common with one another. The first work is Deep Throat (1998), by Vuk Cosic , one of the six pieces that make up the ASCII History of Moving Images series. Deep Throat is a reproduction of the notorious pornographic film of the same name from 1972; this reproduction replaces the grain of the original film with American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) computer code, shifting from the realism of 24 sequential frames per second to a fragmented simulation of letters and numbers, glowing green-on-black. The second work is an excerpt from ESCaperucita & Little Flying Hood (2009), by Nayda Collazo-Llorens. This is a multimedia installation piece that combines a site-specific intervention with a lithographic print series that also exists as a digital animation. The third work that is described is American Cypher (2012), by Mendi and Keith Obadike. This intermedia work combines a gallery installation that displays DNA-like code on the walls, with an audio piece created from a bell owned by Sally Hemings that produces sound only when the projected soundwave is broken. While these works are indeed quite different — having been created by different artists at different times, using varied techniques and methods of production and presentation — they share one prime similarity: dysfunctionality. As will be discussed, many new media artists comment upon developing digital technologies through representations of dysfunctionality, identifying moments when complex technological networks break down or are overloaded, and when the smooth interface between user and machine begins to fail.

Technologies fail. They are sometimes built to fail, whether as a guard against further damage, as in the case of the circuit breaker, or due to the marketplace, in the case of planned obsolescence. They fail in the hands of the user, where they might be misused by individuals who have not read the product specifications, or are abused by those trying to push the technologies beyond how they are intended to perform. Technologies also fail when they come in contact with other technologies; the rapid pace at which such developments take place often means that networked connections are fraught with disconnections, where components are incompatible, or require additional linkages in order to facilitate connection and communication. Networks bring a wide variety of technologies together. These intersections may allow for the amplification of existing applications, such as the Folding @home project, which links home computers in a massively parallel manner so that computational challenges that exceed the processing power of single computers may be solved. Complex technological networks also allow for file sharing, upon which networks such as Napster were founded, allowing individuals to share music and image files, and altering the landscape of the recording industry in the process. Such networks inevitably combine new possibilities for interaction with challenges to legal, social, and ethical structures that currently exist, as Benkler (2005) has exhaustively detailed.

With the possibilities of networked digital media come the challenges associated with interlinked machines, individuals, and information. Networks such as those mentioned above multiply the possible benefits of increased computing power; they also amplify the frustration and devastation that can occur when such networks fail. Networked technological failure calls into question the narrative of efficiency central to modernist epistemologies, as well as narratives of technological progress. In this text, a study of technological failure as presented through contemporary new media art will outline possibilities for productive, and even radical, applications of the digital in a variety of settings, including philosophical thought, artistic practices, and educational interactions. We can learn much about how technologies work by studying how they fail. New media art can present these failures in provocative, playful, and probing ways.

While many new media artists such as those discussed earlier emphasize and utilize moments of technological dysfunction, educators tend to emphasize the efficient, orderly, and smooth functioning of networked digital technologies in the spaces of education. Art educators in particular can learn much from the work of new media artists who deal in dysfunction, as these artists speak to the critical possibilities inherent in the mistake, the error, the glitch. As seen in the previous examples, new media art makes use of a variety of technologies, both advanced and outdated, high-tech and low-tech, to speak to contemporary issues of representation, cultural hybridity, race, class, and biology. New media art has the ability to present these narratives in ways that are not germane to related fields such as anthropology, cultural studies, or the so-called "hard sciences," primarily due to the fact that new media art can present dysfunctionality as a trope, a form of visuality that isolates and highlights the limits of technological progress, while pointing toward new and novel applications for digital technologies.

This book is first and foremost a study of dysfunction in new media art. It is intended for those who are teaching about, learning through, and expressing themselves via digital technologies. New media artists will find that the study of digital media and dysfunction will inform current and future artmaking practices. New media theorists will find the analysis of dysfunction in information science and cybernetics to be a useful historical reference. Educators, particularly those involved with art and art education at the university level, will find the discussion of dysfunction to be of great value as learners navigate the increasingly decentralized spaces of contemporary society. In order to suggest possibilities for learning from, in, and through, dysfunction, I will first present an analysis of decentralized networks within...