Luke Murphy: The New Raw Unconscious - a podcast by ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe

What was Old is New Again. A Meeting of Art and Scholarship | Conference

Fri, 21.11.2008 – Sun, 23.11.2008

While many artists have employed aleatory elements in their work including ceramic effects, Chinese ink blot drawing and Cozens' blot technique, it has been in the 20th century that chance has become an overt aesthetic or anti-aesthetic strategy. At first with Duchamp, dada and Surrealism's psychic automatism and later with John Cage, chance and randomness have become part of the standard new tool box. But it is the use of random number generation that marks the dividing line between traditional art and digital work. Generative programs, sims, data visualization and other mimetic digital work represent the fountain head of the artist encountering the ability to simulate nature through computer generated random numbers. But to move further we need to examine what is the difference between computer generated random numbers, which are themselves a simulation and what it is to tap into the ultimate source of randomness. Concentrating on the clicks from a Geiger counter brings us into direct communion with the fabric of time and space. It is the sound of the raw material unconscious.

Every religion, political ideology, philosophy, and scientific theory embodies a set of structured beliefs. These belief systems maintain a symbiotic liaison with the arts. Throughout history, communal beliefs have relied on music, theater, painting, and dance in order to propagate accepted doctrines, and the arts in turn have shaped the articles of faith.

The conference brings together artists and scholars in an unusual forum. The arts addressed deal primarily with media, the major art form that has only come to the fore in recent decades. The scholarship concerns antique matters, such as Sumerian music, early Egyptian medicine, and the omens, codes of law, and creation myths of Mesopotamia. The divergent perspectives of the participants augur well for innovative ideas emerging from this close encounter between scholarship, the arts, and the belief systems of early and modern times.

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