<nettime> From Total Recall to Digital Dementia - Ars Electronica 2013

[Armin Medosch <armin@easynet.co.uk>]

From Total Recall to Digital Dementia - Ars Electronica 2013

by Armin Medosch (translated from the German by Simone Boria; The German 
version of this article appeared in Versorgerin #99, Aug 31st 2013 
http://versorgerin.stwst.at/artikel/aug-31-2013-1635/von-total-recall-zur-digitalen-demenz)

Year by year Ars Electronica gets larger, greater and more successful. 
One visible sign of this success are the blinking lights of the ACE at 
night, like an upgraded spaceship out of 'Close Encounter of the Third 
Kind'.

The festival now also has a venue, the former tobacco factory 'Die 
Tabakfabrik', that can cope with the rising numbers of visitors each 
year. Ars Electronica is a success story, no doubt about that. At the 
same time the Festival has developed a dynamics of its own, whereby the 
size of the program gives the impression that quantity comes before 
quality. The festival has defined as its primary objective to ignite a 
debate around art, technology and society,. But this debate often seems 
to be held in a quite one-sided way.

This year's subject matter at Ars Electronica is Total Recall- the 
Evolution of Memory. The interpretation of the topic relies -- at least 
regarding the conference -- for most parts on the natural sciences and 
primarily on neuro-science, including also a few biologists and 
geneticists as speakers. The one and only cultural science panel deals 
with prehistoric memory. Topics such as different memory cultures or the 
role and function of archives as a critical resources, that question 
(our) understanding of history and the present, are only occupying a 
niche position at Ars Electronica.

And yet Ars Electronica only continues with a long tradition, by 
uncritically incorporating a positivistic view of science whilst riding 
the waves of hype about technological innovations. The point is, that 
this criticism isn´t new either. In 1998, when Ars Electronica chose the 
topic of 'Infowar' media philosopher Frank Hartmann wrote (1):

„Interestingly enough, the word „culture“ has hardly been heard at this 
conference, which in the end is part of a cultural festival. The social 
aspects of cyberwar have been excluded. It seems to me that one wanted 
to decorate oneself with a chic topic that reflects the Zeitgeist, while 
avoiding any real risk by putting the screen of the monitor as a shield 
between oneself and the real danger zones."

These are the words of the same Frank Hartmann who will speak at the Ars 
Electronica conference as one of the few non-natural scientists this 
year. Ars Electronica manages to discuss the Evolution of Memory in an 
utterly de-politicised manner, and that only months after Edward Snowden 
exposed the existence of the NSA´s gigantic surveillance program that 
exceeds anything that we have known before. Even the film Total Recall 
with Arnold Schwarzenegger presents a more critical stance, at least 
there we have a proper uprising.

Part of Ars Electronica's tradition is the transfer of natural 
scientific terms into cultural and social fields. Timothy Druckrey 
noticed this already in 1996, when Ars Electronica happily took Richard 
Dawkin's pseudo-science of Memetics on board. Druckrey complained that 
“despite of all that aura of universality that surrounds genetic 
research, [...] reflection on cultural impact gets lost." And further:

“In the whole discussion around viruses, ecosystems and networks 
biological metaphors are omnipresent. The collapsing boundaries between 
physics and genetic science give the impression that systems-ideology 
has formed a unifying field where the so called “universal” language of 
molecular or gene technology works in the same way as software does in a 
mechanical world.  Scientific practice becomes consequently rather 
instrumental than analytical, rather interactive than observing 
(monitoring), and is far more interested in the technical production 
than in epistemology. (2)


What is so bad about that? Richard Barbrook formulated it more casually, 
during his critical deconstruction of meme-theory: in Linz, Hitler' 
favourite city and cultural capital, one should be very careful with 
biological metaphors (3). Boris Groendahl, in the same year, couldn´t 
resist to include a similar reference in his posting on the Rizhome 
mailinglist. And in 1997, when Ars Electronica dealt with the topic of 
humans as information machines, myself diagnosed that it suffered from a 
chronic illness of 'metaphoritis' (4).

The pseudo-scientific metaphors that Ars Electronica loves so much, 
usually taken from genetics and biology, and in recent times 
increasingly from neuro-science, lead to the naturalisation of social 
and cultural phenomena. Things that are historical, made by humans and 
therefore changeable, are assumed to be of biological or of other 
natural causes, thereby preventing to address the real social causes. In 
addition, such a manoeuvre legitimates the exercising of power. By 
saying something is scientific, as if “objective”, a scientific or 
technocratic solution is implied. The pseudo- scientification leads to 
the topic being removed from democratic discussion.

In its most harmless form those thought structures can lead to a 
glorification of science as ideology and religion, as explained in 1996 
in Osnabrück by the critical scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. Taken to its 
conclusion it leads to the de-sacralisation of human life, says 
Weizenbaum, and finally to the ideology of obsoleteness and the 
“obliteration”(5) of the human species. Weizenbaum particularly disliked 
 metaphors from the field of Artificial Intelligence.

This also has a long tradition at Ars Electronica. Already in 1979, the 
founding year of the festival, a robot entertained passers-by in the 
city centre of Linz. And to this day Japanese robot art and AI are part 
of the “timeless” subjects of Ars Electronica. Those party poppers who 
want to take away innocent fun with Asimo for young and old! This year 
again we are showered with the latest findings in AI, which is an 
unbroken myth at Ars Electronica.

The deficits in Ars Electronica's content are not hard to make out and 
many key points have already been raised in public speech. Ars 
Electronica, however, displays an amazing resilience against any 
criticism, or maybe suffers from a special form of digital dementia. 
“Digital Dementia” is the title of a best selling book by the 
neuro-scientist Manfred Spitzer. He claims, with the alleged authority 
of the natural sciences, that digital media are addictive, that using 
them causes brain cells to die off, and that children loose their 
learning abilities. Empirical insights which contain a grain of truth 
are blown up into untenable hypotheses by Spitzer. For this reason he is 
such a good example of ascribing too much competence to 
neuro-scientists. That they receive so much attention only shows the bad 
state of the debate on art, technology and society.

But why pick out the Ars Electronica? One cannot make a festival 
responsible for a general deficit. However, Ars Electronica has made 
that connection between art, technology and society its chosen core 
topic and takes on a very central institutional position that 
accumulates a lot of resources. The choice and interpretation of topics 
is shaped by structural reasons - how the festival is socially 
structured, networked and orientated. Ars Electronica began in 1979 as 
the crisis of the industrial age became apparent. As co-founder Hannes 
Leopoldseder anticipated in an editorial in 1982, the structural crisis 
of the industrial age would only be resolved in the long run by arriving 
at a new techno-economic paradigm, the information society. The success 
of Ars Electronica rests on the belief that it has helped to transport 
Linz into the information age. In doing so it was necessary to 
instrumentalise art in order to project a glossed over vision of the 
information age into the sky above Linz. In 1979 Hilmar Hoffmann's idea 
“Art for All" inspired the first “Klangwolke” (Cloud of sound). 
Information society was a vision of the future and somehow one suspected 
that participation would play a significant role in it. Thats why people 
were asked to put radios on their window sills in 1979.

“Klangwolke” long since has degenerated into an event that illustrates 
the idea of the 'society of the spectacle' by deploying a high-tech 
aesthetic which only demonstrates to people their own powerlessness. 
Thereby the real function of information technologies in the globalised 
neoliberal economy gets disguised. IT serves such profane ends as the 
automation of production and global logistics chains. IT allows 
corporations to outsource labour, build factories void of human people 
and synchronize everything via global logistic chains - which is nothing 
else but an euphemism for surveillance systems.

Through the way how it has addressed information technologies since 1979 
Ars Electronica has concealed their real consequences in a neoliberal 
information society. For this it has used again and again flowery 
metaphors which seemingly break down barriers between cultural and 
scientific domains in a pseudo-progressive way.  According to Duckrey, 
Ars Electronica has in 1996, with their frequent references to a 
“natural order”, "reduced diversity, complexity, noise and resistance, 
blending out the cultural politics of memory in the age of Memetics."


This year it seems that one has kept well away from the implications of 
the Snowden affair. What this has shown is that it is no longer about 
surveillance in the classical sense. The supremacy of the United States 
as the one and only super power is based on establishing and maintaining 
a global information infrastructure that secures her military and 
economic dominance. The US-American empire is based on a hegemony of 
information: the ability to filter flows of information, bundle them and 
transform these capabilities into military and financial power.

As the Snowden affair also clearly showed, total information control is 
always partially illusory, a control fantasy. But for the exertion of 
power it is enough to establish these kind of mirages of power, codify 
them as goals, use them in order to mobilise resources, and make those 
goals appear desireable to their subjects, because only this way 
security can be ensured. These tendencies were already inscribed at the 
beginning of the information revolution that had started in the Cold War 
era. Yet we are barely aware of this, as digital dementia makes 
everything disappear in a misty cloud.


[1] »In Elektronengewittern, Das Netzvolk als Kanonenfutter?« Frank 
Hartmann in Telepolis, 2nd of September 1998, 
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/6/6272/1.html
[2] »Gefährliche Ansteckung«, Timothy Druckrey in Telepolis, 11th of 
November 1996, http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2065/1.html
[3] »Linz – Stadt mit Sonne im Herzen. A report on the Ars Electronica 
96.« Armin Medosch in Telepolis, 17th of September 1996, 
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/1/1060/1.html
[4] Telediagnose: Informationsmaschine Mensch. Ars Electronica 97 or 
Media Art as a Medical Record. Armin Medosch in Telepolis 8th of 
September 1997, http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/1/1276/1.html
[5] Computer, KI und Delphine, presentation and talk with Joseph 
Weizenbaum, in Telepolis, 2nd of Oktober 1996, 
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2058/1.html


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