Page 16 - Studio International - October1973

Computer Arts Society is now in its fifth
Computer year: The enterprise of reclaiming the cleaning-lady. Isn't this what art is about ?
John Lifton's exhibit Green Music is
basically a transducer system with synthetic
arts at techniques of data processing and cybernetics sound output which is varied by inputs from
for creative work is a very difficult one, and the
Edinburgh survival of the Society is due to the half-a-dozen plants. The plants chosen are
Aphelandras — an exotic species with bright
determination and open-mindedness of a
handful of people who have kept it going, most yellow flowers of the kind described as 'showy'
of them not artists with the notable exception of by gardeners. (Lifton tried first with rubber
Gustav Metzger, who has introduced an plants but they started to insulate their
important political leitmotiv in his editorship of electrodes.) He also supplies some visual
Page, the Society's bulletin. (Metzger may be explanatory material on the wall about thy
seen as having fleshed out Marcuse's critique of physiology of plants.
the computer as a culmination of technological Each plant has two electrodes in. long
domination.) Last August the Society arranged mounted directly in its stem, and the voltage
an exhibition and conference in Edinburgh. between the two electrodes is measured to
If the CAS has survived through its staying- provide the input information. The voltage is
power, the same strength is needed by artists apparently changed by processes of growth
who want to succeed in these media. Both and by variations in humidity, temperature,
Edward Ihnatowicz and John Lifton have been air-movement and so forth.
at it for some years now and are among the few Lifton's work seems to have meaning as art on
artists making real headway (always allowing for three levels. First, he has conceived a bold
the real possibility that other good work may visual image in connecting these strange results
have escaped notice because of its very of evolution and breeding, the aphelandras, with
originality). Both showed new work at his equally strange assembly of man-made bits
Edinburgh which I shall describe. and pieces. Second, he makes us conscious of
Edward Ihnatowicz is a very respected the dynamic processes of change which happen
worker in this field since he conceives of his in the plant and which taken together
work as art and yet is taken seriously by constitute the plant's existence. Thirdly, Lifton
scientific researchers in robotics and 'artificial is interested in the Backster Effect, which at
intelligence'. I described his Eindhoven work, present belongs to the fringe of science. The
The Sever, in the November 1971 Studio Backster theory suggests that emotion is rooted
International. At Edinburgh he showed a new in single cells, including plant cells, rather than
work, The Bandit — a concept which surely has a in high levels of organization in the nervous
robust future in the fair-ground, yet he has an system. Plants are held to respond electrically
assistant in University College, London's, to other organic systems; for instance, to
department of mechanical engineering who is respond sharply (under controlled conditions)
working on the project for his PhD thesis. at the moment when a shrimp is dropped into
The visitor is asked to move a cylindrical boiling water. Lifton speculates that if Backster
lever, rather like that of a fruit-machine, up is correct he may be able to use plants to
and down, and the lever responds by offering interpret human emotions directly to the
resistance under computer control. The computer.
A Scotsman manipulates Edward Ihnatowicz's
The Bandit at the Appleton Tower, computer receives data about the way in I doubt both whether the Backster Effect is
Edinburgh University The which the visitor handles the lever and — the foundation of a valid scientific theory, and
referring to criteria stored in its memory — it also whether, even if it were eventually proved,
decides and prints out the sex of the visitor and John Lifton will be able to use it to effect a
also (in one word) his or her temperament: scientific transfer of human emotional states to
`crude', 'sensitive', 'timid', etc. Success in sex his electronic systems. However, Lifton is not
determination is at present about 7o%; the a scientist but an artist. Artists have often gone
computer is thrown by children, for instance. in for 'fringe' science, surely as a way of
Obviously there is scope for refining the protesting against the dominance in our society
psychological criteria, but as art the concept of scientistic, objective analysis as a mode of
seems to me brilliant. Ihnatowicz draws on the perceiving the world. The attributing of feeling
eroticism latent in all machinery: the lever to plants has a long history in legend and
becomes a phallus, partly responsive or resistant poetry (for instance, one thinks of the mandrake
to the visitor and partly determined by strange that was thought to shriek when it was
forces outside the visitor's ken. Whether the uprooted). Lifton seems to be using 'fringe'
computer guesses our sex rightly or wrongly science to expose the contradiction between
(its on-line typewriter clacked out that I was scientistic perception and our naive pre-
classed as 'precise masculine'), the artwork can reflexive mode of experience which art has
be seen as a beautiful and serious play on the always preferred. Maybe theories that are
theoretical riddles of the 'tool', or what it means scientifically valid are actually hostile to the
to manipulate and be manipulated, and of what practice of art that is phenomenologically
it means to distinguish an object from a convincing; yet we repudiate science today at
presence. These philosophical enigmas are not our peril. Lifton's work is less lucid than
set out in academic jargon but are captured at an Ihnatowicz's, but something very intriguing and
intuitive, not wholly conscious level, original is there.
accessible to everyone from the professor to the JONATHAN BENTHALL