Knowledge of Non-Humans

In the television adaptation of Robert Graves' I, Claudius, Emperor Claudius's step-mother visits an oracle that announces the future ruling of her son, as well as the appearance of the Robert Graves adaptation almost two thousand years later. As a tie-in to the historical basis of the Graves history, as well as a substantiation of its validity as a history, the oracle functions as a typically otherwise mute institution that through special powers, pronounces "truth" for attentive listeners.

From about 1650 to the present, experimentalists have been attentive listeners to the oracles embedded in non-human scientific devices, objects that "speak" of the experimental veracity and "objective reality" of the world "out there". Key scientific figures such as Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle built and used machines to "prove" the existence of phenomena in Nature, impossible to prove without machines, i.e. culture.

One of Hooke's machines, an air pump, for instance, could produce scientific facts in feedback to the scientist-observer. In Boyle's use of this machine, he established "pneumatic" facts. The existence of a vacuum in Nature relied on the experimentalists' presentation of a machine interceding in the continuum between subject and Nature. Nature in its "pure" form could be input into the machine, and was output, newly transformed as objective Science framing that same Nature.

Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer have remarked upon the role of objects in science. Objects that "speak", much like Bourdieu's skeptron passed to an orator in Roman times, giving authorized control to users, Latour calls "non-humans". Non-humans have always already played a part in the development of hybrid collectives or "commonwealths", encapsulating subject and nature, culture and objects.

Hybridity of the Commonwealth

The concept of the non-human, when employed, grants a symbolic gesture to the otherness of technological objects, ceasing to consider them as being under the sole dominion of humans, while giving them an autonomy that articulates Nature in ways that human subjects perhaps had not consciously intended. The non-human figures or fits quite easily into Latour's "symmetrical anthropology", or the establishment of a "nouvelle" relativism that neither isolates itself from Nature nor stands outside of the multiplicity of cultures.

Symmetrical anthropology places objects as points of mediation moving equally between nature and culture. Subject positions as well as objects also stand within equidistant reach between science and society. Nature becomes nature-culture, as well as culture becomes culture-nature. Nature and culture are both immanent and transcendent at the same time. Only with the apparition of modern science and society did this symmetrical relation become hidden in modern collectives and commonwealths.

Prominent networks unmasked the hybridity of our networked age, so that they created an image juxtaposing, explicitly, a conflict in epistemology between the two epistemological poles of nature and society. For instance, Latour speaks of the news surrounding the hole in the Earth's ozone layer. He remarks that, in the modern commonwealth, the jump from science to the culture of science in one instantaneous gesture, that is, news media's discussion of the subject of global warming, problematized strict boundaries between nature and society. With seemingly "true" distinctions between human and non-human, nature and culture, society and object, modern cultural networks -- both social and technological -- reveal many hybrids, and dissolve, upon reflection, the distinction between nature and culture.

This distinction has actually, Latour remarked, always already been dissolved, except via modern attempts to unconsciously hide the hybridity of the commonwealth. The purification of the moderns could not acknowledge network mediation. Purification erected a non-symmetrical boundary between dual poles of epistemology and ontology. And the emergence of modern art? An exclusive place for abstraction and purification. Either modern art is the breakdown of vision or the purification of vision -- or both. Spaces of art in the early 20th century reveal hybrids and purify techniques of formal inclusion and exclusion.

An Aesthetics of the Object

With inescapable compositeness and a practice that is pure only in its compositeness, how do translation, mediation, and even purification produce creative ideas? Eighteenth Century painters, fully aware of allegory and extra-visual determinants on the visual, bound subject and object in a way analogous to experimentalist performance or exhibition.

Now one question is, not "how" the scientific fact may be constructed, but how the alternative scientific fact, or counterfactual, may be articulated, an artistic fact. Shifting from scientific to artistic conceits similarly conflates those very categories: the artist uses science information to construct allegory. Paintings become scientific instruments. Almost as a revisitation of ut pictura poesis, painting stakes out a position and "speaks" while mute, an object of the visible synchronizing with the invisible.

The intersection of the visible and the invisible parallels that of mediation and purification. Moderns' purification, hiding its mediation, was therefore invisible. This mediation representted to itself its purification, and so purification was foreground, visible. Hybridity and networked systems for information transfer problematize strict demarcations of the moderns -- such as visible/invisible, painting/poetry space/time.

The Construction of Artistic Facts in 3D Modeling and Animation

Robotic arms and steam engines, in particular statements about machine functionality, contribute uchronically behind the scenes of the visible. Knowledge does not simply supervene completely on the visual, although material conditions are important. Knowledge and information, scientific facts which are used to create artistic facts, slice through the visible and define it from within and without -- from all directions. With 3D, we can similarly visualize from many different viewpoints to intercede between the visible and invisible.

Student animations of machines "destroying themseleves" construct artistic facts, and they do it in a number of ways: they create back histories of machine function, they transmute the function of the represented machine into representation, they transmute an encapsulated version of the representation into an abstract conception of machine function. Without a clear and ultimate distinction between object and representation, visual artifacts combine with invisible artistic facts fixing representation and the non representational, subject, world, and object-world (objet-monde)

Science and art, painting and the 17th century air pump, as spaces, constitute "science" and "art" in the 21st Century. The "tools" of scientific visualization and computer animation are the same in this way, and they intercede in solving problems introduced by mechanization. These problems range from technical problems to philosophical problems, both recapitulated by the separation of art and science and the development of technology. Any "unified production" of information or "facts" will take place in a hybrid commonwealth. Computer animation and its artifacts have a complex history and logic. The contract/covenant of the experimentalist with the non-human works for explaining science as well as art.