UC San Diego

A systems perspective brought art out of the institutional frame and opened up new possibilities for autonomy and interaction. Emerging theory in the field of distributed Artificial Intelligence systems seems to signaling a new aesthetic of radical production yet untapped by researchers in the arts and humanities; an asymmetrical cultural autonomy within the instrumentalization of simulation that compresses perspective down to instantaneous and amorphic arrangements. AI has brought to systems theory a Postmodern turn in which quantitative variables changing interdependently and continually are more important than the law of qualitative structure. As processes attach and detach, validation of previous states diminishes and prediction or preemption take precedence. As simulation gains asymmetric mobility, the conditions of human activity change from a classic mode of deterministic structuralization (social Modernism) and are instead increasingly defined by predictive micro-narrative systems (cultural Postmodernism) that are irrefutably "of us", but not explicitly "for us". This is a quandary, even an irreconcilable paradox, when contemplating the role of technology in producing culture. If the institutionalization of the Avant-Garde in Digital Art has truly neutralized its revolutionary content, then future articulations within computer driven communication systems (that follow previously defined strategies) are explicitly doomed to fail, becoming the mundane engineering standards of consumer interfaces. Can the cyclical aesthetics of revolution in any particular technical mode or impetus be discarded for a far more complex interdisciplinary approach that is, as theory, unrecuperable? As nomads countering all modes of subjective metanarrative, are we finally free to simulate freedom and accept there are no meaningful futures within simulation?