aesthetics pros the tics

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Trusting Aesthetics to Prosthetics Author(s): Jon Ippolito Source: Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 3, Digital Reflections: The Dialogue of Art and Technology (Autumn, 1997), pp. 68-74 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777839 . Accessed: 30/04/2011 22:58 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa . . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to  Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org

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Page 1: Aesthetics Pros the Tics

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Trusting Aesthetics to ProstheticsAuthor(s): Jon IppolitoSource: Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 3, Digital Reflections: The Dialogue of Art and Technology(Autumn, 1997), pp. 68-74

Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777839 .

Accessed: 30/04/2011 22:58

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of 

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

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TrustingAesthetics

t o Prosthetics

Jon Ippolito

De gustibusnonest disputandum.

(There s no accountingfortastes.)

Criticism s Container:A LeakyProposition

68 Chris akes thecupof coffeerom Sandyas the ArtSitehome-

page downloadson hercomputercreen.A bannerat the top

of thepage reads, "ArtSite:TheBest of the Web. Arrayedunderneathare buttons abeled Artist Projects, Exhibition

Reviews,Critics'Forum,and Art Buzz "Ithink this is oneofthe best-curatedites on the Web,"Chris ays between ipsof

coffee. "Theyweed through the garbage and pick out the

good stuff-so you don't have to." Sandy nods her head.

"Soundsikeone-stop hoppingor artcriticism," hesays.

his scenario describes the typical WorldWide Web

site devoted to art criticismtoday.Modeled on the

table of contents of a magazineor the brochure or

a curated exhibition, such a site contains an exclusive

selection of artworks hat one or moreexpertshave deemed

to be instructive to the general public. This approachis

familiar. It's convenient. And it's completely at odds with

the social and technologicalunderpinningsof the Internet.

To cometo termswith a digitalculture,an interface o

art on the Webcannotmerely ape museumbrochuresand

magazines,which rely fortheir poweron self-containment,

exclusivity,and instructionby experts.Engagingthe Inter-

net on its own termswill requirean approach hat is radi-

cally distributed-one thatmaythreaten o spill beyondthe

appointed containers of traditional criticism. Crude ver-sions of this distributed criticism are already starting to

crop up on the Web,and the futurethey foretellpresentsa

seriouschallengeto conventionalaesthetictheory.Tobeginwith, the Web s not aboutcontainment. t is

easier and faster to jump from a server in Paris to one in

Tokyothan it is to download a digitized Poussin at one's

presentlocation. For this reason,a typical user is unlikely

to spendan afternoonon-line browsing inks confinedto the

Louvre'swebsite, an experience better suited to CD-ROM.

Instead,that userwill follow a link from he Louvre's ists of

other art sites to the Dia Foundation, from Dia to Ping

Chong'sWebpage, from there to La Mamaand the Robots

Bar and Lounge,then on to the NYC Marathonhomepage.The quintessentialWebsurf does not confine itself to insti-

tutionalboundaries; t puncturesthem. This fact robs con-

ventional aesthetic criticism, when applied to the Web,of

one of its most valuable tools: artistic intent. RolandBarthes's"deathof the author"notwithstanding,most of the

vocabularyof criticalanalysis-plot, closure, tone, pointof

view, composition-presumes that some author has inten-

tionallycraftedthe aesthetic experience in question. Even

if a novelist's intent is unknownto the reader-which is

true in mostcases, actually-the reader will tryto imagineit in order to understand he work:"Well,I guess Dickens

let Little Joe die to underscorethe tragic living conditions

of the underclass."So what does a critic do when the order

of pages is determinednot by an author'scarefulstructur-

ing, but by a reader'sarbitrarymeanderings?On the Web,

the user wanders freely out of one artist's intent and into

another's.1Hence any criticism consistent with a user's

experience of the Webmust abandonthe goal of corralingall the goodwork nto one patchof cyberspace.

From nstructiono Extraction

As the focus of each web surf centers more on the user's

intent than on a single author's, o each user is responsiblefor following the links she or he thinks are most worth-

while. Likewise, most electronic bulletin boardswill pub-lish anyone who is diligent enough to post to them.

Although there is a high price of admission-buying acomputer and modem, investing the hours necessary to

learnto ftpfiles orwrite htmlcode-by andlargethe Inter-

net is a nonexclusive arenafor discourse, in which every-

one who can pay the price of admissioncan have a voice.

Another arenafor discourse-albeit one with a high-er price of admission-is the university. The academic

equivalentof the website delivering "expert"advice is the

tweed-jacketedprofessordispensing knowledgeto the stu-

dents:

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Theprofessor halkstwo wordson the blackboard."Mimesis

and rhythm,"he says, turningtoface the class, "according

to Aristotle,are the twoproperties o which all arts aspire."

Definitelya fill-in-the-blank question or the exam, Sandy

thinks,as shejots the two words nto her notebook.

Fortunately there are other models of teaching

besides instruction, the one-wayflow of information rom

professoro student.Instruction s

onlyuseful where infor-

mationis scarce. This is certainlynot the case for today's

digitally literate aesthetes, who will be rewarded with a

daunting6,000 sites if they performa Lycos search on the

keyword aesthetics. What Internauts need now are not

instructors,but listeners who will work with them individ-

ually to help them choose what to pay attentionto, based

on correlations among informationwith different origins.

And there's nothing to say those listeners have to be

human;2 ome claim that intelligent softwareagentswill be

bettersuited to the herculeantask of sortingthe ten useful

sites from the 5,990 that are a waste of time. Whether

embodied in flesh or silicon, it is intelligence-and notinformation-that will enable students of on-line art to

extract what they need from the flood of wordsand images

streaming nto their modems.

Tobe sure, the softwareagents currentlyon the mar-

ket are no match for the Leo Steinbergs and Rosalind

Krausses of academe.TopicAgents (http://www.verity.com)and similar engines can do boolean searches across web

pages-with criteria likefind all occurrencesof the string'abstractexpressionism'with a date before'1955'-while

Smart Bookmarks http://firstfloor.com)an lie in wait and

report significantchanges to favoritewebsites. Othercom-

panies such as PointCast (http://www.pointcast.com) nd

WebCompass(http://www.quarterdeck.com)have devel-

oped prototypes or an electronic newspaper,the so-called

Daily Me, that features only news and articles tailored to

each individual interest-whether Middle East peace

negotiations, stock market quotes, or Miami Dolphinsscores. Again, however,the features are selected by cate-

goryorkeyword,whichrequiresusers to know whatthey're

lookingfor in advance.This is hardlythe sort of apparatusone would expect to lead a revolutionin aesthetic theory;morelikely, it will simply wear down the groovesof exist-

ing aesthetic categories ratherthan venture onto untestedartistic territory. And these agents aren't as nimble at

applyingmore abstractor philosophicalcriteria; rytellingone to find an on-line artwork hat exemplifies "mimesis"

or "rhythm."The agents that will revolutionizethe way artworks

are reviewed and evaluated will be not glorified search

engines such as these, but a new generationof agents with

distributed ntelligence, designed to learnfromtheir users'

preferencesand extrapolate hem.

MechanizedSubjectivity: he ProstheticEgo

Chris's omputercreenfillswith a list of websites,whichshe

visits one by one. "Are hey supposed o be in some kind of

order?" sksSandy."No," epliesChris."Atfirstheagent ust

spitsout sites randomly o get a handle on yourpreferences.Mostof the suggestions t gave me the irstfew sessionswere

totallyuseless-I ratedthemall 0 or1 exceptor afew vague-

ly interesting ites. Nowthat I'vebeenapprenticinghe agent

forseveralmonths,I regularlydole out an 8 or 9 with every

batch."The irst site, JennyHolzer'sPlease ChangeBeliefs,

downloadson the screen. "Nosurpriseshere-anything she

does is an 8 on myscale."The nexttwo,someratherdryarti-

cles on Victorianphotography,she begrudgesa measly 4.

"Thoughtyou likedphotography," ays Sandy. "Yeah,but

somethingbothersme aboutthosesites, I'm not sure what-

I'mjust not interested n that today.""What's his?" blurts

Sandy,as a Hustlerpictorialfillsthescreen."Mustbe its sto-

chastic unction,"mumblesChris,as shetypesa 0 in thepop-

up window next to the site. As the next site downloads,

geometricorms swirlacrossthe screen. "Notanotherractal

screensaver,"murmursSandy. "Yeah,butI kind of like thisone,"says Chris."The unny thing is that even after three

monthsof trainingthis agent, the sites it givesme still don't

seemto haveanything n common-exceptthatI'mfinding its

suggestionsmoreand more nteresting."

The notionof a prosthetic ego, an agentthat learns a user's

tastes and amplifiesthem, is not pure fantasy.There are at

least three models for this kind of agent accessible rightnow on the Web,thougheach relies on a somewhat differ-

ent mechanism to determine its recommendations.3One

model is collaborativefiltering. Firefly (http://www.firefly

corner.com), currently the most popular example of this

technique, solicits the preferencesof thousands of users to

create a database of likes and dislikes. In its resource for

music lovers, for example, Firefly offers the visitor to its

website a list of ten pop musicians rangingfromMadonna

to Tracy Chapmanand invites the user to rate them, from

"the best" to "it'salright" o "hate it!"(fig. 1). When done,

the user clicks a button marked more and Firefly presentsten more albums, this time a little closer to the user's

tastes. The user rates them again and clicks more to see

more albums. In theory,by the time the user has repeated

this process six or seven times, Fireflyshould consistentlybe listing albums the user prefers (and perhaps some the

user hasn't heardof but wouldlike anyway).Now,Firefly s

no supercomputerprogrammedwith aesthetic principles;it's only a database of people's likes and dislikes. Fireflydoesn't knowwhy people who like Tracy Chapman end to

prefer James Taylorover AC/DC. It just knows that theydo. Firefly's database correlates a user's responses with

otherpeople's,and the morepeople who use it, the better it

gets.4This communaldatabase is a kind of aesthetics with-

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70

FIG. 1 Detailof the musicratingpagefromPattieMaes'sFirefly ebsite http://www.firefly.com/).Copyright ireflyNetwork, nc.

out exclusion. No one's in charge, and theoretically, no

one'staste is moreimportant han anyoneelse's.

Besides its originalincarnation as a music resource,

Fireflyhas just withinthe past few monthsbegun a collab-

orationwith the search service Yahoothatapplies collabo-

rativefilteringto help identifyinterestingweb pages. Users

can jump-startthe process by submittingtheir bookmark

files to Firefly for recording;Firefly will then promptthe

user with addresses for new websites that correlate with

those the user has alreadybookmarked. Toaccess this ser-

vice, the user must first establish a MyYahoo site at

[http://edit my.yahoo.com/config/login], hen click on the

my agent button.)There is a visual analogueto Firefly'sregistrationof

users' tastes called interactive genetic art-for example,the International Gallery of Genetic Art on the Web

(http://robocop.modmath.cs.cmu.edu:8001)5-butit oper-ates on a very differentprinciple fromFirefly's.Again the

first screen gives the user the opportunity to rate eight

examples of something.In this case, they'renine examples

of bad computerart:squiggly lines, circularpatterns,gar-ish fractals. Again the user clicks more and sees new

imagesthatget moreand moreinteresting.But in this case

it's not otherviewers'responses that are determiningwhat

the new ensemble of imageswill look like, but the splicingof the programcode-the "breeding"-of the computer

algorithms hat createdthe originalnine images (fig. 2a, b).

Furthermore,he algorithmswhose imagesthe viewer rates

highest get the most computercode passed on to the next

generationof images,while the algorithmswiththe poorest

ratingsdon'tget any of their DNA passed downto the col-lective progeny. So if the user likes one algorithm that

makes circles and anotherthat makes squiggly lines, the

next generationmight have squiggly circles. (Fortunately,like human sex, the results are usually harder to predictthan this simplistic example.)

Even more than Firefly and interactive genetic art,the Tierra project (http://vrml.arc.org/tierra/index.html)

represents an experiment in decentralized aesthetics.

Whenusers select circles and squiggly lines in interactive

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Therelationship f binarynumbersn computermemoryo visual icons is

analogous to the

biologicalrelationship f

genotype to phenotype.Thege notype or geneticcode s are crossbred

usinga splicingandmutationechnique.

A mutationmayor maynotocccur at a speci icsite n the Icon.Thecrossbreedingof allcombinations f fouriconsproducesa family

of twelve new icons.Four cons are selectedto continue o the next

generation.

2x magnification fa se lected 100th

generationIcon.

91 4 JonF.Sinon, .

iFe~i~~? ~

- E l ic w

i~

...... =MElk aR~An~

FIG. 2a, b Diagramillustratinghow genetic algorithms can be interbred to produce new images. At left: the selective cullingof the offspring of an initialset of"parent" icons. At right: sample icons produced by such a procedure. Copyright1994 John F.Simon, Jr.; mages courtesy the artist.

genetic art, they are deciding which characteristicsare to

be passed on to futuregenerations.Tierra s so decentral-

ized, however,that there is almost no humanintent wield-

ed whatsoever.The idea behindthis project,by TomRayof

the Universityof Delaware and the AdvancedTelecommu-

nications Research laboratory n Tokyo,is to create algo-rithms whose survival is determined by natural selection

rather than human selection. To activate this "wildlife

sanctuary" or computer programs,Ray copies a few short

stringsof machine code onto his computer.Everyso manyminutes, the computer'soperating system executes all of

these algorithms,which are designed to reproducethe way

computerviruses do: by making copies of themselves on

the hard drive. Of course, if left unattended, pretty soon

these prolificlittle creatureswouldtake up all the roomon

Ray'sPC, so Ray built in twochecks on their proliferation.

First, every few cycles the operating system inserts some

randommutation nto the programcode of one of the algo-rithms. Usually this "bug" prevents the algorithm from

reproducing,but occasionally it enables the algorithmto

reproduce aster, thus outstripping the older, unmutated

algorithms. Second, the operating system punishes an

algorithmthat performstoo poorly.Every time the misfit

algorithmgenerates an errorcondition-say, by using an

unrecognizedcommandlike "cpoy"instead of "copy"-it

gets a demerit. Toomany demeritsand the operating sys-tem erases it fromthe hard drive: t becomes extinct. What

makes Tierra a radical approach to the construction of

knowledgeis that once Rayhas configuredhis computer o

handle mutations and demerits,all he has to do is let someprimitive algorithms loose on his PC and watch them

evolve. There'snothing guiding their evolution except for

their competitionfor territory disk space) and food (CPU

time). Yet self-guided evolutionhas given rise to artificial

forms of protolifethat Ray could not have imagined.Tier-

ra's indigenous population now includes parasitic stringsthat rely for their reproduction on being embedded in

longerhost strings(fig. 3); symbioticorganisms hatrepro-duce each other in alternating generations;and nocturnal

creatures that migrateto the darkside of the earthto seek

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72

FIG. 3 Image romTierra: volutionnAnotherUniverse, ideobytheAnti-Gravity orkshop,ourtesy f TomRay http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/-ray/pubs/images/images.html).n hisconceptual endering, Parasitetwo-pieceobject)executes he code of a neighboring ostorganismto replicatetself,producingaughterparasitetwo-piecewire rameobject).

out inactive hard drives on a computernetwork.In some

sense, Tierra s a device for generating possibilities-witha minimal interventionof human will.

Despite the variety of approaches represented by

Firefly,interactive genetic art, and Tierra,at the heart ofeach of them is a distributedapproach o knowledge.6This

distributedapproachcould make possible the mechanism

of subjectivity, in the form of the agent described in the

scenario at the beginningof this section. This agentwould

encode an individual's aesthetic sensibility in software,

actingas a prosthetic ego that could faithfullyreproduce-and even predict-that person's artistic tastes. Such a

prosthetic ego would not be beholden to the self-contain-

ment, exclusivity, and reliance on instructionthat makes

more traditionalmodels of criticism ill-suited to the Inter-

net, yet because it disavows those principles it wouldpose

a challenge to the notion of an aesthetic theory-or any

theoryforthat matter.By theirnature,theories chunkphe-nomena into generalities that can be applied to future

cases of similar phenomena.Some of these aim to be uni-

versal (as in Aristotle's claim that all art functions bymimesis or rhythm); thersaimto be contextual(as in Nel-

son Goodman'sclaim that art tends to display symptomslike syntactic repleteness andmetaphoricexemplification).In no sense, however,can the aesthetic criteriaof the pros-thetic ego be boiled down to a set of axioms or symptoms;

the criteria arespreadout across the entire computational

systemand can only be invokedby applyingthe entiresys-tem to a given circumstance.(In the case of Tierra,the cri-

teria aren't even affected by a user's input, but are an

emergentpropertyof the competition among organisms).7Because they are based on generalizedcriteria,aes-

thetic theories often inspire their adherents to establish a

canon of artworks that fits those criteria, which are pre-sumed to apply to any artworkviewed by any audience at

anytime. This one-canon-fits-allapproach s diametrically

opposedto the prosthetic ego, which does not assume that

every person desires or needs the same kind of artexperi-ence. A given user maychoose to exclude figurativepaint-

ing fromher purview by ratingthat workconsistently low

scores, but that doesn't mean that Francis Bacon and

Philip Pearlsteinmightnot simultaneouslybe at the top of

another user's pantheon. Unlike most aesthetic theories,

prosthetic aesthetics can easily accommodate-indeed,

help to cultivate-the developmentof manymutuallycon-

tradictoryaesthetics withinthe same envelopingculture.

Because prosthetic egos would be customized for

individual users, the distributed aesthetics they embodycould not be taught,only apprenticed.Professorsat Colum-

biaarefree to expoundon theiraesthetic criteria to lecture

halls full of impressionablestudents;writers for Artforum

are free to pass judgments that thousands of people will

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read when the magazinehits their doorstep;but because it

learns by example rather than by instruction, each pros-thetic ego must be trainedby an individual user. Forthose

used to expressing aesthetic judgments in words, it mayseem odd that the aesthetic criteria learned by prosthetic

egos cannot simply be distilled into a Cliff Notes version

and passed on. After all, one of the main reasons to store

information n electronic circuits is so it can be instantly

liquefied:downloadedfroma website, squeezed througha

modemline, or massaged into a table or histogramor piechart. What a prosthetic ego acquires, however, is not

informationbut intelligence. There is no single sector on a

harddrive, no single subroutineof programcode, no par-ticularstringof Is andOs thatcorresponds o a specific bit

of aesthetic sensibility that a prosthetic ego has learned.

That sensibility is embodied in the overall state of the

agent. So how does one go aboutteaching aesthetics if the

content one is teaching is nowhere n particular?

Unfortunately, f a prosthetic intuition can't be putinto words, it's rather difficult to talk about it-which

points to an importantimitation of mechanizedsubjectivi-ty thatwouldprobablyprevent t fromever completely sup-

plantingconventionalcriticism, even for on-line artworks.

Fundamental to the aesthetic experience is not just the

refinementof one's own sensibility, but the sharingof that

sensibility with others.

"Soyou'rereally intojazz," says Sandy, as Chris tunes the

radio to Miles Davis's Flamenco Sketches. "Yeah-I didn't

usedto like it, butafriend lent mesometapes,and afteryoulisten to itfor a while it kind of growson you. Whendiffer-entperformers lay the same tune, it sounds totally differ-

ent-even when the same performer plays at differenttimes.""Idon'tknow,"says Sandy, 'jazz musiciansalwayssound to me like they'reustfooling around,like they don't

know where they're going." "Theydon't," replies Chris,"that's he excitementof it. Jazzgreats like MilesDavistake

risks,which is what art is all about."

This kind of dialogueaboutart,whether t occurs at a

CAA panel or in a car on the way to work,is essential to

the propagationand maintenance of culture as we know it.

Without such a social dimension, the prostheticego could

merely refine individual users' areas of interest without

exposing them to unfamiliarstyles or methods. It is inter-esting to note in this regardthat much of the rhetoric,and

presumablythe impetus, for collaborativefilteringcomes

from marketing; Digital's each-to-each technology

(http://www.each.com),ne of Firefly'scompetitors,offersa

toyrecommendation ite-doubtless to hone Junior's hop-

ping acumen. Is this the fatal flaw in the mechanism of

subjectivity, that it would discourage aesthetic dialogueand encourage the fragmentationof culture into myriadmarketniches of nonoverlapping aste?8

FromApprenticeshipo Breeding

There are a number of potential solutions to this predica-

ment, as exemplified by the three models of distributed

aesthetics discussed above. The creatorsof Fireflysolved

the problemby encouragingconversationamong its con-

stituents. RegisteredFireflyusers have the optionof mak-

ing their own homepages, on which they can list their

favoritebands, makingit easy for others of like mind to e-

mail them or meet them on-line in chat roomsto pursue a

dialogue in real time. Prosthetic egos might be passedback and forth in an analogous dialogue: once users have

apprenticed their agents well enough, they could simply

exchange agents-essentially trying on someone else's

taste for a day.Ultimately,however,this isn't much differ-

ent from simply trading favorite CDs. Like the dialogue

among Firefly's users, the exchange of prosthetic egoswould rarely put users in touch with artradicallydifferent

fromtheir own tastes, since they would naturally gravitateto users who like the same artiststhey do. The advantageof

collaborativefiltering is in some ways its downfall: if all

the relationships in the community are based on sharedtaste, what incentive is there to strike up a relationshipwith someone whothinks differently?

The example of interactivegenetic art, on the other

hand, suggests a moreradicalapproachto the exchangeof

aesthetic tastes. Each user'sprostheticego is ultimatelya

computerprogram,a set of adaptiveinstructions that exe-

cutes everytime the user invokes that agent. In that sense,these agents are directly analogous to the graphic algo-rithms of genetic art and could thereforetheoretically be

bred in an analogous way by splicing their programcodes.

The result, a cross-productof two totally subjective facul-

ties, would have no parallel in our culture today.Throughthe mechanizedsplicing of programcode, the imaginationof one humanbeing could be mated inseparablyto that of

another. Nor need this breeding of subjectivities be

restrictedto onlytwoparents,since it is notmuchharder o

splice three or ten programcodes than to splice two.Theycan even be interbred n differentproportions: 2)G+ (1)N+ (-1)Kcould representthe offspringof twopartsprosthet-ic Greenberg, one part prosthetic Nochlin, and one part

prostheticantiKramer i.e., an agentwhose ratingsare the

mathematicaloppositesof Hilton Kramer's).

Theabovescenariostill leaves humanbeingsin chargeof the breedingof subjectivities; t would be up to the breed-

er whether o cultivateever morerefinedorever moreeclec-

tic tastes.Peoplemight ryto controlsuch interbreedingwith

the electronic equivalent of kinship taboos. Or perhaps

eugeniclaboratorieswouldcrop up acrossthe country, ulti-

vatinghothouseaesthetics with the goal of gainingthe most

marketsharewith a superiorbreedof artcritic. The Tierra

project,however,pointsthewaytowarda finalstagein mech-

anizingthe subjective: etting prostheticegos evolve on their

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own in a wildlife sanctuaryfor feral subjectivities. What

would t meantohave anexperimentalaboratoryoraest

ics, proliferating utside the influenceof academics,cri

andhistorians,a populationof artificial ritics on the loo

The prospect of detaching from the conscious n

an aspect of cultureso profoundlyhumanmaythreaten

sense of control,but it is important o remember hatt]

are alreadycountless selections made for us every da

an unconscious level-within ourownbiologicalenvel

It was once thought hatthe human mmunesystemwoi

in a way analogousto the waythat aesthetics does todc

white blood cell that encountered an "interesting" or

body in the bloodstream "learned" ts chemical signaand then somehow nstructedthe otherlymphocytesin

body to latch onto other bodies with that signatureaccordance with this paradigm,critics act like the lymj

cytes of the social body:after first "discovering"an ai

they teach others that this artist is worth attention.

course, the artistic newcomer is "tagged" for succ

while the bodily newcomer is tagged for destruction]

killer t-cell.) But lymphocytesdon't attendclasses, andbloodstream is no university; so biologists realized tl

had to be a less hierarchical,moreadaptivemechanisi

work.Researchby GeraldEdelman,based on a theory

proposedby Sir Frank MacFarlaneBurnetin the 195(

revealed that the human immune system is based no

instruction but on selection. Every lymphocyte in

body's population is outfitted with a receptor that re(

nizes a different unfamiliarprotein.11When a lymphowith the right receptor happens to come in contactwi

piece of an alien microbe, the successful fit triggers

lymphocyte's genetic machinery to go on a reproduc

spree, dividing into hundreds of thousands of clone

itself. These clones then spread throughout the blc

stream, latching onto other copies of the microbe

marking hemfordestruction.

One of the interesting consequences of this me(

nism is that the immune system has a somatic men

quite independentof the brain's.If a given body has i

attackedby the measles bacillumin the past, there wil

a disproportionatelyarge populationof measles-sensi

lymphocytes n the bloodstream, eft overfromthe prolationof these lymphocyteswhen the bodyfirst encount,

the disease. This makes the body better preparedto Iwith the disease in the future;the same somatic men

explains the success of vaccines. Perhaps by creatii

populationof independently evolving prosthetic egoscan inoculate culture in advance to prepare it for fu

aesthetic developments. Whether or not this happ,there can be little doubtthat as on-line artproliferateswill need as much help as we can get in coming to te

with it all-whether that help is from human aesthete

their mechanizedequivalents.

Notes

The Webaddresses published in this essay were current at the time of writingbut

are subject to change.1. If there is a conventional critical theorythat applies to meandering through

electric neighborhoods, t is probably sociology rather than aesthetics. The e-mail

"chain letter,"forexample, is a beautiful expos6 of the intersection of professionaland casual networksof power.

2. WarrenSack explored the undervalued role of the computer as "privileged

questioner" in "Online LanguageGames,"a paper given at the College Art Asso-

ciation panel "Cyberspace:TrojanHorse or RomanHoliday: A Discussion of Our

Electronic Future" on February12, 1997. More informationon this conference is

available at (http://idea.ucdavis.edu/caa/intro.html).3.

Althoughit is not

currentlyemployedon the

Web,the most effective tech-

nology for implementing prosthetic intuitions may be neural networks,intercon-

nected weighted logic cells that can be trained to recognize simple patterns and

navigate mazes. Some similar technologies currently n development are the Foot-

prints programof Pattie Maes and Alan Wexelblat and the Darwin data mining

programof Thinking Machines Corporation.4. Technically speaking, Fireflyconstructs a vector fromthe weightseach user

assigns to different albums and runs a statistical comparison of this vector with

those of other users.

5. Karl Sims is perhaps the best-known practitionerof interactivegenetic art,

but to date only descriptions of his work are directly available on the Web.

6. In fact, a system that unites all three approaches is already being explored

by Pattie Maes and Alexandros Moukas, though not much informationwas avail-

able on it at the time of this writing. The project they have proposed, Amalthaea,

would be an artificial ecosystem of competing agents that discover and

filter information. More information can be found at (http://www.media.mit.edu/

-moux/research.html).

7. The contrast between the axiomatic model of conventional theory and theemergent criteria of the prosthetic agent has a mathematicalanalogy in the con-

trast between integrable and iterative equations. Integrable equations, for cen-

turies the favored tool of mathematicians for modeling nature, are those whose

solutions can be deduced by mathematical manipulation (they can be "integrat-

ed"). The solution to an integrable equation can be written down in a compactfor-

mula useful forcalculating the state of the system at any future time. Over the last

thirty years, however, physicists have realized that most situations fromreal life

cannot be directly integrated;the only way to find the future state of such systemsis to calculate the time evolution of the system for one moment,then calculate it for

the next, and so on. While mathematicians are adept at finding closed solutions to

integrable equations with pencil and paper, the tedious step-by-step analysis

requiredfor iterativeequations is best accomplished by a computer.8. Jaron Lanier has criticized conventional agents on different grounds: he

claims they dumb downhumanjudgment. While it is true that some researchersin

the field have made extravagantclaims for the way agents will personalize users'

experience of the Internet,Lanier gnores the potentialusefulness of agents in other

capacities. (Wouldhe accuse a screwdriverof dumbing down construction work-

ers?) Consistent with his disdain forartificialintelligence in general, he denies the

possibilitythat any intelligentagent of the future could possibly approachthe sub-

tlety characteristic of human thought. If by subtlety one means unpredictability,then Lanier'scriticism does not applyto distributed ntelligence, whoseoutputfor a

given input cannot merely be reduced to a set of predeterminedcriteria. Lanieris

closer to the mark n his claim that intelligent agents maybe susceptible to bribingor hacking by advertisers. The example of TV is not terribly promising:consider

how much of an averagenightly newscast is outright,or indirect,advertising.9. The advent of artificial ife has broughtnew meaningto Marshall McLuhan's

dictum that humans are the reproductive organsof machines.

10. Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air,Brilliant Fire: On the Matterof the Mind

(New York:Basic Books, 1992), 74-78.

11. This is made possible by the fact that the lymphocyte genes responsible for

the shape of that receptor are especially prone to jumbling duringtheir formation.

See ibid., 77. Whythen, don't some of these randomlyproduced lymphocytes latch

onto thebody's

ownproteins

and mark them for destruction? Because these lym-

phocytes areprogrammed o self-destruct if they attach to molecules present in the

thymus gland, where proto-lymphocytes develop. See Richard C. Duke, David M.

Ojcius, and John Ding-E Young,"Cell Suicide in Health and Disease," Scientific

American,December 1996, 82.

ens, JONIPPOLITOs an artist whose work is now on view at

, we Sandra Gering Gallery Online (http://www.interport.net/

-rms -gering). As exhibition coordinator at the Guggenheim

;s or Museum, he has curated and coordinated shows of new

media since 1993.

FALL1997