Today at the reading group we touched on the question of art and technology. I myself have also made some related remarks before, for example in the comments on Professor Wu Tong’s paper in A Travelogue of the Hailar Conference:
In the Western tradition of oil painting, although one carefully works with a brush during the process of painting, in the finished picture the “brush” is invisible; what appears in the picture is the object depicted. Only in more recent abstract painting or Impressionism does the “mark” of the brush begin to be left on the canvas. Chinese ink painting, by contrast, makes extensive use of brushstrokes; “as Zhang Yanyuan said, if no trace of the brush can be seen, then it is not called painting.” The brush is not only a means of painting, but also merges into the work as part of it. Master Xianglong brought up Chinese calligraphy, and here it can be viewed together with painting. Calligraphy is an even more typical art of “brushstroke.” The reason Chinese calligraphy has become an art is also that Chinese characters do not point directly and without remainder to speech sounds, but instead leave a certain space of resonance, from which a certain milieu of meaning is opened up. In my view, the distinctive feature of Chinese characters is just like the distinctive feature of the brush: unlike the West, where writing hides itself and directly points to speech, or the brush hides itself and directly presents the object, the Chinese brush cannot present the object completely clearly and decisively. As a medium, it is translucent, and the blurred area is the room it has for presenting itself. In this way of revealing itself through the “trace” of the medium, a new space of meaning is opened up, and artists are always good at capturing the implications in these interstices.
I want to say a bit more about this here.
What Heidegger emphasizes as art or “poetry” is obviously not a matter of elegance and romance, but has an extremely fundamental ontological status. Technology is the mode in which truth happens; technology is unconcealment, while art is the originary form of technology. What, then, is the relation between art and technology here? What makes art art? What makes poetry poetry?
In the earlier essay “Network Ontology—A Report on My Experience of Network Media,” I pointed out the concept of the “interface.” In fact, this is precisely a kind of “interstice.” In a revised draft that I have not yet posted, I added a paragraph:
Any medium, while making its content or object accessible and presenting it, will often at the same time reveal some kind of interstice of its own, within which a new space of meaning may be opened up. For example, writing is on the one hand a medium for transmitting words, but if people do not merely attend to the meaning of the words presented by writing, and instead linger in writing activity itself, then the new space of meaning called “calligraphy” is opened up. The space opened by “language” is even richer, so much so that people almost forget that the original meaning of words is to convey intentions within the real world, and instead assign the meaning of words only in that abstract world or world of ideas.
Any technology (medium) is never completely transparent. Whenever we operate through a medium or obtain its presentation, we inevitably encounter certain impediments in this in-between place; thus we can sometimes linger in this interstice, ignore the original “content,” and open up new meanings and images in this “interface” or interstitial space. Some interstitial spaces may become extremely large, with complex layers and structures, within which further interstices will also appear. The entire world of meaning is, in a certain sense, just such a whole of interstitial spaces nested within one another. The world as a whole can be seen as the “environment” of Dasein, that is, the medium through which Dasein approaches itself.
When a space of meaning is opened up in this way, what first reveals these meanings is precisely what we generally call artistic activity. Calligraphy is an art, rhetoric is an art, scholarship is also an art. I walk, moving from one place to another; the activity of walking is merely the medium through which I reach my destination. But if I no longer focus on the destination and instead linger in the walking activity itself, then the simplest act of walking can also become a performance art or a body art.
In this way, we can also reinterpret the media ecology school’s formulation that “the medium is the environment,” and the significance of “new media turning old media into works of art.” Why do old media become works of art? It is because, originally, the medium is always overshadowed by its “content.” A bronze vessel in its own time was regarded more as a container; people used it to hold wine or rice, and it was always filled by “content.” But once an old medium becomes obsolete, its original mission of presenting content is lost; it is “emptied out.” Then its existence as “atmosphere” or “mood” comes to the fore. People’s attention is no longer seized by content, but can linger within this emptied-out space of meaning, and the artistic quality of the work of art then readily becomes manifest. Kant defined art as “purposiveness without purpose”; here we might say that the essence of art lies in “mediality without content.”
April 23, 2011
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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