Experimental media artists are always entangled with the medium-specific materials they work with. They typically have to traverse and synthesise multiple mediated scales at once to repurpose or defamiliarise objects in order to make them speak, whether these scales be from voltages to music, bits to words, or pixels to perspectives. In this sense, media artists are engaged in capturing a material that in turn captures them, and ultimately captures the subjects the constructed artwork aims to address. An artwork is thus a site of ‘reciprocal capture’, to use a term from Isabelle Stengers, in that it undoes strict subject/object dichotomies. This is how artworks can be said to defamiliarise objects and give them a ‘voice.’ And it is not just objects that are defamiliarised but the ‘familiar subjects’ as well. So beyond being simply a savoir-faire, artwork making is a creative act that problematises and dramatises the familiar by shifting the attention and focus of our familiar questions/answers (e.g. Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how is our infrastructure? Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how are our mediated identities?, etc.).  

In this lecture, I will unstitch this way of dramatising ‘problems’ from how such dramatisation is articulated in certain spheres of academia: with empirical methods. In the field of (digital) Media and Cultural studies, there are many connections that could be drawn with the way I qualified what experimental media artists do and what methods supposedly do as well. Making an object speak is also a concern of method. That being said, the fragile and brittle ways in which ‘reciprocal capture’ is sustained in artistic practices are seamlessly re-captured by the (inter)disciplinary narratives that methods help articulate. Within these (inter)disciplinary narratives, methods harbour questions of legitimacy, which is to say they give these narratives abilities to disqualify works that do not fall within certain boundaries. Therefore, rather than collapsing the familiar distance between subject and object, methods’ mode of dramatisation reify a certain subject position that reinstates distances. 

One is thus entitled to ask: Who are the (distant) subjects methods create? Who decides when a method is a method? Taking stock of my own trajectory as an artist and academic, I will address these questions with some of my work and question the ‘methodological turn’ in my field, one that, I will argue, produces what Jean-François Lyotard calls ‘differends.’ Bio Dr. 

David Gauthier is Assistant Professor of Computational Media and Arts in the Media and Culture Studies department at Utrecht University. With a background in Mathematics, Media Arts and Sciences, and Cultural Analysis, Gauthier’s work fosters original means of studying objects and phenomena by making transdisciplinary connections between different modes of inquiry stemming from these cultural and scientific traditions. Influential to his scholarly work, Gauthier is also a practicing media artist. Through the production of artworks which have been commissioned by art institutions across Europe and North America, his engagement with computation spans cultural production and active participation in various cultural networks.  https://www.uu.nl/sta/dgauthier/ https://davidgauthier.info/

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞