E-LOGOS
ELECTRONIC
JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY
ISSN
1211-0442
-----------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Becker
German
National Research Centre of Computer Science, St. Augustin
&
Gerhard Eckel
Institute
de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris
On the Relationship between Art and Technology
in Contemporary Music
==========================================================================
Abstract
This article starts with the question, whether different
epistemological and practical objectives in art and technology are responsible
for the problems which can be observed in present Media-art. Therefore, we
first demonstrate some traditional objectives of art, especially the position
of the so-called Frankfurt-School, according to which art is diametrically opposed
to technological attitudes and claims since art has to express alternative ways
of perceiving and interpreting the world. In contrast to this, we argue that
techniques and technological states always have influenced the creative act. By
demonstrating this effect in contemporary music, we describe some of the
problems which arise when artists use computers and, furthermore, we put for
discussion some ideas which may lead to a more creative use of these systems.
Keywords
aesthetics, technology, philosophy of techniques, criteria of
validation, art-making, contemporary music, computer-systems, media-art
1. Introduction
In the discourse of philosophical aesthetics during the last two
centuries, it is evident that the question of the essence of art has played a
central role. In this tradition, art was not understood as "something constructed".
1 Instead, art was integrated into the conceptual world of epistemology through
the philosophical aesthetics developed in the major philosophical systems.
Accordingly, within this metaphysical tradition, art was attributed an
exploratory, interpretative and epistemological function, insofar as it was
assumed that truth could appear in a given work.
Modern theories of art have freed themselves from this
philosophical bondage, especially from the metaphysical objective of expressing
truth2 by art, tending instead to orient their approaches toward empirical sciences.
Thus at the centre of reflection on theories of art is less a work's ontology,
but rather its experientiality3, that is the way how it will be perceived and
interpreted. Concomitantly, concentration has shifted to specific aspects of
art, like the aesthetic use of signs, schematisation modes, or the message of art,
and thus the metaphysical construct art has been separated into definable,
explainable components. The production and reception of art, the
characteristics of its medium, its capacity for communication, its effective
possibilities and their consequences all these considerations have become
points of reflection which can be analysed independently.
This is the context into which the present essay fits.
Consequently, it is not the relationship between technology and art in general
which will be treated; rather, we want to examine critically the interaction of
artistic and technological perspectives and approaches. In this discussion on using
technology in art, we will concentrate primarily on the aspect of artistic
creation to document difficulties and possibilities and to point out
relationships with the epistemological interests4 and criteria of validity5 in
each discourse area.
This implies the following procedure : First, we will present and
analyse critically the hypothesis of the "two cultures". Then, we
will examine how, in an empirical analysis of partial aspects of art,
connections to technology can be established which render questionable the
strong discrepancy of the criteria of validity in these two domains. Here, we will
take the use of technology in contemporary music as an example to show in what
way artistic objectives can be realised using technological possibilities and
to show what problems arise. We will then demonstrate how these difficulties
result from the implicit acceptance of technological habits by artists. And
finally, we will discuss in which way technology can be used in art without
giving up aesthetic intentions and criteria.
2. Interpreting the World, or: the "Two-culture Problem"
In writings of early Greek philosophers, references can be found
to different ways of interpreting and approaching the world. Aristotle, for example,
differentiates between a theoretical, a creative, and a practical orientation.
According to this, the goal of theoretical science is the search for truth; the
goal of practice ("Praxis") is the act or the result of acts as well
as the proper way of acting ("das richtige Tun"); the goal of poiesis
is making and producing. Analogous to this early distinction are equivalent
attempts at definition, which can be found up to this day. Science has been
primarily imputed theoretical epistemological ideals whose aim was finding
truth. Technique6 has been characterised as principally practical, being oriented
on criteria of usefulness. And art was attributed an individually expressive,
sensually and emotionally characterised exploration function7, beyond
logocentric or expediency potential. In this way, and especially from a
metaphysical perspective, art came al- most naturally into contradiction with
science and technique. Especially in the diagnoses of philosophical cultural
criticism, as they were developed by Heidegger and Adorno, for example, the
distinction between artistic expression and technological rationalism gained particular
meaning. Technique came to be interpreted as the expression of a totalitarian
MAN8 against which only art could set a different accent, for art was thought
of as being capable to express undefinable, unpronounceable aspects of the
world which escape from technological control.
In the context of this interpretation, technique was characterised
as follows: The fundamental paradigm of all technical development is the idea
of Verfugbarmachung (making something available). This refers not only to the
domination of nature but also to the control of social processes. A related
expectation is that technique always has to serve a purpose. Technological
products must be useful, which means that in practice, they must be manageable
as well as utilitary. According to exponents of cultural criticism, with the
spread of technique the danger increases that the whole world, including human
beings, become nothing more than an object of technical availability.
Increasingly within our culture, the only possible paradigm and profitable way
of interpreting and approaching the world appears to be an orientation on
exclusively rationally determined expediency.
In opposition to this sort of technological domination by
technique and associated attitudes, Adorno interpreted art as the only possible
alternative. He pointed out that epistemological objective of art9 always was
diametrically opposed to that of technique: While technique aimed at a general
ordering and a global control, art - in contrast - revealed individual and
particular aspects of the human existence. In artistic expression, new views of
the world which contrast with general paradigms of technology could be
experienced and articulated. In its lack of purpose, art aimed not at making
something available, but rather, in its very distance from the attitudes proper
to technique, it referred to alternative modes of individual and cultural ways
of living. Points of view similar to these are also found in the works of the philosopher
Jurgen Habermas, who undertakes a fundamental differentiation between the
system-world ("Systemwelt") and the life- world
("Lebenswelt")10. These categories imply an important classification
for our discussion: Art is described as an essential aspect of live-world,
while technology is understood as a pillar of the system- world. The criteria
of validity differ accordingly: While art is attributed being capable to
express what is significant for the individual, the paradigm of technology
includes rational purpose, goal orientation and the idea of feasibility.
Habermas makes evident the extent to which these two discourses exert a mutual
influence; nonetheless, the epistemological and practical objectives of the two
are diametrically opposed in his writings. Thus, an orientation towards
purpose, utility, and availability appears here as characteristics of
technique, while art is described as aiming at individual expression,
authenticity, and by its attempt to escape from the purpose-oriented paradigm
of availability by using pre-rational and non-predicative ways of interpreting
the world.
The dichotomy between the discourses of art and technology which
is assumed in such theoretical approaches, would have consequences for the
anticipated synthesis in the domain of media art: - either the synthesis cannot
be realised because the different epistemological objectives and ways of
interpreting the world will never fit together;
- or art would pay for the synthesis with the loss of its particular
criteria and its specific exploratory function, a situation tantamount to the
burdening of artistic intention with the paradigms of technology. In the
following, let us examine more closely the suppositions associated with such a
differentiation. As we indicated in the introduction, most classic attempts to
define the discourse of art suffer from the fact that the evaluation of arts
usually is undertaken from the perspective of art reception. Usually, an
implicit ontological assumption lies at the base of such analyses. Combined
with this is the claim for autonomy in art11, which increasingly has become
dubious and was identified as a residue of bourgeois culture. The
institutionalisation of art as a socially autonomous discourse was and is
combined with exclusionary practices, which have a constituting function for
every discourse. This process of institutionalisation presupposed clear
criteria, which were intended to determine if a work is considered to be art or
not. With the post-modern widening towards triviality, however, exactly these
exclusionary institutionalising practices became questionable and with them the
associated criteria of validity. Art as an independent domain, as it appears in
the works of Heidegger, Adorno and even Habermas, looses its clear boundaries -
its function in the culture is more and more characterised by a tendency
towards a global Asthetisierung of our life- world, which means that phenomena
of our everyday life are regarded under an aesthetic perspective. This
disintegration is combined with an increasing critique of the characteristics
which were ascribed to art wi- thin the metaphysical tradition. More
particularly, this disintegration calls into question the capability of art to
exist independent of other social discourses and to develop its autonomous (or
even "free") forms of interpretation and inquiry of the world, which
go beyond the ruling orientations. The dictum of originality, individuality,
and authentic expressiveness, as it appears as a characteristic of art in
Adorno's and Habermas' works, for example, was unmasked as a remnant of a subject-oriented
view of the world. Such a view fails to recognise that the subject, which was
once considered to be autonomous, has long since been completely permeated by
all embracing social structures, such as language and the technologically
mediated attitude12 of availability and control, to the extent that it is now
influenced by them. According to this, the idea of autonomous criteria of
validity in art also appears increasingly doubtful.
A similar phenomenon can be observed in the realm of technique.
Due to the fact that it permeates all areas of life and influences or even determines
the way of acting within the world by shaping cultural interpretation
paradigms, it cannot be separated from other social areas by identifying
special modes of discourse and particular criteria of validity. Instead, in the
so-called information-society, what Adorno and Heidegger had anticipated,
begins to take place: The paradigms proper to technique become the general
orientation in our culture, penetrating to an increasing degree even areas
which previously, as residues, managed to preserve a proper identity and
specificity. And this is also true, as we will later see, for art and artistic
activity.
3. Art and Technology: Intersections and Interconnections
We have thus seen that the traditional approaches in philosophical
aesthetics and culture criticism - assuming the independence of claims and
attitudes in technology and art, become questionable and that the concept of
art as an autonomous social discourse, cannot be maintained. For that reason,
we are convinced that in order to ensure an analysis of the reciprocal
pervasion of conceived goals, interpretation paradigms, and the associated
lifestyles, the examination of the relationship between art and technology must
take place on a concrete level. In such a limitation of our discussion, a
glance at the creative process proves to be fruitful, for here immediate
references can be observed. Here, in particular, we may gain an impression of
the close connections between technology and art which are a further indication
of the brittleness of an overly rigid boundary between both areas, as we will
demonstrate in the following.
In contrast to the metaphysical tradition, in the early history of
philosophy, especially when looking at the Greeks, the intimate connection
between art and technique in the creative process was an important theme. Here,
the separation between ars and techne represented more a nuance than a
fundamental difference. Weibel, for example, referring to Aristotle, points out
the coupling of techne with the concept of creation. According to this,
technique aims not only at imitating nature, but also at creation13 and at
creative modification of aspects of the world. Technique is a social act: It is
to be "interpreted as a dynamic process, as working and doing, as making
and creating."14 In its creative dimension, technique refers not only to
the realm of necessity and control but also to the realm of freedom. It is not
per se the form of expression of an unconditional will to rationality and rationalisation
which aims at making everything available; it can also contribute to overcome
given states and structures15. Technique can mask the truth just as well as it
can make it evident the creative potential of technique involves the
possibility of liberation. If the creative function of technique is taken into
account, then "technique-art" is not a contradiction, as is sometimes
argued. The traditional confrontation between machine, the mechanical,
technique, technology on the one hand and creativity, imagination, and creation
on the other hand has led to a point of view from which classical aestheticians
could only equate the entry of machines in art with a threatened fall of art.
This confrontation, however, was only possible due to the fact that the process
of artistic creation and the questions of how and by which means art has been
realised were rigorously excluded from the aesthetic discussion. Had these
questions been included, it would have been seen that the divergence described
above couldn't have been sustained in such a strict sense. As Kant already has
pointed out16, every artist takes recourse to techniques or a set of rules and
makes use of acquired craftsmanship in order to express an artistic idea. And
technical means have always been used in order to express artistic intentions.
But even if these conditions have been recognised, they did not play an
important role in traditional aesthetics. In this classical view, "the
material, the medium of the work of art, the systems supporting the
transformation of an object into a painting, or the material medium of a work's
construction"17 were neglected compared to the supposed essence of the
work of art, its ontological level. But the ontological raison d'etre of the
work of art can and has to be traced back to its material structure, to the
conditions under which it came into existence. For that reason, we direct our attention
to the material fundament of art and to the way how it is constructed, because
- as Adorno already said - only in and by its materiality the essence of art
can unfold.
4. The Use of Technology and Techniques in Art
Taking these aspects into account the diagnoses, which predict the
decline of art in general brought about by confrontation with technique- art or
media-art, become relative. That technology and technological products - as
well as technique in the sense of a goal-oriented process - always played an
essential role in art, becomes apparent in the fact that underlying each work
of art, in addition to creative intuition, is also a system of rules and
techniques. Thus, that technique is a basic procedure of art is manifest. But
also the technological products as well as the historical state of
technological development has always influenced artistic ideas and works. Thus,
for example, it was only after the development of metal tools that sculpture
could flourish, and the painting of the nineteenth century was essentially
dependent on the appearance of artificial paints. The problems of contemporary
art result less from the use of technology and the use of goal-oriented
procedures, than from the fact that the rationalised expediency paradigms of technique
begin to suppress artistic criteria and intentions18. And this fear seems
especially valid where aesthetic criteria questionable as they may be must
yield space to the idea of feasibility and mere sensationalism19.
Thus, we have to consider particularly the gradual changes, the fragilities
and the points of intersection which appear in the process of integrating
technology into artistic activity, in order to determine whether the presently
generally observable domination by technique narrows this last remaining space
to play and explore the free space of human expression or whether there remains
freedom for creative innovation and new forms of interpretation.
Before we undertake a concrete investigation on the interaction of
technique and art in contemporary music, let us discuss one important aspect
which can be seen as a consequence of so-called media art. We have shown that
in the course of its history, art has always had a specific relationship to
technological development, although in the past, this relationship was
primarily characterised by the fact that technology served as an additional
resource20. It wasn't until the development of reproduction techniques that the
work of art, its originality, and its aura were questioned21. The explosive
growth of information and communication technology suggests a further
evolution: Increasingly, technology has influenced not only the acquisition of
reality through artisanship and handicraft 22, but, spreading in scope, now
also influences our images of reality 23, that is the kind of imagination and interpretation
of the world, attaining thus a role of central importance in artistic creation,
which may lead to a modification of traditional aesthetic criteria with still
unknown consequences.
5. The Relationship between Technology, Technique, and Art
In western music history we can identify a similar interrelation
of technology and art: particular states of technological development show a
close interdependency to respective artistic concepts. Furthermore we can see
that standardised procedures always have been an essential prerequisite for any
kind of composition. We shall clarify these aspects in the following two
examples:
1) The compositional process is subject to various influences and
it defies - as any artistic activity - a precise description. Nevertheless, when
looking at composition in retrospective, it can be seen that each historical
period was characterised by certain compositional techniques which shaped the
thinking and acting of composers. Over and over, commonly adopted techniques
suggesting new ways of treating the musical material took shape and became
subject to historical development. In this process the work of composers always
implied a kind of response24 to the currently established repertoire of
techniques, which therefore always occupied a central role in artistic work.
2) However, the work of composers is not only determined by
different techniques: artistic intentions are influenced as well by technology.
This can clearly be seen when looking at instrument making: The development of
musical instruments was always dependent on specific technological achievements.
One the one hand the technological progress inspired composers,
instrumentalists, and instrument makers since it enabled them to think of new
possibilities of sound production. On the other hand the concrete musical needs
and wishes expressed by instrumentalists and composers led to the development
of many musical instruments25.
These two little examples show clearly that the relationship
between technology and artistic creation is not simply of a mono-causal nature.
Rather we have to assume a dialectical interrelation of the two domains. Certain
artistic ideas could not have been realised if certain techniques and
technologies were not developed or invented as a consequence of particular
demands. In reverse, technology always stimulated the exploration and
experimentation with new artistic concepts. But our short historical review
points out yet another aspect: In the past, technology or technological
products were only used as a kind of additional resource when realising
artistic ideas. Thus they contributed mainly to the craftsmanship. In the
context of computer and media art, technology gains a more central role and
increasingly influences the intellectual conception of - and approach to -
reality. Technology advances from a bare means to the very medium in the
process of adoption and interpretation of the world. At the same time we can observe
a significant discrepancy between what is technologically possible and what is
artistically exploitable. This disparity seems to be responsible for certain
undesirable developments as they can be noticed today. We will try to clarify
them taking the example of computer assisted music composition and production.
5.1 The Creative Potential of New Technology in Music
The new possibilities offered by technology can be characterised
by a notion we encountered already in the discussion on the traditional role of
technology: Verfugbarmachung, the act of bringing something to someone's
disposal. There are two aspects which become accessible to the composer via new
technology: control over potentially all perceptually relevant aspects of the
sound material and the possibility to symbolically represent and manipulate
musical structures. The fact that sound can be recorded by microphones,
distributed via electrical wires or electromagnetic waves, recorded by tape
recorders, and reproduced by loudspeakers changes radically the composers
access to sound. Especially the possibility to treat sound material out-of-time
became essential for composition in the middle of our century: the possibility
to record sound on magnetic tape and thus freeze its temporality offers new
possibilities of operation on sound. Their impact on music creation may in a
long run be comparable to the one music notation had on the development of
occidental composition. The technological representations of sound26 suggest
manipulations that are almost unthinkable with sounding sound, i.e. with sound
in-time, the only way sound was directly accessible in the past. Like musical notation
allowed for new compositional procedures through its representational
capacities, the storage of sound on magnetic tape or in the computer changed
fundamentally the way composers may think about sound.
In addition, the technological representations of sound (as
electric current in the analogue music production studio or numeric information
in the computer) allow for the synthesis of entirely new sound material with
virtually no limitations and they permit the transformation of existing
recorded sound. Various sound synthesis and transformation methods have been
developed in the past four decades and are used in musical composition today.
Sound synthesis means for the composer the possibility to compose the sound
material itself and to implant on the level of the material properties that can
be exploited on higher levels of musical organisation. The compositional
process may thus be extended to cover the construction of the sound material
itself. Another important aspect technology offers to composers today is related
to the symbolic representation and calculation capacity of information
technology. Computer systems allow the composer to represent and manipulate
musical objects and simulate compositional procedures. Tools for computer aided
composition are available to composers since about two decades and range from
special purpose problem solving engines to general purpose music
representations and simulation systems. Recent development in sound synthesis
control and computer aided composition showed the need to closely integrate the
two domains: the control over sound material and the modelling of structural
and formal aspects of music. In general we can say that computers allow
composers to design models of sound and form. These models have an explicative and
generative function27: They are used to represent and manipulate musical
concepts as well as to produce musical objects (e.g. chords, sounds, rhythms)
which can then be directly evaluated in the context of the concrete
compositional project.
5.2 The Integration of Technology in Contemporary
Composition
The creative potential offered by new technology matches well with
the compositional requirements which have been expressed by composers in the
twentieth century: the transgression of the mechanical and acoustical
limitations introduced by traditional instruments and playing techniques,
generally a better compositional control over timbre, the possibility to
operate with a synthetic sound material whose aura does not directly relate to
known sound sources, the interest of exploring the regions of ambiguity between
harmonic organisation and timbre by directly controlling perceptually relevant
aspects of sound, the integration of traditionally under-represented expressive
means in music like the compositional control of space in the musical discourse
- these are only a few examples of needs expressed by composers to which
technology theoretically can respond to today. When looked at in a larger
historical context these and similar demands appear coherent with the general
development of western musical composition towards an absolute control of the
final result. Inventions like the metronome, which allows to precisely specify
the tempo of the interpretation, or the refinement of musical notation to
describe dynamics and playing modes can be interpreted in that sense. It is not
an accident that the first systematic use of technology in composition - in the
elektronische Musik as it appeared in the middle our century - coincides with
the climax of structuralistic orientation in composition: serielle Musik.
Technology appeared to be the perfect means to realise the paradigms of
serielle composition, which sought for total control over all musical
parameters.
In that context it may seem paradoxical that only a few of the aforementioned
technological possibilities are really accessible in practice. There is a substantial
lack of tools which permit a compositionally adequate exploitation of the new
possibilities. We can identify several reasons which contribute to this
situation. 1) Most of the existing tools are developed for commercial music production
and thus are based on implicit assumptions of musical expression which usually
are not valid in the domain of contemporary music. There is a substantially
larger market for tools adapted to commercial music than for any other branch
of music. Development efforts for artistically more interesting tools are
limited to non-profit research centres and private persons, such as composers
themselves. The majority of technological tools for music production are thus developed
under a commercial and technological perspective rather than an artistic one.
2) There are only very few tools which are well adapted to the compositional
process. The central aspects of creative work, such as imagination,
experimentation, exploration, evaluation, and organisation are not sufficiently
respected in the design of computer tools. The results are inadequate
user-interfaces and arbitrary technical limitations introduced by software
developers with insufficient musical competence. Most aspects typical for the
complexity of human expression and perception, such as the relevance of our
body in exploring and interpreting the world, are under-represented in a mostly
technologically oriented milieu.
3) The complexity of technologically mediated music production
usually necessitates team-work of technicians and composers because the latter are
rarely sufficiently skilled in order to use technological tools appropriately.
This collaboration is very frequently the source of conflicts resulting from
technicians' and composers' divergent ways of approaching problems of all
kinds. Such conflicts lead to misconceptions. Hence aesthetic concepts are very
often replaced by technological effects because artists are overwhelmed by the
technological possibilities. Looking at the use of computers in the composition
process from a more general point of view, we gain the impression that even
composers themselves adopt a more and more technological attitude: The possibility
of controlling and making available almost all musical parameters seems to
overwhelm all other aspects of creative use of technology. This way of using
computer systems seem to mark the end point of a long tradition, during which
the composer aimed at becoming the sole controller and master of every musical
event.
6. Resume
The example of computer use in contemporary music pointed out that
the current employment of this technology is rather unsatisfactory. Instead of
making creative use of the technological potential, computer art overtakes a
technological habit of mind, which aims at control, domination, and the idea of
making available all aspects of the world. As a consequence the individual
forms of expression, which are traditionally attributed to art, are in danger
to be lost. However, this way of dealing with technology is not immanent to the
same: Rather is it the result of a long lasting tradition, which cannot be seen
in isolation but that has its correspondences to intellectual and social
attitudes. The metaphysical concentration on the subject appears as an essential
element of explanation. The perceiving, knowing, and acting subject of
mentalistic philosophy28 was not only at the centre of all questions concerning
the meaning and the sense of the world but in its central role it also aimed at
the total control over nature. For that purpose techniques and technologies
were developed. They increasingly penetrated our life-world29, shaped the
individual way of exploring the world and influenced its interpretation based
on a technological attitude. As already mentioned above, the domain of art did
not remain untouched by this development. Although up to present art could preserve
residuals of an individual sphere as well as particularities in the manner of
approaching the world. But a certain obsession with ingenuity30, as we can find
it again and again in classical aesthetics, is deeply rooted in the
metaphysical concentration on the subject, which may explain nowadays attitude
towards technology. This is not only true with respect to the conception that
the artist is the sole source and supporter of ideas, which have to be
transmitted from a supposed inside to the outside, but it can also be seen in
the general attitude towards the own product. When regarding in retrospect the
tendency of composers to exhaustively prescribe and control all aspects of the
musical process, we perceive an attitude similar to the technological habit of
mind. It is exactly this kind of attribution by artists themselves or by others
which results into an attitude towards technology which, by necessity, creates problems.
Either the artist tries to realise his or her explicit idea by means of
technological tools and often reaches so the limits of their own competence, of
technology, or of the communication with technologists. Or the artists lets
him- or herself seduce by what is technologically possible (e.g. by the
possibility of total control over the sound material and the interpretation) to
the extent that the artistic conceptions are compromised. The anticipated
penetration of artistic creation by a technological habit of mind leads to a
loss of the original potential of creativity which just results from an
insufficiency of control and access. Art, which was originally understood as
the domain representing the particular, increasingly yields its place to a
standardisation of all forms of human expression.
As a consequence, certain preconceptions need to be dropped in
order to allow for a creative use of technology in art today. In that sense the
concept of a solipsistic cogito as the only possible author of artistic ideas has
to be unmasked as a metaphysical construct. It more and more has to be replaced
by the conception that ideas develop in a context, in the togetherness of
individuals, and in the process of exploring the available and accessible
material. The artist should not any longer be regarded as the sole source of
artistic ideas but may appear as a mediator in the attempt to articulate them
aesthetically. This leads to a different approach towards technology and
appears to be the prerequisite for its creative potential to become accessible.
The technological possibilities should be explored in a playing manner in order
to guarantee that they can be at all integrated into the artists' expressive
repertoire. This way of employing technology may result into a richness of
nuances and a diversity which is in clear opposition to the technological habit
of mind ruling our present culture. Only based on such an approach, which leaves
behind all ideas of control and domination, the use of techniques and
technology may overcome a given state or existing structures and thus points to
a dimension of freedom as it appeared in culture-critical analyses as the
proper designation of art.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Joyce Shintani for helping us to translate this text
from German to English.
1Italics by the present authors; reference: Iser, W., "Interpretationsperspektiven
moderner Kunsttheorie", in: Henrich, D., and Iser, W., (eds.),
"Theorien der Kunst", Frankfurt 1992.
2In German: Wahrheitsanspruch.
3In German: Erfahrbarkeit.
4In German: Erkenntnisinteresse
5In German: Geltungsanspruche
6We distinguish between "Realtechnik" = technology,
which is charcterized by the production and use of technical products, and
"technique as a process or procedure," which can describe all forms
of goal-oriented activity. Here, we use the term in the sense of technology.
7In German: Erkundungsfunktion.
8See especially: Heidegger, M., "Sein und Zeit", but
also Adorno, Th.W., "Aesthetische Theorie", Frankfurt.
9In German: Erkenntnisanspruch.
10Habermas, J, "Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns",
Vol. 1 u. 2, Frankfurt 1981.
11In German: Autonomieanspruch.
12In German: Habitus. In the sense Bourdieu assigned to it in
several contributions, e.g. Bourdieu, P., "Homo Academicus",
Frankfurt 1987.
13In German: Gestaltung.
14Weibel, P., "Transformationen der Techno-Asthetik",
in: Rotzer, F., "Digitaler Schein", Frankfurt : 1991, p. 224.
15In German: das Gegebene.
16Kant, I., "Kritik der Urteilskraft", Frankfurt 1984.
17Ibid., p. 228.
18 A danger which increases in information society.
19See as an impressive example: Piene, O., "Das Schone und
das Tuchtige", in: Rotzer, F., "Digitaler Schein", Frankfurt
1991.
20See also: Zec, P., "Das Medienwerk. Aesthetische Produktion
im Zeitalter der elektronischen Kommunikation", in: Rotzer, F., a.a.O.
21This has been explained by Benjamin, W., "Das Kunstwerk im
Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit", Frankfurt.
22In German: handwerkliche Realitatsaneignung.
23In German: Realitatsvorstellungen.
24This response may consist in a mere adoption of current
compositional techniques or in a critical evaluation, modification or
transformation of the same.
25The Wagner-Tuba, which was built after the precise wished of
Richard Wagner, may serve as an example here.
26For details on technological representations of sound please
refer to Garnett, G. E., "Music, Signals, and Representations: A
Survey", in: DePoli, G., Piccialli, A., Roads, C. (eds.),
"Representations of musical signals", The MIT Press, London 1991.
27The notion of model which is relevant to our context is
discussed extensively in Rodet, X. and Depalle, Ph., "De la voix aux
instruments", Les Cahiers de l'IRCAM No. 2, Paris 1993 and in Assayag, G.,
"CAO: vers la partition potentielle", Les Cahiers de l'IRCAM No. 3,
Paris 1993.
28In German: Bewu tseinsphilosophy.
29In German: Lebenswelt.
30In German: Geniekult.
(c) Dr. Barbara Becker & Dr. Gerhard Eckel | Kunst ist
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