“Heidegger, Harman, and Algorithmic Allure”

Peter Erdélyi will like this: a paper on my Bournemouth paper.

Abstract for “Heidegger and the Work of Art History”
Session at Association of Art Historians (AAH) Annual Conference, April 15-17, 2010,
Glasgow, UK.

“Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure”
Robert Jackson BA (Hons)
School of Computing, Communications and Electronics
Art and Social Technologies
http://www.art-social.net/
Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth.

In recent years the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has surfaced with a “realist” re-reading of Martin Heidegger‟s Tool-analysis, pushing it to its logical limits (Tool-Being – 2002). Dismissing Dasein as the root of truth for human beings, Harman instead argues that “Readiness-to-hand” and “Present-at-hand” are qualities available to all entities in the cosmos even if humans created such objects.

In January 2008 Harman‟s paper “On the Origin of the Work of Art (atonal remix)” attempts to perform an “object-oriented-philosophy” reading of Heidegger‟s influential essay on aesthetics, identifying Heidegger’s “strife” as a philosophical idea which escapes into the qualities of all objects and not just privileged artworks. But the extension of Heidegger’s strife hints to the idea of aesthetic “allure,” which Harman describes as “a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing’s unity and its plurality of notes somehow partly disintegrates.” “Allure” occurs when objects are split from their qualities, exhibiting tensions between its essence of “Being” and the way it has been described. Artworks, metaphors and jokes turn out not to be affecting features of human literary culture, but primordial constructions of the universe itself.

The paper will argue that these rich conceptualisations offer insightful commentary on technological artworks which utilise computational algorithms. I claim that artists such as John F Simon and Antoine Schmitt create generative and emergent aesthetic objects which display “allure” in all of their partial opacity, leading to the idea that technological artworks can propel vigorous independence, worlds away from superficial artificiality.