This research paper sets out to problematize a specific mode of contemporary living that surrounds the question of blackboxing pervasive in technological and media art culture, characterized by the concealment of the machine processual core of such works, leading to the illusion of technological literacy and competence. Such an alienation state has many names in the digital age. Latour finds blackboxing’s focus on the efficiency of the input-output loop making science and technology “more opaque and obscure.” (Latour 1999: 304) To McIntyre and Kapp, the blackbox is a symptom of compartmentalization, also that of capitalism. (2000, 1961) Stiegler (2017) calls this the “proletarianization of sensibility” — the everyday person’s loss of knowledge (savoir), i.e. the pre-knowledge of discipline-specific knowledge. (Gutting on Foucault 251) Arendt calls the proletarianized individual the “cultured philistine,” Stiegler the “amateur” in the drive economy, whose love of art is about libidinal energy not knowledge. The artist, too, is proletarianized. Blackboxing, a ruling feature of non-traditional art, produces the artist’s loss of knowledge as he growingly relying on packaged software. (Rodriguez 2008) The simplification of the machine process also saw user experience (UX) and interface design substitute for the democratization of technical knowledge as general knowledge. My critical response is to undo several levels of separation via art curatorship and creative practices. Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space & Time (2018.12.27 – 2019.01.11, City Hall, Hong Kong) experimented with ways to open the black box through commissioning works to soften the art-science divide, display strategies and media archaeological research to generate a new conceptual-historical framework.
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blackboxing ← → co-authorship, co-creativity
\nArtist as producer
\nblackboxing as a social fact ← → ethnography
\ncompartmentalization → organology, concrete action, tactics
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