Luciano Floridi and contemporary art practice

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the thinking of Luciano Floridi, especially his emphasis on information, could affect the way we approach art practice. It aims to situate art practice in relation to contemporary informational theories and suggests that the way we view contemporary art practice needs to move beyond existing theories. Key components to Floridi’s philosophy are introduced with relevance to art practice, followed by an analysis of these concepts with examples from the history of art. It is hoped that, by clarifying some of the more complex terms and concepts, readers will form a better understanding of the connections and potential synergy between art practice and the sciences of information, through the philosophy of Floridi.

KEYWORDS:

• Luciano Floridi
• philosophy of information
• art practice
• infosphere
• semantic capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gordon Edison McQueen (@gemcq) is an artist and graduate of City, University of London, who completed his dissertation on Luciano Floridi’s approach to information and its relevance to art practice. He lectured on British and American culture at the China University of Mining and Technology between 2005 and 2006 and later co-founded liminalart.org, a network for creative exchanges examining models of liminality.

David Bawden (@david_bawden) is Professor of Information Science in the Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London. He is the editor of Journal of Documentation, joint editor of the Foundations of Information Sciences series, and co-author of Facet’s best-selling textbook, Introduction to Information Science. His research interests include the foundations of the information sciences, information resources and documents and information behaviour, particularly those aspects associated with individual differences, with creativity and innovation, and with digital literacies.

Notes

1 To date, Floridi has published three books of an anticipated five-volume work on ‘The Foundations of the Philosophy of Information’ (see https://twitter.com/Floridi/status/1074955123107995648). The first volume, The Philosophy of Information (2011a) lays down the ‘conceptual foundations of the series’ (2011a, xii). The second, The Ethics of Information (2013) discusses ‘what duties, rights, and responsibilities are associated with the poietic practices that characterize our existence’ (Floridi 2019, xii). The Logic of Information (2019) offers a bridge between epistemological analysis of the first volume and the normative analysis of the second by focusing on the ‘conceptual logic of semantic information as a model’ (2019, xii).

2 E.A.T. assisted in the matching of artists with engineers (Kuo 2018, 163), presaged a ‘faceted navigation’ system of data processing much like the internet of today (171) and by 1970, attempted the ‘EATEX’ database which echoed Vannevar Bush’s vision of manipulable information (177). Indeed, some of the most iconic art projects stemming from the 1960s, from the new materials of Eva Hesse (192), to the use of light by James Turrell (272) would not have been possible without the establishment of E.A.T. (193).

3 At the beginning of this century, Wilson (2002) provided an extensive presentation of art research inspired by the latest scientific and informational thinking. Similarly, an anthology of text on the theme of information was later compiled by Cook (2016), offering a glimpse into the way artists have explored the questions of connection, memory and the access to knowledge from past to present.

4 The inclusion of Holzer’s work is significant as Floridi has mentioned mostly historical artistic efforts in passing. Despite what was to become the start of a global economic decline, Holzer’s work, like many New York based artists of the time, mirrored the ‘slickness and surface’ of the 80’s era (Harrison 2003, 82). Whatever the reasons, the stream of information flickering across the electronic displays and reflected on the marble surfaces must have made quite an impression. Towards the end of the 90’s, Floridi was to focus on what was to become a Philosophy of Information (Floridi 2011a, xii).

5 We thank an anonymous referee for drawing attention to this link.

6 A similar project by a group known as Hack the Artworld uploaded their own augmented displays as a critique of the Google-sponsored DevArt exhibition at the Barbican Centre of London (Collins 2014).

7 Level of abstraction (LoA) originates ‘from modelling techniques developed in an area of Computer Science, known as Formal Methods’ (Floridi 2008b, 91, 2013, 30–31). Floridi’s use of the concept was developed with a former colleague, Jeff Sanders (Floridi 2013, xvii) and an introduction to the concept can be found in the works of systems scientist Edsger Dijkstra, and of David Parnas, a pioneer in software engineering (Floridi 2013, 29).

8 The term constructionism, or maker’s knowledge (see Floridi 2011b), came from the computer scientist Seymour Papert and his work on the psychologist Jean Piaget’s constructivism (Floridi 2013, 176). The clearest example of constructionism in art would be an artist’s workshop or makerspace. Interestingly, although by no means a perfect example, Snapchat recently created a Spin Art filter in collaboration with Damien Hirst (see Wilson 2020). For a small donation, users of the mobile application can create and display their own virtual spin painting through the augmented reality tool.

9 Floridi acknowledges Marvin Minsky as having pioneered the study of presence. It is commonly understood as ‘a type of experience of “being there”’, especially in relation to some form of mediation (2013, 34).

10 When semantic content is false, we could simply call it misinformation. When the semantic content is an intentional lie, this becomes disinformation (Floridi 2010a, 50). As semantic content, semantic information, that is, a truthful semantic content, could be instructional or factual (34). Semantic content could be factual without being entirely true, like that of a false story concerning a situation. We could potentially deduce information (that is, elements of truth) out of the story, but the content itself remains false. The story is only considered factual semantic information if it is entirely true (49–50).

11 Animals have narratives ‘within which meaning is embedded’ (Floridi 2018b, 485), but as far as we know, they don’t make sense of their existence. Artificial agents can ‘only handle syntax, not even meaning’, so they cannot define who they are on their own terms (Floridi 2018b, 485). The only way an artefact can enrich an experience with an interpretation is if we humans use it to make sense of our existence. So, something like a collection of art could be said to give us a sense of meaning or help us make sense of the world.

12 Claire Bishop (2012, 1) differentiates participatory art from interactivity, where the former ‘connotes the involvement of many’ and the latter, a one-to-one relationship.

13 Schneider (2016, 202) has noted that Gell's social relations has particular significance when viewed with the writings of curator Nicolas Bourriaud, which discuss social relations as the materials artists work with. Interestingly, Bourriaud has asserted that participation was never the central aspect of his relational aesthetic theory (see Dryansky 2016, 785).

14 Dominic Preston, writing in Philosophy and Technology (a journal edited by Floridi) is concerned with Lopes’ ‘ambiguity between … cases where a display varies over time, and cases where a display varies because there are multiple, varied instances of it’ in relation to its properties (Preston 2014, 270). Preston suggested, for sake of clarity, that Lopes’ definition should speak of display type (271). It is also apparent, Preston continues, that although Lopes ‘goes to some lengths to lay out the properties possessed by displays, it is less clear what properties the [interactive] artworks themselves bear’ (272).

15 In a passage that quotes the writings of Janet Murray, Floridi later identifies the three pleasures of digital environments as that of immersion, agency and transformation (see Floridi 2013, 172). He adds the further pleasure of interactivity, as the vision of what defines telepresence in the infosphere (173).

16 ‘This work consists of a clock, a photograph of this clock on the same scale, and three blown-up photographs of entries from an English-Latin dictionary for the words ‘time’, ‘machination’ and ‘object’. It is one of a series of works comprising a real object such as a clock, a chair or a hammer, together with its photograph and one or more entries for words relating to descriptions or definitions of it taken from dictionaries (usually dictionaries from English into another language)’ (Alley 1981, 399).

17 At a given level of abstraction, the system observed is treated as a reference model: ‘We never check semantic information against some fact, we check it against other semantic constructs’ (Floridi 2011a, 203–204). So, for example, in the case of Joseph Beuys and the myth of being shot down as a pilot in the Luftwaffe, the narrative, which his art is constructed around, supports his work as a system.

18 If we call it an authentic unoriginal assemblage, then we are saying that it was in the style and content of a Matta-Clark – which it could be, since he was very flexible with his projects. Then again, we would also be saying that it was not original in terms of what he had in mind. This is more difficult to prove as stories conflict, but there were mentions of the process he envisaged the collection to follow (see Kastner 2005, 45). If we say it was an inauthentic original assemblage, then we are questioning the process but not the intent.

19 Boden studied at the Cambridge Language Research Unit where she encountered Pask and his computer-aided learning devices (see Floridi 2008b, 2).

20 This is not to say that we will not have human information organisms attempting to master skills that a machine could perform with ease. After all, the art of painting realistically did not die with the advent of photography. This emphasis on process could be interpreted as the importance of constructionism (see Floridi 2013, 173), where the difference is purely informational.

21 For a simple yet interesting exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of using a generative adversarial network in art, see Shane (2019).