Eco's Openness and Interactive Art & Design
Transcript of Eco's Openness and Interactive Art & Design
Umberto Eco’s Open Work
Understanding Art & Technology through the concept of Openness and Meaning Crea@on
Umberto Eco (1932-‐ )
Italian literary cri@c, novelist, semio@cian, who gained interna@onal fame with his intellectual detec@ve story IL NOME DELLA ROSA (1980, The Name of the Rose), a book about books. It extended the use of semio@cs to fic@on, and combined various genres, literary theory, mediaeval studies, mystery, and biblical exegesis. As a semio@cian Eco is known for his contribu@on to the theore@cal study of signs encompassing all cultural phenomena.
Umberto Eco
• Eco's major studies in aesthe@cs, literature, communica@on and semio@cs are OPERA APERTA (1962, rev. ed., 1972, 1976), A Theory of Semio1cs (1976), in which he took up and developed various lines of research begun in the laZer half of the 1960s, Semio&cs and the Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpreta&on (1991).
Umberto Eco quotes:
• The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
• Transla@on is the art of failure.
Umberto Eco’s ‘Opera Aperta’ in English Open Work (1989 [1962])
• Aesthe@cs • Semio@cs
• Art • Communica@on Theory
• Literature
„…the spectator makes the picture‟ (Duchamp 1987, p.187)
Eco (1989) claimed that many of the modern art works:
placed the spectator’s percep@on in mo@on
• concept of „openness‟ discussed most extensively by Umberto Eco (1989) , describes a new aesthe@c based on the ac@ve spectator.
Concept of OPENESS
Concept of OPENESS
Umberto Eco’s well-‐known work “Opera Operta” (Open Work, 1989 [1962]) introduced the concept of “openness” to suggest that artworks produce an aesthe@c through “meaning crea@on”. Eco proposed that ar@sts should work along a mul@ple semio@c crea@on process which generates an openness; thus every spectator creates his/her own subjec@ve meaning.
Italio Calvino’s Openess
• Besides Eco’s concept, there are other approaches to the no@on of openness that were presented by Italian novelist Italio Calvino (1986). The openness in Calvino’s work is represented as an unconven@onal way of comprehending novels, that he terms ‘hypernovels’ or ‘literary machines’.
Open Work
Eco’s concept of open work emerged from a semio@c inves@ga@on of literary transcripts which he explained as poten@al applica@ons for the crea@on of mul@ple meaning and interpreta@on, which can be comprehended as an open system
Open Work
• He developed this concept into an aesthe@c examina@on of modern art revealing that open works ac@vate their reader/spectator to co-‐create the artwork.
• Eco’s concept produces an innovatory understanding of art produc@on in which the ar@st and spectator were linked together in the framework of an unfinished work of art (Eco, 1989).
“work in progress‟
Eco used the no@on of „work in progress‟ to declare the new spectatorships whose duty it is to finish the work.
Meaning Crea@on
• The essen@al point of Eco’s proposal is that he interlinked the par@cipatory character with what he termed an ar@s@c meaning crea@on (Eco, 1989), which he elaborated as mul@ple meaning perceived by every spectator differently, establishing the new characteris@c of spectatorship.
Concept of OPENESS (Semio@c Openness)
• the ar@st’s decision to leave arrangements of some cons@tuents of a work to the public or to chance – and for its striking an@cipa@on of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of mul1plicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interac@ve response between reader and text.
Meaning Crea@on in the Art Work
• Eco differen@ate meaning from those quali@es in art which refer to „informa@on‟ or „message‟.
• He comprehends that whereas informa@on or message is the content without an interpreta.on, meaning is the essence of the work which is formulated by the ar@s@c inten@on and subjec@vely recovered by the spectator.
Degree of Openness • ac@ve spectatorship suggests that single meaning produces a spectrum of interpreta@on in the artwork, which is based on the par@cular ac@ons of a spectator.
• In Eco’s sense, the degree of openness is determined by the balance between the formulated meaning of the ar@st and the acquired meaning interpreta@on of the spectator provided through the artwork.
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Degree of Openness …balance is an aesthe@c scale of openness, which elaborates a crea@ve capacity between the ar@s@c crea@on and the spectator’s act.
Informal Art • Exemplifying openness, par@cularly in art, Eco engendered a cross-‐
genre art form termed „informal art‟, which is par@cularly driven from an aesthe@c of ac@ve spectatorship and is here defined as the first layer of (semio@c) openness.
• Eco stated that the ini@al characterisa@on of informal art, which he declared as a visual art form, concerned inten@ons about reproducing the phenomenon of „mo@on‟ in the artwork.
• He referred to pain@ng techniques which tried to express mobility, most profoundly iden@fied in the conceptualisa@on of dynamics in futuris@c and cubis@c works.
Informal Art • Eco comprehended these new characteris@cs as significant as they redefined the structure and created deconstruc@ve forms.
• He declared that artworks exhibi@ng kine@c movement (for example kine@c sculpture) produce a heightened openness and non-‐reproducible experience for the spectator.
• Exemplifying this experience, Eco depicted that, whilst the artwork and spectator are in mo@on, the spectator chooses his or her point of view, producing the specific connec@ons and interpreta@ons.
“The “reader” is excited by the new freedom of the work, by its infinite poten@al for prolifera@on, by its inner wealth and the unconscious projec@ons that it inspires. The canvas itself invites him not to avoid causal connec@on and the tempta@ons of univocality, and to commit himself to an exchange rich in unforeseeable discoveries.”
(Eco, 1989, [1962], p. 91)
Art work as a communica@on system
• From Eco’s point of view the artwork is a communica@on system.
• A message of the artwork, according to Eco, can be described as a carrier of informa@on which, by the means of the interac@on, transports the meaning to the spectator.
Meaning Crea@on: Order and Disorder
He comprehended crea@ve processes as a highly compressed informa@on-‐exchange which displays „contraven@on of conven@ons‟ and therefore exhibits a high improbability
and unpredictability:
“The meaning of a message is a func@on of the order, the conven@ons, and the redundancy of its structure. The more one respects the laws of probability, the clearer and less and less ambiguous its meaning will be. Conversely, the
more improbable, ambiguous, unpredictable, and disordered the structure, the greater the informa@on –
here understood as poten@al, as the incep@on of possible orders.”
(Eco, 1989, [1962], p. 91)
Informa@on theory: Art work as a communica@on system
Artwork is a communica@on system which oscillates between a formal structure and the mul1ple meaning produced by a
‘wonderment’ of the spectator (Eco, 1989).
In Eco’s view an understanding of ‘ambiguity’ as disorder – a concep@on deriving from informa@on theory – is significant
for producing an aesthe@c in the interac@on process.
aesthe1c experience of the spectator produced through an ar1s1c decision of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ in the content,
which creates the ar@s@c meaning.
Disorder/Ambiguity in the Meaning Crea@on
Eco termed this phenomenon as „ambiguity‟ and he elaborated it through the mathema@cian Norbert Wiener’s theory of disorder (Wiener, 1948). Wiener’s theory explained the message as an organised system which might produce disorder regarding its degree of organisa@on. Increase the informa@on in a message requires an increased probability of noise.
Eco proposes that the level of disorder is immediately linked to unpredictability and mul@plicity; therefore, mul@ple meaning in art is an aesthe@c challenge of disorder
Uncommon Connec@ons / Unusual Laws
Eco further suggested par@cular tools with which to achieve ambiguity in art; for
example, encountering accidents and chance in experience or using „uncommon
connec@ons‟ or „unusual laws‟ to create wonderment in the experience
(Eco, 1989, p.94).
Structure -‐ Ambiguity
• Eco states that an ar@s@c system needs both certain forms for obviousness within a prac@cal func@on and a characteris@c of ambiguity, the oscilla@on of which creates novelty in the meaning.
• Eco depicts the example of the Byzan@ne mosaic that includes both a formal system through the matrix of the mosaics and an ambiguity through the repeated representa@onal forms.
• Thus, the en@re matrix of the mosaic encompasses the message in which every mosaic has its own place and angular offset.
• As the system has to communicate a clear figura@ve signal from a par@cular perspec@ve, the colour and angle of the bits within a collabora@ve process duplicate each other‟s signals.
• Through the ambiguity of the par@cles it produces a clear noiseless message of a holis@c figura@ve representa@on.
Structure -‐ Ambiguity
Open Work as an Aesthe@c Model
Informa@onal theory for meaning crea@on provides meaningful ways for an aesthe@c in which the ar@st’s decision on propor@on of order and disorder produces the quality of interac@on between art work and the
spectator.
Open Work as an Aesthe@c Model “controlled disorder”
One applica@on of informa@on theory in art produc@on is that Eco (1989) declares that a „controlled disorder‟ is the crucial decision that the ar@st has to make between the func@onality and ar@s@c content for a noiseless interconnec@on between ar@st and spectator.
Communica@on processes in tradi@onal mediums (one-‐way) and in technological mediums (two-‐way)
(Zics, 2007)
Semio@c Openness The no@on of openness is taken from Umberto Eco’s
inves@ga@ons of par@cipatory art.
These explain novel aesthe@c claims based upon a heightened involvement of the spectator. By revisi@ng
Eco’s original concept of semio1c openness, the emphasis lies on the significance of the concept of
‘meaning crea@on’.
Re-‐evalua@on of Openness: Structural Openness
The re-‐evalua@on, termed ‘structural openness’, defines not only openness in the spectator’s percep@on but also
a profound modifiability in the artwork itself. This redefini@on of openness for technological applica@on produces an aesthe@c value through its poten@al to
produce meaning (Zics, 2008)
Reading:
ECO, U., 1989. The open work. 1 edn. USA: Harvard University Press.
ZICS, B., 2008. Transparency, Cogni@on and Interac@vity: Toward a New Aesthe@c for Media Art. PhD Thesis. Newport,
Wales: University of Wales