At the time of writing, I find myself in the transition of new roles, from a student stepping into the responsibilities of a teacher, one that oscillates between the becoming and the known. Yet the questions that trouble me remain, now amplified by those newcomers seeking inspiration in media arts: How do I address technology in art?
Technology is a complex, shifting, recursive landscape. As a half-baked programmer, I am acutely aware of my limitations. The deeper logic of software, information, and abstraction layered upon abstraction stretches beyond my grasp. And yet, this is the territory I have ventured into. Technology today can also not be detached from the world in which it operates; it encodes our society and feeds us via screens and interfaces. It is a human-made production, which inherently holds politics, that shapes raw materials into meaningful sense through forms and manipulations2. Teaching something as technology is then not a matter of translating technical skills, catching up on the latest developments, or demonstrating flashy particle effects, but rather giving a sensibility that every algorithm is also a proposition. Technology, thus, is both a tool and a subject, the medium and the message.
The question of how to discuss technology arrives at a time when technology itself begins to teach. Artificial intelligence, once the subject of science fiction, now writes, recommends, critiques, and, in some cases, even instructs. These trades are materialized in the manner of interfaces, yet interfaces have to be held by materials, namely, electronic chips.
Chips have been the center point of mass political debates, and the entity that can produce such chips arguably shapes our narrative on technology. Yet, as a political entity that is not even recognized as a country, Taiwan produced 100% of all high-end semiconductors used in artificial intelligence. The unstable balance deeply resonates with my identity, which has inspired my interest in understanding how such technology has been formed. It seems appropriate to quote the famous American philosopher Madonna Louise Ciccone before we undertake this journey: 'Cause we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl. How can we, then, not address the materials that shape the world we inhabit? To ignore them is to remain alienated. To engage with them is to begin to speak of our present.