The Black Box

Abstract

In societies where industrial conditions of production prevail, the artist’s equipment tends to become a black box. The photographic camera and the computer, for instance, are essentially black boxes. The contemporary artist increasingly confronts technologies and systems whose internal operation appears mysterious. The very tools on which her creative work depends are fundamentally opaque. Many digital artists and designers, for instance, use computers without understanding even the basic principles of computer hardware or software engineering. They depend on tools whose mechanism is veiled in ignorance. The opacity of the artist’s equipment, which is unprecedented in the history of world art, is a defining feature of what is often called “media art”. The principal purpose of this essay is to clarify the fundamental properties of the black box, to describe its role in contemporary media art, and to suggest various possible courses of action in response to its ubiquitous presence. I claim that the “black box” is the fundamental concept of media art theory, because it defines the specificity of its object. The technical is always already intertwined with the social. This essay argues that the concerns of media art theory must be reconsidered in recognition this fact.