Participant: Kate Slaymaker
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: recursion, paradigm, praxis

The intersection between that domain which I call art and that domain which I call society is rich in potential for social change. This potential goes unrealized when a work of art fails to become input into a social system.

Art does not effect social change simply by virtue of being presented as art. No causal relationship exists between art and society. Artists may intentionally enter into recursive relationships with society. I see a social need for the tending of these relationships. Cybernetics offers a language by which both artist and audience, as observers, make a difference by uttering their observations.

I would like to offer the role of social change artist as a container for constraint-based behaviors and strategies toward developing interfaces between art and society. One might call themself a social change artist when they:

• explore the relationship between invitation and perturbation,
• carefully craft invitations to enter into relationship with a work of art,
• work to resist an audiences understanding,
• offer and invite others to compose distinguishing descriptions of a work of art,
• formulate responses that engage common dismissals,
• work to lower the social cost of hazarding a guess,
• or invite conversation within the constructed system of a work of art, so that art be input into society.

This presentation, and accompanying paper, draws on the work of Theodor Adorno, Gregory Bateson, Peta Bowden, Marianne Brün, Martin Buber, Mark Enslin, Douglas Flemons, Max Horkheimer, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Nel Noddings, Susan Parenti, Larry Richards and Francisco Varela.