Another take on Semionauts/Socionauts
Dave Beech presents an alternate take on some of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theories:
Postproduction does not match the emphasis on cultural contestation and collaborative independence that is so conspicuous in the networks and projects of the new socially oriented artists. True, Bourriaud argues that “art can be a form of using the world”, but when it comes to the details, Bourriaud converts these social events back into those of an encounter “between the artist and the one who comes to view the work”. His new artist is a ’semionaut’ (the DJ, the programmer, the web surfer), whose ‘collaborations’ with the social world are reduced to exchanges of signs.
. . .
We are not semionauts; we are, if anything, socionauts. Socially oriented artists do not demonstrate any inclination today to reduce social encounters to semiotic encounters. At the same time, such social encounters are not typically those between an artist and a viewer mediated by the object that is made by the former for the visual pleasure of the latter. If the contemporary artist contests culture by, among other things, contesting the role of the artist, then it follows that the contemporary artist contest culture by contesting the modes of attention of the viewer (the artist’s traditional collaborator). In fact, contemporary artists seem to be in the process of converting the viewer into a doer, an active participator in the events and actions set up by the socionaut. (excerted from “Independent Collaborative Hospitality“)
