Fabrics of interaction: art-based inquiry for cognition

Technology has always operated as a structural aspect of human experience: not just a simple instrument, but a constitutive condition of our thinking and acting processes. This contribution adopts a systemic-relational perspective which, with close reference to the material engagement theory (Malafouris, 2013) [1] and the enactive approach (Parisi, 2015) [2], analyzes the development of artifacts not only in their prosthetic dimension, but also as agentive elements within an environment that is already technically structured, now developed as a network of distributed cognition (Hayles, 1999) [3]. In this context, the possibility to extend human faculties becomes conceptually far more dense in light of generative systems capable of actively incorporating human exteroflections into algorithmic schemes of revision, whose variables are no longer entirely accessible or adjustable. The case study of the artist and researcher Sougwen Chung makes these dynamics visibly explicit. A substantial part of her practice is carried out through collaborative performances guided by improvisation, during which the artist draws alongside robotic arms able to mimic her own gestures. The robot is configured to develop a certain drawing sensibility through a combined system of machine vision and recurrent neural networks (RNN). The different versions and developments of D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation), each devoted to the exploration of a specific theme – contributing to define the study of hybrid artistic collaborations – are trained through a heterogeneous combination of data, mostly drawings that Chung herself produced during her lifetime, even her own neural network data and biofeedbacks. The performance unfolds as an intense gestural dialogue, a dynamic that materializes and deeply elaborates the “ways we embody systems and vice versa” (Chung, 2023) [4]. Emphasizing the importance of feedback is a crucial theoretical move in this context, since the artwork is always the visually condensed outcome of a constitutive opacity: retroactively establishing who drew what becomes impossible and, on the other hand, such an investigation, oriented to essential reconstruction, runs the risk to prove itself redundant. The artist and the machine are active counterparts of a process which is ontologically grounded in the reciprocity of their exchanges; they form together a hybrid cognitive system able to produce an emergence that would have not been possible otherwise, to unlock creative possibilities that the artist alone could not have accomplished. This results in a level of shared elaboration [5] that extends the human’s expressive-creative possibilities within an interplay of mutual adaptation, which in turn enables a reorganization of cognition in a distributed sense. This contribution aims to propose, within a model grounded in co-creation, a notion of meta-interactivity as a horizon of meaning through which coherently contextualize these considerations. This allows us to evaluate art as a space of symbolic negotiation to problematize the human–machine interactions within a shared experiential domain where the logics of production develop alongside those of perception; to frame technology as a regime to actuate relations; and to acknowledge the central role of the most recent generative algorithms within the process of incremental stratification of such relations.