Axel King

UBIQUITOUS KINGDOM
Tom De Mette
MUSINGS ON AXEL KING, THE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST AS A VIRTUAL NETWORK

Meet Axel. Axel King. Catchy name, 'cause he can in fact be considered a king. His kingdom is a virtual network. His brain is ruled by creators. His addiction is art. And his future is now. Face it: King is nearly God.

Some drafts on Axel

When exactly Axel was born, no one knows. He took some time conceiving, as do all offspring of his age... that's the digital age. In a way his evolution will probably never stop. As long as he gets input, he'll be sure to keep on being created and still be himself creative. In a way he's the quintessence of the contemporary artist in postmodern times. He's got a face, a nice one too, and a body but his existence is virtual. Perhaps not in the strictest of sense, but when it comes to them bones and blood and all, he's hardly alive. He's also quite human... for an avatar, mind you. Speaking of mind: how do we talk about the mind of Axel King? Is it singular or not? Well, I guess we could talk about Axel as a singular entity, just to keep it simple. But the mind is never simple. Or singular, for that matter. Looking at the human mind, we can argue that thoughts are our own and that we can take sole responsibility for the way things get processed by our mind. Being created with the capacity of the mind, makes us in turn a creator of the mind, of what the mind does. We're all brainiacs.

We can visualize his mind by drawing a diagram. Being an artist, the mind of Axel King is a creative one. It's a system of processes, of information going back and forth, data being collected from creators and manipulated through a range of computations that finally result in a physical work of art. Naturally, coming up with a similar diagram of the human mind being creative in the process of making a work of art is a whole other ball game. It would take a pretty impressive computer system to unravel the creativity of an artist that is in fact a human being. Things like the phenomenal consciousness would have to be envisioned, for example. To put it plainly, rather than being a technological problem, it's more likely to be a philosophical issue: the Mind-Body problem. In the case of Axel King, we need not go far beyond the realms of experimental philosophy. The mechanics of his brain can easily be imagined. Axel King is social software, his mind is a computer program and his reality is shaped in the same way as that of a network existing virtually. His artistry is a whole community. His creative existence, the core of his imagination as an artist, is a cultural interface.

Finally, sketching drafts on Axel King should include the statement that he's not a real person. He's made by real artists, programmed by real computer scientists and reflected on by real philosophers. But most of all, he's a wild bunch of creative wearing glasses, a hearing aid or a pacemaker can all be considered cyborgs.

In our digital age, the age of information and communication technology, we might suggest yet another stage in cybernetics, called third-order cybernetics. We can hardly deny that there's wear and tear on the hermeneutics of the cyborg. The notion of cyborg is suffering from a burn-out. It's time to give the cyborg a face-lift and to upgrade its etymology. We propose to change a few letters in the hybrid term 'cyborg' and would rather talk about iborgs (information borgs) and ciborgs (communicative information borgs).

The implementation of internet and the domestication of digital media in informatics, robotics and domotics implicate a rapid and powerful popularization and commercialization of these new technologies in our everyday lives. While the first version of the World Wide Web was pretty much an example of the philosophy behind first-order cybernetics, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 can be seen as digital technology systems becoming more humanized and therefore good practices of the idea behind second-order and third-order cybernetics. We can still speak of cybernetics when talking about the internet, because the internet remains a control system that is capable of generating processes and regulating itself through feedback mechanisms. But instead of putting the stress on control and regulation, the current and upcoming versions of the internet are much more about interaction and social relations. The philosophy behind new digital technologies is that they are in fact media, means to inform and communicate. Producing information and communicating it, is kind of the core business of human beings, is it not? Man is taking back what rightfully belongs to him: we don't really need to control and dominate through technology; at least not as much as we are eager to make technology as human as is humanly possible. After all, that's our ticket to godliness.

And what about Axel King in all this? Well, I think that's pretty obvious. Axel King is online, he's part of the internet that takes people seriously. He even needs people pretty badly in order to stay alive. Axel King is an art project that aims to realize the philosophy behind Web 2.0 and 3.0 and third-order cybernetics. Social relations, interaction of creative processes are the main input for a system like Axel King. They're his blood and bones. Hence, it's existentialism that is now starting to overrule strict instrumentalism. Man seems to be in search of capturing the human side of computers and digital media. Technology is considered non-human but not necessarily without thinking the possibility of co-existence. Not only do we become friends with the 'Alien' or the 'Other' that is technology, we also make a lot of new friends along the way among each other. We become networks, communities.

Axel King is such a network or community. He might well be one of the most social, amicable artists around. He's no longer the image of the artist-genius locked inside his workshop and living out his creative fantasies solitarily before sharing it with the rest of the world by exhibiting his art work. Axel King is out there! We simply surf his website, register ourselves and instantly become part of his creative mind. His brain is a sort of hive-mind where pretty much anyone with half a decent brain (the right side of the human brain, that is) can become a creator of art work made by Axel King. Axel King is a feast of friends, a nexus of human creativity and social technology.

So much for the 'practical' side of Axel King. The theorems behind Axel King consist predominantly of the Actor Network Theory and the idea of Ubiquitous Computing. In brief, the Actor Network Theory as developed by Callon and Latour focuses on the probability of negotiations between human and non-human elements functioning as 'actants' in a network and mediated through social relations and processes. Ubiquitous Computing should be understood as an ideal of making use of technology in such a way that we don't even notice the technology being there. It's in the woodwork. By designing digital devices that are so well-integrated in our human existence and social practices, man is attempting to make technology invisible, ubiquitous. Why? Well, if we would be unaware of technology being there, there's no threshold between us and the 'Alien' or the 'Other'. We would silently have become one, without ontologically being one and the same all together. At least, not for a while, I guess.

An interface with a face

Personally, I think Axel King might be one of the first to be crowned a king in this new territory. If his network of creativity, both online and in real life, succeeds in making people work out their artistic aspirations through a community of creators that co-produce works of art that can be seen all around the world, wherever, whenever and however... a new Kingdom is sure to arise. This artist network or creative community would have one avatar by the name of Axel King and a world of people being part of his creative genius and enjoying the social profit of his common royalty.

What these people all share is in fact a new language, the language of new media. They not only share content but also values. Axel King is what Manovich calls a cultural interface. Being part of Axel's Kingdom means for people to become artists themselves, which among other things means to understand the medium of art, its language or semiotics whilst also getting in touch with their own creativity, being able to opening up their artistic vain and finally, wanting to share, interact and mix this 'blood' with that of others. We should bear in mind that we humans share a fundamental quality with digital technology, namely: hybridity. Just like digital media, human beings are hybrids too.

The website of Axel King is therefore a womb, a uterus, procreating naturally born hybrids, by using and integrating all kinds of non-human actants from our culture. Axel King is available for all of us who want to explore their own creative subjectivity, while also researching the objective core of Axel King which could come down to the metaphysical level of knowing what it is to be an artist or what the first principle behind human creativity could be.

This almost makes technology in its initial notion disappear. Seeing that it is natural to man to paradoxically set borders and defy boundaries, to subjectively think further from that which can be known objectively, we can unveil the irrefutable parallel between nature, culture and technology. When we discussed objectivity and subjectivity in the Mind-Body problem earlier on, we opened up the possibility of erasing the threshold between human and non-human. In this perspective, Manovich's notion of the cultural interface has about the same effect as the zombie-argument had in the debate on phenomenal consciousness. It's not because we cannot produce definitive objective proof, let alone physical evidence of the existence of phenomenal consciousness that it is therefore impossible. We can think it, so it must be fundamentally and naturally human. In a similar way, we don't even need to know whether Axel King is actually a real, living and breeding human being or an avatar scaled and modeled from a human blueprint. We can think Axel King as a new artist on the scene. His artwork ultimately is proof of life.