A key similarity I have found between these artists is an anti-disciplinary approach to their work. While inter- or trans-disciplinary have been common labels for artists in recent years, anti-disciplinary seems to only just be gaining momentum. Joichi Ito, former director of MIT Media Labs, describes the difference between inter- and anti-disciplinary as: “Interdisciplinary work is when people from different disciplines work together. But antidisciplinary is something very different; it’s about working in spaces that simply do not fit into any existing academic discipline–a specific field of study with its own particular words, frameworks, and methods” (Design and Science). Anti-disciplinary resists the pre-established frameworks and, though it may draw from some established methodologies, seeks to create its own fields in order to make works beyond binary categorizations.

In my creative practice I have come to feel best described as an anti-disciplinary artist. Both artistically and academically, I have never felt quite at home within any one label as my work takes cues from multiple fields and mediums. My research is situated between academic spaces like digital anthropology, contemporary religious studies, game studies, and media theory, while my practice itself has taken shape as writing, audio, film, and sculptural work. Moving between many mediums and fields, an anti-disciplinary practice gives me the flexibility to investigate each, while never establishing myself firmly within their bounds. My practice, therefore, may be best described as having a research-basis and an anti-disciplinary approach.

Resisting the Expert

Despite living in a time which increasingly asks artists to specialize and narrow themselves down within very certain practices, a guiding principle of my practice is the idea of ‘resisting the Expert’.

Michel de Certeu notes that the Expert is someone whose “competence is transmuted into social authority” and who is an “interpreter and and translator of his competence for other fields” (The Practice of Everyday Life). As opposed to the work of the Philosopher where “ordinary questions become a skeptical principle in a technical field”, the Expert implies a degree of mastery within a certain specialization. Unlike the Philosopher, who is guided by a certain skepticism and curiosity, the Expert works with a supposed authority. Considering de Certeu’s assertion that “the Expert is growing more common in this society”, one does not have to look too far to find that the artworld is full of ‘Experts’.

Experts are middle-men, mediators who translate between one world and another. I do not see my practice as one of mediation, but rather of magnification. I may work between two (or more) worlds at once, but only because I am actively involved within multiple spaces. Therefore, I am not translating one world to the other, but magnifying aspects of one space into the other for collective consideration. The objects and experiences I choose to magnify are not ones that my audiences are wholly unfamiliar with, or would not have access to themselves, rather they may not have considered the certain aspects I highlight, and my work might allow new interactions with somewhat familiar objects. Unlike the Expert, whose authority allows them to tell audiences how to think about their objects and in what context, my work is more participatory, further bridging communities that may have some entanglement already.

An example of this is my research with the online community of Truck Simulator enthusiasts. Truck Simulator, a video game series that allows players to simulate driving commercial trucks through various American and European landscapes, has a massive and dedicated online fandom that congregates through SubReddits, Twitch streams, and YouTube videos. Many in my generation have become familiar with the game for its unusual following, and may have seen TikTok videos, Reddit posts, or buzzy think-pieces about it. I first became interested in the game after reading a Vice article which compared the act of playing the game to meditation experiences. Fascinated, I became a player myself and a participant within the online community. Most notably I began to use the game like a digital meditation tool, and noticed many others were doing the same. This made me curious: how could such a trivial game inspire transcendent experiences?

Natalie Loveless writes that “(y)ou can’t be curious about something you already know, but you need to know something about it in order to be curious” (How to Make Art at the End of the World). While I knew something about Truck Simulator and its community, I did not know how my experiences and preconceived notions related to the community as a whole. My curiosity led me to engage in digital ethnographic research with the online Truck Simulator community, to figure out how (and why) the game was able to produce ‘transcendental moments’. Eventually this research became both a paper, which was presented (virtually) at a panel for the Royal Anthropological Institute’s conference “Anthropology, AI, and the Future of Human Society”, and a short video piece, which has been presented as part of New Media Art Space’s “re:present” exhibition in New York and the H&R Block Space’s “On the Road Again” exhibition in Kansas City. Working between academic writing and filmmaking helped me expand on my initial curiosity, magnifying a unique aspect of the Truck Simulator community to an audience who was already somewhat familiar with the game.

Working in this way I did not feel like an ‘Expert’, rather an observer within a community investigating a micro-trend and amplifying it. Splitting this research between a more formal paper and an experimental video underscored this sense of non-authority too. Having multiple creative outputs, which explore different facets of the same phenomenon, demonstrates the multiple paths one could take based on a single curious impulse revealing that, no matter how much time you may spend within an area, you may never truly be an Expert. Rather than seeking authority, it may be better to magnify your curiosity and invite others into your research journey, working symbiotically with your chosen communities. This approach is distinctly anti-disciplinary, freeing one’s self from the authority of established discipline(s) and working solely from that libidinal place of curiosity to see where it may take you.

Academia: The Elephant in the Room

For all my talk of anti-disciplinarity and resisting the expert, I continue to embrace an intimate relationship with higher education and the university system. In some ways this feels paradoxical, as academia often emphasizes the ‘expertization’ of its students. However, the university setting is one that (at least somewhat) embraces working with multiple modalities and gives ample space to present work that fits outside the typical bounds of the art world. I believe situating myself further within the university will provide opportunities to exhibit and present my work in settings where I can highlight my specific research approach. The mode of research-based practice is not widely adopted within the American university system yet, but there does seem to be growing interest and opportunity to show such work even within more traditional higher-academic settings.

For example, this October I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a conference hosted by Georgetown University’s graduate English students where I was able to screen my film, In the End We Become Our Avatars. The film is a video-essay documentary, created in a similar fashion to “Transcendent Simulator”. As such it is the continuation of a research interest of mine, which has sprawled out to other creative outputs including a paper and the curation of a group exhibition. Presenting at Georgetown, to a cohort of academics from a variety of disciplines, I did not feel like I was participating in “the economy of ‘I know and now you know’” (as Loveless describes it) common to the neoliberal university, rather it felt like a natural extension of this research. Answering questions from fellow grad students, I got a chance to dive deeper into my own curiosity and to learn from others. Presenting at the conference felt symbiotic and not completely transactional, an actual chance to magnify my interests to a like minded community and explore together.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write that “to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it”. Where the university can feel like a safe haven for my work, and provide me with an income for what I do, I find this assertion very challenging. This idea also brings up hard questions regarding my relationship to the university system. What would my practice look like without recognition of the university? How can my anti-authoritarian beliefs extend to the academic in me? In the same way it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, it is hard to imagine research-creational work taking place outside academia. However, I have a strong investment in alternative education models, and being an academic-artist both inside and outside the traditional university.

My interest in these alternative models may be best exemplified by my work with Six Minutes Past Nine, a ‘neo-new-media’ art collective based in the UK. I have been working as part of Six Minutes for a little over a year now, helping to develop a nine week intensive program for artists which focuses on building a virtual studio practice. Together with the Luxembourgish art collective MNEMOZINE, we will be presenting our pilot program starting in late February 2024. I will be acting as a facilitator, helping artists in the program to reflect on what their ‘virtual practice’ might look like. Rather than the Expert model of some art schools or residencies, we will seek to work collaboratively with our cohort, operating outside traditional academic hierarchies. As a facilitator, I hope to bring an anti-disciplinary approach to the intensive, encouraging curiosity over authority. In doing so I also hope to question my relationship to the academy, and find new ways to work both inside and outside the university.

Conclusions: Embracing the Fool

In Tarot, the Fool is generally the first card in the Major Arcana. Often unnumbered, or numbered as zero, the Fool represents new beginnings and a beginner's eagerness toward specific tasks. The Fool is perhaps best described as having a beginner’s mind, in the vein of Zen Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki writes in Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind that “(i)n the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few”. I see the beginner’s mind of the Fool as a model for my research-based practice. Working from a place of curiosity, rather than of social authority, there becomes many possibilities and channels for creative research output. The Fool is a reminder to enter the space of research with a beginner's mind and to search for new beginnings from genuine curiosity.

I believe the Fool is also representative of my anti-disciplinary approach. Working outside conventional disciplines means constantly charting new creative paths, which may have only been lightly traveled before. Like the Fool, to be anti-disciplinary is to be flexible, open-minded, and eager when starting down these new roads. In the same way that the Fool is excited about, but not ignorant of, the world, anti-disciplinary artists are not ignorant to established disciplines or mediums, rather they traverse their boundaries in new ways to find new possibilities. Considering my practice in the vein of anti-disciplinarity has afforded me a freedom from the constraints of certain contemporary art practices, while reinforcing my dedication to curiosity. Especially as a research-based practitioner, anti-disciplinarity allows the research to lead while the creative output follows, the message preceding the medium. In embracing anti-disciplinarity I embrace the Fool, allowing my curiosity to form its own paths in my practice.

In this short collection of aphorisms, Byung-Chul Han examines how rapid digitisation and the proliferation of information is slowly but surely dismantling a stable concept of truth and replacing it with the empty, directionless noise of a “defactualised universe [defaktiziertem Universum]”. [1]

On the surface a response to post-truth and fake news debates, the book takes an interesting turn by announcing the arrival of a new nihilism: the breaking down of a shared world by a general dismissal of factuality itself. The disintegration of truth takes place beyond categories of truth and lies, in a hyper-real dimension in which every piece of information can stand as fact, with no regard to whether or not one is speaking the truth or telling a lie. Lies still imply the intentional disregarding of an actual truth: those who lie know they are knowingly withholding or twisting the truth. In the age of fake news, however, lies give way to a modellisation of available information. Lies play here no role; what matters is that information, data and facts are laid out in meaningful harmony, without any concern for the overarching factuality, the real life referent, of such a semantic construct.

According to Han, digitalisation is to blame for this development. With digitisation comes “total producibility [totale Herstellbarkeit]” and consequently the crumbling of any trust in the reliable facticity of Being itself. [2] Information alone is unfit to uphold a convincing narrative of truth, since its very nature is read as contingent: the information I am shown could also be otherwise. When everything becomes digitally malleable, when information is only shared within the moulds and rhythms of algorithmic pulses, truth itself disintegrates and society begins harbouring mistrust towards the facticity of reality itself.

Standing in opposition to big narratives, big data is an accumulation of empty markings or meaningless signs, which can be read and interpreted in any direction one sees fit. For the same reason, conspiracy theories are flourishing in the age of information: structuring select facts into micro-narratives offers enough stability and flexibility to maneouvre a world lacking conceptual guidance by a mutually agreed notion of truth. Since information by itself only amounts to pure contingency (facts alone are not enough to convince us that something is necessarily the case, the ecological crisis being a perfect example), conspiracy theories narrate away the uncertainty emitted by pure information.

To counteract this, Han is calling for a renewed courageous care and concern for parrhesia, the speaking of truth. [3] Only when there is an effort to speak the truth, to care for the truth, can democracy flourish. This responsibility applies to philosophers, scientists, politicians and citizens alike. This exact care, according to Han, is today diminishing, even disappearing entirely. And it is unbridled digitisation that is at the heart of this crisis: 

Today, we are prisoners in a digital cave while believing that we are free. We are chained to the digital screen. The prisoners of the Platonic cave are inebriated by mythical-narrative images. The digital cave, however, is incarcerating us within information. The light of truth has fully eclipsed. There is no more Outside [Außerhalb] beyond the information cave. A potent white noise of information [Rauschen der Information] blurs the contours of Being. Truth emits no white noise. [Die Wahrheit rauscht nicht.]

[...]

In our post-factual information society, [...] all pathos of truth is headed for the void. It becomes lost in the white noise of information. Truth disintegrates into information dust, gone with the digital wind. It will have been a short episode. [4]

Yet, while Han’s analysis is an excellent one, it also bears certain limitations. One of its shortcomings is its somewhat nostalgic lamentation of the loss of analog reality. In one passage, Han describes digital photography as the harbinger of the destruction of facticity (given the vast potential for the digital alteration of reality), as opposed to analog photography, which is a documentation of that which one day really was (silver halide crystals physically capture light that really was there). [5] This explicit reference to Barthes’ Chambre Claire [6] is somewhat misguided, since Barthes’ project of describing the ontology of photography is itself, perhaps unintentionally, the result of pure mnemonic fiction: the remembrance of his late mother, the memory emitted by the  photographic prints he chose to analyse, the historically contingent selection of photographs that was availble to him at the time etc. There is a mediating, highly contingent layer involved in Barthes’ description of photography which shakes the aim of his project at its foundation. 

Beyond this, however, the denigration of the digital with regard to the analog is, in itself, questionable. Photo editing and even the alteration of photographic facts are not and never were exclusive to digital photography. One only has to think back to Stalin’s Great Purge and how photography became a tool to alter the facticity of documented events. In addition, analog photography involves reversing negative images in the printmaking or scanning process, which is always a matter of interpreting the highlights, shadows, tones and colours captured in the emulsion layers, and never simply a one to one translation of a documented event. Photography is thus always also a mediation of that which (never) was.

This lamentation of the loss of analog photographic reality is perhaps also telling of a deeper flaw in Han’s proposal. Suggesting that truth is only now losing its once glorious flame, the book presents an implicit nostalgia for a lost epoch. However, this itself is again a paradox: isn’t this very nostalgia precisely the fiction which creates, retroactively, the truth that we are yearning for in the present?

Truth is never lost, it is constantly created. In this sense, the crisis of truth is not an event of post-modernity, it is the constitutive element of truth itself: truth is not the stable background to which we should return, it is rather the very disconnect which we now feel in the face of senseless facts and information. Truth clamours, through the white noise of information, as a struggle for meaning against the odds, and this has always been the case. 

Truth is also not the eradication of all things contingent and thus the victory call of a necessary narrative, but it is rather the product of contingent triggers which force it to reinvent itself in the face of its own challenge. The fact that truth is nowadays in disorder should not be read in the sense that order has been lost and needs to be restored, but rather that truth is disorder, that disorder is our stable ground and that the seeds of truth are planted at the heart of it. The upside of this is that truth cannot dwindle, since when caught in a contingent vortex there is always a chance for truth to invent itself anew in the midst of its own crisis.

If we assume this fiction then truth holds the potential to assume the digital age not as a total disintegration of facticity, but as that which, through its inherent plasticity and malleability, allows for a fractal generating of other possibilities for the future. Total producibility would thus also mean the potential for the production of a future truth that is other than the prospect of a past narrative, the false promise of competing conspiracies or the catastrophic present order of things.

Parrhesia, speaking the truth, inventing a truth beyond its current contradictions – or: the digital wind as truth catching an invigorating breath, projecting it, as specks of dust, towards yet unthought but promising directions. Pure noise crackling in the background, its voice slowly rising to a hum.

Mathieu Buchler, artist and co-founder of Mnemozine, studied philosophy at University College Dublin and at Freie Universität Berlin. He currently works as a writer, translator, editor, photographer and educator.

[1] Han, B.C. Infokratie. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2021. p. 64.
[2] Ibid. p. 74.
[3] Ibid. p. 80-3.
[4] Ibid. p. 83-4. Translation M.B.
[5] Ibid. p. 74.
[6] Barthes, R. “La Chambre Claire”. In. Eric Marty (Ed.). Oeuvres Complètes Tome II 1966-1973. Paris : Seuil 1994.