Technologies for Interauthorship, A Lecture by Artur Matuck

October 4, 2005

As the computer enlarges its range of action, human expression has been increasingly shaped by collaborative systems of authorship. These systems can be defined as computer systems that attain autonomy or semi-autonomy in the structuring of complex signs.
Computer systems are able to organize information into highly complex clusters and may eventually surpass the human ability to generate original artworks. The prospect of artificially programmed 'authors' challenges artists' identities as they have been traditionally defined. In the process, a series of questions emerge.

How are artists and writers reacting to forms of artificial intelligence, media technology, and software, that can be seen as new 'authors'? How do theoreticians, historians and critics evaluate the authoring of meaning created by computer programs?
Is the human mind now being challenged to supersede the creative abilities of technomedia and electronic systems? What becomes of artists when artificial processes are prioritized over the human production of meaning?

This lecture at the Department of Media Study will review the work of designers and electronic authors. Matuck will describe interdisciplinary collaborations that focused on inter-authorship; the process of designing artificial 'authors' in art or literature; the actual production of artificial 'authors' and a theoretical reflection on the possible futures of authorship.

About Dr Artur Matuck
Artur Matuck has been an assistant professor at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Sao Paolo since 1984. In Sao Paolo (Brazil), Europe and North America, he has worked as teacher, researcher, writer, visual artist, video producer, performer and more recently as a designer of teleart events and interactive sites.

Since 1977 Matuck contributed to conferences and workshops on New Media Arts, Interactive Television, Telecommunication Arts, Performance Art, Computer-Generated Writing, and Intellectual Property issues. In 1990, he was awarded a prize in the video-art category from the São Paulo Art Critics Association. In the same year, he completed a comprehensive study on the history of video art and interactive television, which resulted in the doctoral thesis: "The Dialogical Potential of Television." In 1991 at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) he produced Reflux, a global Telecommunication Arts project. This project produced at CMU while in residence as research fellow was one of the very first artistic experiments to involve collaborative networking activities.
In 1995, as post-graduate fellow at the University of Florida, he started to experiment with text-reprocessing. "Landscript" is a web-based tool that co-authored textual creation. In 2002 this piece was included in the 25th Sao Paolo Biennial (in the net art category).
Artur Matuck is also the creator of "Semion"-- an international symbol for released information, a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the ongoing debates on intellectual property rights and information dissemination. His most recent endeavors include the planning of video communication and web-based multicultural, international exchanges between artists, researchers and individuals.