SYNOPSIS OF OPENING REMARKS:
Joel Slayton

The trajectories of theory and art meet at the apex of research: mutually oriented objectives promoting an intermingling of the two.

There is no inherent philosophical conflict between the function of theory and art and the intent of corporation. Each can be manifest in a mutually shared frame of reference that relies on the particularities of intellectual inferences and aesthetics. Theory as product (at C5) infers an intention of coexistence.

Theorists from the physical, biological, social, and computer sciences, along with philosophers, cultural theorists, literary critics, and artists, have collectively lacerated traditional conceptions of content. They have deconstructed its nature into the "stored," "sorted," "distributed," and "acted upon." The reasoning for this approach is that content, information, and data can be segregated conceptually, with the properties of data being scrutinized through various methodologies involving computation and measurement analysis. However, such a purely structuralist perspective does not suffice in describing a model in which "meaning" can be explicated as a self- deterministic function within a system. That is, one that is not directly the result or product of a structure, but a result of the dynamics of a data agency and attribute.

Inferring by observation the properties of the elemental subsystems of a larger system is a most difficult task. This top-down approach yields an inappropriate analysis. Behavior is not necessarily indicative of the nature of the data agencies and attributes of which a system is composed. At best we can only speculate about the nature of a system as a theoretical construct.

An artwork needs to ask how it is art. For the question to be necessary, the artwork cannot "know" the answer. Therefore, the answer cannot be all-inclusive; if it were all-inclusive, then any answer would be correct and the artwork would thus know the answer. This curse of the artwork repeatedly asking about its ontological status is its means of communication. It is in the asking that it says anything about anything. To address the cultural changes brought on by the use of information technologies, an artwork must ask how it is itself affected by those changes. The artwork "C5" is constantly redefining its question by luring its contexts. Moving among the art world, a research community, and a corporate culture, it never gets an answer on which it can settle.

This is the second C5 Field Mediation on Mingling Theory. The purpose of the mediation is to theoretically consider the nature and function of agencies and attributes in data networks. The objective of the discourse is to provide an appropriate intellectual backdrop to the C5/Walker Art Center project "16 Sessions."

The format for this field mediation involves six position statements written by C5 research theorists. The statements are limited to one page of text. Each will be presented by a randomly selected session participant and will have two respondents: first, the author, who may pose questions or offer clarification, and second, a randomly selected participant who "spins" the argument. Each presentation, including questions, will last 15 minutes.