Francisco J. Ricardo

Ricardo was born in 1962 in Havana, Cuba. When he was seven, his family moved to Madrid, Spain, and two years later, to New York City. His father, an architect and professor at the University of Havana, had studied under Josef Albers during Albers's residency in Havana. His mother had been a gymnast and had founded a "Health Bauhaus" based on alternative nutrition in the United States.

Ricardo studied at Harvard University, receiving an Ed.M. Ricardo then transferred during his doctoral work at Harvard and received a PhD in Humanities Computing conferred through the University Professors Program of Boston University.[3] At Boston University, he worked as a Research Associate and later taught art theory at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Ricardo's scholarly writing has focused on how to critique and understand new media art using methods from Continental philosophy and contemporary art history. In his book The Engagement Aesthetic, for example, Ricardo argues that interactivity is not a sufficiently comprehensive principle by which to distinguish the contribution of new media art, particularly as many artworks are not interactive. Instead, he applied the term engagement in numerous separate forms as the operational and aesthetic aim of electronic works. In this manner, he argued, new media can be understood as an extension of contemporary art, rather than as an unrelated break from the artistic directions explored by many conceptual artists in the 1970s.

In the 1990s and 2000s Ricardo examined epistemological frameworks for new media studies and knowledge representation. He posed several criteria for new media studies in the article Interaction Science: A General Meta-Framework for Digital Representation (2001), and joined hypertext and knowledge management (e.g., Hypertext and Knowledge Management, 2001)

Ricardo has frequently collaborated with German theorists such as Roberto Simanowski and Jörgen Schäfer (https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/germanistik/mitarbeiter/schaefer_joergen/). Ricardo and Schäfer have edited books in the International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics, a series of books of which Ricardo is Founding Editor. These texts treat contemporary and new media art as a related line of creative effort by arguing that aesthetics is now a form of critique of media and that aesthetics and critique have become synonymous terms in new media and contemporary art and literature. At the Rhode Island School of Design, Ricardo wrote about forms of media art, including digital art.

He left teaching and formed his own documentary film studio, Conceptualist Films in 2014. The subject of his documentary, named F for Franco[4] examines the process of acting and the effects of Hollywood film and celebrity on coming-of-age identity formation as symbolized through the art and performance works of the actor/artist James Franco. Franco, who was once Ricardo's student, had a wide body of his own experimental art and film work, which is explored in the film. F for Franco had its premiere at the Hollywood Film Festival in 2015 and was reviewed by Neon Tommy[5] and by The Hollywood Reporter.[6]

Ricardo's approach has been acknowledged as contrary in process to narrative methods used in conventional filmmaking, often driven by his perspective as a scholar. Of F for Franco, the phenomenological approach to generating James Franco's subjective experience is an explicitly visual part of the content, suggesting that experiences rather "facts" are being recounted. One reviewer found that  "Ricardo’s expertise in art theory and new media is highlighted in the film. The documentary itself is not set up according to conventional methods. It was cited as a challenge to how narratives are presented and that is extremely relevant in the structure of the film, as well as the visual effects the audience digests."[5]  Calling it "an astute examination of the driving themes in Franco’s work and a cohesive portrait of the artist," The Hollywood Reporter found that "Ricardo’s excitement about digital-media opportunities for new forms of synthesis is persuasive" [6]. In research work, Ricardo's work has been described as one that "seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary projects and inquiry that are innovative, imaginative and creatively interactive."[7] Ricardo's theories of new media art have contributed to understanding the difference between contemporary art, whose media are derived from painting and sculpture, to new media art, whose materiality often leads to a art that embraces a plurality of states, a condition that he calls "transmodal", "a recursive amalgam of filmic, literary, performative and near-sculptural conditions," [q1] and David Johnston uses transmodality to assert that with "digital imaging techniques, the porosity between text and image increases."[q2]

Seeing a multiplicity of theories of new media, Ricardo posited the possibility of science of interaction that might operate as a unified field approach between social science and digital media studies, comprising a fundamental class of analysis called interaction with four distinct types: [q6] Behavioral interaction, as seen in games and simulations, whose objective is to produce an optimal path or solution based on efficient performance on one or more dimensions (time, velocity), and which could involve other forms of interaction such as movement interaction and combat interaction. Learning interaction, as seen in computer-aided tutoring/learning systems, whose focus is the assimilation of conceptual complexity into a user’s cognitive vernacular. Analysis interaction, as seen in knowledge management systems and digital libraries, revolving around interactions for the production of conjectures and interpretations. Creation interaction, as evident in development and authoring systems, for the production of digital content He then summarized the analytic approaches of new media into for kinds of frameworks - speculative frameworks, empirical frameworks, production frameworks, and hybrid frameworks, classifying each new media theorist within one of these types, and then defined four characteristics of interactions:

If we ask (whether for a machine or a human), “What is involved in an interaction?” we should identify four characteristics present in any interaction:

Protocol: A boundary detection protocol (What were the hypothetical rules for identifying an interaction?) Marking: Perceptible and detectible boundary markers for events (How do we confirm an interaction in real time?) Integration: A means for gathering and incorporating new data with existing knowledge (How does this interaction make sense in light of larger experience?) Evolution: A means for sharing knowledge as a transaction (How does this interaction generate new interactions, promoting the specific communicative objective as a whole?) [q6]

The scope of interaction analysis was argued as equally relevant to the methods used in three dimensions of interaction (what he termed the text/narratological/interpretive; the systemic/computational; and the social/collaborative/intersubjective) and was intended to address the shortcomings of other systematic approaches which do not study the means by which to structure interaction:

We need a generative field, one that can help to generate or explain how to structure interaction, not just study it through existing works. On this count, media studies, film studies, and other fields that still view digital content as a kind of narrative lack methods for systematically helping designers put mechanics of meaning in motion and engage the world in real time. [q6]

Ricardo is known for his podcast, "The Mind of Francisco Ricardo.[8]" This podcast covers weekly or bi-weekly topics including film reviews and film theory critiques of popular cinema.

Ricardo's metaphysics has scrutinized both language and visual art. Following a linguistic direction, Ricardo examined Derrida's views on grammatology, the study of the relationship between written and oral language, in view of writing forms that emerged at the dawn of digital media, such as blogs and emails. Derrida had critiqued the linguistic view that written and oral language were largely independent of each other, with writing being a support for oral communication, as Saussure claimed: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first." (q3, p. 30). For Derrida, writing and orality were interrelated differently, and he asserted that "writing up to the present has not only not contradicted, but indeed confirmed the linguistics of the word." (Ibid.). Ricardo's work departs from both Saussure and Derrida by denying that such clean separations exist between these two modalities, and that, instead, something like a codependent blend between orality and literacy had begun to emerge with the rise of globally networked interactive media. Through statistical analysis of lexical density and mean length of utterance (MLU) across blog posts, email messages, printed text (e.g., literary fiction), speech, Ricardo demonstrated that this new hybrid form, which he called "conversational writing," exists between orality and print, by showing high sentence length correlations between blog and email messages (98.5%), between blogs and speech (75.4%), and between emails and speech (70.7%), but significantly lower correlation between email and print (28.4%). Similarly, average lexical density of blogs (9.0%) and emails (10.7%) was located between that of speech (6.0%) and print (17.2%). [q4]

Ricardo also examined and argued for the intersection between expressive forms in research and creative work that fuses literary genres and visual art in digital media, a hybridity of expression that he termed "literary art" and which had historical foundations in 20th century poetry and visual art, but which had not been seen as a throughline in literary or art history:

If a name could convey the fusion of literature and art beyond media, it would connect to earlier traditions that harbored the same aesthetic and poetic aspirations. For what might still too imprecisely be called “Literary Art” in digital media follows significant forays into lettristic exploration that began with Mallarmé, Marinetti, Picabia, Chagall, and later returned with Broodthaers, Holzer, Kruger, Bochner, Kosuth, Nauman, Horn, and Weiner. This spectrum encompasses and has navigated through whole movements that swept within concrete poetry, Futurism, Dada, Fluxus, conceptual art, and even postart, to use Donald Kuspit’s term. [q5]

Ricardo has recorded content for several albums and singles. His first album, Adding and Subtracting</ref> His second album, Groove Morphisms,[9] was released in December 2015. In early 2016, Francisco released A Singular Within '.[10]

• The Jaco Groove
• Minimal Souvenirs [11]
• Calligraphies [12]
• F For Franco (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [13]
• PhilsPhases [14]
• Meridians [15]
• Sound Seance

Francisco's documentary "F for Franco "https://www.fforfranco.com/ showed at festivals in United States. The film is filled with personal interviews between the director and James Franco that was recorded over the course of four years. These conversations became the foundation for a journey that takes audiences through years of creative works with footage from Franco’s personal archives unveiling works never-before- seen by the public. The film also includes appearances by poet Frank Bidart, Seth Rogan, and Michael Shannon. He has an upcoming film about Cuban jazz trumpeter, Arturo Sandoval, set for release in late 2019. The film is entitled, Arturo Sandoval: Journey to a Dream https://www.sandovalfilm.com/.

Ricardo, F. J. (2013). The Engagement Aesthetic: Experiencing New Media Art through Critique. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. http://www.amazon.com/The-Engagement-Aesthetic-Experiencing-International/dp/1623561345

Ricardo, F. J. (2010). The Object-Image. In ASPECT, Volume 15: Influence and Reference, Boston, MA.

http://www.aspectmag.com/

Ricardo, F. J. (2009). Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism. New York: Continuum.

http://books.google.com/books?id=8Hq0Zsp0UP0C

Ricardo, F. J. (2009). The Locative Challenge to Modernist Dualisms of Place and Event. Presentation at Embodiment and Mobility, A Digital+Media Symposium. April 3, 2009. Providence, RI: Rhode Island School of Design. http://dm.risd.edu/news/embodiment-mobility-a-digitalmedia-symposium-on-april-3rd/

Ricardo, F. J. (2009). Cyberculture and New Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=-_XvCZ0JdAsC

Ricardo, F. J. (2008). Spirited Gestures, Rational Views. In M. Jahn, C. Hopkins, B. Golonu (Eds.), Recipes for an Encounter. New York: Western Front & Pond: Art, Activism, and Ideas.

Ricardo, F. J. (2008). Framing Locative Consciousness. Presentation at Beyond the Screen. University of Siegen, Germany, November 20–21, 2008. http://www.litnet.uni-siegen.de/veranstaltungen/beyond-the-screen.html?lang=de

Ricardo, F. J. (2007). Convergence and Transformation of Contemporary Art and New Media. Presentation at MIT5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, International Conference. April 27–29, 2007. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_agenda.html