The document discusses the concepts of immateriality and post-materialism in art. It explores how art has moved beyond physical objects to ideas, processes, and relations between people and their environments. It examines how technology has shaped new forms of artistic production and presentation that are dematerialized, existing more as information than physical matter. It questions where the art actually exists if not in a physical object - is it in the moment of creation, or in its documentation and re-presentation? It considers how art has become defined more by social and conceptual elements than material ones.
Face Ex Machina. Demiurgical Faces from the Eye of Hal9000 to S1m0ne and AvaFACETSERC
Bruno Surace, video of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGK55-6wj2I&t=1028s
"Transhuman Visages: Artificial Faces in Arts, Science, and Society", Symposium and Meeting of the Senior Advisory Board, PIAST, Polish Institute of Advanced Studies, 28 January 2020
In this original Digital Art and Philosophy class, we will become familiar with different forms of digital art and related philosophical issues. Digital art is anything related to computers and art such as using a computer to create art or an art display that is digitized. Philosophical aspects arise regarding art, identity, performance, interactivity, and the process of creation. Students may respond to the material in essay, performance, or digital art work (optional). Instructor: Melanie Swan. Syllabus: www.MelanieSwan.com/PCA
In this original Digital Art and Philosophy class, we will become familiar with different forms of digital art and related philosophical issues. Digital art is anything related to computers and art such as using a computer to create art or an art display that is digitized. Philosophical aspects arise regarding art, identity, performance, interactivity, and the process of creation. Students may respond to the material in essay, performance, or digital art work (optional). Instructor: Melanie Swan. Syllabus: www.MelanieSwan.com/PCA
Face Ex Machina. Demiurgical Faces from the Eye of Hal9000 to S1m0ne and AvaFACETSERC
Bruno Surace, video of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGK55-6wj2I&t=1028s
"Transhuman Visages: Artificial Faces in Arts, Science, and Society", Symposium and Meeting of the Senior Advisory Board, PIAST, Polish Institute of Advanced Studies, 28 January 2020
In this original Digital Art and Philosophy class, we will become familiar with different forms of digital art and related philosophical issues. Digital art is anything related to computers and art such as using a computer to create art or an art display that is digitized. Philosophical aspects arise regarding art, identity, performance, interactivity, and the process of creation. Students may respond to the material in essay, performance, or digital art work (optional). Instructor: Melanie Swan. Syllabus: www.MelanieSwan.com/PCA
In this original Digital Art and Philosophy class, we will become familiar with different forms of digital art and related philosophical issues. Digital art is anything related to computers and art such as using a computer to create art or an art display that is digitized. Philosophical aspects arise regarding art, identity, performance, interactivity, and the process of creation. Students may respond to the material in essay, performance, or digital art work (optional). Instructor: Melanie Swan. Syllabus: www.MelanieSwan.com/PCA
Imageability today. Telling stories in images.
In the context of this conference, my talk will not be about the representation of the image, but about the imageability of digital images. I’m particularly interested in what actually takes place inside the image and how this affects the value of the image – so not what is the story of image but what is the story in images. Storytelling here is no longer telling stories in a narrative way, but rather storytelling as an abstracted form that creates shifts in agency, which I will argue is constructed by human-machine relationships. It is clear that today’s images are not made through light and chemical processes anymore, and while even those materials could be used and manipulated in various ways to show or hide certain things, what happens when more and more images are made by webcams, satellites, security cameras, traffic cops, eBay sellers, Google StreetView cars, and tourists on a quest for the exact same photograph? Or, as Trevor Paglan mentioned, when referring to machine-vision, what happens when “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” [Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You), 2016].
In this new ecology of images, the actual taking of a photograph –if that is still the case– is merely one step in a long chain of abstractions in which the image is manipulated, recontextualized, sometimes in combinations with other images, at times these processes happen in unpredictable or irreverent ways. In other words, where does the image begin and end? While there is an over-abundance of photos and images around today, I will highlight 3 different positions that I think are crucial when discussing these specific aspects of contemporary images, and show how they relate to storytelling. This is an abstracted sense of storytelling taking place below the surface, while different narratives start to emerge. First, the digital as a tool in which traditional models of institutional cultural authority and disciplinary expertise still rule, here a digital image emphasizes but also questions the power of the original image through different modes of circulation; Secondly, the effect of optimization or automatic evaluation of image content in semi-automated algorithms; and related to that 3. The construction of value through machine vision [obscure algorithmic processes].
Playing the game: Role distance and digital performanceeDavidCameron
This paper explores the connection between the conventions of the live role-based performance of Process Drama, and the mediated performance of online role-playing videogames.
Identity formation within digital/virtual environments is a dominant theme in cyberculture studies. Equally, the adoption of alternate identities through performance is a key concept in Process Drama. Both activities allow participants to ‘become somebody else’. Both deal with the identity shifts possible within imagined environments. This mutability of identity
provides a metaphor for considering the episodic nature of in-role performance and out-of-role reflection in both drama and videogames. The prevalence of this metaphor within popular culture texts suggests young peoples’ perceptions of performance, role and the individual are changing. Increasingly
identity maintenance is mediated through texting, screens, the Internet and multiplayer videogames.
This paper describes a reflexive qualitative analysis of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Everquest in terms of dramatic performance and role distance, focusing on identity and learning outcomes. It provides a theoretical
connection between the conventions used in the two related educational fields of Process Drama and videogames.
Draft version. This is a preprint version of the article:
Carroll, J., & Cameron, D. (2005). Playing the game: Role distance and digital performance. Applied Theatre Researcher, 6.
A socio-cultural perspective of creativity for the design of educational envi...eLearning Papers
Authors: Françoise Decortis,Laura Lentini.
Creativity has long been a topic of interest and a subject of study for psychologists, who analyse it from several perspectives. From the cognitive perspective, researchers attempt to identity the specific processes and structures which contribute to creative acts, whilst from the socio-cultural perspective they try to demonstrate that artistic innovations emerge from joint thinking and exchanges among people. According to the latter, creativity indeed does not happen only inside our heads: the interaction between people's thoughts and a socio-cultural context is fundamental.
There is no difference between the 'real' and the 'virtual': a brief phenomen...Stéphane Vial
My speech at Theorizing the Web 2013 conference, in New York City, March 2nd, 2013, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) : http://www.theorizingtheweb.org/2013/. This is the first time I introduced the concept of 'Digital Monism' in order to develop the critics to the 'Digital Dualism' started by Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey.
Gebser 2017-heiner benking concreteness in integral worlds-revisitedHeiner Benking
Presentation from the International Jean Gebser Society 2017 in New York. Recorded but not delivered, Connection / WLAN problems.. A Video will be made available soon.... maybe check the GEBSER 2001 publication: XXVII Annual Jean Gebser Conference, Worldly Expressions of the Integral, October 18-20, 2001 - Ohio University, Athens, OH,
Concreteness in Integral Worlds
http://benking.de/gebser2001.html
Context Design (beta2) World IA Day 2013Andrew Hinton
My talk for World IA Day 2013, based on a book I'm writing. This is another permutation, somewhat different from the first "beta" talk I did in the fall. More about book: http://inkblurt.com/contextbook/
Imageability today. Telling stories in images.
In the context of this conference, my talk will not be about the representation of the image, but about the imageability of digital images. I’m particularly interested in what actually takes place inside the image and how this affects the value of the image – so not what is the story of image but what is the story in images. Storytelling here is no longer telling stories in a narrative way, but rather storytelling as an abstracted form that creates shifts in agency, which I will argue is constructed by human-machine relationships. It is clear that today’s images are not made through light and chemical processes anymore, and while even those materials could be used and manipulated in various ways to show or hide certain things, what happens when more and more images are made by webcams, satellites, security cameras, traffic cops, eBay sellers, Google StreetView cars, and tourists on a quest for the exact same photograph? Or, as Trevor Paglan mentioned, when referring to machine-vision, what happens when “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” [Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You), 2016].
In this new ecology of images, the actual taking of a photograph –if that is still the case– is merely one step in a long chain of abstractions in which the image is manipulated, recontextualized, sometimes in combinations with other images, at times these processes happen in unpredictable or irreverent ways. In other words, where does the image begin and end? While there is an over-abundance of photos and images around today, I will highlight 3 different positions that I think are crucial when discussing these specific aspects of contemporary images, and show how they relate to storytelling. This is an abstracted sense of storytelling taking place below the surface, while different narratives start to emerge. First, the digital as a tool in which traditional models of institutional cultural authority and disciplinary expertise still rule, here a digital image emphasizes but also questions the power of the original image through different modes of circulation; Secondly, the effect of optimization or automatic evaluation of image content in semi-automated algorithms; and related to that 3. The construction of value through machine vision [obscure algorithmic processes].
Playing the game: Role distance and digital performanceeDavidCameron
This paper explores the connection between the conventions of the live role-based performance of Process Drama, and the mediated performance of online role-playing videogames.
Identity formation within digital/virtual environments is a dominant theme in cyberculture studies. Equally, the adoption of alternate identities through performance is a key concept in Process Drama. Both activities allow participants to ‘become somebody else’. Both deal with the identity shifts possible within imagined environments. This mutability of identity
provides a metaphor for considering the episodic nature of in-role performance and out-of-role reflection in both drama and videogames. The prevalence of this metaphor within popular culture texts suggests young peoples’ perceptions of performance, role and the individual are changing. Increasingly
identity maintenance is mediated through texting, screens, the Internet and multiplayer videogames.
This paper describes a reflexive qualitative analysis of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Everquest in terms of dramatic performance and role distance, focusing on identity and learning outcomes. It provides a theoretical
connection between the conventions used in the two related educational fields of Process Drama and videogames.
Draft version. This is a preprint version of the article:
Carroll, J., & Cameron, D. (2005). Playing the game: Role distance and digital performance. Applied Theatre Researcher, 6.
A socio-cultural perspective of creativity for the design of educational envi...eLearning Papers
Authors: Françoise Decortis,Laura Lentini.
Creativity has long been a topic of interest and a subject of study for psychologists, who analyse it from several perspectives. From the cognitive perspective, researchers attempt to identity the specific processes and structures which contribute to creative acts, whilst from the socio-cultural perspective they try to demonstrate that artistic innovations emerge from joint thinking and exchanges among people. According to the latter, creativity indeed does not happen only inside our heads: the interaction between people's thoughts and a socio-cultural context is fundamental.
There is no difference between the 'real' and the 'virtual': a brief phenomen...Stéphane Vial
My speech at Theorizing the Web 2013 conference, in New York City, March 2nd, 2013, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) : http://www.theorizingtheweb.org/2013/. This is the first time I introduced the concept of 'Digital Monism' in order to develop the critics to the 'Digital Dualism' started by Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey.
Gebser 2017-heiner benking concreteness in integral worlds-revisitedHeiner Benking
Presentation from the International Jean Gebser Society 2017 in New York. Recorded but not delivered, Connection / WLAN problems.. A Video will be made available soon.... maybe check the GEBSER 2001 publication: XXVII Annual Jean Gebser Conference, Worldly Expressions of the Integral, October 18-20, 2001 - Ohio University, Athens, OH,
Concreteness in Integral Worlds
http://benking.de/gebser2001.html
Context Design (beta2) World IA Day 2013Andrew Hinton
My talk for World IA Day 2013, based on a book I'm writing. This is another permutation, somewhat different from the first "beta" talk I did in the fall. More about book: http://inkblurt.com/contextbook/
The final part of the course takes social housing as a case study to develop an understanding of how modernism was thought to have failed. James Clegg
Part 2 by Deborah Jackson.
In this original Digital Art and Philosophy class, we will become familiar with different forms of digital art and related philosophical issues. Digital art is anything related to computers and art such as using a computer to create art or an art display that is digitized. Philosophical aspects arise regarding art, identity, performance, interactivity, and the process of creation. Students may respond to the material in essay, performance, or digital art work (optional). Instructor: Melanie Swan. Syllabus: www.MelanieSwan.com/PCA
A partial state of the art of a research project that is currently underway and that I started to address during my PhD years, when I decided to explore the possible intersections between the new communication technologies that emerged in previous years, social networks in essence, and architectural culture.
Hyper-interactivism- ArtRadar: Contemporary Trends in ArtCoach Hall
This trend is a step further into interactive art, combining interaction with immersion in a virtual reality environment (mostly). Immersion is defined as the state of consciousness where a person’s awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment - often artificial. The term is widely used for describing immersive virtual reality, installation art and video games. This trend is obviously concerned with the art aspect. An immersive digital environment is an artificial, interactive, computer-created scene or "world" within which users can immerse themselves. Interactive art is generally considered to be something physical and solid to be messed with and moved around, but this trend incorporates computer and, often, projection or film technology. The whole idea is to involve the audience in a virtual, immersive experience. I titled this trend as “hyper-interactivism” or “immersionism” because of that extra level of involvement.
One artist, Maurice Benayoun, created the Tunnel Under the Atlantic and Cosmopolis. The Tunnel features an “entrance” in Paris and one in Monreal, allowing people in those areas to view each other by what has been described as “televirtuality.” Cosmopolis is a very large-scale rotunda of sorts with 12 screens facing a center. There are 12 little view stations that each show a 360 degree view of one of 12 cities. What is being viewed from those view-finders at a particular moment is projected onto the screens, creating a giant 360 degree view of a cityscape created by bits of other cities.
Another artist, Don Ritter, created Vested and Intersection. Intersection features a dark room with 4 speakers representing a 4-lane highway. Each speaker contains a sensor that, when it senses a person, will react by projecting sounds of cars screeching to a halt, accelerating, or crashing.
The last artist I chose for my presentation is Myron W. Krueger. He is an American computer artist who developed early interactive works, and is in the first generation of virtual reality researchers. One of his ideas sums up my trend well: the art of interactivity, as opposed to art that happens to be interactive. He did several pieces of art leading up to this bigger virtual immersion art in the late 60s and early 70s. The piece I featured was Small Planet, which allows the user to stand in from and control what he viewed of this small planet by moving his arms in an airplane fashion.
Reading on the Holodeck: Ray Bradbury, Ivan Sutherland, and the Future of Books. An exploration of the consequences of immersive media environments on IP policy, libraries, and creative arts.
What are the emerging trends in technology shaping the visit experience at the museum? How can museums harness their collection and displays to create a playful inviting immersive environments? How can museums encourage new forms of storytelling by blending digital technologies and the physical realm?
Keynote at the ICOM conference "The visitor experience in museums in the digital age."
Playlist available - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlM0ESI_brIWnOO2XlTf3dWEh7wEAqbtc
...A SIMPLE CHART WE USE TO BRAINSTORM THE USE OF HUMAN/COMPUTER INTERFACES WITH THE PERFORMING BODY. THIS INVOLVES THE CONFLUENCE OF THE 'NOOSPHERE' WITH THE HUMAN BODY IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY....A DOSE OF HISTORY AND NARRATOLOGY.
The power of the image: Contemporary art, gender, and the politics of perceptionDeborahJ
The relation between visual representations and the identity of the human subject.
The ideas and research that have informed this lecture are grounded in the areas of queer theory, gender studies, critical race theory, and feminist studies.
The global image. from consumer culture to the digital revolution DeborahJ
The Global Image: From Consumer Culture to the Digital Revolution is focused on the way we engage with images in the post-Internet era, when they can be shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history.
Beyond the visual: The Body in Contemporary ArtDeborahJ
When we think of the Body in Contemporary Art we could consider a number of different and relevant aspects. For instance, the body - the human form - is central in art, traditionally the body was often used to explore allegory, beauty and sexuality and so on. But in the twentieth century there was a significant shift in both how the body was perceived, and how it was used to create art across a range of media, from painting and sculpture to installation, photography, video art, performance and participatory art. By considering the different roles played by the body in art, we can identify that there has been a shift from being the subject, for example, in a portraiture, to becoming an active presence in live and participatory events. Alongside this there has also been a significant transformation of the role of the audience, broadly speaking, from passive viewer to active participant.
This presentation crutinises how art practitioners are navigating the artworld, which in our contemporary, late capitalist society is arguably, increasingly regulated by free market conditions, managed in the artworld by the same bureaucrats, curators, dealers and gallery owners, roles that have encroached on the career of artists themselves.
Debates around the idea that the interrelation or the interaction between artwork and viewers has been modified with the practice of Relational Aesthetics.
How Art Works: Week 5 The Rise of the ismsDeborahJ
This lecture will:
Examine how artists sought to find a language that would adequately express the changes and disruptions associated with modern life
Attempt to capture the dialectical relationship between each movement and its predecessors
Make connections between historical events and art genres
Encouraged you to think of styles as useful tools for exploration and analysis, rather than as hard and fast academic definitions, and to relate to the art itself rather than to a merely conceptual idea
Is a picture worth 1,000 words? Textual AnalysisDeborahJ
This lecture will introduce semiotics or the semiology of art, a mechanism for deriving meaning that is considered to a more inclusive development of Panofsky’s Iconography
How Art Works: Week 1 The ‘unruly discipline’ DeborahJ
This lecture will:
introduce ways to think about art and its history and help you to understand how art historians go about their practice
look at some of the issues and debates that make up the disciple of Art History
offer some reconsiderations of art history
consider the importance of the gallery and museum
Aims of todays lecture:
To analyse the conditions in which contemporary art is produced
To (re) evaluate your function as an artist within a broad context
Address making a living in the current climate of instability and enforced austerity
Consider issues of free labour, particularly internships, in the cultural sector
The Future of the Image | Week 5 | The Art of Nothing: Different approaches to the ‘non-object’
1. The Future
of the
Image
Week 5:
The Art of Nothing:
Different approaches
to the ‘non-object’
Deborah Jackson
2. Art After Space
• Explore the relevance
between forms and
ideas in an age of
project making
Olivia Plender
Information, Education, Entertainment (2007)
3. Art After Space
• Examine the space for
artistic production, and
its potential as a
transformational context
for
dialogue, exchange, critiq
ue, happenings, performa
nce etc
Francis Alÿs
Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997)
Alÿs pushes a block of ice through
the streets of Mexico City until it
melts; serving as a way to mark time
and measure existence.
4. The History of the Future
"We have eliminated the real world - which world is left ? The world of
appearances ? Not at all. Together with the real world, we have
eliminated also the world of appearances” (NIETZSCHE)
5. Hyperreal
There are two hypotheses.
The first one, is that the lost
universe of appearances
has not given way to an
objective world - the world
relieved from truth and
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order
appearances becomes a
to make us believe that the rest is
fable.
real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the
America that surrounds it are no longer
real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to
the order of simulation. It is no longer a
question of a false representation of reality
(ideology) but of concealing the fact that the
real is no longer real, and thus of saving the
reality principle.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
6. Jean Baudrillard
Integral Reality
The second hypothesis, is quite
simply the fall, the collapse of the
world into reality.
The world becomes real to such a
degree of reality that is bearable only
by the way of a perpetual denial of
the type : "This is not a world”
(echoing the famous "This is not a
pipe" of Magritte, as a surrealist
denial of the evidence)
Craig Mulholland
This is not a message
(2013)
7. Jean Baudrillard
Integral Reality
“To turn reality itself into
an art object, you just
need to make a useless
function out of it”
• Instant museification
• Virtual ready-made
We Live in Public
(2009)
8. Art and the Everyday
The revolutionary idea of
contemporary art was that any
object, any detail or fragment of
the world could exert the same
attraction and raise the same
questions as those formerly
restricted to a few forms called
works of art.
All are equivalent, everything is
great - universal ready-made.
Jeff Koons Acrobat (2003–
09)
9. The Conspiracy of Art
According to Baudrillard:
• There is no object anymore -
just the idea of the object
• And what we enjoy in it is not
art itself, but merely the idea of
art
• Thus we are no more in the
space of forms, but in the space
of ideology Dave Sherry
(2013)
10. Image Feedback
Retour-image
Everything we perceive on the
screen is nothing but an image-
feedback producing a reality-effect
through a simulacrum of exchange.
11. Image Feedback
Now the question is : how
to break this
circularity, this vicious
circle of integral reality -
how to think beyond
truth, how to look
beyond TV, how to live
beyond reality ?
Ross Sinclair
Real Life painting show
(2006)
12. The Allure of Machinic Life
John Johnston characterizes
“two conflicting cultural
narratives, the adversarial
and the symbiotic,” in which
humans either lose control of
their environment at the
hands of technology or
merge with technological
systems.
Olivia Plender
Machine Shall be the
John Johnston, The Allure of Slave of Man but we
Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Shall Not Slave for the
Artificial Life, and the New Ai Machine
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, (2008)
2008), 12.
13. Technology and Postmodern Pessimism
The hallmark of
postmodernism
may well be
skepticism, even
despair, over
technology's role
in shaping our
world
Mike Nelson Coral
Reef, 2000
14. The use of new technologies
throughout history has always
affected the way artists create
their work. Technologies present
the possibilities of how to create
new forms and processes.
“Our cognition becomes more
imaginative as twenty-first
century computers and art will
provide humankind with an
unlimited landscape for
exploration, and unparalleled
aid for the imagination.”
Cliffford Pickover
15. The ever important
function of creating
an art object by
hand has long been
diminished by
science and
technology.
A landscape painted on David
Hockney's iPad
16. The relationship between art and
technology to the gallery
Incorporeal materiality (having no
material existence) is materiality
nonetheless
No longer serve to free concepts
from their materiality but shift
materiality away from familiar
objects to the techno-sciences and
post-modern notions of space
Martin Creed Work No. 845 (THINGS
(2007)
17. Art After Space
Is arts condition today post-spatial?
• explore ‘space’ as an open-ended
term, ranging from personal space
of one’s self and domestic,
intimate surroundings, the
Internet, TV broadcasting, the
streets, web-based online curating,
Martin Creed abandoned buildings and even art
Work No. 79 Some Blu-Tack venues, including the imaginary
kneaded, rolled into a ball, and space of reflection preceding these
depressed against a wall presentations
(1993)
18. ‘UNOBJECTS’
Disembodied presence, devoid
of the materialist trappings of
canvas, paint, stone and metal
associated with conventional art
objects
“unobjects” and “immaterials”
remain distinct from the
dematerialization of art
associated with conceptual
movements and institutional Karla Black
critique Venice Biennale exhibition 2011
19. “The specific function of
modern didactic art has been
to show that art does not
reside in material entities, but
in relations between people
and between people and the
components of their
environment.”
Burnhan, Great Western Salt Works:
Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Martin Creed
Art, 15. Work No. 370 Balls
(2004)
20. Cybernetics
“Information is information not
matter or energy. No materialism
which does not admit this can
survive at the present day.”
Norbert Wiener
Part of a utopian view of information,
messages here have no material
presence, acting as pure pattern,
distinct from energy, remaining
immaterial until encoded in print,
electrical pulse or digital bit.
Olafur Eliasson
The Weather Project
(2003)
21. Lyotard’s Les Immateriaux
‘Material’ aspects of
experience
dissolve, when
mediated by techno-
scientific data, into an
infinity of processes and
relations that cannot be
grasped in perceptual or
imaginative terms.
“To be is to be perceived.”
George Berkeley
22. “The relationship between
mind and matter is no longer
one between an intelligent
subject with a will of its own
and an inert object. They are
now cousins in the family of
‘immaterials’.”
Jean-François Lyotard, Les Immatériaux, ed.
Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and
Sandy Nairne, Thinking About Exhibitions
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 165.
23. Richard Hamilton
Just what is it
that makes
today's homes so
different? (1992)
Beyond the dematerialization of the art object, the Pop art problem of
irrealities and issues related to the techno-scientific and digital revolutions,
Lyotard was concern with the artificialization of life beyond the museum.
24. Space of Curating Immateriality
The postmodern
landscape, in
other words, is
invisible and
imperceptible but
not unreal.
Craig Mulholland
Peer to Peer (2008)
25. “Change emanates, not
from things, but from the
way things are done.”
Jack Burnham
System Esthetics
(1974)
Keith Farquhar
Plastic Wood (2009)
26. An Internet of Things
A lot has changed since Benjamin wrote his manifesto on the effects of
mass production of art. Art can now be viewed with the click of a mouse
because the internet is saturated with images of art.
27. Immateriality -
Art as Process
Any finished work of art stands
secondary to the process of art.
As mere objects they are simply
objects of the past that have
historical (and also aesthetic)
value as records of our past
intentions and attitudes, they can
instruct upon how someone
might have created their own
vocabulary (reality), as artefact
they show how culture is
changing.
Dean Hughes
Filling up puddles on a day that it
didn't rain (2010)
28. The immateriality question
• Where actually is the art?
• Is art in the moment or is
it in its re-presentation?
• Can art ever be an object?
Martin Creed
Work No. 610 (Sick Film)
(2006)
29. Post-materialism
The intangible is a state, a
condition, a thing, which
cannot be directly
possessed in its own
possibility, perceived, or
traced. Intangible art,
therefore, can not be held,
seen or reproduced
directly for an indefinite
amount of time nor can it
be bought and sold,
bartered, traded or gifted.
Anthony Schrag
Restore the Natural Order: Lecturing sheep
about the Highland Clearances (2013)
30. The Tyranny of Vision
You can’t tell
art just by
looking
Editor's Notes
http://mehreenmurtaza.tumblr.com/post/43023836725/1-the-worlds-first-computer-art-is-an-image-of-aLast week’s film touched upon an ‘understanding of the growing symbiosis in man- machine relationship’, whichcharacterises ‘the advanced technological culture’ at large…This week, in order to answer some key questions regarding art in the 21st century that keep resurfacing, I want to concentrate on different approaches to the ‘non-object’…There is the potential to create work that is not possible on a paper canvas.What remains as an art object in the artist’s head once the project or the installation has finished and exists no longer. What kind of object is left to present for posterity? The works stem from an initial first idea and what is displayed here is the residual essence of the concept.
This lecture will:Explore the relevance between forms and ideas in an age of project making
This lecture will also:Examinethe space for artistic production, and its potential as a transformational context for dialogue, exchange, critique, happenings, performance…
The 1960s and 1970s mark the first time contemporary art opposed modernist art. Formalist strategies that privileged the art object were displaced by discursive, administrative and conceptual approaches that emphasized relationships, and connoisseurship gave way to the demands of the growing research-industrial complex. The concept of creativity partially shifted from a traditional craft function to intensive means of research, production and exhibition as seen in the emergence of land, environmental and ecological art, conceptual and performative practices, and spatial installations. However, in entering the information and systems age, which supplanted the industrial and machine age, art struggled to maintain (or willingly ceded) its materiality, which became divorced from message, as did content from expression, reinforcing philosophical dualisms."We have eliminated the real world - which world is left ? The world of appearances ? Not at all. Together with the real world, we have eliminated also the world of appearances" (NIETZSCHE
There are two hypotheses. The first one, is that the lost universe of appearances has not given way to an objective world - the world relieved from truth and appearances becomes a fable.Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
The second hypothesis, is quite simply the fall, the collapse of the world into reality. Once the world of truth is lost, together with the world of appearances, the universe becomes a real one. It falls into reality in a kind of telescopic collapse. It falls into reality as a rest, as a residue, as a definitive reduction and deconstruction of the enchanted world of illusion, one which no longer even needs to be true. The world becomes real to such a degree of reality that is bearable only by the way of a perpetual denial of the type :"This is not a world" (echoing the famous "This is not a pipe" of Magritte, as a surrealist denial of the evidence –This double impulse of the absolute, definitive evidence of the world and of the equally radical denial of this evidence dominates the whole trajectory of modern art, but not only : all our perceptions and imagination of the world are affected.
According to Baurillard, in order: To turn reality itself into an art object, you just need to make a useless function out of it. And this may be extrapolated to the whole production of material or immaterial things. As soon as this production reaches a critical level, a critical mass, where it can no longer be exchanged for anything in terms of social or individual achievement, it becomes a kind of gigantic surrealistic object, seized by the aesthetics of the performance, and virtually inscribed in a sort of irresistible final process without finality.Instant museificationof the whole technical environment, but also of the existential environment : for example in We Live in Public, Josh Harris is filmed 24 hours a day on the Internet – his, behaviour or acting recreates exactly Duchamp's gesture of the ready-made, he transfers his everyday life into the frame of the screen just as Duchamp transfers his fountain into the frame of the museum. He doesn't make a narrative or a fable out of his life, only a clone of it, a factual stereoscopy, an hyperrealistic transfer - a virtual ready-made.http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/integral-reality/
The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the world could exert the same attraction and raise the same questions as those formerly restricted to a few forms called works of art. That was democracy : not just in the access of all people to the enjoyment of art, but in the aesthetic uprising of an object-world where, to quote Warhol's famous formula, each object, without distinction, would have its 15 mins of fame - and particularly those banal objects, images and commodities. All are equivalent, everything is great - universal ready-made. Reciprocally art and the work of art are also transformed into objects - ready-mades without illusion - art as a merely conceptual acting-out, a generator of deconstructed objects that deconstruct us in turn.
Conceptual objects generated not by art itself, but by the idea of art. No body, no face, no gaze - just organs without a body, flows and networks without substance, fractals and molecules. No more judgment, pleasure or contemplation - one gets connected, absorbed, immersed, just as within force-fields or networks.According to Baudrillard:There is no object anymore - just the idea of the object. And what we enjoy in it is not art itself, but merely the idea of art. Thus we are no more in the space of forms, but in the space of ideology.
Image-feedback ("retour-image")induces everything to focus on itself, to duplicate itself in advance, cutting short the process of representation - a phenomenon particularly noticeable in the field of photography, where very few images, be it a face, an event, a human being or a landscape, escape that image-feedback. Most of our images mask themselves with a con-text, a culture, a meaning, an idea of themselves Everything we perceive on the screen is nothing but an image-feedback producing a reality-effect through a simulacrum of exchange.
Now the question is : how to break this circularity, this vicious circle of integral reality - how to think beyond truth, how to look beyond TV, how to live beyond reality ?
In complicating and extending the ontology of art, this more conceptual mode of thought has given rise to what John Johnston characterizes as “two conflicting cultural narratives, the adversarial and the symbiotic,” in which humans either lose control of their environment at the hands of technology or merge with technological systems.[1] Either option creates fear and alienation because humans are denied active participation in creation. With the machine, a discrepancy between technics and culture opens up, because humans are no longer “tool bearers,” but rather subjects gradually devolving from active to passive operator, reduced to a small a part of a larger system.He is suggesting a total loss of control or complete assimilation in the face of technicization,John Johnston, The Allure of Machinc Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New Ai (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 12.
The hallmark of postmodernism may well be skepticism, even despair, over technology's role in shaping our world.There is a tension that the machine has been sought out to replace the handwork of a person to make work easier or more productive, and the so the argument goes, that less knowledge or skill is required.
However, the use of new technologies throughout history has always affected the way artists create their work. Technologies present the possibilities of how to create new forms and processes.“Our cognition becomes more imaginative as twenty-first century computers and art will provide humankind with an unlimited landscape for exploration, and unparalleled aid for the imagination.” ClifffordPickover
The ever important function of creating an art object by hand has long been diminished by science and technology.
Rather than seeing technology as a force that intervened between the individual and reality, has the machine become a way of creatively ‘deforming’ reality, even mastering it? Technology has certainly long become a creative force for the artist by being defined as a new ‘screen’ or ‘filter’ through which the world is experienced.Key to exploring the relationship between art and technology and the gallery is an:understanding that incorporeal materiality (having nomaterial existence) is materiality nonethelessThe focus in no longer to free concepts from their materiality but shift materiality away from familiar objects to the techno-sciences and post-modern notions of space
Paradox; art wants space; yet art’s condition today is post-spatialexplore ‘space’ as an open-ended term, ranging from personal space of one’s self and domestic, intimate surroundings, the Internet, TV broadcasting, the streets, web-based online curating, abandoned buildings and even art venues, including the imaginary space of reflection preceding these presentations.
Jack Burnham suggests that conceptual art marks such a disembodied presence, devoid of the materialist trappings of canvas, paint, stone and metal associated with conventional art objects.Burnham linked technological shifts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to an accompanying paradigm shift in thinking and creative practices in which conceptual art became nebulous information rather than defined thing. Formalist art objects were countered by “unobjects,” defined as “either environments or artifacts which resist prevailing critical analysis.”It is also work noting that:“unobjects” and “immaterials” remain distinct from the dematerialization of art associated with conceptual movements and institutional critique
Burnham continues, “The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment.”
Cybernetics, in other words, constituted an epistemic shift in which technological progress became informational rather than material or energy.Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, writes, “Information is information not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.” Part of a utopian view of information, messages here have no material presence, acting as pure pattern, distinct from energy, remaining immaterial until encoded in print, electrical pulse or digital bit.
Les Immatériaux,,an exhibition curated by Lyotard, functioned as a kind of model for the postmodern condition. It showed us how familiar ‘material’ aspects of experience dissolve, when mediated by techno-scientific data, into an infinity of processes and relations that cannot be grasped in perceptual or imaginative terms. Infinity is inscribed in the familiar.Lyotard’s turn to immaterials has a history with which as a philosopher he would certainly have been familiar. Immaterialism has its eighteenth-century advent in Bishop Berkeley, whose metaphysics held that there are no material objects, only minds that apprehend.Berkley stated “To be is to be perceived”
Immaterial for Lyotard takes on a different meaning. He writes, “The relationship between mind and matter is no longer one between an intelligent subject with a will of its own and an inert object. They are now cousins in the family of ‘immaterials’.”The exhibition reveals the means by which our sense of reality has been defamiliarized and rendered insecure through technoscientificimmaterialization.The postmodern condition is one of an artifice for which there is no longer any original nature to oppose, or in which the artifice-nature distinction is blurred.
Beyond the dematerialization of the art object, the Pop art problem of irrealities and issues related to the techno-scientific and digital revolutions, Lyotard was concern with the artificialization of life beyond the museum.
Space of Curating ImmaterialityThe site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems.The importance of computers has lead to communication technologies that allow for the quicker exchange and distribution of the means of production. Dematerialisation of the artwork has lead to immateriality, where it is no longer the object but the social relations that are measured. “The ‘immateral’ surrounds the inhabitants of this [postmodern] society in all direction, even if it is, strictly speaking, ‘unrepresentable’, and installation art functions as an embodiment, and a vehicle for the communication of, this immateriality. The postmodern landscape, in other words, is invisible and imperceptible but not unreal.
Critic, Jack Burnham“Change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”That is to say,Technology offered new formats as well as new materials that enabled artists to go beyond an institutionalised context and instead conceive of and work with reality - directly and comprehensively; not as a number of autonomous objects but as a field of interrelated and complex systems calling for analysis, criticism and experimentation.
A lot has changed since Benjamin wrote his manifesto on the effects of mass production of art (The Work of Art in the age of mechanical reproduction). Art can now be viewed with the click of a mouse because the internet is saturated with images of art. This development does not mean, however, that original works of art have lost their authenticity just because they can be seen virtually anywhere in the world via the internet. The originality of art comes from being in the presence of the artwork itself, not from viewing a mere replica. On the other hand, what if the original were produced in the same way that the replica was produced. In this situation the only thing that differentiates the original from the copies is the amount of time and contemplation that the artists put into the original, and even then the work may not actually exist. Therefore, the value of originality does not specifically refer to and art object, but only to its theoretical enquiry.An object’s virtual representation, can have stakeholders. For instance, it makes more sense to own shares of a company than it does to own a physical piece of the company.
The art image as non-tangible representation then poses the question of whether artistic enquiry itself can be a valid form of art. This question implies that artists do not necessarily need to produce or make objects, but rather that they must contemplate and inquire about the true meaning of art and its relationship to art objects. Indeed there is a growing tendency for artists to regard their work as an enquiry, an open ended activity that does not aim at producing an object but nevertheless provides a defined statement.Any finished work of art stands secondary to the process of art. As mere objects they are simply objects of the past that have historical (and also aesthetic) value as records of our past intentions and attitudes, they can instruct upon how someone might have created their own vocabulary (reality), as artefact they show how culture is changing.
This draws attention to the "Immateriality question": What is art?, or more to the pointWhere actually is the art?Is art in the moment or is it in its re-presentation? Can art ever be an object?
‘What is intangible Art?’ The question has continually defied being answered in part due to the elusiveness of the content itself. The intangible is a state, a condition, a thing, which cannot be directly possessed in its own possibility, perceived, or traced. Intangible art, therefore, can not be held, seen or reproduced directly for an indefinite amount of time nor can it be bought and sold, bartered, traded or gifted.