Art, Modernism, Posthuman (original) (raw)

RENEWABLE FUTURES CONFERENCE, Latvian National Library, Riga., 2015

Abstract

In her book How We Became Posthuman (2001) Katherine Hayles analysed the process through which the conception of the liberal humanist subject let its way at the posthuman subject, a subject who lives in complete intertwining with the digital. This process, however, was not innocuous: it made pervasive within many fields of knowledge the (imaginary) perception that information could do without material instantiation, a process to which Hayles finds an origin in the Macy Conferences and the evolution of cybernetic theory. This research identified an analogous process within the artistic realm: When Clement Greenberg delineated the concepts of opticality and colour field as the main characteristics that “defined” Modernist painting he conceived of these in a purely disembodied subject (Krauss 1997). In this context, this work proposes to consider that the actual overcoming of Modernism comes along with the advent of the Posthuman tracing its origin to Marcel Duchamp and his “invention” of the readymade, and not with Postmodernism, which theoretical consistency, at least in the artistic field, this work will question. A desired result of this research in the long term will be to unify the main concepts of the artistic field with those of cybernetics, to bring together, or at least closer, “Turing land” and “Duchamp land”, to put it in Manovich’s words.

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