The iconoclasm of technological realism: the research behind “Unpainted Undrawn” and “Arnulf Rainer for Digital Performers” (original) (raw)
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First, technologies (photography, tape recorder, telephone, radio, television) and, afterwards, neo-technologies (total digitalisation, Internet, mobile phones) have created the conditions for overcoming the arts towards what the author calls "technological sublime". Within this new dimension, not only the category of art reaches its own decline, but the very aesthetic dimension experiences a profound transformation of its own essence, exercising its ancient function and, yet, at the same time, assuming a novel anthropological character. The author supports his thesis by founding it, as he has always done before, on the works of a certain number of artists, whom he considers as the most meaningful of our age.
Through the Screen Darkly? Enchantment in Digital Art
Acta Universitas Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 26, 2024
The phrase in the title, borrowed from Paul (1 Corinthians 13:12), though used in a twisted form, suggests interest of new media in faith-based art, and leads to the question of whether and how such applications work in that specific context; also, if they do, then how they contribute to the spiritual and religious experience. Our media world is "the shelter where the vast majority of those of us who live in the West dwell and from which we draw the material out of which we make sense of our lives," Cobb (2005) claims. Accordingly, as part of our world, the rise of digital art has also become common in faith-based (spiritual and religious) art. This phenomenon has been addressed in international theory, including studies of the post-secular age and (re)enchantment, as well as in theory combined with curatorial practice (e.g., Groys and Weibel 2011). The paper pays special attention to the practices of Central European artists.
2017
This publication accompanies the exhibition Screens: Virtual Material, on view at deCordova Sculpture and Museum. from Oct 06, 2017 - Mar 18, 2018. Exhibition summary: From iPhones to televisions to electronic billboards, screens saturate our daily lives. We stare at, touch, and communicate through their luminous surfaces. Yet we often overlook the powerful ways they shape our vision, behavior, and beliefs. Beyond their familiar functions, screens can be seductive barriers, conveying confinement and intimacy in equal measure. They mark thresholds between private and public spaces, or divide sacred and profane realms. They also translate the three-dimensional physical world into flattened and fractured picture planes. This exhibition addresses these and related ideas through the work of six leading contemporary artists: Brian Bress, Marta Chilindron, Liza Lou, Matt Saunders, Josh Tonsfeldt, and Penelope Umbrico. In their sculptures and multi-media installations, the screen is both the primary artistic medium and the conceptual focus. From glittering metal fences to deconstructed television monitors, the various types of screens shown here are unexpected and interactive, and invite new ways of considering this crucial boundary between our virtual and material worlds.
30 Years after Les Immatériaux - Art, Science and Theory
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In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the post-modern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years. Texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Jean-Louis Boissier, Andreas Broeckmann, Thierry Dufrêne, Francesca Gallo, Charlie Gere, Antony Hudek, Yuk Hui, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Mackay, Anne Elisabeth Sejten, Bernard Stiegler, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein.
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Technoetic Arts, 2016
The classification presented here will condense into five categories the adjectives, concepts, artworks and topics of discussion that are related to ‘post-materiality’, understood here to mean those art practices that are related to artistic physicality in some shifted way by being objectless artworks or works beyond physicality. I present several elements that are related to the history and theoretical background of this question. The immateriality, dematerialization and non-materiality of art will be considered in the context of digital art and culture. We can follow artistic concepts related to immateriality in the late 1950s, discussions on dematerialization of art in the late 1960s and the appearance of ‘immateriality’ in the 1980s. ‘Immateriality’ emerges again in the early 1990s, this time in association with the digital environ- ment, and has remained a much-discussed term and more of a metaphor up to the present since so-called immaterial digital art is in fact a labour-intensive and mate- rial-intensive sphere. In observing the experimental and theoretical activity around artistic technologies over the past 50 years, it is possible to discern two directions: first, dematerialization in the context of non-technological art, and second, immate- rialization of the art object in the context of technological art.
Sensual Alterity of Digital Objects
2016
This thesis hypothesizes ways in which contemporary theory constructs sensual qualities in digital objects. I disrupt the common epistemological understandings of objects to describe what constitutes a sensual alterity. The sensible object is defined to be something more than representing a real object. This thesis expands upon demonstration files available in breve, an open-source, multi-agent simulation software. The digital object substructure is unpacked through the lenses of theorists Karan Barad and Graham Harman. I negotiate digital bodies as vertices and attributes to be ontologically stable. I formulate rasterization (transferring vector to pixel visualization) to be a model of the intra-actions (assemblage of causal forces) of agential separability (practice of mattering) showcasing the apparatus as inexhaustible in its penetrative cut. I explore this sensual exteriority and apply the apparatus of touch to indicate the capacity of digital objects to experience otherness, o...
Virtual Loops: Deconstructing Painting to Explore the Aesthetics of Mediation
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This thesis document outlines the key concepts and research practices I undertook to explore the aesthetics of mediating digital and analog logics through materiality and painterly abstraction. It culminated in a body of work of 8 paintings and a final thesis exhibition from March 22 to April 1 at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. This work builds on my practice as an abstract painter to deconstruct painting and use a site responsive installation method to explore the optical dimensions of borders, boundaries, and surfaces to negotiate between digital and analog logics. This interest in a medial condition coupled with the impact of Covid 19 focused my observational and material research to center around the site and idea of LCD and plasma screens of personal computing devices. The screen mediates between two categories of digital and analog, and in an attempt to study communication loops between these two categories I use digital processes of laser cutters, 3D scanners, and 3D printers as well as analog processes of silicone casting and paint drying to explore different variations of transmutation. The materials I choose are based on visual effect and the relationship with transparency/translucency and opacity/obscuring. Through fusing an expanded painting practice (using flat, painterly elements) with the spatial and sculptural (using the actuality and volume of sculpture) I want to consider the digital as a state of abstraction that is constantly mediated between the analog forms of real. This research draws on the theories of the media archaeology of colour by Carolyn L Kane for my selection of colours and surfaces, Alexander Galloway's conception of the digital as an epistemological category that exists outside of personal computing devices, and Bernhard Siegert's notion of cultural techniques to frame the screen as a material technic that reinforces ideas and divisions of digital and analog, while these categories and ways of thinking have long historical precedents.