The Technological Regime on Newness: Technology, Art, and Temporality (original) (raw)

2020, Lecture draft

This is a translated lecture draft for the exhibition, Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow, The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (13 January, 2020) https://www.mori.art.museum/en/index.html The main focus of the lecture is the issues that I have discussed in my previous papers (i.e., Regimes on newness, Multiple personae etc) namely the problem of the contemporary techno-art that relies on the innovative aspects of progressive technologies that eventually bring about the rapid obsolescence of their technological elements. Focused here is the different temporalities that co-exist within the art regime that may reveal the alternative ways of regarding artwork from the existing view of evaluating it with its progressive temporality.

FROM CYBERNETICS TO THE POST-DIGITAL READYMADE: ON THE POLITICS OF IMPERMANENCE AND EPHEMERALITY IN DIGITAL WORKS OF ART

The proliferation of digital technologies in nearly every aspect of life has been accompanied with narratives of change – both dystopian and utopian – from its early days. And if art is in any way to relate to our lived experience, then it comes at no surprise that artists started to investigate the digital – as a tool and medium, but also as a testing ground for new models of thinking about art in relation to society. As Walter Benjamin infamously demonstrated in his analysis of art in times of technical reproducibility, technological advancements not only affect the way art is produced, but also the politics of its distribution and consumption. If the reproducibility of a photograph has caused the loss of the aura of the unique original – what effects do the ephemerality and malleability of the digital artwork have on previous formulas of producing, viewing and thinking art? Is digital art in its fleeting, participatory nature capable of challenging the the status of the artwork as a commodity, as envisioned by the politically motivated computer art of the 80s and 90s? Or are we today merely dealing with a digitalised version of an established system of contemporary art under the rule of neo-liberal capital?

Notes on art and technology for the current millennium

2010

This short essay was written for BE-Magazin, Berlin, October 2010. Best considered as a 'position paper' on the relationship of critical (media-) arts practice and the technological complex - the 'Digital Leviathan-on-Wheels'.

2016 - Archiving and Questioning Immateriality: Proceedings of the 5th Computer Art Congress

Everardo Reyes, Pierre Châtel, Khaldoun Zreik, frank dufour, Nina van Doren, Pilar Rosado Rodrigo, Maria Giulia Dondero, Eva Figueras Ferrer, k badni, Gabriel Pareyon, Federico A Garrido, Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Alexandre Michaan

We Have the Technology: The Conditions of Art and its Experience in a Would-be Age of the Technological Sublime

2018

Slyce contributes an essay to this volume–deriving from the 2018 Verbier Art Summit with the theme More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age–that analyses our moment and its infatuation with the technological sublime. He examines drives towards Virtual Reality in light of both an earlier moment of technological innovation through Walter Benjamin’s writing on 19th century photography and then signal examples of 1960s practices coming out of post-Minimalism and Conceptualism that explored new technologies while not succumbing to their forces or distanced modes of production. Starting with two signal cultural products of the 1980s in a song by the avant-rock band Pere Ubu and then David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Slyce considers the conditions of making and the experience of virtual reality as art now, some five years before it is imagined–at least by the corporate powers standing behind VR–when ‘we’ will all own at least two such devices. The book, published by Koenig Books, was launched a...

Art and Technology Playing Leapfrog: A History and Philosophy of Technoèsis

New Journal of Physics, 2005

... is why I prefer to speak of the co-evolution of technological design, the formation ... The dominantphilosophy of a particu-lar period should be articulated by metaphors provided ... and disciplinary cultural practices, what is left of the renowned autonomy of art and artists, especially ...

Technomagic and the Individual in Reactive Digital Art

Modern technology is an ongoing formulation, first of awe (or euphoria), then of adoption (or acceptance), then finally of absorption into the common vernacular, an object of the mundane. The ever-present fetishization of the 'new', and its corollary of impermanence and lack of lasting depth, is strongly present in reactive new media art. Works such as Daniel Rozin's various Mirrors, a number of works by Camille Utterback (such as any of her Untitled series), and some of my own works, such as Ghostmaker, rely on this cultural form of euphoric awe, something I call the “Technomagic 'Wow' Factor”, as a central element. In this paper I first look at some important terms that are key to understanding these art-forms, then I discuss “technomagic” and how it is received, and then I look at ways in which meaning may exist in these works through the situating of the individual, the body, in the contemporary digital experience. Consider this to be a sort of sketch, a quick look at these ideas and possibilities, rather than an exhaustive analysis.

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