The New Life of Images. The Case of Postmodern Cinema in L. Malavasi, S. Tongiani (eds.), Technophobia and Technophilia in the Media, Art and Visual Culture (original) (raw)
Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, 2020
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.
'The Posthuman Theory, Digital Culture and Cinema' course profile
The course analyzes and compares selected perspectives seen in the form of motion pictures to express the concepts of 'Humanism, 'Posthumanism, and 'Transhumanism'. The content of the course consists of researching and examining the phenomena of Nature and City, cyborgian embodiment, epistemological accumulation and alienation in the context of language, advanced technological developments that penetrate the human body, and the role and expression of art in such developments. Since the course examines current technological development and contemporary social structuring on a sociological and philosophical basis, it differs from science fiction cinema with a clear line. Within the scope of the course, posthuman subjectivity, space, and our relations with all living things with whom we share this planet, as well as the effect of technological culture seen in contemporary cinema on sociological development will be examined in the context of posthumanism.
Out of the post. How Media Defined, Un-Defined and Re-Defined Modernity
in Elisa Bricco, Luca Malavasi (eds.), The Future of the Post. New Insights in the Postmodern Debate, Milano, Mimesis International, pp. 165-179, 2022
This intervention proposes three mutually related arguments (and this neo-modern style yet promises an overcoming of postmodernity…) My first point is that both the definitions of the postmodern trend and the various movements pretending to overcome it are affected by the concurrent transformations of the media system to a greater extent than they usually admit. In other words, to correctly understand the debates on postmodern and post-postmodern tendencies, it is essential to consider the evolution of the media over the last fifty years or so. Second, in more detail, I argue that the spring of the postmodern condition is intimately linked to the last season of electric media, between the 1970s and 1990s of the twentieth century: during this period, the multiplication and ubiquity of media screens lead to the birth of “mediascapes”; these new media environments exasperate the contrast between media experience and real experience, which has already arisen since the end of the 1950s. In turn, the overcoming of the postmodern trend is linked to a complete affirmation of electronic and digital media from the 1990s onwards: the images they carry become part of more general data flow management processes that transcend the medial sphere and expand to various social practices (defense, surveillance, medicine, trade, etc.); the new images that derive from it are operational, that is, they imply not only being observed but instead effectively operating within and on different environments. Finally, my third argument is that the transition from electric media to electronic-digital media is linked to the shift from postmodern to post-post-modern trends because of transformations that take place in the epistemic status of images. Indeed, the last phase of electric media is marked by a tendential scepticism towards images, while digital electronic media introduce a renewed confidence in their ability to render the real and operate on it – yet no longer directly but through the visualization and manipulation of data structures that constitute world models and that can actually oper-ate within and on the world. This renewed trust in the relationship between images and reality, however, does not imply a return to a pre-postmodern situation at all but, rather, the opening of a new phase based on the use of algorithmic models for the control and appropriation of the world.
Towards “post-digital”. A media theory to re-think the digital revolution.
Ethics in Progress, 2019
Can we say we live in a post-digital condition? It depends. This paper sets out to distinguish between the current mass digital culture and an authentic post-digital culture. If we mean “post-digital” as the full internalization and awareness of the result of the so-called digital revolution, then it is necessary a philosophical work to discuss related problems, identify the causes and propose solutions. An authentic philosophy of digital will, however, have to start from a clarification of the terms and basic objects of its investigation. Here media theory is inserted as an analytical tool: the purpose of this essay is to outline a road map for a good media theory that interfaces with questions of definition of digital, also in light of the notions of space, time, and matter. As will be seen, the description given here for a “good media theory” does, in fact, coincide with an already existing – and inserted in the contemporary debate – school. In conclusion we will try to delineate the field of philosophical inquiry opened by the clarification brought by the previous analysis, and to suggest a general framework within which philosophy will have to move in order to finally reach the authentic postdigital condition.
Media technologies and their people. A posthumanistic view
Prace Kulturoznawcze, XIV/2
Inspired by Donna Haraway's writings, the author indicates that a significant part of post-humanities could be regarded as a reflection on technologies, of which the digital and network (so-called new) media seem to show a particularly strong non-anthropocentric potential. This reflection, distinct from earlier established technophilic and technophobic positions, lies within the framework of critical posthumanism. The scientific and artistic undertakings mentioned in the article, but also the daily encounters of humans and machines are shown as cyborgising phenomena. Accentuating the non-human agency and reassembling the organic and non-organic, the relations between people and technology have grown to be a challenge for "ontological hygiene" and bring about many epistemological and ethical tasks.
The Question Concerning Technology as Art
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013
This paper presents that politics and the aesthetic meet in creative tensions between art, technology and humanities. The coincidence of politics and the aesthetic comes from the doubleness of technology performed by collaborative action of "We" human-and-technology. The way of technology posing the pairing of politics and the aesthetic in contemporary art opens a new way of understanding of relationships of humans and technology in collaborative action rooted in interdependent perspective.
Luca Malavasi, Sara Tongiani (eds.), Technophobia and Technophilia in the Media, Art and Visual Culture, 2020
In this paper I raise the question of whether audio–visual media, notably cinema, can be considered as technologies of time and if so, by what means and dynamics they operate on, in and with time1. The first two sections adopt a top–down approach. In section 2 I examine what forms time takes on in modernity, while I dedicate section 3 to the role played by cinema in this context. The second part, in turn, takes a bottom–up approach: in section 4 I take into consideration the processes of constitution of subjective temporal experience as they emerge from contemporary cognitive neuroscience; section 5, in turn, focuses on a couple of theories on the transition from the subjective to social experience of time. Finally, in the last section, I propose a hypothesis about the specific role of cinema in the transition from the subjective to the social dimension of temporality.
Since the advent of the Internet, a community of artists have engaged with emerging digital technologies in a field of practices that have been indicated with overlapping denominations such as net.art, net art, media art, new media art, Internet art, post-Internet art, screen-based art, digital art, and born-digital art. Case studies of artists Hito Steyerl, Olia Lialina, Constant Dullaart, Harm van den Dorpel, and Katja Novitskova, will delineate the main concerns of born-digital art in relation to the development of the Internet. Through their artistic practice, these artists’ work allow an urgent look into the increasing configuration of user culture online, the standardization of the web and its platforms, the instrumentalization of social quantification to manipulate and control public opinion, and the use of affect and bonding strategies deployed by technology firms to ‘capture’ user participation. Taking the art institution LIMA as the central node of my fieldwork, this ethnography will showcase how born-digital art emerged in response to three founding myths concerning the Internet and its potential for humanity. They include that of 1) the ‘original state’ of the Internet, which 2) in and of itself held emancipatory potential, and was 3) lost when the Internet ‘died’ in the year 2000. Through ethnographic fieldwork, case studies, and interviews, this thesis outlines how the born-digital art community attempts to find resolution between the visible/opaque, emancipation/capture, and enchantment/disenchantment through these founding myths. This research will serve to illuminate the role of myth in artistic production, and shed light on how anthropology may foster alternative methods for analyzing contemporary discourses on technological development.