The Way We See the World (original) (raw)

Seeing the World through Technology and Art

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2008

Mediated Vision, edited by Petran Kockelkoren, is a collection of articles and art exhibitions that each explores the effects that technology has upon the ways humans experience the world. After a review of the collection as a whole, I return in a final section to two of the articles, those written by Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek, to provide them further contextualization and commentary. Verbeek's piece, I suggest, represents an important next step in a specific line of criticism of Ihde's work. With Mediated Vision, Kockelkoren has made the rare accomplishment of assembling a collection that taken together amounts to more that the sum of its individual contributions. The articles and works of art are quite diverse, but are related to one another in that each explores aspects of human vision mediated by technology. The essays are written by philosophers and art historians such as Don Ihde,

"The Digital Presence of the Ephemeral: Three Study Cases", 35th CIHA World Congress in History of Art, Florence, 1-6 Sept. 2019

35th CIHA World Congress in History of Art, Florence, Villa Vittoria, 1-6 Sept. 2019

What happens when a project for artwork is refused? Or when an artwork is destroyed, stolen, lost? How can the institution exhibit this ephemeral heritage, its memory? Does the ontology of this kind of artwork change? In the last few years, in the wake of the virtualisation process (Levy, 1995), the idea of the ephemeral (the immaterial) has turned in a theoretic​al object to be exhibited. Thus, one can recognise a series of exhibition and artistic dynamics that have investigated the heuristic potential of the intangible within the creation process. Our paper aims to reply to the above questions through the deepening of three specific cases: - A museum: The MoRE Museum (Museum of Refused and Unrealized Arts Projects) - An exhibition: The Gallery of Lost Art (Tate Gallery, London, 2012) - An art project: The Incompiuto Siciliano (Alterazioni Video) The MoRE Museum is a digital museum which has appropriated the digital language to make it a heuristic device. It digitally collects, preserves and exhibits, refused and unrealised art projects of the 20 and 21st centuries. The Gallery of Lost Art was an immersive, online exhibition that told the stories of artworks that had disappeared. It was divided into ten categories representing ten types of missing works: stolen, destroyed, rejected, unrealised, put aside, disappeared, degraded, reworked, censored. The Incompiuto Siciliano is a non-profit project, based in Milan, and founded by the artist group Alterazioni Video. For ten years now, they have described the phenomenon of the unfinished public works in Italy from a new perspective, by collecting, mapping, and photographing more than 750 unfinished architectural works. The cross-study of these three cases allows us to offer a particularly composite picture of the current condition, where the idea of immateriality is experienced in different ways and represented in various forms. In particular, the case of the MoRE Museum not only offers the possibility of re-interrogating the value of the ephemeral heritage, by insisting on its collection, valorization and conservation; but also suggests the ontological turn experienced by the idea of the project (which loses its nature of preparatory work to acquire the status of full-fledged artwork). Besides, the study of the London exhibition offers an occasion to rethink modes to exhibit the ephemeral through a digital perspective, by questioning the digital modalities of spectatorship apprehension and experience. Finally, the case of the Incompiuto, as a material witness to the current socio-cultural context that permeates everyday life, enables us to insist on the “aura” of the unfinished and its heuristic potential.

#EARTH2018 - Digital Environments for Education, Arts and Heritage

L’applicazione delle tecnologie digitali alla museografia contemporanea sta progressivamente cambiando la concezione dell’edificio museale, così come delle modalità allestitive. Il ruolo della tecnologia non solo aggiorna scientificamente il processo museografico, ma aggiorna le possibilità fruitive del percorso museale. Il paper si propone: 1) di individuare i modi e i tempi di questo cambiamento. Non solo l’individuazione del momento in cui si sviluppa l’applicazione della tecnologia digitale all’interno museografico, ma anche la definizione degli elementi al contorno, definiscono lo scenario di una nuova fruibilità dell’immagine artistica. 2) di verificare se lo scenario contemporaneo possa essere riportato alle precedenti categorie di analisi fenomenologica. È possibile cioè confrontare la dialettica estetica tra spettatore e opera d’arte del passato con quella del presente (e possibilmente del futuro)? 3) di additare uno scenario plausibile per la disciplina museografica (in riferimento sia all’ambito scientifico-disciplinare, sia al destino del patrimonio culturale), non solo riaggiornando l’ambito disciplinare, ma anche allargando la nozione di opera d’arte.

Open-air museums: digital cultures, aesthetics and everyday life

Vista, 2021

At a time when everything becomes art, art no longer belongs to itself, to the point of overflowing from the frames that have enclosed it for several centuries-museums, galleries, churches-with unprecedented effects not only in the field of aesthetics, but above all in ordinary life. To understand this in depth, it is necessary to take into account the digital reproducibility of the work of art as a dynamic that upsets the relationship between work and spectator, subject and object, politics and everyday life. From the second half of the 18th century onwards, we saw a dynamic of "aestheticization of the public" parallel to the birth of the cultural industry and, therefore, the transformation of culture into merchandise. It is an ambiguous process, as it implies the emergence of the mass as the central subject of our culture, but also its definitive reification. What about aesthetics in such a condition? This study explores the genology and history of this process by updating Walter Benjamin's thinking in relation to the cultural emergencies of our time. In particular, it seems essential to understand what happens to the aura in the context of a condition in which the aesthetic object, the work of art and, more generally, the area that concerns beauty is available, used and consumed in everyday life, to the point of placing our cities as "open air museums".

The Return of Technology as the Other in Visual Practices

In this thesis I will ponder on the claims made by the protagonists of the contemporary philosophy movements Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. They are looking at (technological) objects to understand them better from themselves, without any human intervention. The New Aesthetic can be seen as the visual branch of this philosophy. The works collected under this name look at how computational devices perceive our world through their sensors and software.