New Media and Aesthetics (original) (raw)
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Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy which deals with the beauty, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc. and on the other hand technology is a branch of knowledge which deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science and pure science. It is difficult to define the words aesthetic and technology, wherein twenty-first century the post-modernist contemporary era, these two sectors are playing a vital role to change the meaning of their definitions with the new inventions, methods, and necessities. In which the work of art has been influenced by these new inventions of methods and techniques to produce a more complicated visual experience and output. If we try to figure out what would be the future of our cultural industry and how it would behave in this utopian condition? Where art is controlling peoples lifestyle, dreams, emotions, and the overall psychological world. If we focus on the effects of technology, we will be able to identify that in every decade or sooner the technology and the medium of communicating with the spectators are changing. Form the beginning of the 19th century there are museums, theatre halls, then cinema halls, television channels came forward and took their place, and now along with all of these old media platforms, new media platforms also come forward with the interactive communicative
Modernism and Technology Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin Modernism first emerges during the transformations of time and space wrought by the age of steam, and it comes to dominance against the background of the 'second industrial revolution'. This revolution, which was really more of an intensification of earlier processes, was driven by, inter alia, the exploitation of electricity and the internal combustion engine, use of early plastics (celluloid, and later bakelite), the oneiric power of the cinematograph, the sound-reproduction technology of the phonograph, and the communications technologies of the telephone and later the radio. In theoretical terms one could argue that there is no space, no "and" between modernism and these technological shifts: they are bound together in a common culture. But for practical purposes we can describe a set of relations between the two: Modernism incorporates technological change as historical content; it appropriates new representational means for its own artistic practices; and at times it self--consciously draws on the machine world for aesthetic models. The flurry of innovation in mechanical reproduction brought the materiality of older media into sharp focus. 1 For some, of course, the era of mechanical reproduction appeared to undermine lingering conceptions of the artist as Romantic creator, or as bohemian rebel. Further, Modernism enters its mature phase during the industrialized slaughter of the First World War, and it is imbued with an awareness of the lethal potential of modern technology, and of the fragility of the human body. Keeping such factors in mind, in this chapter I will consider, among other things, the new cultural forms that were directly made possible by technology; the way in which human/machine relations are imagined in these years; and the development of "machine" aesthetics.
Aesthetic Mediation and the Politics of Technology
Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory, 2014
There is a rich history in early critical theory of attempting to harness the power of aesthetic imagination for the purposes of political liberation. Both Adorno and Marcuse pursue this project in different ways. But it has not yet been linked concretely enough to the philosophy of technology. In advanced technological societies, technologies often aid in and embody certain political structures of domination. This has led some theorists to equate technology itself with domination, by way of a technical rationality that is supposedly devoid of any moral, political, or aesthetic content. In his recent work in the philosophy and politics of technology, Andrew Feenberg challenges this thesis, pointing out that the reduction of technologies to their function is a theoretical abstraction rather than a historical fact. As such, it can be understood as a technological fetishism (analogous to commodity fetishism) which conceals rather than clarifies the political character of concrete technologies. 1 Once technologies are seen as socially constructed and mediated, the design and social organization of technology becomes a normative issue. That is, one can then ask, as Feenberg does, how technologies ought to be constructed in order to best serve the interests of a democratic society. It is not my intention to challenge this program of democratizing technology. Rather I would like to draw out and examine a particular aspect or "initiative" within it. Technologies, as concrete objects infused with political content, are especially appropriate for bringing aesthetic elements into the everyday lives of their users. In the first place this is merely the discouraging insight that aesthetically pleasing design is an important feature of commodities in consumption-driven societies. But aesthetic aspects of technologies can resist as well as support the status quo, and further, I will argue, aesthetic initiatives are a vital component of resistance to technocratic (i.e. undemocratic) organizations of technology, since the power of these technological regimes is partly symbolic. The phenomenon of customization and personalization of technologies, although already coopted in a variety of ways, is a testament to such resistance. I begin then, by specifying the conventional method of understanding technological domination: the differentiation thesis. I then show how this understanding of technological development fails to grasp the reality of technologies as they are embodied in social contexts. From the concept of an embodied technology, I demonstrate, through an analysis of customization, that aesthetic imagination plays an important role in politicizing technologies, and enrolling these technologies themselves in the project of resisting the general phenomenon of technological domination. This helps to understand what it might mean to translate the insights of early critical theory into a contemporary critical praxis.
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'.
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.
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 ...
Hybridization of Art and Technology
Artistic Narration 2018,, 2018
Technology and art define and continue to reshape the world we live in. Re-imagining what we know as real or as a solid ground, pushes not only our opinions and understandings of nature to the limits, but with new inventions and experiments, both the mind and the body, the language, and the world itself seems to be making room for a different sphere and fresh rules. Thenceforward a subsequent fusion towards substitution of the former with the latter was imminent. In other words, contemporary artistic practices reach the climax-through video and digital art, of critically engaging in their means of expression as much scientific and technological advance as never before, changing the face of art forever and completing the revolution of sociological and political infusion into the field of art. Less orientated towards the past, the present paper aims at reviewing the changing role of technology played in the art of the present with an interest taken in the artist status and the public involvement. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary experimentation central to contemporary art is given attention in order to point out how individual aesthetics have been gradually replacing general aesthetics.
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.
in Carlos Leone (ed.) Rumo ao cibermundo, 2000
Lisbon, Celta 2000, pp. 11-35. [Key concepts advanced in the following text:
Art in America, 2020
Review of "Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (MIT, 2020); and Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (Duke, 2020)