ART & POSTHUMAN BEING: A New World & Its Appearances (2022) (original) (raw)
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Posthumanism and Contemporary Art
[NOTE: This is an essay commissioned and published by the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art for its Spring, 2016 Art Exhibition, and can also be found at their website, here: http://www.mocacleveland.org/sites/default/files/files/lagrandeurpaperfinal.pdf\] The idea of the posthuman--the transformation of humanity by its convergence with emerging technology--is a big new philosophical and scientific concept, and big new philosophical or scientific concepts often cause paradigm shifts in the way we think about our world, about ourselves, and about our relation to the universe. And that, in turn, changes art. Which changes us, because art reflects and anticipates our struggles to absorb and assimilate new ideas and how they relate to us.
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This paper is an investigation into the posthuman influence on postmodern art and the potential for art production in a posthuman context. It emphasises one particular period in art history. The period spanning from the late twentieth century to the early twenty first century is an era bent on the domination of the media and the promiscuity of technologies. It is an era that provokes the onset of posthumanism, where the distinctions that once held humanity in place have become dated; because it is no longer clear who makes and who is made in the relationship between human beings and machines. In this way, it is no longer necessary to write science-fiction since we are currently living it. Our time is a posthuman era where the body has become vestigial and obsolete; expendable under the confines of the global village, which has imploded under the weight of its own progress. Posthuman art comments on this paradigm shift, where man submits to the vestiges of hyperreality and a dependence on the media.
Emerging technology, Art, and the Posthuman
For visual artists, the incipient elements of the posthuman identified in this article signal change in how art is produced and under whose agency, what human art means, and even what being human means—given the blurring of how we define the concept of " human " in a rapidly changing posthuman environment.
The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero's oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction's indeterminacy to Surrealism's fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.
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Leonardo, 2001
If the development of mass media utterly revolutionized the situation of art in the 20th century, current research into the technological reconfiguration and replacement of the human organism promises an even more radical disruption of art's cultural status. As engineers contemplate the creation of artificial life, artistic creation again finds its traditional values and procedures called into question. How will artists respond to the challenges posed by cyborg culture?
Posthuman Being: Inceptive Sentience
Media Models to Foster Collective Human Coherence in the PSYCHecology, 2019
With the enormous chaotic changes taking place today, contemporary artists are showing us a vast and mystifying range of artworks that show glimpses of nascent worlds coming into being and just as quickly disappearing into oblivion. In Part One the author explores a world that seems to be gaining some traction—the world of the posthuman. Contemporary art is showing glimpses of this still-forming world in artworks produced from a collision between, or interpenetration of virtual reality and empirical reality, giving rise to weird, horrific, and sometimes strangely beautiful forms. In Part Two the author seeks to penetrate “behind” this posthuman art to the activity of the artist, in order to find the original “bringing forth” (Heidegger) of posthuman artworks. This move reveals the fundamental place of revelation and prophecy as the origin of any world-forming artwork and thus indicates the essential nature of the posthuman world. Keywords: Art, Artwork, Prophecy, Revelation, Jung, Heidegger, Initiation, World, Alien, Virtual, Empirical.