Thinking Outside the Black Box: The Apparatus between Art and Science (original) (raw)

Looking into the light : reinventing the apparatus in contemporary art

Creative Industries Faculty School of Media Entertainment Creative Arts, 2013

This practice-led research explores the 'apparatus' in relation to its mediation of experience in contemporary art. Drawing on the thought of Vilém Flusser, a model of the apparatus is developed. Technical images such as photography, film and video, are dependent on the apparatus for their production and dissemination, yet the apparatus itself is often hidden or obscured in both the experience of the work and the discourse that surrounds it. I propose that in making or modifying apparatuses that are part of the viewing experience, artists produce specific modes of spectatorship. Using the framework of the apparatus as an interpretive lens, these modes of spectatorship are considered in works by Carsten Höller, Pipilotti Rist and Olafur Eliasson. The research identifies key practice strategies that foreground the apparatus both in the production of work and in its presentation. These strategies are developed and articulated in the context of my own practice and explored through creative works in the exhibition 'Complex Experience.' The research therefore develops critical and generative strategies to explore and interrogate the workings of the 'apparatus-audience complex.' iv

Looking at the Blindspot: Towards a Material Hermeneutics of the Apparatus

2018

This paper approaches the problematics of visibility and invisibility embodied by the apparatus, which is routinely treated as a latent presence, or blind spot, within the images that it produces. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the blind spot in perception offers a means of reconsidering the relationship between apparatus and image. Vilém Flusser's category of 'technical images' will be considered in relation to the material hermeneutics of scientific imaging articulated by Don Ihde. These approaches will be applied to key examples that include contemporary scientific imaging of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the contingent astronomy of August Strindberg's <i>Celestographs </i>(1894). These examples embody particular relations between apparatus and image that shed new light on imaging practices at the intersection of science and art.

An Ecosophy of Artifacts: Explorations of Technical Objects in Artistic Practice (CfP)

2024

A new understanding of the technical object is emerging to perplex and rescramble debates on new materialisms, speculative philosophies, relation realisms, and vitalist ontologies. Working from within an ethics of co-enmeshment, this volume will bring together the question of the technical object and the question of ecosophy to put on display the singular artistry of artifacts. In bringing forth the environmental dimension of the technical object, the essays in this volume will delve into the ontological status of technical objects in artistic practice while taking a closer look at the onto-ethical implications of intra-artifactual interweaving. So far, the conceptual atmospheres surrounding the technosphere, artistic or otherwise, have been shaped in the terms of simian consumerism. Any discussion of the technical object is cast in the vocabulary of an ascribed economic, emotional, or intellectual value. This volume will shift towards an ecosophy of artifacts to explore the intricate mesh of the technical and the artistic beyond modes of valorisation and insignia of co-dependence. The volume encourages submissions that look at technical objects as a wealth of relations fully indifferent to a simian universe and explore vocabularies for the articulation of these relations. Of special interest are the excavations of conceptual regions that preclude epistemological points of entry and call for novel ways of engagement with our practices of perceiving and knowing. The collection will hypothesise that technical objects express these unexplored relations most fully in artistic practice.

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.

When Art, Science and Technology Interact

Research in Arts and Education, 2019

One of the objectives of the paper is to ignite a productive debate on the overlapping tendencies of art and the exact natural sciences, as well as to address the educational dimension of these intersections. The paper presents some results of the research realised within the project titled Useful Symbiosis carried out in 2014, the main outcome of which was the book tilted Useful Symbiosis: Science, Technology, Art & Art Education which was published two years later. In this project, we were interested in the relationship between visual arts and sciences and their technical applications. Apart from introductory and rather theoretical overviews, the paper also lists particular examples of these symbioses in which we demonstrate that science sometimes 'does art' as well as art can 'do science', and sometimes the borders between art and science disappear altogether. The overlapping tendency of science and art is also topical in education. We will also tackle the problem of the isolation of individual educational fields in contemporary education, the relationship between individual subjects, and the process of overcoming the transmissive approach to teaching.

Art and Technology: An Innocent Relation or a Dangerous Affair

The technology has brought into our lives new means of expression, on which artists picked up very quickly and exploited in their work. Latest developments in sensor networks, robotics and visual technologies have stimulated various attempts to fuse the technology with the human body, either as a scientific experiment or as a new means of artistic expression. We perceive this merger of Art with Technology as a necessary and unavoidable result of our contemporary societies, considering at the same time Art as the means of the human expression. In this work we follow the way in which Art integrates with modern technologies, starting from Telepresence and Telematic Art towards the Cyborg Performance and Second Life like experiences. By examining the fusion of Science, Technology, Art and the Human Body we analyse the social effects that might result from such a fusion. We may notice that the growing use of technology in Art advances the communication between people, but at the same time separates audiences from performers. Virtual technologies offer illusionistic worlds and exciting experiences but they often alienate the actor from his stage and the spectator from his spectacle. We ask a question: is the merger of Art and the Technology an innocent relation or a dangerous affair?