Notes on art and technology for the current millennium

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.

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?

in "Mimesis Journal", 2014

The purpose of the paper is to identify some converging lines that appear increasingly strong in the relationship between digital media and contemporary art. A convergence that was widely anticipated (in the Twentieth Century avant-garde movement in general, and especially in its conceptual trends). The paper will give a quick overview of how digital media are offering a new conceptual and operational scenario, reconfiguring on the one hand the expectations of individuals and institutions about digital tools, and on the other offering the artists new opportunities to elaborate their expressiveness and experimental creativity.

2015

As stated Oliver Grau, «Media art is the art form that uses the technologies that fundamentally change our societies». In the Italian publishing system this book represent the first attempt that try to systematize the phenomenon of Media Art. The book is separated in three parts: Theories, Histories, Perspectives. The last part is dedicated to the exhibition "From Body to Mind. New Generations of Italian Media Artists" hosted in the Roma Media Art Festival which this book is strictly tied.

ISEA2025, 2025

This paper argues for the conceptualisation of art as a technology, exploring its implications through the lens of complexity. It challenges the traditional partitioning of art and technology, proposing that art is a codifying system that dislocates objects and materials from their original functions and meanings, and encodes them with new affective potential. In other words, it is a kind of technology that programs our capacity to attribute affective potential to objects. The analysis suggests that rethinking art as a form of technology has the potential to expand the creative possibilities for artists working with emerging technologies and offers a pathway to reconsidering our relationship with our technologies. Analysis of the author's own artworks form part of the argument. The conclusion invites artists who work with emerging technologies to explore an ethical mode of crafting that foregrounds interdependence and complexity.

IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies

From Emojis to Manga, from western adverts to "foreign" brand consciousness, visual products are continuing their near instantaneous circulation around the globe. Especially their apparent "naturalness" and freedom from translation is appealing. But here also lies the problem: many of the consumers of these images are oblivious to the fact that these materials have been constructed by social actors with specific backgrounds and specific agendas in mind; thus, especially their "foreign" receptions create challenges, including ethical ones. In order to properly study these fairly new phenomena, a different kind of terminology is needed, not one that relies on older media concepts, but one that does them justice in terms of their contextual and technological complexity, multivalence and mobility. I will propose the term "VisionBytes" for these phenomena. These denote complex visual arrays, oftentimes of foreign cultural origin and consisting of still or moving images. They circulate within a system of non-photography as sketched by François Laruelle (2013) and are akin to the "objects" described in Quentin Meillassoux' Beyond Finitude (2010). Invariably, they touch on issues of belonging, identity, exclusion, globalisation, human and AI rights, all points featuring strongly in this text. Already today, these images have begun participating in the preparations for the gaze of the (technological) Other, of a possible singularity which for the first time will allow humans to review themselves and thus be seen by non-human intelligent others, a trajectory already taking its course. As so often, art is at the forefront of these mediated upheavals. In the final part of the article, I will examine a number of recent art pieces/installations from a 2016 Art Fair in Shanghai, from the 2017 Dokumenta 14 in Kassel, and from an ongoing internet project. These select pieces all point to an ever more life-permeating media future where wanting to merely live with media will never do.

The proliferation of digital technologies in nearly every aspect of life has been accompanied with narratives of change – both dystopian and utopian – from its early days. And if art is in any way to relate to our lived experience, then it comes at no surprise that artists started to investigate the digital – as a tool and medium, but also as a testing ground for new models of thinking about art in relation to society. As Walter Benjamin infamously demonstrated in his analysis of art in times of technical reproducibility, technological advancements not only affect the way art is produced, but also the politics of its distribution and consumption. If the reproducibility of a photograph has caused the loss of the aura of the unique original – what effects do the ephemerality and malleability of the digital artwork have on previous formulas of producing, viewing and thinking art? Is digital art in its fleeting, participatory nature capable of challenging the the status of the artwork as a commodity, as envisioned by the politically motivated computer art of the 80s and 90s? Or are we today merely dealing with a digitalised version of an established system of contemporary art under the rule of neo-liberal capital?

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.

This paper is a chapter from the larger thesis 'Anthropononcentric Art'. It explores how technology has had a fundamental effect on the history and sociology of art, taking the term technology as it is used in common parlance in contemporary society denoting a monumental wave of both objects and concepts, manifested and futuristic - and how this wave has been a huge force in how art has developed, impacting even on the notion of what art is. Not only via the intellectual and creative friction it created within science and art, which could be said to be the two major cultural discourses, but also via that fact that it’s presence exacerbated the infighting in the artworld itself between modernist and postmodernist discourse.

Megarave - Metarave, 2014

Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of artists with a focus on desktop-based practices decided, where possible, to leave the technologies at home when they were invited to exhibitions. Software was converted into prints, videos, installations; performative media hacks were documented and presented in set-ups inspired by the ways in which conceptual and performance art manifest themselves in physical space; and the early adopters of the “post-internet” label, whose practice mainly consisted in appropriating and reframing internet content and playing with the defaults of desktop-based tools, naturally looked at video, print and installation as media to operate in physical space. This text has been commissioned for and first published in Megarave - Metarave, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthaus Langenthal / WallRiss Friburg 2014, pp. 37 - 46. Re-published in Domenico Quaranta, AFK, Link Editions, Brescia 2016, pp. 8 - 22