Intermedia Remediated & the Question of Designing Discourse

2011

Whi le the enhancement of participatory technologies over the last decade has converted viewers of information into producers of a digital world, less attention has been given to the role played by narrative in structuring our interactions with the digital. As digital technologies intersect with our movements, decisions and responses with increasing ubiquity, the meanings of these transactions coalesce as eventful and episodic transactions that structure our communicative experience in the form of interactive narratives. Based on previous Australian Research Council funded research undertaken at the iCinema Research Centre at The University of New South Wales, this paper sets out a framework for theorizing the emergence of interactive narratives in our encounters with the digital, particularly in immersive and cinematic art installations.

‘Art Inquiry’. Recherches Sur Les Arts, Vol. XIV (XXIII): Performative Aspects of Art, ed. Grzegorz Sztabiński, Łódź: Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe, p. 199–219, (pp. 21), 2012

Abstract: The starting point of the article is the assumption that the performative turn directs our attention to the expressive dimension of social activity and events which have the character of a process. If we transfer this assumption to the field of ​​visual culture, then the object of our inquiry will no longer be images, but rather their perception by participants of visual events or the processes leading to those events. The performative aspects may be noticed in the definition of the "visual event" formulated by Nicholas Mirzoeff, who suggests the introduction of this term to replace "image." In accordance with this concept, the visual event constitutes the main aspect of the reception - the process of seeing, in which the user or the consumer seeks information, meaning or pleasure in a encounter with visual technology: from an oil paintings to television and the Internet. The main thesis of the article is that the visual event is the product of a network which in turn conditions the actions of users communicating with one another. The performative aspects of Internet-mediated communication are revealed when Internet employ speech acts. Simultaneously with this process of "doing things with words," the interlocutors communicating with one another create a "community" which resembles 'communitas' (the term used by Victor Turner). We can view 'communitas' as a network "community", in which the Internet users interact with one another not only with the help of verbal messages, but also with other forms of internet visual communication (images derived from web-cameras, flash animations and photoblogs). The presented issues find their reflection in the net artwork Listening Post (2003) by Marek Hansen and Ben Rubin, the "visualization" of the Internet-mediated communication of the users employing speech acts in chat rooms. The online verbal communication used in this work takes on the dimensions of a performance, which is the source of its visual aspects, and the speech acts employed by the Internet users function as "citations" within in the "iterability model" in the sense suggested by Jacques Derrida. The net artwork Bodies © INCorporated (1993) by Victoria Vesna is another example of performative aspects of Internet-mediated communication, which is described in the context of Judith Butler's theory of performativity. These examples present the ways of using performative aspects of communication Internet-mediated communication in net art.

Proceedings of the 5th conference on Creativity & cognition - C&C '05, 2005

The workshop will explore in depth the nature of freedom and constraint in the creative process in digital fine art from the perspective of embodied mind. The problem is crucial to our understanding of the creative process in fine art. The aims and objectives of the workshop are to bring into visibility critical insights into the creative process, thereby potentially empowering digital artists.

This paper uses Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation between people and things as a focal point for analysis of the work of contemporary new-media artists Paula Gaetano Adi and Lindsey French, who utilize robotics and interactive technology to explore interspecies communication.

The Encyclopedia of New Media Art: Volume 2: Artists & Practice, 2024

Digital aesthetics is characterized by a diversity of approaches that stem from the constantly evolving nature of new media and aesthetics. What qualifies as digital or its umbrella term, ‘new media technologies’, is continually changing and covers various applications and theories from art, science and industry. Aesthetic discourse is concerned with the experience of the world and its effect on the embodied subject (Karatzogianni and Kuntsman 2012). Anna Munster argues that aesthetics ‘cannot remain undisturbed by the machine’ since its influence manifests and augments itself in our perception and associated responsibilities (2006: 151). I argue that the relations inherent to the processes of new media influence, mediate and sensitize us to digital artworks and their associated aesthetic, perceptions and ethical and political affects (Felski 2020). This will require taking into account the material-discursive dimensions of digital media and how they work in relation to the generative possibilities of the body and its sensations.

A distinction between two kinds of communication: transmission and interaction, based on the concept of shared space (physical or virtual), leads to another distinction: face--to--face communication and mediated one. The latter can assume one of three possible variants: mediated transmission, quasi--direct mediated communication, or indirect mediated communication. The most of types of the interactive art are related to the last of those three models. The context of interaction --the product of the artist, which plays in the same time the role of partner of recipient's interaction -is the only message in the mediated indirect communication. The interaction creates an artwork -- a result of creative behaviour of the recipient. A contact and the interaction have been separated.

This practice-based research sets out to explore new ways of visualizing and conceptualizing the notion of aura in art. It departs from Walter Benjamin’s widely known critique of aura, the thesis of which is that aura as ‘uniqueness’ of an artwork decays with the rise of technological reproducibility. Benjamin affirms with the decay of aura also the loss of the transposition of religious projections of distance onto fascist politics. His thesis had a major influence on contemporary critical theory where aura is still approached with great reservations. These concern a relapse into religious structures, which mirror, so the thesis argues, the fact that aura has been, also in Benjamin’s ambivalent conceptualization, left ‘territorialized’ in a regime of transcendence in art. The main research question has been: What could aura mean for painting in the expanded field, especially in relation to digital imaging? The outcomes of this research are paintings, works on paper (both involving the input of digital sources), digital films and writings. The thesis develops a reading and visual ‘mapping’ of aura in the framework of Gilles Deleuze’s (and Félix Guattari’s) ontology of immanence where difference and its repetition as differentiation replaces the static metaphysics of ‘origin’ or ‘essence’. Splendor Solis, a series of book illuminations from the Northern Renaissance proved to become a major visual source for experimentation. Aura is introduced in this alchemical work as the ‘splendour’ of Becoming, the deframing power of the differential processes that accompany individuation. As a sensation experienced in intuitive art practice, aura affects and is affected by a field of interacting multiplicities and the potentiality of temporal differentiations, which reach beyond any ascertained subjectivity into virtual collective questions and problems. Aura suggests as an ‘echo’ of Becoming an involvement with affects, and the research follows strands between qualitative intense moments that activate a ‘wound’ and extend to what Deleuze calls a ‘wound i that existed before me’, an experience related to the synthesis of future, which confronts an individual with its emerging double. Constructing, or ‘mapping’ aura as visuals on an axis that involves media of ‘uniqueness’ and digital technology gives those outcomes an ontological status of ‘simulacra’ or assemblages, far from the traditional associations aura would evoke. Touching both experience and experiment, so the thesis argues, aura in immanence can provide an access to the virtualities of the ‘new’ in art practice. The research introduces a visual scenario or ‘conceptual persona’ for intuition, which as method of this research folds both practice and writing. Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished play Empedocles at Etna, provides a metaphor or metamorphosis encompassing aura’s and intuition’s involvement with immediacy and duration. The practice documentation of the thesis reflects the strands of the research as plurality of its differentiations, allowing the dynamics of its method in action to reflect the dynamics of aura.

The development of contemporary art has been framed by a transition from the construction of material objects to the exploration of immaterial forms, such as relational aesthetics and digital art. Antonio Negri has argued that this transition has taken place alongside the rise of immaterial labour in post-Fordist societies. Consequently, Negri explains, artists have had to adapt their methods to reflect a world that is shaped and constituted by cognitive, cooperative and electronic networks. However, Franco Berardi has warned that the prevalence of digital communication indicates that the material body will be neglected and erased. Using the work of the digital artist Dries Verhoeven (Wanna Play? – 2014), this paper will illustrate that artists can use immaterial forms to highlight how one’s body can switch between the physical and the digital without risk of erasure. Verhoeven engages with the immaterial artistic practice of digital communication as well as expressing a concern for the loss (and potential renewal) of material experience. These works will be compared to Roy Ascott’s notions of ‘double consciousness’ and ‘interspace’, where the participants of a digital artwork simultaneously exist and negotiate between material and immaterial spaces. It will be argued that Verhoeven’s work points out that our digital communication devices operate as a type of balcony, connecting and transfiguring the borders of material/immaterial, physical/virtual. The architectural figure of the balcony will be shown to be emblematic of the digital age, representing our duality as material bodies and digital beings.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2018