The Practices of Art and Science

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.

Critique d'art, 2014

The Space Of Technicity: Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, 2024

Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group of thinkers who courageously traverse disciplinary boundaries. What brings them together is the least stratified ‘component’: a shared problem. It is a widely recognised that a problem gets the solution it merits. However, only a few acknowledge that a problem seldom neatly fits within a single discipline, nor does it conform to the principle of general equivalence. Handling its irreducibility and non-entailment is a skill possessed by very few. Even fewer take the quasi-causal capacity of what we term the ‘space of technicity’ seriously. The space of technicity, the shared problem of this volume, is a consequence of immanence. Each configuration of surfaces comprising the built environment produces an intangible effect, acting as a quasi-cause. It can be referred to as downward causation or the timely rediscovery of (neo)finalism. In this volume it is approached it from the perspective of axiology. The space of technicity allows us to evade techno-determinism without adopting an anything-goes attitude. That which has become manifest could have individuated differently. However, the potential of a body cannot be discerned before intervening in the causal fabric of agential reality to extract the singular points that make certain outcomes more likely than others, surpassing mere probability. When operating within the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where sense becomes intricately dependent on sensibility, and vice versa, the volume’s attitude might be said to approximate the Spinozian third kind of knowledge that intuits design (and its space of technicity) beyond mere imagination or reason. This edited volume was inspired by a virtual round table that exhibited a high degree of resonance among the participants.

In this thesis I will ponder on the claims made by the protagonists of the contemporary philosophy movements Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. They are looking at (technological) objects to understand them better from themselves, without any human intervention. The New Aesthetic can be seen as the visual branch of this philosophy. The works collected under this name look at how computational devices perceive our world through their sensors and software.

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2008

This paper is concerned with the nature of traditions of Arts practice with respect to computational practices and related value systems. At root, it concerns the relationship between the specificities of embodied materiality and aspirations to universality inherent in symbolic abstraction. This tension structures the contemporary academy, where embodied arts practices interface with traditions of logical, numerical and textual abstraction in the humanities and the sciences. The hardware/software binarism itself, and all that it entails, is nothing if not an implementation of the Cartesian dual. Inasmuch as these technologies reify that worldview, these values permeate their very fabric. Social and cultural practices, modes of production and consumption, inasmuch as they are situated and embodied, proclaim validities of specificity, situation and embodiment contrary to this order. Due to the economic and rhetorical force of the computer, the academic and popular discourses related to it, are persuasive. Where computational technologies are engaged by social and cultural practices, there exists an implicit but fundamental theoretical crisis. An artist, engaging such technologies in the realization of a work, invites the very real possibility that the technology, like the Trojan Horse, introduces values inimical to the basic qualities for which the artist strives. The very process of engaging the technology quite possibly undermines the qualities the work strives for. This situation demands the development of a 'critical technical practice' (Agre). This paper seeks to elaborate on this basic thesis. It is written from the perspective, not of the antagonistic luddite, but from that of a dedicated practitioner with twenty five years experience in the design and development of custom electronic and digital artworks. Note and Disclaimer: This paper, inevitably, focuses on issues which arise as a result of the peculiarities of western cultural and technical history, and reflects discourses conducted in the English language. As discussed, some of the forces influencing those historical flows relate to the traditions of western philosophy, itself strongly influenced by Christian doctrine. The question of what form automated computation might have taken if it had arisen in a culture with different religious and philosophical history is a fascinating one. Likewise, the way that such a culture might negotiate the relation between technology and culture might be very different from that which has occurred in the West, and might offer important and useful qualities.

2016

Virtual Worlds, 2000

Electronics is about to change the idea of art and drastically so. We know this is going to happen -we can feel it. Much less clear to most of us are the hows, whens and whys of the change. In this paper, we will attempt to analyze the mechanisms and dynamics of the coming cultural revolution, focusing on the «artistic space» where the revolution is taking place, on the interactions between the artistic act and the space in which the act takes place and on the way in which the act modifies the space and the space the act. We briefly discuss the new category of «electronic artists». We then highlight what we see as the logical process connecting the past, the present and our uncertain future. We examine the relationship between art and previous technologies, pointing to the evolutionary, as well as the revolutionary impact of new means of expression. Against this background we propose a definition for what we call «Alive Art», going on to develop a tentative profile of the performers (the «Alivers»). In the last section, we describe two examples of Alive Artworks, pointing out the central role of what we call the "Alive Art Effect" in which we can perceive relative independence of creation from the artist and thus it may seem that unique creative role of artist is not always immediate and directly induced by his/her activity. We actually, emphasized that artist's activities may result in unpredictable processes more or less free of the artist's will.

…the greatest point of art consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions. By this I mean such a transformation of our diagrams that characters of one diagram may appear in another as things. A familiar example is where in analysis we treat operations as themselves the subject of operations (Peirce CP 5, 162) 1

Arbor Vol. 197 Nom. 800, 2021

The digital relies on computation. Programming uses algorithms. Algorithms are sets of rules that solve problems in a finite number of steps. In this sense, the digital world is governed by quantities, numbers, fixed rules. The degree of freedom seems to be very limited. Artistic agency and creativity, on the other hand, rely on openness, freedom, and qualitative experiences. Such experiences are not only vital to artistic expression but also to everyday life. Technological lifeworlds as they are represented through current technologies (e.g. smart homes or automated driving) and science fiction do not seem to accommodate such open structures. The philosophy of technology is divided: Many hold that to a large extent technology determines human cognition (such as Mark B.N. Hansen, Bernard Stiegler) and thus subordinate human cognition to mechanical organizations. Others take a different approach and reflect on the creative potential of new technologies (e.g. Erin Manning, Jaime del Val).

2016