Contemporary art: 1989 to the present

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.

As far back as the introduction of the Greek myths – and specifically that of Echo and Narcissus (where Echo is Sound and Narcissus is image) appreciation of the nature of art has been derived from archaic and classical values that promote the idea of interpretation as a meaningful metric of the value of an idea or an object. In his ‘Poetics’, Aristotle posited that diegesis (Echo) is the reporting or narration of events, contrasted with mimesis (Narcissus) which is the imitative representation of them: the distinction is often cast as that between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. Together with discrimination and comprehension, both of these functions are part of the mechanism of interpretation. When Gutenburg created the printing press which enabled the beginnings of the mass production of text, the concept of reading and interpreting gained even greater historical purchase due to the encoding of meaning in actual objects: books. ‘Interpretation’ was given even greater power within the rise of modernism with the intervention of the Frankfurt School, which fore-grounded the idea of the ‘interpretation’ of art as meaningful and significant. Walter Benjamin reframed and reinterpreted the medieval belief of the power of the relic of the Saint in his famous question: Can the aura of the original be found within its replica? This question is even more pertinent now when art is created within the digital realm and must be reframed once again: Can the aura of the original exist at all, given there is no difference between the original and its copies? By examining new ideas of ‘entrainment’, where immersivity, resonance, synchronicity and direct response become the factors that reveal the potency of art, In this paper I re-examine how art or media events can function without dependence on the idea of interpretation.

Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on the Modern Development of Humanities and Social Science, 2013

This essay proposes "We" human-and-technology as the new human identity performed by the collaborative action of human and technology. Its aim is to open a new way for intersections of art, technology and humanities, through the political and aesthetic intimacy of human and technology in the collaborative action based interdependent perspective. The concept of "We" human-and-technology emphasizes the process of when the collaborative action of human and technology is performed. It focuses on two ideas: Enframing and the fetish. The former presents that the instrumental perspective uses the binary frame of "Us" versus "Them" as an instrument for ideology subordinating both humans and technology into the instrument. The latter demonstrates that the instrumental understanding of technology governs our senses through the fetish as blinded practices and beliefs distorting relations between human and technology.

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.

Lumina Journal, 2017

Where is art in the digital era? This essay identifies the digital as an abstract, formal system. Since art has always relied on formal, abstract systems to carry and deliver itself, what are the implications for art in the digital era? Is the digital a site for art, or is it the other way around? Can there be digital art? Identifying limit and boundary problems as the crucial existential problems for the digital, the essay shows that art has always concerned itself with such problems. This prompts the question as to whether it is possible that human existence and art become the same thing in the digital. Because the digital is currently primarily manipulated in the service of globalist economics, this is clearly not (yet) the case, so what does this mean for art? The essay then briefly examines the self-declared movements of dada, post-digital and post-internet art, concluding that these movements are not capable of questioning the digital as digital, before going on to examine some artists whose practice may be providing guiding lights toward a genuinely digital art.

AESTHETICS AND THE MEDIA
 Changes in artistic practices and aesthetic experience in the digital world

The paper examines the attributes of content as these appear in the visual narratives of digital works made by contemporary artists who negotiate their practice using two types of media; digital video and photography. In the narrative that a digital work creates, we observe an ever-changing combination of relationships between the person-who-tells-a-narrative and the medium-that-presents-this-narrative. Such a relationships are responsible for shaping a new aesthetic experience: The content artists elaborate, provides us with an intrinsic aesthetic value that emerges through unfathomable itineraries that draw a territory which resembles a labyrinthine, a seemingly uncertain plan of reasoning and practice. I will discuss the parameters responsible for creating that dimension where digital video and photography through the shooting, manipulation and presentation of a narrative content become the means of those particular elements that are forming their aesthetic aspect. As the relationships that are forming the digital content are so rich in praesentia, they soon introduce an organization in absentia of these relationships, therefor, a specific knowledge is used, developed in the field of post-modernism, e.g., post-structuralism, reflexivity, relevant and relational aesthetics, in order to elucidate concepts forming the content. The text begins with the fact that the whole effort of interpreting a digital work of art is a matter of understanding the artistic thought behind it which, is limited to unfolding itself in every present, where as we observe a series of temporal-events, the doubt threatens to create at any time multiple introductions, versions and deviations towards the concepts they convey.

Art in The Age of Ubiquitous Media, 2022

The Special double number of VCS-Visual Cultural Studies Journal attempt to investigate situation of art and technology today in an age in which media are ubiquitous. Many international scholars will anlaysis these topics from artificial intelligence to NFT, from sound art to virtual reality, from browser art to blockchain. The number is opened by a Sean Cubitt essay, Art in the age of Apathy.

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