This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Postdigital, in artistic practice, is a term that describes works of art and theory that are more concerned with being human than with being digital, similar to the concept of "undigital" introduced in 1995, [1] where technology and society advances beyond digital limitations to achieve a totally fluid multimediated reality that is free from artefacts of digital computation (quantization noise, pixelation, etc.). [2] The postdigital is concerned with our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms.
According to Giorgio Agamben (2002), the postdigital is a paradigm that (as with post-humanism) does not aim to describe a life after digital, but rather, attempts to describe the present-day opportunity to explore the consequences of the digital and of the computer age. While the computer age has enhanced human capacity with inviting and uncanny prosthetics, the postdigital provides a paradigm with which it is possible to examine and understand this enhancement.
In The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age, Mel Alexenberg defines "postdigital art" as artworks that address the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between high tech and high touch experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory, and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalization, between autoethnography and community narrative, and between web-enabled peer-produced wikiart and artworks created with alternative media through participation, interaction, and collaboration in which the role of the artist is redefined, and between tactile art and NFTs. Mel Alexenberg proposes that a postdigital age is defined in Wired by MIT Media Center director Nicholas Negroponte: "Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only in its absence, not by its presence. Face it - the Digital Revolution is over"
Kim Cascone uses the term in his article The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. [3] He begins the article with a quotation from MIT Media Lab cyberpundit Nicholas Negroponte: "The digital revolution is over." Cascone goes on to describe what he sees as a 'post-digital' line of flight in the music also commonly known as glitch or microsound music, observing that 'with electronic commerce now a natural part of the business fabric of the Western world and Hollywood cranking out digital fluff by the gigabyte, the medium of digital technology holds less fascination for composers in and of itself.' Japanese theorist, Ryota Matsumoto adapts the postdigital discourse of Kim Cascone to their ingenious culture and construes Japanese social structure as the postdigital after the collapse of capitalist accumulation and the subsequent integration of their tradition with the pharmacology of digital age. [4]
In Art after Technology, Maurice Benayoun lists possible tracks for "postdigital" art considering that the digital flooding has altered the entire social, economical, artistic landscape, and the artist posture will move in ways that try to escape the technological realm without being able to completely discard it. From lowtech to biotech and critical fusion - critical intrusion of fiction inside reality – new forms of art emerge from the digital era.
Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist or the spectators to become part of the artwork in some way.
Glitch is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the 1990s which is distinguished by the deliberate use of glitch-based audio media and other sonic artifacts.
Software art is a work of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software art has attained growing attention since the late 1990s. It is closely related to Internet art since it often relies on the Internet, most notably the World Wide Web, for dissemination and critical discussion of the works. Art festivals such as FILE Electronic Language International Festival, Transmediale (Berlin), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz) and readme have devoted considerable attention to the medium and through this have helped to bring software art to a wider audience of theorists and academics.
Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.
Information art, which is also known as informatism or data art, is an art form that is inspired by and principally incorporates data, computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, and related data-driven fields. The information revolution has resulted in over-abundant data that are critical in a wide range of areas, from the Internet to healthcare systems. Related to conceptual art, electronic art and new media art, informatism considers this new technological, economical, and cultural paradigm shift, such that artworks may provide social commentaries, synthesize multiple disciplines, and develop new aesthetics. Realization of information art often take, although not necessarily, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches incorporating visual, audio, data analysis, performance, and others. Furthermore, physical and virtual installations involving informatism often provide human-computer interaction that generate artistic contents based on the processing of large amounts of data.
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a non-profit and tax-exempt organization, was established in 1967 to develop collaborations between artists and engineers. The group operated by facilitating person-to-person contacts between artists and engineers, rather than defining a formal process for cooperation. E.A.T. initiated and carried out projects that expanded the role of the artist in contemporary society and helped explore the separation of the individual from technological change.
Roy Ascott FRSA is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic art and telematic art.
Rebecca Allen is an internationally recognized digital artist inspired by the aesthetics of motion, the study of perception and behavior and the potential of advanced technology. Her artwork, which spans five decades and takes the form of experimental video, large-scale performances, live simulations and virtual and augmented reality art installations, addresses issues of gender, identity and what it means to be human as technology redefines our sense of reality.
Maurice Benayoun is a French new-media artist, curator, and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong.
Virtual art is a term for the virtualization of art, made with the technical media developed at the end of the 1980s. These include human-machine interfaces such as visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and screens, digital painting and sculpture, generators of three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, position sensors, tactile and power feed-back systems, etc. As virtual art covers such a wide array of mediums it is a catch-all term for specific focuses within it. Much contemporary art has become, in Frank Popper's terms, virtualized.
Mel Alexenberg is an American-Israeli artist, art educator, and writer recognized for his pioneering work exploring the intersections of art, science, technology and digital culture. He experimental with digital fine art prints in the 1980s that are in 30 museum collections worldwide, circumglobal cyberangel flights honoring Rembrandt in 1989 and in 2019.
Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic encounters. Telematics was first coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in The Computerization of Society. Roy Ascott sees the telematic art form as the transformation of the viewer into an active participator of creating the artwork which remains in process throughout its duration. Ascott has been at the forefront of the theory and practice of telematic art since 1978 when he went online for the first time, organizing different collaborative online projects.
Communication Aesthetics is a theory devised by Mario Costa and Fred Forest at Mercato San Severino in Italy in 1983. It is a theory of aesthetics calling for artistic practice engaging with and working through the developments, evolutions and paradigms of late twentieth century communications technologies. Observing the emerging supremacy of networks over subjects, it called for an artistic approach that was both adapted to, and invested in this changing techno-social arena.
Dominique Moulon is a historian of art and technology, art critic and curator, specializing in French digital art. He is the author of the books Art contemporain nouveaux médias and Art Beyond Digital.
Maurizio Bolognini is a post-conceptual media artist. His installations are mainly concerned with the aesthetics of machines, and are based on the minimal and abstract activation of technological processes that are beyond the artist's control, at the intersection of generative art, public art and e-democracy.
New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies. It comprises virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, immersive installation and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts such as architecture, painting or sculpture.
Glitch art is an art movement centering around the practice of using digital or analog errors, more so glitches, for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. It has been also regarded as an increasing trend in new media art, with it retroactively being described as developing over the course of the 20th century onward.
Post-conceptual, postconceptual, post-conceptualism or postconceptualism is an art theory that builds upon the legacy of conceptual art in contemporary art, where the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work takes some precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The term first came into art school parlance through the influence of John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. The writer Eldritch Priest, specifically ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square from 1973 as an early example of post-conceptual art. It is now often connected to generative art and digital art production.
Cybernetic art is contemporary art that builds upon the legacy of cybernetics, where feedback involved in the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The relationship between cybernetics and art can be summarised in three ways: cybernetics can be used to study art, to create works of art or may itself be regarded as an art form in its own right.
Ryota Matsumoto is a Japanese artist and media theorist. He was born in Tokyo, Japan. He had been an adjunct professor at the Transart Institute for Creative Research, University of Plymouth from 2016 to 2018 and is a research associate at the New Centre of Research and Practice. He is known as the theorist of the postdigital art movement.