In this anthology, we examine the place and role of aesthetics in light of the current relationship between the arts and new media technologies.
Within the creative, academic, and pedagogical spheres, due to the growing role of technology, there is an urgency in re-assigning aesthetics to issues that vary from cognition and design to globalization and skills. Our attempt is to contextualize these issues and offer an alternative platform to aesthetics—one that would address the changing dynamics of art and aesthetics as interrelated. Aesthetics is increasingly implicated in contemporary and future worlds as informing us about the relation of new technologies to memory, knowledge, and image production. Examples range from computer design to Web sites, cinema, theater, photography, architecture, painting, and information media. We focus on how such issues spell out the ways in which an aesthetic program can transcend the contingencies of contexts without overriding our ability to respond to imminent events. The speed at which our and future generations’ technological tools change makes it urgent to comprehend the consequent modifications of our perspectives, and at the same time, every attempt at comprehension must inevitably be hypothetical and flexible, in such a way that it can detect and include at any moment an unpredictable change in orientation, caused by the ongoing technological revolution.
Moreover, insofar as technological interfaces alone may obliterate moral responsibility by removing our responses from both transmission and communication, it is necessary to detect a possible emergence of a new sense of responsibility—an aesthetic responsibility. How do we re-assign the role of aesthetic education to the future? How do we approach the cultural production of events and objects or images with a growing sense of multiplicity and yet with an equal universalizing-globalizing force?
We have followed the reflective paths of various scholars and artists in this book to find out about these issues and questions. Each has offered both a critique and a proposal to engage with future aesthetics as intertwined both as a future direction and as a source of learning through art and aesthetics. The twelve contributions offered in this book are prefaced by short interviews with the authors, facilitating the reader’s paths into the chapters through a dialogue.
The social-cognitive sphere and the aesthetic sphere overlap but are never entirely in congruence. The conception of such an experiential sphere is anchored in a phenomenological perspective that feeds off Edmund Husserl but remains methodologically open-ended. Each of the contributions in this volume offers a version of such a perspective with the intent of situating the socio-cognitive permutations of our times in reference to aesthetic issues. Insofar as postmodernist attempts—of deconstructing concepts such as the sublime, autonomy and appropriation or of engaging aesthetics within the political—to ground aesthetics within the social sphere have failed to address the responsibility inherent to the aesthetic, we suggest a different outlook. One through which the social sphere itself is undergoing aesthetic changes and a transformation into emergent systems, thus allowing our probing to be relieved of many of the assumptions that were perpetuated by postmodern approaches which critiqued modernity and its constructs from a polarized relation with technologies of new media. The fact that information systems and networks no longer enable us to distinguish reality as a sphere removed and isolated from those systems calls into question the role of aesthetics in shaping our experience and knowledge of the realm of art. And on this ground we base our arguments, revolving around two main topics: the aesthetics of future and the future of aesthetics.
In the first part the inquiry tackles the issue of understanding the future “aesthetically”: given that a radical aesthetics is constituted, as a way to imagine and produce reality, how are we to orientate ourselves in this production, and distinguish and control the value of its manifestations? As it would be too easy and obsolete to claim to supersede the limits of this systemic feedback between the real and its production (we produce on the basis of what we have produced), we direct our attention to the fact that systems are often finite and mutually inconsistent. Hence, we must turn to the possibility of instability as affordable and plausible, explicated in terms of convergence of multiple open-ended systems; and since we can no longer base aesthetics on the fixity of visual cultural approaches that rely on their opposition to the past, we must turn to the possibility of instability explicated in terms of integration of multiple non-linear systems.
In the first part of the book we encounter the topics of the virtual body, robotics, Twitter, neuro-aesthetics and web art in ways that posit a relation to aesthetics from a future rather than past traditions in culture and art. In particular, Roberto Diodato argues in his chapter that in a virtual environment perception immediately fades into reflection, as an image is neither external nor inside consciousness, thus indicating the emergence of a new cognitive condition.
The idea of “robots that have art” is for Domenico Parisi not a mere speculation but rather an inevitable consequence of our probing of the meaning of a time when human behavior can no longer be dissociated from computational systems and robotical machines. For Parisi, a theory of behavior as expressed by a robot cannot be described in words or mathematical symbols but rather exclusively through the rules used to construct the robot. In his words, “If the robot behaves like a human being, the theory incorporated in the robot is a good account of human behavior.”
Peter Lunenfeld examines the notion of unimodernism as connected to a Unicode in which modernism and the networked cultures come together, and shape up a new balance between the banal and the sublime, a balance collectively construed by “users, artists and audiences, readers and writers, downloaders and uploaders.”
Alessandro Lanni’s reflections on Twitter bring to the fore Kant’s critical constructs as pivotal to our evaluation of how we construe a decentered aesthetics in relation to Twitter, and the role of the “filter” might very well become a seemingly mechanical and not cognitive critique of reason with long reaching effects on subjects and cultural production. In reversal, Lanni shows how a ‘cooperative’ subjectivity may be introduced and enhanced by a “transcendental” virtual space.
Rob Spruijt probes neuro-aesthestics and finds hope in future art precisely since aesthetic qualities tend to be located in the very relation between the material work and the response of the mind, or its emotional and motivational processes, in such a way that the work of art becomes an occasion for self-revelation. For Spruijt the phenomenological fulcrum of artworks is to be found in the fact that “aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to embodied cognition” and “is emotional-motivational.”
Miltos Manetas’ contribution, which represents a sort of exemplary way of conceiving the new aesthetic challenges due to technological opportunities, relates to his work as an artist who willed to give up the categories of art production in favor of an open-ended network that he announces through his encounter with “mneem.” Manetas explains that the term is produced by a mix of Mneme (“memory” in Greek) and meme, a term coined by Richard Dawkins, to mean a unit of cultural information easily transmitted and continuously re-interpreted. A mneem is a new cognitive subject which, appropriating the human cognition, guides its choices and decisions, and catches it in the technological “Web.”
In the second part we focus on the ways in which art produces and transforms reality; specifically, how traditional practices of art, high and low, performative and cinematic, institutionalized and urban, are reciprocating with emergent technologies especially in terms of re-inventing the image of art and its reach outside its traditional perimeters. By entailing new aesthetic possibilities that emerge out of its rapport with new media technologies, art is no longer simply the passive subject of scrutiny and analysis of aesthetics. In other words, art’s ability to reconfigure its relation to the very topos of aesthetics has been transformed by its new alliance with new digital and media means. Thus, future art seems to lose its traditional aesthetic autonomy only to find itself mobilizing a radicalized aesthetics, which no longer deals with an outside reality. There seems to be no traces left of an ontological substratum ratifying the productions themselves. The arts analyzed in these essays appear to have a common feature: They claim to construe sense in the only possible way in which the new technologies allow—a sense that, through the different techniques, legitimizes itself. This may very well be the Janus face of future aesthetics, being equally amnesic and mnemonic, easily forgotten and thrown into oblivion and recycled, sampled, and revisited. Whether we call these radicalizing techniques transcoding, or automatic cognition, or the filmic reliving of ruins, or the interacting with the artwork through locomotion perception, or urban identification through the networks, or an aesthetic use of the results of the experimental cognitive sciences, we are confronted with a new way to cope with the world in which art is no longer its symptomatic expression or manifestation but rather its instigator.
Erith Jaffe-Berg looks into the enactment of kinesthetics in contemporary theater performance as both reflecting and extending our sense of digital presentification. Jaffe-Berg observes the more and more frequent use of simultaneous time frames, allowed by different lighting or spatial location on stage, which emphasizes the exploration into a nonlinear fashion of narrative. On the part of both the authors and the audience, there will be more liberty to choose from which stage location to derive meaning, and how meaning changes even its own definition, being multiple and independent from a singular narrative. Both of these consequences conform to a less hegemonic way of conveying a story, which also accords with a more multicultural ethos in general.
Brunella Antomarini extends the reading into the creative matrix of art and suggests a holistic view of art in relation to the figure of the artist, which tends to become a “constructor,” that is, actually only an aspect or part of the real agent of art, which is the complex machinic apparatus. Every singular human constructor is a kind of tool serving the purpose of editing and animating “the real agent of construction, a kind of super-organism, made of natural and technical elements.” Seen from such a vantage point then we may look at future art as the emergence of auto-poietic “artifacts,” or “humans” as apparent automata, which won’t need to affirm any particular aesthetic perspective, nor rely on the traditional culture/nature opposition.
Adam Berg looks at “transcoding” as the emergence of a new “universal algorithm” (following Stephen Wolfram) and shows how it affects the photographic image in particular and art in general. Key epistemological notions such as correspondence, evidence and representation are subverted into non-hierarchical nexi of transcoded images. And as Berg observes, “in more than one respect, contemporary technological extensions/mediations are presenting us with ‘evidence’ that poses less the question of its corresponding objects but instead its correspondence in perception.”
Alain J. J. Cohen’s essay is to draw our attention to the aesthetics of ruins in relation to aggression and destruction in art, and specifically in cinema, that goes beyond the allegorical significance of those experiences and rather posits the phenomenon of cultural and historical revisitation as a kind of present/future lived-memory theater. The prevalence of ruins becomes conduits or unifying platforms that weave historical facts and narrative fragments into an ongoing cinematic unfolding, in which the new technologies of film restoration allow us to enjoy the past as a presence.
Teresa Iaria’s argument against art’s systematization is ironically denouncing not just of art’s reduction to a single stabilized system, but also of the endless manipulation and inclusion of multiple systems of art for its own unfolding. Gazing beyond the scope of the present anxiety regarding interdisciplinarity in art, Iaria suggests that the role of the artist is no longer to amend fragments or to connect objects and images of experience, but rather to identify their respective systemic or disciplinary signs, drawing our attention to such multiplicity.
Ysamur M. Flores-Peña explores urban aesthetics and its relation to education through the unpacking of the decaying history of a place, an urban community, retrievable in what he calls Locus Serenus. In the age of social networks it is Locus Serenus that re-encompasses both actual and virtual cultural signs and memories and identities. As Flores-Peña observes, “many urban gangs repurpose the history by creating a meta-history within the confines of an apparent historical desert.” It is time more than space then that provides, through the social networks, an urban identity, its meaning, its historicity, the force to resist metropolitan fragmentation and dispersion.
It is within the framework of aesthetics and its future concomitants that we have imagined a discussion on the arts within the technological horizon as equally prevailing on a global scale and yet also marked by the specificity of places. And as such, the international sites for the writers, within the realm of their practices and analyses, reflect on specific community and regional concerns, but the echoing issues reflect the fact that, while regionally specific, these concerns are not closed off to one and other. It is our hope that this book will broaden not only the critical discourse but also the dialogue between the arts and its imaginary interactions and projections on future aesthetics and its role in shaping the future.
Brunella Antomarini and Adam Berg
Los Angeles and Rome, January 2013