Aesthetics of (new) media

The musical universe of the 20th and 21st centuries is a force-field in which styles, instruments, personalities and stories can be found that are ascribable to conceptual frameworks that may differ greatly one from another. Such complexity cannot be traced back to single theories or all-encompassing interpretations, but may be tackled, philosophically, starting from certain characteristics. This book identifies nine such characteristics: namely, Extremes, Noise, Silence, Technology, Audience, Listening, Freedom, Disintegration, and New Media. Each of these permits us to open up unforeseen philosophical-cultural paths and interpret, in its multifarious variety, the developments of contemporary music, profoundly interwoven with the history of thought, culture and society.

Contemporary society is characterized by excess, by the exasperated search for beauty, in both psycho-physical (e.g., from athletics to yoga, from fashion to cosmetics, from cosmetic surgery to genetic  engineering) and material terms (from clothes to accessories, from mobile phones to automobiles). Confronting a reality where appearance, pleasure, and fun have become dominant concerns, the study of aesthetics has to move beyond the “canonical” confines of abstract academic inquiry in order to orient its research sphere in a pragmatic direction. There is an increasingly urgent need to identify new categories and to articulate more appropriate epistemological models.
Addressing these concerns in the present volume, Elisabetta Di Stefano aims to reconfigure aesthetics in transdisciplinary and transartistic (i.e., “hyperaesthetic”) terms. The goal is to understand the complexity of experience by establishing a dialogue with other disciplines (e.g., ecology, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, gastronomy) and also to initiate a richer and more comprehensive analysis of art, whose forms are no longer (or not solely) to be found in the artistic object, but also in the practices of everyday life. This goal explains the decision (which may be restrictive, but it is not arbitrary) to adopt as privileged interpretive frameworks the theories of two philosophers, the American pragmatist Richard Shusterman and the German neophenomenologist Gernot Böhme, because both reevaluate the significance of sensible knowledge through explicit references to Baumgarten. Shusterman aims to rethink in philosophic terms some bodily practices (e.g., cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, athletics, yoga) and to account for the aesthetic value of popular culture. Böhme articulates the new category of “atmosphere” in order to offer interpretive and critical tools with which to intervene consciously in many fields of “aesthetic work:” from design to packaging, from scenography to interior architecture, from fashion to cosmetics, from communications to advertising. Adopting this dual interpretive framework, the author examines various aspects of everyday life (from nature to design, from marketing to politics), in order to reconceptualize them in light of a new pragmatist aesthetics.

La società odierna è caratterizzata dall’eccesso, dall’esasperata ricerca di bellezza sia psico-fisica (dalla ginnastica allo yoga, dalla moda alla cosmetica, dalla chirurgia estetica all’ingegneria genetica) sia materiale (dagli abiti agli accessori, dal telefonino all’automobile). Di fronte a questa realtà in cui l’apparenza, il piacere e il divertimento sono divenuti, in ogni campo, gli obiettivi dominanti l’estetica deve sforzarsi di superare i confini “canonici” di un’astratta speculazione accademica al fine di orientare in senso pragmatico la sfera d’indagine. Diviene, quindi, sempre più urgente individuare nuove categorie e adottare più adeguati modelli epistemologici. Da qui l’ipotesi di riconfigurare l’estetica (“iperestetica”) in senso transdisciplinare e transartistico. Lo scopo è quello comprendere la complessità dell’esperienza attraverso il dialogo con altri saperi (ecologia, biologia, sociologia, psicologia, antropologia, gastronomia), ma anche di avviare un’indagine più ricca ed esaustiva sull’arte, le cui forme non sono più (o non solamente) identificabili con l’oggetto artistico, bensì sono da rintracciare tra le pratiche della vita quotidiana. Con questo obiettivo si giustifica la scelta, forse restrittiva ma non arbitraria, di privilegiare, come chiavi di lettura per questo lavoro, le teorie di due filosofi: il pragmatista americano Richard Shusterman e il neofenomenologo tedesco Gernot Böhme, poiché entrambi rivalutano, attraverso un esplicito richiamo a Baumgarten, il valore della conoscenza sensibile. Shusterman vuole riconsiderare, in chiave filosofica, alcune pratiche corporee (cosmetica, chirurgia estetica, ginnastica, yoga ecc.) e riconoscere il valore estetico della cultura popolare. Böhme, attraverso la nuova categoria di “atmosfera”, vuole offrire strumenti interpretativi e critici con cui operare consapevolmente in molti settori del “lavoro estetico”: dal design al packaging, dalla scenografia all’architettura d’interni, dalla moda alla cosmetica, dalla comunicazione alla pubblicità. Secondo questa duplice chiave interpretativa vari ambiti della vita quotidiana (dalla natura al design, dal marketing alla politica) saranno sondati al fine di riconsiderarli alla luce di una nuova estetica pragmatica."

As medical technology continues to progress, we are able to correct deficiencies in the body through means such as cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs. This has led some scholars to argue that we are creating technologized, cyborg bodies. However, these technologies have also enabled us to correct perceived cultural flaws in the body. This article explores the nature of the body through the lens of posthumanism, examining ways that individuals attempt to reshape their bodies through cosmetic surgery and other forms of body modification. Specifically, this article examines the practice of hymen restoration, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s artistic endeavours in cosmetic surgery and Stelarc’s cybernetic experimentations. These cases yield three potential visions of the body: the body must be restored; bodies must be unified; and the body must evolve. Such visions have consequences; the ways in which the body is rhetorically constructed influence how people choose to alter their own bodies. By considering the body itself as medium and as an interface with other technologies, we can better theorize what it truly means to be human.

What follows here is not a definition of art by decree. Nor is this some kind of art manifesto. We are not saying this is how art should be, or could be, but how it is, if you let go of the prison of aesthetics, and follow an infinitely more interesting conceptual trail. This is about uncovering and identifying an approach to art which avoids the triviality of sensory-based aesthetic theory and moves instead towards exploring the experiential worlds that art presents us with. And this approach is not about diminishing the sensory enjoyment of artworks, but about placing them in a much richer context, where they can work a far greater magic.

Whilst linguistics are still being made use of to promote global harmony and international communication, suffice to say that similar efforts are becoming concentrated further towards use within the media. So to what extent does Tolkien's work, and those which followed, deviate from the earlier constructed languages? How do other artlangs compare to Elvish? And to what extent have artlangs affected people having become commonplace in modern-day media? These are questions which will be addressed in this paper, with the intention of illustrating not only how Tolkien influenced the current artlang era, but the extent of the impact that artlangs had, and continue to effect our current view of linguistics.

Since the 90s decade, when the first online newspaper borned, untill nowadays, the research on designing them have hardly been developed. Most of online newspapers are in an experimental state of the question, in dependence on the traditional ones – lack of an own planned structure and contents – and conditioned by a group of technical limitations. Moreover, we have to add the disadvantages observed in usability and information architecture.

Key words: design, Internet, navigation, usability.

Desde que en la década de los 90 surgieran los primeros medios, hasta nuestros días -2006-; el diseño de estos medios se encuentra todavía en un estado incipiente de la cuestión. La mayoría de las versiones digitales se encuentran en fase experimental, en dependencia de los medios tradicionales - carentes de infraestructura organizativa propia y contenidos- y condicionados por una serie de limitaciones técnicas. Hemos de sumar además las críticas respecto a usabilidad y arquitectura de la información.

Palabras Clave: diseño, Internet, navegación, usabilidad.

This chapter explores the discursive potential of 'seeing like digital devices – the call made by the New Aesthetic – from a media-archaeological perspective and argues that we need to go beyond, below and around the visible for a comprehensive understanding of the media-theoretical implications that come along with this metaphoi.

A Spanish-translated collection of essays on postinternet art, including "Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture," originally from Words Without Pictures (LACMA, Aperture/ Thames & Hudson, 2008); "Postinternet: Art After the Internet," originally from Foam Magazine #29 (Winter 2011/2012);  and "The Rhetoric of Soft Tools," originally from The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, ed. Kathy High, Sherry Hocking, Mona Jimenez (Intellect/ University of Chicago Press, 2013).


All but the interview above, in Spanish:

_Arte Postinternet_, Marisa Olson, Cocom Press (Escuela Superior de Arte de Yucatan: Mexico), 2014

Even though it’s frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as “chewing gum for the mind” really disappeared.

Philosopher Martin Shuster argues that television is the modern art form, full of promise and urgency, and in New Television, he offers a strong philosophical justification for its importance. Through careful analysis of shows including The Wire, Justified, and Weeds, among others; and European and Anglophone philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls; Shuster reveals how various contemporary television series engage deeply with aesthetic and philosophical issues in modernism and modernity. What unifies the aesthetic and philosophical ambitions of new television is a commitment to portraying and exploring the family as the last site of political possibility in a world otherwise bereft of any other sources of traditional authority; consequently, at the heart of new television are profound political stakes.

Society for Novel Studies Conference 2014

Desert of the Real, Oasis of the Virtual: Technostalgic Pastoral in À Rebours and Ready Player One

Dr. Alf Seegert
Department of English, University of Utah
alf.seegert@utah.edu

Paper for Panel 18: FantasyLand, Virtuality, and Speculative Geography

An analysis of the relationship between Pierre Schaeffer and the musical avantgarde of 1953, with particular reference to Pierre Boulez and to Schaeffer’s shift from musique concrète to recherche musicale. The main source is Schaeffer’s “Vers une musique expérimentale” (Revue musicale 236); extensive excerpts are translated here into English. The antagonism between the Paris and Cologne studios is discussed in the light of two different approaches to technology and tradition; for the exponents of elektronische Musik new technology was a means to perfect Western music, while for Schaeffer it was simply a means to make new musical discoveries. [RILM I]

Schaeffer’s research on different sound sources — including electronic devices and concrete sounds — led him to experiment with compositional techniques such as serialism. His role in the development of musique concrète has been misunderstood by those who focus on his sound sources rather than his compositional methods. His later phase can be categorized as experimental, as he used his earlier experiences with sound sources as a stimulus for investigating new compositional procedures and forms. [RILM II]

"The paper draws on the author’s research into podcasting, especially in relation to its uptake by public service radios, which may be constituting a revitalising of the public radio voice. Invoking historian, John Durham Peters discussion of the merits of dissemination and dialogue, and critical theorist Bertolt Brecht’s disappointment with “one way” broadcast radio in the 1930s, the author explores podcasting as a new form of broadcast dissemination which draws on radio’s past dreamings of “eros and democracy” (Peters 1999). The significance of this time-shifted and ever expanding distribution of voice and its acousmatic presence creating a new media 'pod-ecology' is also discussed in the context of amateur and citizen media.

Reference; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, University of Chicago Press, 1999.""

This article addresses social and symbolic differences in contemporary Kinshasa as these are expressed in and mediated via widely watched music television shows such as Bana Léo (‘The Children of Léo[poldville]’) and Sentiment Lipopo (‘The Feeling of Lipopo’), both of which have become extremely popular in Kinshasa (‘Léopoldville’ as the city was called during colonial times, or affectionately ‘Lipopo’) since the early 2000s. Recorded in local nightclubs, these programmes show elderly people performing cha cha cha, merengue, polka piquée, bolero, rumba, and other international dance styles to Congolese rumba music dating from the late colonial and early postcolonial periods. Intimately tied to the emergence of a new category of elderly people in Kinshasa, these shows clarify the boundaries between the ‘urban elderly’ and (a) the younger generations and (b) the ‘elders from the village’. A ‘practical nostalgia’ is performed that aims at restoring value to, and the esteem of, elders in the African city. The Bana Léo genre thus illustrates the ambiguity of the production of difference in the cultural domain. While generational differences may be expressed in the space of this genre, it simultaneously articulates a cultural attempt to overcome that distance and to create conviviality among the generations.

Many sub-Saharan African societies have undergone significant political shifts in the last two decades. Changes in political representation and leadership have induced new forms of political mediation and communication. This article probes into one of the most visible transformations in Kinshasa’s political society: TV news reports about urban misery, often resulting from a malfunctioning state, are produced in which Kinshasa’s inhabitants testify about their difficulties and press fellow citizens as well as local and national leaders to bring about change. Exposing suffering is a strategy to mobilise shame and it thus becomes a political act. Through the discursive and visual aesthetics of the proximity account, citizens and political leaders are inserted into one political community. The main argument is that the proximity account illustrates a new kind of political communication. The article analyses the socio-political contexts in which the proximity report emerged and has become popular. The emergence of this new kind of interaction between political leaders and citizens enabled through the proximity account is traced back to the transformation of the late Zairian ‘state’, vernacular understandings of ‘democracy’, the influence of NGO activities and Pentecostal Christianity.


[Key words: DR Congo, Kinshasa, political society, political communication, journalism, media, news]

copyright Cambridge University Press

This research was ultimately generated by the recognition of disturbances and difficulties pertaining to the curation, exhibition, and preservation of contemporary new media art. To start to formulate a process that is understood and achieved through the adaptation of artists, curators, and Academia, by researching current professionals’ experiences and opinions in each of these roles is the goal of this study. Comparisons between those artists categorized as “fine” or “commercial” show diversions that take this genre of fine art away from the art institution, and solutions on how to bridge the gap between these diversions are theorized. The role of the “medium” is broken down as Virtual Reality (as well as Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality) is touched upon as a crux in the theory of the aura of art and digital reproduction, as well as an outlet for future preservation and exhibition. Three case studies are presented to supplement each section of research including: Christopher Bauder, Vello Virkhaus, and Björk.

Abstract
Has art theory any function and any importance? A function and importance for who? For the practising artist, theorists, writers on art?
Art speak and its place in art theory, art criticism and artists’ statement. - Many tools  to create an intersubjective and universal frame of reference to make sense of any art exist., for example art history, labels such as expressionism, impressionism, modern art, contemporary art, Fine art, Visual Arts, Northern Baroque Art, minimalist, post-minimalist, anti-art, anti-anti-art, New Aesthetics, new media,  slow art movement, etc and ‘art speak” .

Alisa Baremboym's eclectic and hermetic work is receiving a great deal of attention, judging by the number of exhibitions in which her objects have been featured and by the critical literature they have generated. Her sculpture juxtaposes materials and processes, opacity and transparency, lightness and weight, abstraction and figuration, the past and the future, the illusion of perfection versus the reality of its opposite. There are also elements of social engagement and playfulness. Baremboym's work is not easily pinned down, a characteristic that seems particularly pertinent to our current social and cultural condition.

The essay aims to explore the soundness of traditional definitions of Aestethics (as Theory of Beauty, as Theory of Sensibility, as Philosophy of Art) in the Age of New Media. Analyzing some texts written by Walter Benjamin, the essay focuses on some ideas (montage, innervation, aura-choc) that, in different way, we can find in the current Media Studies (McLuhan, De Kerckhove, Ortoleva). Particularly, the concept of the “Innervation” comes to that “Technological body” (subject of various performances) in which technical medium and human body complement each other. Digital devices strengthen the human body’s possibilities communicating and perceiving, therefore, they give a new relevance to Aesthetics as Theory of Sensibility (aisthesis) in the baumgartenian meaning.
ITALIAN: il saggio vuole verificare quale delle tradizionali definizioni di estetica (teoria della bellezza, teoria della sensibilità, filosofia dell’arte) sia ancora valida nell’età dei nuovi media. Attraverso l’analisi di alcuni testi di Walter Benjamin vengono individuati alcuni concetti (“montaggio”, “innervazione”, “aura-choc”) che trovano riscontro nelle teorie dei massmediologi contemporanei (McLuhan, De Kerckhove, Ortoleva). In particolare il concetto di “innervazione” ha trovato esito in quel “corpo tecnologico” (oggetto di varie performance artistiche) in cui medium tecnico e corpo umano si integrano. Il potenziamento comunicativo e percettivo apportato nel corpo umano dai dispositivi digitali conferisce nuova attualità all’estetica, intesa in senso baumgarteniano come teoria della percezione (aisthesis).

La teoria dell’imitazione centrale nella riflessione estetica fin dall’antichità e fulcro del sistema delle Belle Arti elaborato nel Settecento da Charles Batteux sembra entrare in crisi con l’emergere delle nuove tecnologie e in particolare con la realtà virtuale. Il saggio, attraverso l’esame di alcune istallazioni artistiche multimediali e interattive, mette in luce le riconfigurazioni del concetto di imitazione nella contemporaneità in cui l’intero apparato categoriale tradizionale (autore, opera, fruitore) appare completamente trasformato.

The article discusses practices of media art taken within the context of the discourses of trans-mediality and the sublime. Digital technology creates phenomena that provoke new modes of perception and new sensory experiences, including those evoking a sense of something that is beyond representation, a feeling traditionally belonging to the aesthetic framework of the sublime. I focus on the analysis of affective qualities of the experience of transition across media borders and of the potential realm beyond the closed loops of these borders. What kind of meaning does this translation produce on the level of phenomenological and aesthetic inquiry, but also in terms of increasingly complicated cultural relations? Does the technical challenge carry any affective charge? What are the strategies via which new media art enacts the sensorial tensions of transmediality? I address these questions while analyzing practices of media art that represent diverse types of rendering relations: mutually affected recombinations of movement, speech and written text (" BodyText " by Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine); interactive projects, involving smell and gesture by the Russian group " Where the Dogs Run " ; and visual and acoustic interpretations of physical data (" psychogeophysics " projects by Martin Howse and the micro_research group).

In this essay, I will propose that we are witnessing a new type of ‘presentation’ that sits alongside the ‘haptic sight’ and aesthetic simulations, as discussed by Peter Gallison and Lorraine Daston in their book Objectivity1. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, data and computers, we are all becoming more used to computational processes ‘re- presenting’ nature to us and providing algorithmically led ‘trained judgement’ on our behalf. Many of the issues and ideas that previously surrounded ‘mechanical objectivity’ have returned in new ways, not powered by the chemistry of photography but the mathematics of computers. This shift is exhibited most vividly in the disciplines of computer vision and big data visualisations. Artistically this shift has been noticed by the trend known as ‘the New Aesthetic’. This essay hopes to highlight the complications surrounding this new ‘algorithmic objectivity’, as highlighted by the work of several artists practicing within New Aesthetic.

An interview between Marisa Olson and Nick Warner in which Olson calls for a shift from her original definition of Postinternet Art as "Art after the internet" to a consideration of "the symptoms of connectedness." This interview is a precursor to Olson's Fall 2014 Pratt-Upload Keynote Lecture, "Postinternet is Dead. Long Live Postinternet," in which she called for a reification of the term along more historically-aware lines, taking into account feminist precursors to internet art and zooming out to emphasize the postinternet condition itself, over and above postinternet art per se, beginning to outline a working list of Symptoms of Network Culture.

Nell’attuale società dell’immagine multimediale bisogna riconfigurare le tradizionali categorie estetiche dell’arte e dell’artista. Dal mito michelangiolesco dell’artista divino che plasma faticosamente con le mani la materia si è passati a quello dell’artista divo, a cui l’aureola della celebrità è conferita, come alle star, secondo meccanismi economici di pubblicità e di mercato. Oggi si assiste al declino della techne, della perizia manuale, l’artista opera su immagini già esistenti, modificandole e trasformandole anche con strumenti informatici: L’espansione della tecnologia ha trasformato la nostra cultura e le nostre forme di vita. In questo senso l’estetica, come scienza della conoscenza sensibile, secondo la definizione di Alexander G. Baumgarten riacquista una sua attualità, configurandosi come quella disciplina che, tenendo conto dei nuovi media, deve ridisegnare la mappa epistemica del sapere estetologico e recuperare il valore etimologico dell’aisthesis.

One of the basic tenets of humanistic inquiry is that intellectual and artistic production should be aimed at understanding, exploring, and building a society's zeitgeist.  In this view, it is the pro-active making and critique of culture and not a re-active posture which ought to occupy committed people.

In architecture, this issue increasingly dominates contemporary reflections.  What is the architecture of and for the information revolution / age / society ?  Is it possible to honestly maintain a material and traditional understanding of architecture in a world increasingly dominated by disembodied, electronic information ?  Can we approach architecture from an informational paradigm ?

Although architecture possesses an informational nature,  there is a big gap between this fact and seeing architecture as an information construct.  Further still is trying to transform buildings into artifacts fully responsive to (driven by) information flows.  The major problem lies in the stable nature of matter once it has been formed.  The act of building freezes certain kinds of information in time which then preclude the displays of other, new information.  In other words, constructions neither have nor respond to the fluid nature of information.  Or do they?

If one cannot deny the material stability of constructions, one can argue against their representational stability.  After all electronic technologies provide us with artifacts that defy the representational stability of matter.  Television sets and computers are good examples.  The screen makes these artifacts' presence (i.e. their materiality, fixed information) far less important than what they present (i.e. representations, fluid information).  At issue is not what happen behind or around but on their screens.  Quite simply, the function of TVs and computers is not to be pieces of furniture or machinery but windows to the virtual world of information.  The true power of these constructions is not their technological might but their ability to sustain media events.  Considering that it is mediated reality upon which post-industrial life depends, it seems natural that material stability is surrendered to the power of fleeting, foreign representations.

If Modernity used the machine as the metaphor to guide its quest for an architecture of and for the industrial age, can't we use the prime technologies and media of the information revolution as ours?  This paper explores one possible direction: the creation of an architecture of screens.

During their philosophical careers, both Vilém Flusser and Jean Baudrillard have developed a unique and quite singular perspective about the broader impact of technology and media on humans, from an anthropological and sociological point of view. Despite they shared a general framework and a number of hypotheses, there are several differences – namely in regard to code and simulation – which could be interesting underline. The aim of the article is precisely to reassess the intellectual and philosophical relation between these two major figures of contemporary media theory.

The chapter focuses on the issue of transmedial and sensory exchange in the context of digital culture and biometric technology. It analyzes critically the epistemic claims behind the various brain-scanning technologies, focusing on the status of the inner images that underlie cognitive activity. Multimedia performances and artistic experiments designed in collaboration with neuroscientists open up new dimensions in the discussion of translation between different sensory modalities, as well as translation between human perceptive apparatus and computational systems. Engaging the methodologies of contemporary image science and critical neuroscience, the paper shows how artistic scenarios help to both localize and expand our understanding of mental imagery and to offer an alternative to the existing correlations-based approach.

This paper discusses the ways in which affect and the political aesthetics of Anonymous can be linked to possibilities of arousing affect, create unity and mobilise resistance; invite public participation in public affairs. In the culture of Anonymous, political resistance is not considered as limited to rational tactics nor in accordance with the principles of intellectual/cognitive “reason” (alone), but interplayed with “the lulz” – a specific kind of political passion – that works as an affective political force; capable of inspiring an alternative (radical) imaginary. In this context, the “lulz” and the aesthetics of Anonymous are reflected in strategies of engagement deployed to challenge the hegemonic discourses promoted by political economy. Following Mouffe (2013), we argue that there is no political equality (plurality) without conflict and without conflict no constructive political dialogue. In this line of argument, we are also influenced by the Spinozan perspective on affect as ability for action and change.

Keywords: Anonymous, Affect, Aesthetics, Hacktivism, Passion, Lulz, Social Media, Power, Surveillance, Resistance

Ferrada Stoehrel, Rodrigo and Simon Lindgren. 2014. For the Lulz: Anonymous, Aesthetics and Affect. TripleC - Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 12 (1): 238-264.

Why is today's culture so deeply attached to the past and focused on its own remnants, which have suprisingly quickly come to represent its creators' main field of interest? Marzec explores this question by drawing on Jacques Derrida's quasi-concept of 'the spectre' in order to interpret the artistic 'found footage' work of Bill Morrison and other artists fascinated by the unusually creative and productive force of disintegration. This interesting film genre, forever gazing into the abyss of archival resources, not only brings to light the traces of a reality that has long ceased to exist - it also inspires a deep sense of nostalgia in its viewers and points to the faint presence of the past in the present, but above all, it fetishizes remnants.

Dlaczego współczesna kultura jest tak bardzo przywiązana do swojej
przeszłości oraz skoncentrowana na własnych resztkach, które w
zadziwiająco krótkim czasie stały się głównym obszarem zainteresowania
jej twórców? Autor pragnie odnaleźć odpowiedź na to pytanie,
wykorzystując quasi-pojęcie „widma” Jacquesa Derridy do interpretacji
artystycznej twórczości „found footage” – prac Billa Morrisona oraz
innych artystów zafascynowanych niezwykle twórczą i produktywną siłą
rozkładu. Ten ciekawy gatunek filmowy, nieustannie zapatrzony w
przepastne zasoby archiwum, nie tylko wyciąga na światło dzienne ślady
nieistniejącej już dawno rzeczywistości, budzi w swoich widzach
głębokie poczucie nostalgii oraz wskazuje na słabą obecność
przeszłości w teraźniejszości, ale przede wszystkim fetyszyzuje
resztki

Master of Arts—Integrated Studies 656: Datascapes: Information Aesthetics and Network Culture critically examines the intersections of the information arts and information technologies in our rapidly changing times, and explores how cross-pollination between these fields alters not only art and culture but the world we live in. Through exploring the differences among how contextualized information, data, and knowledge are written in and by a diversity of media, this course maps the unique shapes that information assumes in digital culture. It engages new approaches to understanding the transformation that information is enacting on our temporal, spatial, and visual perceptions. The increasing fragmentation of cultural structures and the rise of connectivity as a new paradigm is evident all around us, from the world of medicine to multinational capital to the World Wide Web. The ascendance of the database as a new pre-eminent cultural form begins to blur the boundaries between art and reality, and representation and simulation, and creates new social networks necessary for interactive engagement.

Revisiting the origins of the term "Postinternet," a decade on, I assess its contemporary relevance from a psychological, political, and architectural perspective, in the context of the E-Flux series on Postinternet Cities. While I initially conceived of it as a way to refer to "art after the internet," I've more recently called for a focus on the postinternet condition as reflective of "symptoms of network culture." In this text I identify some of those symptoms, particularly the emotional affects of living our lives primarily online. I also speculate about the physical and residential needs of future lonely internet users.

[*Note: One of the main classes I enjoy teaching on every semester, this seminar constitutes arguably the backbone of my critical and scholarly formation as an art critic and a scholar. While updated virtually every semester, and traversing various yet a peculiar group of thinkers such as Simmel, Uexküll, Heidegger, Karatani, Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, Kittler, and Agamben, this seminar nonetheless remains fixated on the central question: what is it that which makes artworks and our experiences of them possible? What is that which mediates us (as artists, spectators and audiences) and artworks? Or, put differently, what are the conditions of (im)possibilities of these entities and their relationships, which often vanish upon completing their roles? These are the questions that will lead us somewhere, if not everywhere.] "This seminar seeks to think through and reflect on 'media' less as a material or a set of means than as fundamental 'conditions of possibility' of art/aesthetics. Put differently, this class does not try to 'recall' familiar 'pedigrees' and 'idées fixes' the idea of 'media art' is bound to suggest via, say, a conditioned reflex.

If art(ist)s willing to characterize themselves in terms of a 'specific medium' are becoming harder to find, it is strictly due to the situations where the relationship between 'art in general' and 'media' itself has become an object of inquiry. Hence the idea of the 'post-medium.' When the status of media as a medium, i.e., what mediates (aesthetic) entities in the middle (cf. 'in media res'), is displaced/disjointed (again), and extant material coordinates are in ruins, 'media art' must be redefined anew.

With these in mind, this seminar concerns concerted efforts and works to render figural- if not ‘figurative’- something, which is- despite its essential contribution to mediating certain things to function as aesthetic objects- now somehow made virtually invisible. In this sense, we will pay attention to scattered genealogies of divisions or separations dividing 'background and foreground', 'objects and circumstances', 'subjects and environments/Umwelt', and, further, 'the visible and the invisible.'"

Wie digitale Vernetzung unsere Gesellschaft verändert, gehört zu den drängendsten Fragen der Gegenwart. Wie jedoch dieser Prozess die zeitgenössische Literatur prägt, erfährt seit der enthusiastischen Erforschung von Hypertexten um die Jahrtausendwende wenig kulturwissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit. Dabei lohnt es sich, die Beobachtungsperspektive von der Literatur im Netz auf das Netz in der Literatur zu verschieben. Denn informations- und kommunikationstechnologische Netzwerke – und vor allem das Internet – schreiben sich zunehmend in die Romane der Gegenwart ein. Nicht selten avanciert das ›Netz der Netze‹ sogar zum inhaltlichen Kernelement von erzählten Welten und wird dort vielfältig wirksam: von der räumlichen und temporalen Inszenierung des Motivs über das Zusammenspiel von Figurenkonstellationen und Erzähltechnik bis hin zur formalästhetischen und symbolischen Ausgestaltung der Texte. Auf einer breiten theoretischen Basis erkundet die vorliegende Studie literarische Erzähltexte, die den medial bedingten Wandel der Lebenswelt reflektieren, indem sie dessen wohl wichtigstes Movens poetisch durchdringen.

Cinematographic aesthesis. How does digital Cinema transform our Sensitivity?

Abstract
Nowadays, many cinema studies are dedicated to understand digital phenomena. The technological development of software for media production allows us to open the research landscape and to formulate new and renewed questions to understand what is happening. For example, think about how digital applications impact on film creation and in the spectator experience. In several analytic and theoretical approaches we can find some kind of aesthetic intentions that explore both, formal (technical and artistic) and sensitive (perceptual or emotional) implicated issues related to the digital. Let´s focus on this topic highlighting the following question: Who digital cinema transforms our sensibtivity? To approach an answer I propose to talk about transformations in what I call cinematographic aesthesis. Here, the film as an object and the spectator as a subject, both, are deeply involved into the notion of aesthesis: sensitive condition that can be understood in terms of expression throughout film and, fundamentally, as human perception and affection. So, with cinematographic aesthesis I define thereby a mental process, mainly perceptible, implicated in the connection film-spectator; process in which there is a relevant relation between cinematographic aesthetics and sensitive spectator. Based on this, I would like to explain, inspired by cognitive film studies and by the new media context, possible transformations raised by certain qualities and features of the digital. And why this explanation about cinematographic esthesis could be significant? Because with it we can understand, analytically, possible changes arising from the digital cinema that impact in narrative and interaction film experiences.

Keywords: cinematographic esthesis, digital cinema, transformation, sensitivity.

For citation or Bibliographic reference: Gómez Mayorga, Jacqueline. “Cinematographic Aesthesis. How Does Digital Cinema Transform our Sensitivity?”. Bieszczad, Lilianna (ed.).( 2015). Practicing aesthetics . Institute of Philosophy of Jagiellonian University. Poland: Wydawnictwo LIBRON. ISBN 978-83-65148-42-1

For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibility of climate change, especially as it relates to the dark bed of the oceans, is unnerving. The oceans are persistently screened: as the human inability to envision large-scale geo-logical politics is laid bare, we are surrounded by ever more innovative machinic eyes. While singular disasters related to climate change produce news events, the ongoing pollution of the oceans does not qualify for live coverage. Is it not surprising that visual culture - from mainstream disaster movies to activist artworks - has taken it upon itself to fill this vacant space of attention. Taking as my case study sculptural installations by Jason deCaires Tylor, which can be viewed underwater or on a screen, in this paper, I theorise a ‘blue’ type of mediation, arguing that durational decay is a trait of oceanic media in the climate change era. This temporal decomposition links blue media to drowned histories that underwrite the Anthropocene, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and the Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic figures as an unmarked grave site. Referring to the work of Zylinska and Kember as well as Väliaho, I argue that as the ocean is increasingly defined by death, the mediation of life becomes necessary in the absence of a live climate change event. Blue media perform their disappearance, thus recalling other disappearances of life in the waters, while they also participate in the neoliberal imperative to capture the productive capacities of life. In their aesthetic decomposition, where disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and decomposition by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety as to the finitude of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own capture within the neoliberal logic of production.

There exists a routine in most people’s lives wherein they
wake, work, and sleep with few activities in between those
main moments. During this routine, typical behaviors occur
wherein the participants are completely numb to the activities
that they are completing each day, they are so used
to doing them that they no longer are aware of their movements.
Work and everyday life is so typical that people feel
the need to exercise to offset their lack of movement, their
typical actions. Assuming this situation, we seek to explore
how everyday bodily attention and movement can be challenged,
and made aware. If there is a possibility that we can
make people aware of their full body movements, we can
therefore create the tendency for people to become more explorative
in their daily lives. We explore concepts of the
body-mind disconnect, introduce elements of curiosity and
examine unawareness of body.
We developed a process of research wherein we conducted
initial research observations, a series of low, mid and high fi
prototypes, body movement workshops, and cultural probes
to examine how people experience bodily awareness.

Currently, at the edge of the new digital frontier, automation and smart algorithms are gaining immense social attention, enticing, as mechanization and machines in the previous centuries, as much wonder as awe. Countless magazine headlines paint a fully automated future and ask question about the social significance of automation driven by artificial intelligence. The most recent cover of the MIT Technology Review magazine (July/August 2018 issue) reads: ‘AI and robots are wreaking economic havoc. We need more of them’. Automation seems to be creeping into all aspects of our lives (at least in the developed and industrialized parts of the world), remaining especially noticeable in the context of work (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2011) and the utilitarian products and processes of the fourth industrial revolution – such as fully automated Tesla’s factories, Google’s driverless cars or Amazon’s automated order and delivery chains, to start with
a few most recognizable examples. But, automation is not only altering work. It is changing play too (in the broadest sense of the word).