Rationality: Beyond Aesthetics and Communication

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013

This paper presents that politics and the aesthetic meet in creative tensions between art, technology and humanities. The coincidence of politics and the aesthetic comes from the doubleness of technology performed by collaborative action of "We" human-and-technology. The way of technology posing the pairing of politics and the aesthetic in contemporary art opens a new way of understanding of relationships of humans and technology in collaborative action rooted in interdependent perspective.

Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory, 2014

There is a rich history in early critical theory of attempting to harness the power of aesthetic imagination for the purposes of political liberation. Both Adorno and Marcuse pursue this project in different ways. But it has not yet been linked concretely enough to the philosophy of technology. In advanced technological societies, technologies often aid in and embody certain political structures of domination. This has led some theorists to equate technology itself with domination, by way of a technical rationality that is supposedly devoid of any moral, political, or aesthetic content. In his recent work in the philosophy and politics of technology, Andrew Feenberg challenges this thesis, pointing out that the reduction of technologies to their function is a theoretical abstraction rather than a historical fact. As such, it can be understood as a technological fetishism (analogous to commodity fetishism) which conceals rather than clarifies the political character of concrete technologies. 1 Once technologies are seen as socially constructed and mediated, the design and social organization of technology becomes a normative issue. That is, one can then ask, as Feenberg does, how technologies ought to be constructed in order to best serve the interests of a democratic society. It is not my intention to challenge this program of democratizing technology. Rather I would like to draw out and examine a particular aspect or "initiative" within it. Technologies, as concrete objects infused with political content, are especially appropriate for bringing aesthetic elements into the everyday lives of their users. In the first place this is merely the discouraging insight that aesthetically pleasing design is an important feature of commodities in consumption-driven societies. But aesthetic aspects of technologies can resist as well as support the status quo, and further, I will argue, aesthetic initiatives are a vital component of resistance to technocratic (i.e. undemocratic) organizations of technology, since the power of these technological regimes is partly symbolic. The phenomenon of customization and personalization of technologies, although already coopted in a variety of ways, is a testament to such resistance. I begin then, by specifying the conventional method of understanding technological domination: the differentiation thesis. I then show how this understanding of technological development fails to grasp the reality of technologies as they are embodied in social contexts. From the concept of an embodied technology, I demonstrate, through an analysis of customization, that aesthetic imagination plays an important role in politicizing technologies, and enrolling these technologies themselves in the project of resisting the general phenomenon of technological domination. This helps to understand what it might mean to translate the insights of early critical theory into a contemporary critical praxis.

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy which deals with the beauty, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc. and on the other hand technology is a branch of knowledge which deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science and pure science. It is difficult to define the words aesthetic and technology, wherein twenty-first century the post-modernist contemporary era, these two sectors are playing a vital role to change the meaning of their definitions with the new inventions, methods, and necessities. In which the work of art has been influenced by these new inventions of methods and techniques to produce a more complicated visual experience and output. If we try to figure out what would be the future of our cultural industry and how it would behave in this utopian condition? Where art is controlling peoples lifestyle, dreams, emotions, and the overall psychological world. If we focus on the effects of technology, we will be able to identify that in every decade or sooner the technology and the medium of communicating with the spectators are changing. Form the beginning of the 19th century there are museums, theatre halls, then cinema halls, television channels came forward and took their place, and now along with all of these old media platforms, new media platforms also come forward with the interactive communicative

Critique d'art, 2014

Art & Culture Studies, 2021

The problem of interaction between machines and humans has been relevant at all times of human civilization’s development. This subject arose most acutely in the era of scientific and technical progress, giving rise to a wide problem field, many aspects of which still require scientific understanding. In this discussion, the researchers tried to analyze the situation of the widespread implantation of new technologies and machines into the art field. The integration of technology generates the necessity of the author’s interpretations about the relationship between the technological and the humanistic. The authors turned to the problem of identification and draw the boundaries of the human “I” in the era of computerization of many spheres of life, to the topic of technology’s images in cinema (Polish, American, documentary), to the image of industrialization in American art of the first half of the 20th century, to modern installations by A. Reichstein, to the screen media in the sta...

Modernism and Technology Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin Modernism first emerges during the transformations of time and space wrought by the age of steam, and it comes to dominance against the background of the 'second industrial revolution'. This revolution, which was really more of an intensification of earlier processes, was driven by, inter alia, the exploitation of electricity and the internal combustion engine, use of early plastics (celluloid, and later bakelite), the oneiric power of the cinematograph, the sound-reproduction technology of the phonograph, and the communications technologies of the telephone and later the radio. In theoretical terms one could argue that there is no space, no "and" between modernism and these technological shifts: they are bound together in a common culture. But for practical purposes we can describe a set of relations between the two: Modernism incorporates technological change as historical content; it appropriates new representational means for its own artistic practices; and at times it self--consciously draws on the machine world for aesthetic models. The flurry of innovation in mechanical reproduction brought the materiality of older media into sharp focus. 1 For some, of course, the era of mechanical reproduction appeared to undermine lingering conceptions of the artist as Romantic creator, or as bohemian rebel. Further, Modernism enters its mature phase during the industrialized slaughter of the First World War, and it is imbued with an awareness of the lethal potential of modern technology, and of the fragility of the human body. Keeping such factors in mind, in this chapter I will consider, among other things, the new cultural forms that were directly made possible by technology; the way in which human/machine relations are imagined in these years; and the development of "machine" aesthetics.

Synesis, 4, 2013

It goes without saying that the change we experience today, which is fuelled by a series of new technologies, differs from other profound changes that have defined our culture in the past. The current change affects our everyday lives, but the new tools it offers us can be seen as an extension of our senses, of our various modes of communication and, to a certain extent, of our brains (since the question about whether one regards machines as extensions of living organisms or living organisms as complex machines seems to be a topic of exploration as well). Nowadays, the proliferation of the fields of knowledge, the often vague distinction between art, technology and science, and the "immaterial" form of the new tech-nologies compel us to widen the field of our traditional research disciplines, and most crucially the field of ethics. The debate around the morality of technology has given rise to special moral categories -regarding for example the issues of responsibility, safety and risk -which had not been as important in premodern moral philosophy.

In the analysis carried out we have established the fact that today"s society needs are to be characterized by morality, this being the most important value where the individual can decide on his own life. Regardless of whether the techniques and technology have evolved, regardless of whether we are looking at aspects of the individual from the point of view of rights and freedoms, the ethical dimension will be considered the basis on which the facts will be judged. The dynamism and vitality of societal development have shown that human life and dignity are considered virtues, and from this point of view the behavioural attitude of individuals and of the political actors must be consistent with the moral principles upon which any rational action with a rational purpose rests. Thereby, under the rules ethics involve, even areas such as aesthetics -malleable entity across time -become study cases for the humanity"s evolution stages.

The technology has brought into our lives new means of expression, on which artists picked up very quickly and exploited in their work. Latest developments in sensor networks, robotics and visual technologies have stimulated various attempts to fuse the technology with the human body, either as a scientific experiment or as a new means of artistic expression. We perceive this merger of Art with Technology as a necessary and unavoidable result of our contemporary societies, considering at the same time Art as the means of the human expression. In this work we follow the way in which Art integrates with modern technologies, starting from Telepresence and Telematic Art towards the Cyborg Performance and Second Life like experiences. By examining the fusion of Science, Technology, Art and the Human Body we analyse the social effects that might result from such a fusion. We may notice that the growing use of technology in Art advances the communication between people, but at the same time separates audiences from performers. Virtual technologies offer illusionistic worlds and exciting experiences but they often alienate the actor from his stage and the spectator from his spectacle. We ask a question: is the merger of Art and the Technology an innocent relation or a dangerous affair?