Digital Dynamics: Art's New Environments

Digita Dynamics: Art's New Representations, 2021

There is no doubt that contemporary art has and is changing in relation to the digital sphere, and that the technological development of recent decades has greatly influenced art’s production, distribution, interfaces and forms. Curator and scholar Tanya Ravn Ag has focused her research on the study of the ways in which the meanings, places and roles of art change with contemporary technological culture. In 2019 she published 'Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art' based on artist interviews and perspectives from curators and theorists. She has continued this work since the book's publication, creating a series of four conversations with artists, scholars and curators grouped around specific themes focused on art's new virtual and augmented environments, art's new ways of making with digital materiality, art's new representations, and art's new natures when acting in a world undergoing lockdown and social distancing. The below interview, titled Art’s New Representations, is the third of these conversations and is a reflection on the concept of representation and the ways in which this idea continues to evolve in relation to new digital technologies. The conversation includes perspectives from Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir, Saemundur Thor Helgason, Bernhard Garnicnig and Jonatan Habib Engqvist. The text is initiated and introduced by Tanya Ravn Ag and edited by Vanina Saracino.

ISEA proceedings 2020. Why Sentience? , 2020

This paper explores the concept of fields of experience as a way to engage with the conditions of emergence of what we might call sentience. As a process of fielding, sensation and processes of sense-making are of an emergent and entangled quality in the overall ecology of experience. We specifically wish to emphasize the dynamics of the closely interrelated conditions for sensing and sense-making – what we conceptualize as ‘shifting immedations’ - and its affective politics. Rather than transgression, ‘shifting’ foregrounds the sometimes almost imperceptible reorientations of fields of experience that are lived immediately as tendencies and vectors for change (feeling the non-sensuous). In particular, we wish to zoom in on specific practices and technologies that might modulate and reorient such experiential fields. We do so by analyzing two cases that emphasize the emergent relations between digital and interactive technologies and their fielding potential; BERMUDA is an interactive installation that attempts to relay affective intensity into tendencies for collective action, whereas the interventions of etcetera emphasize time-sensitive modulations of experience. Exploring these cases, we ask how experiential fields and shifting immediations might allow us to think and act towards new forms of engaging in a politics of sentience beyond the human subject.

Digital Dynamics: Art's New Making, 2021

Digital technology and culture continue to radically change the conditions for art’s production, distribution, interfaces, and forms. With a point of departure in the book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) that examines how digital technology and culture influence contemporary art, this conversation addresses the topic of ‘art’s new making’ by asking: What drives creative artistic pursuits today? How can we understand art’s ecologies when involved in making the ‘new’? What might the pursuit of art’s ‘new’ making promise, demonstrate, and feed forward? Participants of this conversation include (in order of response) Laura Beloff, Elizabeth Jochum, Saara Ekström, Morten Søndergaard and Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen. It is initiated and introduced by Tanya Ravn Ag and edited by Vanina Saracino.

Customized Reality-- the Lure and Enchantment of Digital Art, 2018

When entering modern society, we transform traditional social life with technical methods, disenchanting those illusion generated from mythology and religion since the pre-historic period. German sociologist and philosopher, Max Weber described the unrationalized mentality, which tends to consider those mysterious phenomena as part of life, as “the world remains a great enchanted garden.” Facing the sense of disenchantment within modernity, artists also follow the contemporary current and make use of digital technology to interpret those unseen illusions, dream, and fantasy through the process of data visualization. However, in the spectacle era when visuality takes full control, artists sophisticatedly manage the interactivity of digital media and the aim to create virtual space with imagery, grafting virtual limbs to the viewers’ bodies. In this sense, artists take visuality as the extension of human’s mind, perception, and body, and further enable the viewers to gain real perception. Baudrillard declared that our time has achieved the state of “hyperreal,” and the artistic practice of new media is exactly the way to reveal the reality and exceed the reality; it further simulates a kind of spatial reality with a new reality. This exhibition takes a peek at the disenchanting ritual during the process of artistic creation of new media, leading viewers to step into the time and space simulated by artists to experience the new perception after their mind being extended. The aim of the exhibition is to tell apart virtual and real senses and to question the so-called “reality” within this context. New media artists try to achieve the state of disenchantment; yet, as enchanting the society, they twist the way we comprehend the world with a new reality.

Hava Aldouby (ed.), Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of Presence, Agency, and Empathy in Early 21st Century Media Arts, 2020

Leuven University Press, 2020

Google Preview: https://books.google.co.il/books?id=nVfTDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI&hl=iw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false Early 21st century media arts are addressing the anxieties of an age shadowed by ubiquitous surveillance, big data profiling, and globalised translocations of people. Altogether, they tap the overwhelming changes in our lived experience of self, body, and intersubjective relations. Shifting Interfaces addresses current exciting exchanges between art, science, and emerging technologies, highlighting a range of concerns that currently prevail in the field of media arts. This book provides an up-to-date perspective on the field, with a considerable representation of art-based research gaining salience in media art studies. The collection attends to art projects interrogating the destabilisation of identity and the breaching of individual privacy, the rekindled interest in phenomenology and in the neurocognitive workings of empathy, and the routes of interconnectivity beyond the human in the age of the Internet of Things. Offering a diversity of perspectives, ranging from purely theoretical to art-based research, and from aesthetics to social and cultural critique, this volume will be of great value for readers interested in contemporary art, art-science-technology interfaces, visual culture, and cultural studies.

Performance Research, 2006

In this paper, I offer a description of various performance and art practices which involve interaction with "new technologies"-such as, motion tracking, artificial intelligence, 3D modeling and animation, robotics, digital paint, interactive sound technology, and biotechnology. My theoretical approach consists of both an aesthetic perspective, a development from my previous liminal theorisation, and a neuroesthetic approach, which relates to the biological processes that inform how we perceive. According to Heidegger: Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.

The article investigates how the use of extended reality technologies and interactive digital interfaces have affected the design of exhibition spaces. Its main objective is to shed light on how these technologies have influenced the ways in which immersive art installations are conceived and experienced. Particular emphasis is placed on the impact of interactive technologies on how visitors experience exhibition spaces. The article examines an ensemble of immersive art cases, paying special attention to the distinction between immersion and interactivity. Two concepts that are pivotal for understanding the transformations concerning the subjectivity of the exhibition visitor those of the “imagineer” and the “ultra-technologist”, which are analysed in the article. The intention is to render explicit how extended reality technologies have contributed to the design of immersive experiences, significantly influencing the interrelations between the technical, aesthetic and institutional aspects concerning exhibition design and the methods of dissemination of art.

2022

From summer 2021 to spring 2022 the NXT Museum in Amsterdam has run the exhibition Shifting Proximities, meant to investigate the ways in which global events and developments, mediated by technologies “are continually shifting the proximities between us, both literally and metaphorically”. This study wants to offer an account which, starting from this exhibition experience, addresses the temporal variations of the relationship between museums, visitors and their bodies, trying to investigate the extent to which technological developments, associated and guided by changing epistemic paradigms, have contributed to influence display and curatorial choices and their relationship to the visitor’s body. In this interplay artistic intuition – intertwined with technical and creative innovations – will prove essential to trigger institutional changes, together with philosophical undertakings of the political ideologies that inform power dynamics in the museum system. The visitor’s body, in its materiality and motion habits, will be seen as engaging in continuously changing ways with the museum space, mirroring the evolving epistemological paradigms of its times. Through an historical account of bodily practices and customs across museum spaces, this study aims to discuss the ways in which citizens’ dives through museum halls have been and are used to establish socially shared ideas of art and knowledge.

Philosophy of Photography, 2014

Rapidly changing intersectional processes of globalization, media and technology generate an urgent need for the reconsideration of experiential conditions involving time, space, place and the body. In Senses of Embodiment, editors Mika Elo and Miika Luoto have assembled nine essays from a diverse group of authors and artists in order to explore questions concerning the relationship between diverse and evolving media forms and the embodiment of 'sense'. Of course, sense, in the context of contemporary art practice and media studies, is a multifarious concept that refers to questions of ontology, affect and bodily perception. Elo and Luoto define the collection's approach through what they call 'mediality of sense', a phrase that denotes intersections between artistic presentation through new technologies, bodily capacity and aesthetic experience, and the reflexive interaction that may occur between the individual subject and technology.