Postdigital
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Postdigital, in artistic practice, is an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital. Postdigital is concerned with our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms. If one examines the textual paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either the "postdigital" society has intrinsic meaning, or it is contextualised into a paradigm of consensus that includes art as a totality.
Theory
Giorgio Agamben (2002) describes paradigms as things what we think with, rather than things we think about. Like the computer age, the postdigital is also a paradigm, but as with post-humanism for example, an understanding of postdigital 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 may provide 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.
In addition to the wide scope of artistic discourse, the notion of postdigital is emerging as a term that describes the exploration of our relationship to the computer age as a dominant paradigm in a time of global mixing, intertwined economies, population certainty and planetary limits, for example in the work of Berry (2014).
Roy Ascott has demonstrated that the distinction between the digital and the "postdigital" is part of the economy of reality.
Music
Kim Cascone uses the term in his article The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.[1] 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.'
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.
Further reading
- Alexenberg, Mel, (2011), The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press; ISBN 978-1-84150-377-6.
- Alexenberg, Mel, ed. (2008), Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 344 pp. ISBN 978-1-84150-191-8. (postdigital chapters by Roy Ascott, Stephen Wilson, Eduardo Kac, and others)
- Ascott, R. (2003), Telematic Embrace. (E.Shaken, ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21803-5
- Berry, D. M. (2014) Critical Theory and the Digital, New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1441166395
- Berry, D. M. and Dieter (2015) Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, London: Palgrave. ISBN 978-1137437198
- Barreto, R. and Perissinotto, P. (2002), The Culture of Immanence, in Internet Art. Ricardo Barreto e Paula Perissinotto (orgs.). São Paulo, IMESP. ISBN 85-7060-038-0.
- Benayoun, M. (2008), Art after Technology abstract of the text written by Maurice Benayoun in Technology Review - French edition, N°7 June–July 2008, MIT, ISSN 1957-1380 Full text in English
- Benayoun, M., The Dump, 207 Hypotheses for Committing Art, bilingual (English/French), Fyp éditions, France, July 2011, ISBN 978-2-916571-64-5.
- Bolognini, M. (2008), Postdigitale, Rome: Carocci. ISBN 978-88-430-4739-0
- Ferguson, J., & Brown, A. R. (2016). "Fostering a post-digital avant-garde: Research-led teaching of music technology". Organised Sound, 21(2), 127–137.
- Pepperell, R. and Punt, M. (2000), The Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology and Desire, Intellect Books, Bristol, UK, 182 pp.
- Wilson, S. (2003), Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. ISBN 0-262-23209-X
External links
- Google Books: The Postdigital Membrane
- What is a paradigm by Giorgio Agamben
- Post-Digital Humanities: Computation and Cultural Critique in the Arts and Humanities
- Monoskop: Collection of resources related to Post-Digital Aesthetics
See also
References
- ^ Cascone, Kim. "THE AESTHETICS OF FAILURE 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" (PDF). Computer Music Journal, 24:4 Winter 2002 (MIT Press). Retrieved 15 June 2017.
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