Panel and audience conversation at Media Art Histories Re: Sound 2019. With Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, and Jøran Rudi, moderated by Tanya Toft Ag.
Tuesday August 20, 2019, 13:00 – 14:00
Auditorium – CREATE AAU, Rendsburggade 14, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark
Art’s New Environments
Afforded by digital dynamics, current contemporary art evolves contingently with immersive technology and manifests in environments as much as in concepts or objects. From a survey of artist testimonials collected for the book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019), it seems that artists explore a mode of subjectivity rooted in their own embeddedness in digital conditions of society. They formulate their artistic positions as participants of the contemporaneity that their practices deal with. Relying on immersion rather than narrative or conceptualized meaning constructions, they explore what it actually feels like to be present in our contemporary world and its temporal-sensorial conditions.
Following a trajectory of growing interest in affective experience across contemporary visual culture, the practical arts, and academia, perspectives in this panel will examine how contemporary art, afforded by digital technology, moves from a perspective on what is represented to us towards how we are present – and questions what conditions our sense of presence today. Our discussion will address human sensing as a both ontological and epistemological premise for art’s existence and experience: How do contemporary artists who engage digital culture and technology work with ideas of presence, affectivity, and immersion? What might artistic employment of digital tools and aesthetics implicate in ecological, digital-cultural, and technogenetic perspectives? What (if anything) is ‘new’ about artistic compositions of sense environments and experiences today, and how might art’s ‘new’ environments re-route art’s histories?
Visit the Art’s New Environments program.
Image: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Exile and Other Syndrome (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
