With this research we explore how an educational approach could be devised that encourages both a critical and creative engagement with the postdigital condition. While those art practices seem omnipresent in cultural institutions, there is surprisingly little work done at the university level. Yet, practicing artists exhibit a particularly pragmatic, yet critical attitude when it comes to appropriating technologies and often generously share their own insights and experiences in making art with digital tools. We devised a course format during which advanced second and third-year students of communication and interface design engaged with postdigital theory and practice. Our aims were to lower thresholds to tools and technologies, encourage the engagement with the ethical and aesthetic aspects of digitization, and convene a temporary community of students that freely share and collaborate. We report on the results of the course and reflect on our observations.
Collaborative Vision: Livestream, Volumetric Navigation, AI Image Processing, and Algorithmic Personalisation
Provides Ng
‘Vision’ is the faculty of perception and visualisation that helps us to acquire information about our environment as an individual. The media industry has shown how the collection and distribution of such information can impact the public realm. For instance, the 2019 Extradition Protest in Hong Kong, which propagated itself through livestreaming events on media platforms, brought about the compliance of the government by collectively disrupting physical-urban and virtual-media spaces. These media technologies have demonstrated their capacity in facilitating a ‘collaborative vision’ that communicates and accumulates individuated information in real-time. This gives the urgency to understand the working of these distributed media and their potential in formulating a cohesive infrastructure that will help us in reconstructing and understanding the consequences of our own events collectively. This paper summarises a research — ‘Current’ — which utilised 4 techno-social ideas to prototype a means of ‘collaborative vision’.
Photographs, as Vilém Flusser argued repeatedly, are the outcome of pre-programmed apparatuses: camera designs, industrial complexes and the economies which drive them. Flusser’s elaborate view is contrasted by Aïm Deüelle-Lüski’s hand-made multi-pinhole cameras and particularly his ‘horizontal’ cameras, wherein the negative (and later negatives) are placed horizontally within the camera. Deüelle Lüski’s oeuvre is thus a unique problematisation of all other forms of photography that are revealed as solutions for only a single problem: how to produce referential pictures.
Post-digital Aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Art
Pedro Ferreira, Luísa Ribas
This paper examines the current tendency to theorize our contemporary times pervaded by digital technologies and media as ‘post-digital’. It discusses the different understandings of this term and its relationship to other concepts that not only seek to define a contemporary aesthetics but also the current condition from which it emerges. In order to frame the main traits of a post-digital culture of artistic production, the paper starts by addressing the concept of the post-digital as aesthetics of failure. It then considers the changing conceptions of the term and related artistic approaches that gradually shift their focus on the digital medium’s infrastructure towards the broader socio-cultural effects of the ubiquity of computational technologies. According to this view, we highlight how a contemporary post-digital culture of audiovisual production explores two main forms of hybridity.
