Keynote at Ph.D. Summer Camp, Artistic Production and Curating in The Age of Technogenesis, at CATCH in Elsinore and in the framework of Media Art Histories Re:Sound 2019.
At least since the beginning of modern art, a concern with perceptual experience and representation of reality has occupied the arts. Questions have especially challenged representation of the ‘real’ and perceptual, cultural, and socio-political impacts of speeding temporalities introduced with industrial and technical evolution. In lieu of the affective turn and increasing attention to sentience as a dimension of hybrid, technological objects and environments today, questions of ‘what’ we experience are accompanied by concerns with how we experience – and how sense-experience connects to our cognitive faculties. In this perspective, and especially with regards to media art, my talk suggests a shift in perspective from art’s objecthood (as a thing, concept, or situation) towards art’s sensorial, emotional, cognitive, and technogenetic effects and ecologies as a guiding principle for what to ‘care’ for in curatorial inquiry. This perspective positions artistic and curatorial attention in a larger condition of ‘expanded reality’ and within the urgency of what neuroscientists and theorists have named a ‘cognitive crisis’ today – tied with biological, cultural, and environmental implications of media aesthetics.
The research for the keynote feeds into a monograph in development and also extends from my work on Expanded Reality at the Neuro Design Lab of artist and professor Maurice Benayoun at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, with thanks to the Carlsberg Foundation’s Internationalization Fellowship.