Talk at the Ars Electronica HK Garden symposium: Post-Human Art: Robots, Aliens, Chess and Tokens.
1000 years from now, in a perhaps different perceptual dimension, a human being will research the meanings and technological traces of a time in art’s existence when the human species changed along technocultural narratives co-formulated by the art-subject. The art-subject, a term evolved based on technologically developed qualities of the art-object to become sentient and co-evolve with its public and environment from the intentionality of the artist, guides a currently emerging mode of art as an active phenomenon that evolves with humans and environments through transductive processes (Benayoun & Ag 2020). The art-subject engages deep-anchored memory of the body and the brain in its environment of experience and participates in human technogenesis. To think through the entanglement of art and technogenesis is an attempt to address art’s ontology and existence in perspective of human communicative existence and development with technics. The technogenetic perspective challenges current posthuman discourse that describes the human being by a transductive process towards becoming technological rather than biological and towards technocratic ends to society. The technogenetic perspective rather sees human becoming as having always evolved with technology and technics – but without becoming technological or robotic. And art has always participated in this development. Speculations on entanglements of the art-subject with human technogenesis awakes questions that a future researcher might ask: How does the art-subject participate in human evolution with technology? How do media aesthetic qualities of the art-subject entangle with processes of plasticity and epigenesis in human experience? How did the art-subject in the late 2010s/early 2020s relate to what was then considered posthuman-related problems of humanity.
The Ars Electronica HK Garden symposium included talks by Maurice Benayoun (keynote), Martin E. Rosenberg, Beatrice de Gelder, Ray LC, Lisa Park SoYoung and myself, moderated by De Kai. I took place on Friday 10 September, 2021 (online).
About the symposium – here.
(Video recording below, my paper begins at 1:36:50)
Image: Maurice Benayoun, SPACE0000 – The Birth of Space, brain-shaped twodee representation of the abstraction “Space” and token from the project Value of Values (2019).