the art happens here

09TH NOVEMBER > 5PM/7PM I ROOM 4.11

A Thousand Years of Procedural Practices

Miguel Carvalhais

5PM

Computational technologies have radically transformed our social and cultural landscapes. Their reach spans everything from our education, to politics, war, how we socialise, work, go about our lives, how we die and are mourned. This is not only due to the ubiquity of computational technologies but also because they have been, since their inception, developed with the intent of becoming complementary cognitive artefacts that may augment human intellect and fuse with humans in a synergistic whole. Engelbart, Licklider, and many others started the process of hybridisation of human beings with the machinic phylum (De Landa 1991) thoroughly, and perhaps irreversibly, accelerating hominisation, “the process of the emergence of the human species” (Lévy 1997). 

As human intellect is transformed, deep changes in fields of the arts and design inevitably follow. But this transformation was not caused solely by the development and popularisation of computational technologies. Rather, computational or procedural thinking is something that artists across all fields have been probing for a rather long time. This presentation will explore some of that history, laying some of the artistic practices that predated the availability and ubiquitousness of contemporary computing machines. 

Miguel Carvalhais: https://www.carvalhais.org

The Digital in Digital Art

Mario Verdicchio

6PM

Theorising over the relation between art and digital technology is challenging, because a new layer of analysis on the artistic use of computers was added in the 1960s over a debate on art that was far from over. Some technological and sociotechnical aspects of computers must be taken into account to form a more complete picture on what is going on in digital art. Technological characteristics of computers depend on the physical properties of their components, while their sociotechnical aspects derive from the fact that these artefacts are conceived, designed, built, and deployed in society. Dealing with electronics on the one hand and with companies on the other may not look relevant for a discourse in aesthetics, but computers are fundamentally dependent on these aspects of reality and, thus, a discourse on what digital art is must take off from this standpoint.

Mario Verdicchio: https://cs.unibg.it/verdicchio/