Collective Constructions

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

rhizomatic effect of Asia on Western art and culture

"Parallel events took place in the East and the West during the rise of modernism, when both sides looked towards their cross-cultures and co-authored the rise of technology. Although art based on new technology can be easily associated with visions of a Western techno-utopic paradigm, unwritten histories interrupt this common understanding and collapse the logic of the East/West dichotomy. The objective here is to trace how media cultures and new media art reflect Asia tendencies that redefine cultural territories and deconstruct canonical understandings of space and time."

-- Mina Cheon, Asia Effects in New Media, Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2006

Saturday, November 21, 2009

aesthetics of interactivity

"Designing the interactive experience adds an entire dimension to the esthetic endevour, one without precedent in the visual and plastic arts. In the west, the visual arts have no tradition of an esthetics of interactivity. Six hundred years of painting has resulted in a rich esthetics of the still image, of color and line, shape and area, of representational geometry and perspective. The effect of six hundred years of enculturation is that we know how to read images (which observe the conventions of renaissance perspective) before we can read text. One hundred years of moving image has given us a culturally established set of cinematic conventions: we can read cinema. But as yet we have no culturally established esthtetic of real time interaction."

-- Simon Penny, "From A to D and back again: The emerging aesthetics of Interactive Art," 1996

Thursday, November 19, 2009

cultural restructuring

"The African or Asian artists who, in my opinion, are important today may sometimes use traditional forms of their culture but they are not stuck with them: these forms have been set into movement, nomadised, and encounter other vocabularies. "Form routes" thus emerge in dynamic cartographies. The reference to local forms . . . define [sic] the world as a territory whose dimensions, temporal and spatial, can be explored by everyone."

--Nicolas Bourriaud, "ALTERMODERNITY", Spike 11, 2007