A Cybersemiotic Approach to Technoetic Arts: New Vocabularies in Transdisciplinary Research
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Changing Vocabularies of Digital Art
Presentation Title:
- A Cybersemiotic Approach to Technoetic Arts: New Vocabularies in Transdisciplinary Research
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Contemporary, technoetic arts (art, technology and consciousness), that oscillate between analogue and digital technologies, often approach a situation, that in many ways resembles transdisciplinary research. It integrates elements from numerous fields of science, technology and philosophy in interactive environments, that can be a challenge to frame within a verbal interpretation. In this paper, I focus upon the relationship between technoetic interfaces and user contemplation. The Cybersemiotic framework is a theoretical approach (2005/English translation, 2008) to semiotics, which is based on a further development of Information Science, Cybernetics, Social Systems Theory, Biosemiotics, phenomenology and Peircian semiotics. Cybersemiotics delivers a range of new terms that can successfully address the multiple, looped, dynamic processes of communication that lie in the interfaces of contemporary technoetic art communications. This gives an opportunity not only to experience interactive arts at the level of embodied presence, but to also intellectualize and name a combination of multisensory and symbolic experiences in ways, that can contribute to the development of adequate vocabularies concerning the integration of art, science, technology and philosophy in general. I will present central terms from the cybersemiotic framework and demonstrate their use in “readings” of contemporary, high quality, technoetic artworks. The aim is to both extract knowledge from the works, as well as to broaden the potential of “self-understanding” that they present to us. The cybersemiotic framework has been developed by Danish Professor of Semiotics, Søren Brier, who is the founder of the Journal “Cybernetics and Human Knowing”, and who has received the Warren McCulloch Award from the American Society for Cybernetics in 2008 in line with Gregory Bateson, Gordon Pask, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and other central developers of the cybernetic paradigm. Artworks will be: Blue Morph (2007) by Artist Victoria Vesna and Nano Scientist James Gimsewski, and the electro-kinetic sculpture, Hylozoic Grove (2008), by Architect Phillip Beesley.
