“Investigating the Notion of Art2.0” presented by Veenhof and Molga

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Session Title:
  • Changing Vocabularies of Digital Art

Presentation Title:
  • Investigating the Notion of Art2.0

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Abstract:

  • In their attempt to find a proper definition of the term Art2.0, the two artists Kasia Molga and Sander Veenhof came to the realization that much of all presumed Art2.0 is hardly any different than what could be labeled as Art1.0. In search for the factors that truly differentiate between art which is basically a reflection on web2.0 technologies and artworks intrinsically structured according to contemporary 2.0 principles, Molga and Veenhof concluded that there is yet another radical shift taking place on the axis of artist and audience dynamics. We live in an era in which users/viewers have become responsible for their own experience by contributing to and customizing the content and that the distinction between artist and audience seems to disappear. The audience has changed from consumers to co-producers. In some remarkable cases of mass worldwide cooperative creativity, the resulting outputs could very well be defined as Art 2.0 according to the criteria specified by Molga and Veenhof, while an artist as an initiator or author could even be absent. That doesn’t mean that the concept of ‘artist’ is fully out of the equation. Artists are resettling at a higher level of abstraction in a new role, not asking their audiences only to contribute to an artwork but giving the entire control over the artwork away. Either by publishing the artwork as a creative tool, or by releasing the artwork as a reusable module to be integrated into a larger framework by means of an API specification of inputs and outputs, in analogy to how the world wide web is currently structured as a mash-up universe.

    The investigation of these developments has been carried out through a study of the phenomena uncovered as being Art2.0 and several iconic “2.0” artworks, and by reflecting on a selection of works from their own artistic practice, in which Molga and Veenhof share a similar approach and interest on giving viewers the power of co-creation in various experimental forms, aware of the impact of their projects on their own position as artists in a 2.0 art world.

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