Note on Digital Aesthetics

Symposium:

• ISEA98: Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA98:  

• Digital Aesthetics

• Note on Digital Aesthetics

• Ryszard W. Kluszczynski

• The basis for contemporary digital, interactive, multimedia art were created in the sixties and seventies. It was conceptual art to lay fundamentals for the present state of art, together with its products (emanations): performance art, happening, installation art. The most important characteristics of conceptualism, which are relevant for the aesthetics of new media art are:

  1. Rejection of the idea of producing beautiful objects/forms treated as vehicles for aesthetic values, replaced by textual artistic praxis; – dematerialization of artwork
  2. Split between material arrangement (artefact) and its semantic extension (artvvork)
  3. Relations as new values

  Some of those features got new shapes (and entered into new structures) in post-conceptual, palimpsest-like artworks, which bridged conceptualism with formal art. But nowadays interactive arts accept again main conceptual principles. There are some changes, which do not damage, however, conceptual spirit:

  1. Semantic object is being transformed into immaterial one
  2. Split between artefact and interface has been established.

  In general, there is a sort of continuation between conceptual art and contemporary hypermedia art activities, as well as a close structural connection between them. This is a reason for the idea of building digital aesthetics on the conceptual fundamentals.

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