scholarly journals The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms: The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

Author(s):  
Audrey Chan

Observing the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated […] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73).

Author(s):  
Nizan Shaked

This chapter takes a comparative look at several models of interdisciplinary conceptualist practices that responded critically to Conceptual Art’s original claims. Artists responded to a limitation they identified in the narrow focus of early Conceptual Art, and turned to the social, the political, and the “life-world,” external to the hermeneutic definition of art. When this second wind of conceptualism integrated external subject matter, it was no longer in the modernist sense of art and politics. Synthetic conceptualism incorporated the basic investigations of Conceptual Art to form a complex method of artmaking that was deconstructive just as it was referential. Artists integrated a meta-critique to reveal frameworks that endowed artistic language and strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labour and gender issues to the discourse of the subject; and Martha Rosler from the documentary mode to the critique of representation in mass media.


Literator ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita M.C. Swanepoel

This article offers a philosophical overview of conceptual art. I argue that, since the project Transgressions and boundaries of the page transgresses and conceptually extends the boundaries of the concept of the book, it can be viewed in its entirety as a language-based installation art, consisting of various components, viz. artists’ books. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this conceptual art installation challenges the boundaries of conceptual art. The project and exhibitions confirm that artists’ books constitute an ideal medium to involve artists from divergent disciplines in the play with and discovery of the possibilities of the book. The project as a whole can be categorised as conceptual art, as it reconsiders, reinvents and theorises the concept book.


2006 ◽  
pp. 5-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Wood

Artists make maps. Inspired by maps made by the Surrealists, by the Situationists, by Pop Artists, and especially by Conceptualists of every stripe, artists in increasing numbers have taken up the map as an expressive medium. In an age less and less enamored of traditional forms of representation – and increasingly critical – maps have numerous attractions for artists. Beyond their formal continuities, maps and paintings are both communicative, that is, constructs intended to affect behavior. As the energy of painting has been dispersed over the past half century into earth art, conceptual art, installation art, performance art, video art, cyber art, and so on, it has dispersed the map as a subject along with it. The irresistible tug maps exert on artists arises from the map’s mask of neutral objectivity, from its mask of unauthored dispassion. Artists either strip this mask off the map, or fail to put one on. In either case artists simultaneously point to the mask worn by the map, while they enter unmasked into the very discourse of the map. In so doing map artists are erasing the line cartographers have tried to draw between their form of graphic communication (maps) and others (drawings, paintings, and so on). In this way map artists are reclaiming the map as a discourse function for people in general. The flourishing of map art signals the imminent demise of the map as a privileged form of communication. The map is dead! Long live the map!


2019 ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
О. С. Гальчінська ◽  
К. О. Гамалія ◽  
К. Л. Пашкевич

Purpose of the article is to research the distinctive features of the works of leading artists of land-art of XXth century, the analysis of their place and contribution to the overall development of culture, as well as the impact of work on the creative artists today. Methodology. The methodological basis of the study is a systematic approach, methods of comparative-historical and art analysis. Results. Works of the leading artists of land-art of the XXth century were considered as part of the the goal. It is confirmed that the source of inspiration from artists of land art is nature, its phenomena, as well as human, his inner world and interaction with the environment. Defined the special significance of the information component in the land-art, as natural space and Earth's horizon is perceived by the artist as a coherent concrete semantic field. It was analysed that the concept of land-art combines a huge range of artistic projects created by the authors using different approaches, techniques and Ways of execution, but all of them are combined with common origin – to transform an element of a natural landscape into an art object. Methods of creation and presentation of viewer work in order to form a certain public opinion are researched. Scientific novelty consists in defining the peculiarities of the approaches and means for the creation of art objects of land-art as manifests by artists who turn to society in order to form public opinion and to attract attention to social and environmental problems of mankind. Practical significance is that the materials presented, their analysis and generalization can be used in scientific researches devoted to development of art of land art and also in definition of the creative influence of leading artists of land art of XX century on the activity of contemporary artists for further implementation in author's creative projects.


Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Ning Gu ◽  
Peiman Amini Behbahani

Computational creativity in built environment (BE) design has been a subject of research interest in the discipline. This paper presents a critical review of various ways computational creativity has been and can be defined and approached in BE design. The paper examines a comprehensive body of contemporary literature on the topics of creativity, computational creativity, and their assessment to identify levels of computational creativity. The paper then proceeds to a further review of the implications of these levels specifically in BE design. The paper identifies four areas in BE design where computational creativity is relevant. In two areas—synthesis (generation) and analysis—there is considerable literature on lower levels of computational creativity. However, in two other areas—interfacing and communication—even the definition of computational creativity is not as defined and clear for the discipline, and most works only consider the role of computers as a supporting tool or medium. These open up future research opportunities for the discipline.


Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-596
Author(s):  
Elena Popa

AbstractThis paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms.


1973 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hillel Schwartz

“Oh, Mr. Pym, this breaks the heart,” lamented Sir Richard Grosvenor in the House of Commons in 1629; “if God be God, let us follow him, and if Baal be God, let us follow him, and no longer halt between two opinions.” The Baalites, it was clear to the Commons, were the Arminians, who threatened “the very ruin and desolation if not dissolution of Religion in this land.” Such was the threat of Arminianism that when the Commons presented its Protestations on March 2, the first article read,Whosoever shall bring in innovation in Religion, or by favour or countenance, seek to extend or introduce Popery or Arminianism or other opinions disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, shall be reputed a capital enemy to this Kingdom and Commonwealth.This was no ordinary condemnation of schism or theological haggling. The members of the Commons shared a strong suspicion of Arminianism as a political as well as religious heresy. They had a clear idea of what English Arminianism was and who was an Arminian. Before 1624, no Englishman had even been accused of Arminianism, either in Parliament or in contemporary literature devoted to religious controversies. How did the definition of English Arminianism develop between 1624 and 1629? How did Arminianism, originally a moderate Dutch Calvinism, come to be considered along with Popery as a treasonable theology?At the turn of the seventeeth century, Jacobus Arminius, Divinity Reader at the University of Leyden, had proposed a theological compromise between Supralapsarian and Infralapsarian Protestantism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-200
Author(s):  
Nizan Shaked

Abstract Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption, symptomatic of a capitalist worldview, that rare or historic objects bear intrinsic value. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and as a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly-held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.


1973 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 50-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fergus Millar

More than thirty years after its publication The Roman Revolution still stands unrivalled, not as the ‘definitive’ account of the emergence of a monarch from the ruins of the Republic but as something far more than that, the demonstration of a new method in the presentation of historical change. The aspect of this method, which has found most imitation, is of course prosopography; and it is indeed essential to it. But far more important is the use made of contemporary literature to mirror events, and to analyse and define the concepts and the terms in which the events were seen by those who lived through them.It is the common characteristic, perhaps even the definition, of great works of history that they invite imitation and offer a challenge, not just to apply their methods and standards to other areas, but to pursue their own conclusions further. The present paper is gratefully offered as an attempt to portray with a different emphasis some aspects of the establishment of Octavian as a monarch, first by demonstrating the extent to which the institutions of the res publica remained active in the Triumviral period, and secondly by redefining the change which culminated in 27 B.C., precisely by asking again in what terms it and the novus status which emerged from it were seen by contemporaries.


Leonardo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-137
Author(s):  
Gustavo Crembil ◽  
Paula Gaetano Adi

With a cultural and material “cannibalistic” approach, the authors aim to revise certain technological discourses by introducing TZ’IJK, a “mestizo” robotic artwork developed in the Peruvian Amazon. Far from the utopian visions of Hollywood sci-fi movies populated by highly intelligent, anthropomorphic and responsive machines, TZ’IJK employs a combination of high and low technologies that embody Latin America’s anthropophagic, postcolonial and hybrid nature. Mestizo Robotics proposes an alternative approach to the development of embodied artificial life forms, from both theoretical and technological viewpoints.


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