Constant consensus building: art and conflict in the ESMA museum and site of memory

This article describes the history, development and social role of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, which is located on the grounds of the former clandestine centre for detention, torture and extermination, in the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories of the Argentinian dictatorship. The project is characterised by the cumulative effort of artistic expression, public debate, conflict and tension. Through the presentation of different artistic installations and plays, the article explains the focal function of art practices in spaces of memory that are strongly linked to a traumatic past, as well as how undertaking these practices can lead to the establishment of consensus.

Face to Facelessness: Imagined Intimacies and Socially Distant Desires

This paper revisits a performance titled Falling in Love Again - and Again which was first performed in 2014 as part of a series of works I created questioning relational intimacy and proximity in public space. During Falling in Love Again - and Again participants were invited to explore public space with the intention of anonymously falling in love with strangers. The details of these encounters were shared with me as the leader of the piece via mobile phone text messages, but never with the subjects of the participants' desires.  Understanding the dynamics of intimacy and proximity in 2014 was a very different experience to how I understand them in 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing, and two periods of lockdown has drastically influenced how relationality and physically being in the world with others is performed.  This paper is concerned both with the intimate and proximate dynamics of relational bodies during that performance as I understood it then, and, as a consequence, how we might understand relational proximity and intimacy now.Critical points of departure for the paper include art historian Grant Kester's writing on conversational art practices and his framing of dialogic encounters through the use of Jeffrey T. Nealon's Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998).  Models of 'dialogical' experience and 'responsibility', as situated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas respectively (Nealon, 1998, cited in Kester, 2004, 118) are used in this article to frame a rethinking of the dynamics and ethics of face to face contact and physical proximity, as bodies in space maintain distance from one another, connected only by our digital devices and our imaginations.  The voyeuristic practices of Sophie Calle and Vito Acconci converge with theatre makers Forced Entertainment's 'writing over' of place (Kaye, 2000) to explore imaginary relational connectivity.  The writing of geographer Doreen Massey supports this framing through the use of Massey's thoughts on the fictional poetics of social interactions and 'stories so far' (Massey, 2005).  Ultimately the paper asks what happens when we are required to imagine being with others in physically distant and imaginary ways with only our mobile devices as depositories for our fictional desires. 

Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art

From a small community of pioneering artists who experimented with artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1970s, AI art has expanded, gained visibility, and attained socio-cultural relevance since the second half of the 2010s. Its topics, methodologies, presentational formats, and implications are closely related to a range of disciplines engaged in the research and application of AI. In this paper, I present a comprehensive framework for the critical exploration of AI art. It comprises the context of AI art, its prominent poetic features, major issues, and possible directions. I address the poetic, expressive, and ethical layers of AI art practices within the context of contemporary art, AI research, and related disciplines. I focus on the works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the epistemic or political ambiguities indicative of a broader milieu of contemporary culture, AI science/technology, economy, and society. By comparing, acknowledging, and contextualizing both their accomplishments and shortcomings, I outline the prospective strategies to advance the field. The aim of this framework is to expand the existing critical discourse of AI art with new perspectives which can be used to examine the creative attributes of emerging practices and to assess their cultural significance and socio-political impact. It contributes to rethinking and redefining the art/science/technology critique in the age when the arts, together with science and technology, are becoming increasingly responsible for changing ecologies, shaping cultural values, and political normalization.

Procesos artísticos participativos y colaborativos en los distritos culturales de Burdeos y Nantes

This paper analyses the burgeoning impulse, in the main cultural districts of Bordeaux and Nantes, of participative and collaborative art practices. Such adjectives are not synonymous but, true enough, it is sometimes difficult to differentiate these two categories of relational art; moreover, co-working spaces could literally be considered another kind of collaboration process. All in all, beyond terminology matters, the aim of this essay is to point out the flourishing of combined official and community-based initiatives. A model of arts-led urban revitalisation seeking greater involvement of the local ecosystem shaping a “cultural district”, as alternative to the paradigm of the singular institutional trigger worldly identified with the Guggenheim-Bilbao. Nowadays there are many counter-examples in Bilbao and in French cities on the Bay of Biscay. Este artículo analiza el prolífico impulso en los principales distritos culturales de Burdeos y Nantes del arte participativo y colaborativo. Tales adjetivos no son sinónimos, pero es cierto que a veces es difícil diferenciar estas dos categorías de arte relacional; por otro lado, los espacios de co-working podrían ser designados, al pie de la letra, como otro tipo de proceso de co-laboración. Con todo, más allá de la terminología, lo que pretende esta reflexión es constatar el florecimiento de iniciativas oficiales y de base comunitaria combinadas. Un modelo de revitalización urbana a través de las artes con mayor involucración del ecosistema local formando un “distrito cultural”, como alternativa frente al paradigma del singular detonante institucional mundialmente identificado con el Guggenheim-Bilbao. Hoy día no faltan los contraejemplos bilbaínos y en ciudades francesas del golfo de Vizcaya.

Symbiosis of art studies and business

The purpose of the article is devoted to the characterization of the interaction and intersection of art practices and business, the analysis of artistic activities in existing business structures, and the expansion of tools for building a new paradigm in the system of "art-business". The methodology is based on structural-functional and system analysis, statistical method, which consists in finding and studying new knowledge, interdisciplinary approach, which involves the study of issues in the interaction of art practices and existing business systems. The scientific novelty of the work is that for the first time a practical study was conducted on the impact of art practices on the business structure and analyzed the artistic properties that can form new economic and artistic values and interests. Conclusions. The issue of interaction between art and business is quite new and is just beginning to develop. However, the existing stereotypes that art and business are mutually exclusive positions have already begun to shift and outline new spaces for their interaction. Art in modern society is trying to return to a secularized space because it has properties that are able to strengthen and transform the modern business system, which in global consequences may be reflected in improving the economic condition of Ukraine. Also, a deep and meaningful look at art practices once again convinces the effectiveness not only in the aesthetic and artistic context but also reveals its pragmatic and applied potential in business. Key words: art history practices, interaction, business systems, symbiosis, corporate culture.

The practice of multispecies relations in urban space and its potentialities for new legal imaginaries

This article explores what it means to enact multispecies relations in urban space. This exploration is rooted in contemporary art practices that create living frameworks through which encounters with non-human animal cultures, histories, rituals and justice are manifested. Such works play with the legalities and categorizations of ‘animal’ and ‘nature’ by exposing the nested reasonings and protocols that continue to propagate hierarchical species logics. Consequentially such work, alongside scholarship on earth-bound legalities, looks to how law can foster more just multispecies orderings, which aspire to create more equitable conditions for all. To scaffold such transitions the article makes the case for how a constant, public, educational and social rehearsal that unknots histories of liberal individualism is required in order to shift the ontological position of the human species. This rehearsal is set against the backdrop of climate emergencies and the call for a more expansive notion of the urban commons. The closing reflections point to how the Earth’s inviolability must necessarily be placed at the centre of an approach to urban making that is complemented by an intersectional set of innovative cosmologies, actions, manners and ways.

INTEGRATION OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY: HYBRID ART APPLICATIONS

Today, hybrid art applications attract attention as the integration of science, technology, new media and design. These art practices started with Modernism at the beginning of the 20th century, with the search for some changes in the understanding of art based on knowledge and talent, and a more determined search was started, especially since the 1960s. Artists collaborated with experts from different disciplines, and although these collaborations did not lead to a complete change in modern art, they aroused interest as hybrid applications that combine different competencies; It has been described as a necessity of modernism's search for innovation. Over time, it has been seen as interdisciplinary combinations, applications that combine experimental and research-based art, design and technology. In this study, it is aimed to clarify the definition, scope and blurriness of hybrid art by examining the application and theoretical infrastructure of today's hybrid art practices in the historical process, which combines different disciplines and stands out in unlimited processes and environments. The works, which have been put forward by the meeting of technology and art from the 1960s to the present, have been examined with examples through the theoretical framework. Keywords: Hybrid art, integration, interdisciplinary art, art and technology, new media

Researching public art and public space

This special issue is devoted to research on the changing paradigms of public art, and of public spaces. Today all art can be characterized as public since it is mediated via relational networks. The shift of paradigm from modernist art to contemporary art coincides with this shift of paradigm – from consumption to communication – in the sense that advanced art practices had already absorbed the change from individual mediation to relational networks. In the communication network of relations, artists and works are constitutive elements. Without the works and the artists, the relational network does not exist, and vice versa: Without the network of relations, neither artists nor works are made visible. This constitutive reciprocity of relations is decisive both for theorists doing research on public art and art in public spaces, as well as for artists who are doing research in public spaces.

Audiovisual practices of new media and their communicative nature

The purpose of the article is to analyze the specifics of audiovisual practices of new media and reveal their communicative nature. The methodology of the work is to involve an analytical approach to highlight the features of new media and their components. A comparative approach was used to highlight the features of audiovisual practices and media art. Scientific Novelty. The specifics of audiovisual practices of new media, which are characterized by interactivity, are revealed. Their role in communication through audiovisual content is emphasized. Simplifying the mechanisms for creating an audiovisual product in software applications makes it easy to distribute messages. In contrast to media art, which has a clear aesthetic function, in audiovisual practices prevail communicatively. Conclusions. New media occupy a significant place in the modern cultural space. A wide range of phenomena that can be attributed to new media is characterized by certain common features. These include their communicative nature and existence on the Internet. Audiovisual practices of new media are extremely diverse. They include both media art and practices that contain an aesthetic component but cannot be fully attributed to the arts. The art practices of new media are evolving through a combination of birth digital and became digital objects. Communication and interactivity are the basic characteristics of new media audiovisual practices.

"It‘s Hard to Keep Track": Mapping a Shifting Nation in Dylan Horrocks‘s Hicksville

<p>Using an art form that justifiably lays claim to both visual and literary genealogies—the graphic novel—Dylan Horrocks's Hicksville advances, rather than strictly challenges, many of the discussions which have informed the local manufacture of art and literature. My purpose in this thesis is to explore Horrocks's deployment of the critical perspectives of both art historical and literary discourse as they have developed from the pre-colonial to the twenty-first century in New Zealand, especially those associated with cultural nationalism. Hicksville claims a particular relation to the existing traditions within both art-historical and literary lines wherein they are conjoined in practice; integrated into the formal properties of Horrocks's work, the traditional concerns of local art and literature are not only subject matter but guide Horrocks‘s approach to narrative. The tension between art and place—the responsibility of the artist to the nation and its referents—appears in Hicksville as a structuring device rather than polemic via its concern with the economisation of art—or global capitalism—as it bears upon particular places and art practices. Yet Horrocks‘s handling of this theme upholds neither aestheticism nor populism. Rather, he invites the reader to make sense of extensive references to a range of artistic figures, from Heaphy to Hergé to Hotere, in a way that accounts for their equal force. Hicksville thus deliberately destabilises the joint histories of art and literary history to pointed effect, valuing its range of artistic and cultural inheritances—whether the visual or literary, the highbrow or lowbrow—for how they can remind us that contemporary artistic accounts of New Zealand must also consider the various ways the country has been constructed throughout its wider</p>