Prehistories of the Post-digital: or, some old problems with post-anything

According to Florian Cramer, the “post-digital” describes an approach to digital media that no longer seeks technical innovation or improvement, but considers digitization something that already happened and thus might be further reconfigured (Cramer). He explains how the term is characteristic of our time in that shifts of information technology can no longer be understood to occur synchronously — and gives examples across electronic music, book and newspaper publishing, electronic poetry, contemporary visual arts and so on

Real-time for Pirate Cinema

In this essay, Geoff Cox (Associate Professor at the Dept. of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, and Adjunct Faculty at Transart Institute) opens up a discussion on the temporal complexity and the radical montage of multiple realities reflected in the project Pirate Cinema. Understanding temporality at different speeds, levels and scales means beginning to unfold a more nuanced understanding of different kinds of time existing simultaneously across different geo-political contexts

Ways of Machine Seeing

Commissioned essay for Unthinking Photography platform

Craftivism

Craftivism is a participative exhibition responding to the resurgent interest in craft as it relates to socially-engaged art practice. It involves 14 projects developed by artists and collectives that work with craft-based traditions and activist practices, and who employ the tactics of ‘craftivism’ (combining crafting & activism) to question the prevailing codes of mass consumerism. The artists involved engage with craft-based traditions through diverse practices including art, technology and fashion. Craftivism has been developed in relation to a range of contexts and includes nine artist-led participatory projects developed with local communities, shown as part of the exhibition. Craftivism is an Arnolfini / Relational project curated by Zoë Shearman (Director, Relational), Geoff Cox (Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini) and Ann Coxon (Assistant Curator, Tate Modern)

Aesthetic Programming

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. Using p5.js, it introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning

Prehistories of the Post-Digital:

In this short essay I want to try to speculate on what is being displaced in the post-digital and why this might be the case. It is not so much a critique of the post-digital but more an attempt to understand some of the conditions in which such a term arises. Is contemporary cultural production resigned to make empty reference to the past in ‘post-history’: thereby perpetuating both a form of cultural amnesia and uncritical nostalgia for existing ideas and mere surface images?