The Myth of Emancipation through Interaction. On the Relationship between Interactive Dimensions and Emancipating Potentials of Contemporary (Digital) Art

The purpose of this article is to critically address a widespread assumption that reads like this: Works of art that make use of digital media automatically, through interactivity, are generally better suited for generating democratic processes in society than other art forms or phenomena that do not make use of digital media, and, therefore, digital art is more avant-garde than other art forms. By analysing the chains of equivalence underlying this assumption the article presents and discusses a number of issues that, taken together, render this assumption fallacious

PÅ ØLEJR MED SAMTIDSKUNSTEN

Anmeldelse af CHRISTIAN GETHER, STINE HØHOLT, MARIE LAURBERG (RED.): Utopia & Contemporary ArtOstfildern, 2012, (ARKEN Museum of Modern Art & Hatje Cantz Verlag), 176 s

Crea.Blender: A Neural Network-Based Image Generation Game to Assess Creativity

We present a pilot study on crea.blender, a novel co-creative game designed for large-scale, systematic assessment of distinct constructs of human creativity. Co-creative systems are systems in which humans and computers (often with Machine Learning) collaborate on a creative task. This human-computer collaboration raises questions about the relevance and level of human creativity and involvement in the process. We expand on, and explore aspects of these questions in this pilot study. We observe participants play through three different play modes in crea.blender, each aligned with established creativity assessment methods. In these modes, players "blend" existing images into new images under varying constraints. Our study indicates that crea.blender provides a playful experience, affords players a sense of control over the interface, and elicits different types of player behavior, supporting further study of the tool for use in a scalable, playful, creativity assessment.Comment: 4 page, 6 figures, CHI Pla

Who’s Afraid of the Audience? Digital and Post-Digital Perspectives on Aesthetics

This article analyses how works of art that make use of or refer to digital technology can be approached, analysed, and understood aesthetically from two different perspectives. One perspective, which I shall term a ‘digital’ perspective, mainly focuses on poetics (or production) and technology when approach- ing the works, whereas the other, which I shall term a ‘post-digital’ perspective, focuses on aesthetic experience (or reception) when approaching the works. What I tentatively and for the purpose of practical analysis term the ‘digital’ and the ‘post-digital’ perspectives do not designate two different sets of concrete works of art or artistic practice and neither do they describe different periods.[1] Instead, the two perspectives co-exit as different discursive positions that are concretely ex- pressed in the way we talk about aesthetics in relation to art that makes use of and/or refers to digital technology. In short: When I choose here to talk about a digital and a post-digital perspective, I talk about two fundamentally different ways of ascribing aes- thetic meaning to (the same) concrete works of art. By drawing on the ideas of especially Immanuel Kant and Dominic McIver Lopes, it is the overall purposes of this article to ana- lyse and compare how the two perspectives understand the concept of aesthetics and to discuss some of the implications following from these understandings. As it turns out, one of the most significant implications is the role of the audience.&nbsp

Unbound: the circulation of works of art among different cultures

This article investigates how cultural circulation of art may be considered from two different perspectives: one sees the circulation of art within a globalization paradigm according to which contemporary art has become increasingly global by circulating among and transgressing different geographical and national borders, whereas the other focuses on the circulation of art across different epistemological borders. Thus, the first is an intra-discursive circulation of art insofar as the epistemological discourse of art itself is not transgressed despite the focus on cultural transgression within the globalization paradigm. The latter, on the other hand, is an inter-discursive circulation of art, since it focuses on art's ability to work, simultaneously, within different epistemological discourses. By analysing the artwork Free Universal Construction Kit, the article critically investigates the aesthetic potentials of these two different paradigms. The analysis is carried out by considering how Kantian subject positions regarding the aesthetic can be taken on within each paradigm. The author demonstrates that, paradoxically, the inter-discursive circulation of art prompts for greater aesthetic potentials than the intra-discursive circulation of the globalization paradigm