Distributed Critique : New Media Art as a Research Environment for the Posthumanities

Jones, Nathan (2019) Distributed Critique : New Media Art as a Research Environment for the Posthumanities. In: Biennial PARSE Research Conference, 2019-11-13 - 2019-11-15, Valland.

Abstract

I propose that we might think of New Media Art as a research environment for post-disciplinary thinking. This presentation asks two questions that are fundamental to the question of New Media Art in the context of the Posthumanities. a) how can we understand artworks that have grown out of technologically complex cultures and processes, without reducing them through the lens of the humanities’ emphasis on certain forms of eg. aesthetic and semiotic analyses? b) how can this understanding inform changes and challenges in fields outside of the humanities, and cultures beyond art academia? Theorists such as Rosi Braidotti have shown that the disciplinary hierarchies we inherit from the emergence of the humanities in the Enlightenment era are poorly equipped for thinking through today’s world – and today’s art. But today’s new media artists have produced a number of highly potent multi-disciplinary environments for Posthumanities research to take place. The paper takes up the case study of a project called Distributed Critique, which is a series of discussions, podcasts, and public and private ‘dissections’, of artworks, originally commissioned as part of the Freeport online portal, and the New Networked Normal. The project uses complex and compelling new media artworks by Kyriaki Goni and Geocinema as fulcrums for interdisciplinary, world-leading thinkers to be brought together. Ideas and approaches posed by this programme of new media art are gathered around the notion of “distributed networks”, and the new relations of the global and local that are opened up by distributed computing and decentralised networks. It is fitting therefore to distribute the job of engaging with their formal and conceptual complexities, beyond a singular disciplinary view. The paper presentation includes audio clips of the postcasts contributed to by “citizen sense” project leader Prof. Jennifer Gabrys, classical scholar Dr Christy Constantakopolou, and textural sound work by the musician Kepla.