Call for artists who consider their artwork to be POSTDIGITAL.Please send me (melalexenberg@yahoo.com) info about your work for possible including in my book ‘THE FUTURE OF ART IN A POSTDIGITAL AGE: FROM HELLENISTIC TO HEBRAIC CONSCIOUSNESS’ (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press), a new updated and expanded edition of my 2006 book ‘The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness.’
I’d also like to receive artists' views on what constitutes postdigital perspectives. Below are some ideas on art beyond the digital in my 2008 book 'Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture' (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press).
In his chapter “Beyond the Digital: Preparing Artists to Work at the Frontiers of Technoculture,” Stephen Wilson proposes that although the impact of digital technology is significant, it forms part of something much more momentous that is intertwined with the aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and social-economic. Scientific research and technological development are radically transforming basic philosophical ideas about the nature of the physical world, time and space, the nature of life and intelligence, and the limits in our abilities to transform the world and humanity. Art redefined by a digital revolution linked to revolutions brewing in the realms of biology, neurophysiology, materials science, and cosmology require new methods for educating artists at the intersections of art, science, technology, and culture.
Roy Ascott in his chapter “Pixels and Particles: The Path to Syncretism” also proposes that the digital moment has passed in the sense that interfaces are migrating from a cabled, box-bound environment to wireless multi-sensory, multi-modal, mobile, wearable forms, and eventually with biochips implanted in our bodies. He coins the word “moistmedia” as the symbiosis between dry pixels and wet biomolecules. Our artistic inquiry and design skills will be devoted to creating moistmedia artworks from which new metaphors, new language, and new methodologies will arise. The dynamic interplay between digital, biological, and cultural systems calls for a syncretic approach to arts education realized through connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence. Ascott explains that young artists face the challenge of creating a syncretic art that explores telematics (planetary connectivity), nanotechnology (bottom up construction), quantum computing (augmented cyberception), cognitive science and pharmacology (field consciousness), and esoterica (psychic instrumentality).
