Videology: Art & Cybernetics

This seminar focuses on the transformation of the relationship between art, technology and futurity through the reshaping of human consciousness in the post-industrial age. From the advent of the industrial revolution to the birth of cybernetics, artificial intelligence & quantum computing, what poet William Blake called the “human abstract” has undergone a radical evolution – & this has been reflected in a transformation both of the idea of art & its forms, from machine aesthetics to cyberculture to xenofeminism & beyond. If modernity has come to be characterized by the “end of history” (Auschwitz, the Cold War, the Anthropocene, the Technological Singularity) in which humanity “experiences” its own negation, as Walter Benjamin suggested, as an aesthetic experience of the highest order, how is this mediated through the intersection of art & cybernetics? If technology, in its broadest ramification, represents both the necessity and impossibility of a “living on” – from individual, to species, to general ecology – beyond what Buckminster Fuller famously evoked as the mission of “Spaceship Earth,” is the task of art to represent the possibility of a post-future of the post-human? The seminar will address the work of artists from Marcel Duchamp, John Cage & Nam June Paik, to Stelarc, VNS Matrix, Nina Sellars, Merz, Mark Amerika, Laboria Cuboniks & Christian Bök – among others.