stetik og Digital stetik

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Æstetik og Digital Æstetik
The study of artistic experience or sensibility,
from the Greek Aisthesis (sensation, perception)
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dagens menu

• Freeland
• Flickr
• Qvortrup
• Practical info blog
• Øvelser art?

del 1
del 2
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Freeland summary

• What is art?
• Historical overview of what has been an answer to
  this question in different times (all still
  alive!)
• Why most answers are unusable with contemporary
  art, or are they?
• Serranos Piss Christ

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Freeland history

• Imitation theory (IV-III b.C) Greece
• Plato against as copies
• Aristotle in favour as educates (katharsis, good
  characters)
• Challenges in contemporary media, photography,
  painting non realistic anymore, no room to
  originality
• Beauty as divine (XIII) Middle Age
• One of the essential properties of God
• 3 principles for beauty proportion, light
  (claritas) and allegory (i.e. Chartres)

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Freeland history (Versailles) XVIII

• Educated audience to interpret
• Hume
• Taste, education and experience, people agree on
  standard of taste, universal
• Critic cultural indoctrination
• Kant
• Beauty grounded in object themselves (i.e. rose)
• We label world (perception-understanding)
• Purposiveness without a purpose
• Stimulates emotions, intellect imagination
• Non contaminated by desire! (Psychical distance)
• The sublime

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Freeland history

• Dyonisos-Apollon (XIX) Nietzsche
• Essence of life as violence, suffering
• Beauty of form
• Parsifal too Christian (Cultural Nationalism)
• Anything goes (XX) Warhol
• Brillo Box why art? (Duchamp)
• If accepted by museum, galleries, purchased, etc.
• Danto anything art if interpreted as such

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Freeland history summary

• Imitation theory
• Beauty as divine
• Hume
• Kant
• Nietzsche
• Anything goes?

Form educates
Form points to God
Taste education high art
Form per se
Content vs Form
Communities
Still, some works communicate better than others
critic has to identify meanings and explain the
mode of their embodiment (material formal)
Back to Form?
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Serranos Piss Christ

• Bodily fluids ritual?
• Gathering-community
• Symbolic value
• Only shock
• No beauty
• No morality

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Defending Serrano

• Formal and material properties
• Content (meaning)
• Context (place in Western tradition, i.e. Goya)

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Flickr seminar
Aesthetization?
ddakf06portrait
Helmut Newton, Self-Portrait with Wife and Model,
Vogue Studio, Paris, 1981. Gelatin silver print.
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give us a break!!!
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Qvortrup summary

• Through 2 examples (House of Love and Jodi.org)
  examines what is digital art
• Continuation of avant-garde, grænsekunst,
  readymades
• Cannot use the old theories so proposes new

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Qvortrup the examples

• House of Love
• METAWORK
• Genre mix
• Encyclopedic
• Multimedia
• Immersion
• (my interpretation of his description)

• Jodi.org
• ANTI WORK
• Attack on spectator
• No beauty, harmony
• No interaction
• No meta

So what is it? ?
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Qvortrup grænsekunst

• Duchamps fountain
• Rejects mimesis
• Signature, installation context
• Investigates borders between work and non-work
• No immanent qualities

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Qvortrup 3 theorists

• Manovich the cinema look (multiplicity,
  montage) not only crossing borders, also
  creating new artistic entities
• Bo Kampann Walther epistemologisk vs ontologisk
  rekursivitet, (fortolke vs handle)
• Peter Bøgh Andersen interaktivitet fra iagttager
  og fortolker til objekttegn i værkets univers af
  objekttegn, dobbeltblik

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Qvortrup perspective on art

• Has a sociological perspective (no aesthetic
  immanence or medium fixed)
• Looks into societys changes that justify why
  universalism is not possible (except for
  cognition) and why art and cultural system
  changed
• Importance of Duchamps idea that work of art
  distinguises itself from world (make a
  distinction, limits, limit possibilities)

Or has he?
sociological
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Qvortrup are they art?
MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Point to paradoxical distinction between art and
  non-art
• Manages limitations and creates a world (content)

Jodi.org
House of Love
But art needs the two in combination (like
Flipper) so NO ART!!!
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Qvortrup what makes digital works different?

• Not enough with the technology
• There has to be ontologisk rekursivitet, we are
  objekttegne
• This makes the crossing of borders even more
  extreme than in Duchamp

But this is a basic formal property! Critic
arent there others?, objects very different
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Practical info blog

• Gruppearbejde
• Feedback
• Read (and comment!) each other
• Show how it works

http//ddakf06.blogspot.com/
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Til næste gang

• Check out blog during week to see updates
• Read
• LISTER et.al. 2003. New Media A Critical
  Introduction. London Routledge (pp. 9-37)
• MANOVICH, Lev. 2001. What Is New Media? in The
  Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA MIT Press.
  (pp.18-48)
• Think of all the (aesthetic/immanent/ontologic)
  properties of new media that you will read about,
  which do you think is the most important one and
  why (bring a few notes to class)