There is certainly no lack of media technology around us. In fact, within the first 20 years of the 21st century, the media exist in superabundance. For thoroughly media-conditioned individuals, this cannot possibly be the stuff that obsessions are made of any longer but has turned into a given. Media are no longer coveted objects of desire but are now utilized and defended as property. Advanced technology has become an integral part of an everyday coercive context which is termed “practical constraints.” As cultural techniques which need to be learned for social fitness, these constraints are at the greatest possible remove from what whips us into a state of excitement, induces aesthetic exultation, or triggers irritated thoughts.
This current-day situation is an enormous challenge for artists who are working with advanced technologies. The change of paradigm in art praxis and in thinking the arts has enormous aesthetic and ethical consequences for the artists and those who are dealing with the arts – in the public sphere, education, in galleries and museums and the art market. Participants within this vibrant, living system are responsible for each and every element within this reality.
The complex interplay between the ideas for an expanded visual arts and the challenges of an art after the media will be in the center of a book project realized by HKACT!, initiated and organized by the Osage Art Foundation. As a starting point it takes the public forum HKACT! Act 4 “A Forum Act”, held in January 2019, in which it gathered outstanding thinkers and activists working in the field of art, culture and technology relations. The Hong Kong Forum was organized around “HKACT! Act 1 BeHere”, a new public art project by Masaki Fujihata, the Japanese pioneer of Media Art. Implicitly, his extraordinary Oeuvre is present in the reflections of the contributors for this book.
A dozen international authors from different fields of the arts, sciences and humanities will reflect broadly and precisely with distinct forms of entrances for a lexicon on some of the main concepts developed and discussed at the January Forum like Interobjectivity of Images, the Zero Dimensionality of the Technical Image, Networked Interaction and Visuality, Time Based Media/Animation, the Perception Quality of Experience and New Faculties for Art Education.
Contributors:
JAMIE ALLEN (Kopenhagen)
HANS BELTING (Berlin)
SUZANNE BUCHAN (London)
TIMOTHY DRUCKREY (New York)
ANNE-MARIE DUGUET (Paris)
YUK HUI (Hong Kong/Berlin)
HIDETAKA ISHIDA (Tokyo)
HIROAKI KITANO (Tokyo)
SCOTT LASH (London)
CHARLES MEREWETHER (Tiflis)
KENJIRO OKAZAKI (Tokyo)
ANDREY SMIRNOV (Moscow)
BERNARD STIEGLER (Paris)
PETER WEIBEL (Karlsruhe/Vienna)
SIEGFRIED ZIELINSKI (Berlin)
Editors Siegfried Zielinski & Charles Merewether
Contributing Editor Masaki Fujihata
Managing Editor Agnes Lin
Text Editors Charles Merewether & Siegfried Zielinski
Copy Editor Lauren Wolfe
Editorial Assistant Yidi Tsao
Designer Osage Design
Production Print Management Sigma Art Services
Publisher Osage Publications
Supported by
Institute of Creativity, Hong Kong Baptist University
(Sponsored by Hung Hin Shiu Charitable Foundation 孔憲紹慈善基金贊助)
Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University
ISBN 978-988-77281-3-9
Price USD50 (shipping excluded)
Enquiries: info@oaf.cc