Cybercontemporary art: mutations and digital contagion

Abstract

Digital technologies are increasingly present and accessible in nowadays. This ubiquity produce a creative and specific research field, influencing the way others artistic production modes operates. Contemporary art, until now not infrequently operates in appropriations of means, modes and styles of other branches of art or culture as a whole. Thus, the characteristic of the contemporary indexer practices, intent to the use digital technologies to embody its multifaceted proposals. This annexation unlike other art forms merged into contemporary production is not innocuous. And what it was to be a negotiation between an independent and dominant medium is completely disfigured by the object to be appropriate. The technology for its changeable essence changes the contemporary practice: it becomes more a virtualized environment and incorporated into the digital culture of the new media. This research seeks to develop a reflection on the flirtation of the consequences of contemporary art with technological devices and technoscience. One hypothesis of this mix is that the appropriate technological means fail to have a neutral effect to become autonomous and re-setting ruling of all contemporary production. Their intertwining is often undervalued by the mainstream of contemporary art criticism and artists which insists on seeing the technological arts as a mere branching, arising or prolonging the language of contemporary art in an "archaic humanism" where the man always overlaps technology. In this sense, I think it is not possible that such a powerful medium in the change and creation of new cultural demands and habits does not directly influence contemporary art today. Therefore, conceive the technological arts only as a sub-branch of contemporary art is wrong. A preliminary distinction can be made between participation and interaction. In the artistic context of the 1960s, participation refers to an involvement, be it, on the intellectual or behavioral plane. This encouragement to the spectator's participation will imply an evocation from the tribal, ritualistic and festive ludic level to political-social issues. The term interaction is more recent in the history of art and refers to a more pragmatic involvement of the viewer. So, the artist stimulates a two-way path between his work and the viewer, this double invitation is only viable through technological interfaces. Thus, the participation in the context of contemporary art refers to the relationship between the spectator and a pre-existing work of an open, but already completed character where the meaning is setting by the thought of artistic project. And the interaction will involve a relationship between the spectator and artificial intelligence systems, where the hierarchies are broken. From the new technologies, the research focuses on the "device-image" and retakes its historical power of control over the viewer. Inserted in the work it will act as part of an experiment. Thus, the viewer participates in the work like a guinea pig inserted in an aesthetic-behavioral test. The eye interface is the unveiling of the functioning of the visual mechanism, wavelength capturing edge detection, endorphin production, cicardian cycle control among others.