| dc.description | Description: Pau Alsina, PhD, is a Lecturer at the Arts and Humanities Department of the Open University of Catalonia where he coordinates, teaches and does research in the Arts and Contemporary Scientific and Philosophical Thought area. He also teaches Digital Aesthetics, Media Art History and Art Epistemology at the Master’s degree of Media Art Curatorship, in the ESDI Higher School of Design - Ramon Llull University. Since 2002 is Director of the Artnodes Journal of Art, Science and Technology, where he coordinated special issues on Arts and Sciences such as Mathematics, Biology or Complexity Sciences. He has authored /coauthored several publications on Art, Science and Technology and Contemporary Philosophy, as well as has co-curated exhibitions such as "Cultures of Change: social atoms and electronic lives" (2009-2010), on Complexity Sciences and Digital Technologies at Arts Santa Monica, in Barcelona. In 2014 he organized and was co-Chair of the Art Matters International Conference, and in 2016 he also co-Chaired the Interface Politics Conference, and also the Art and Speculative Futures Conference, in collaboration with other universities and cultural institutions. He actually is a member of the Board of Trustees of the HANGAR Foundation, Center for Artistic Research and Production, and the Board of Trustees of the New Art Foundation, and institution devoted to the promotion of collectionism and preservation of Media Arts. With a strong interdisciplinary background in Philosophy, Arts and Engineering he got his Ph.D. in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture at the Barcelona University and since then he has been doing research in four areas which he tends to blend: 1) Software Studies and Bioart. 2) Media Archaeology 3) New Materialist Philosophies. 4) Science and Technology Studies, and specifically Actor Network Theory applied to Art Infrastructures. (palsinag@uoc.edu) twitter: @paualsina | |
| dc.description.abstract | As all steps of Art’s value chain get transformed by the ever-challenging practices of Media Arts and other forms as Art and Science intersections, and while agents and Institutions are adapting to the on-going transformation of processes involved, the Historical study of Media Art practices and theories enable us to transform, or evolve, epistemologies and ontologies of Art itself. Closer to transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research effects, creative research and in particular artistic research as a mode of knowledge (Borgdorff 2011) invents transforming and elucidating fundamental epistemological and ontological assumptions. This replaces results with processes making knowledge production relational to its circustances of production and going from matters of fact to matters of concern (Latour, 2004). In this paper we analyze and compare three interconnected theoretical and methodological approaches that are facing key challenges of Media Art Studes in a different manner but in some aspects presenting similar results: Media Archaeology, Actor Network Theory and New Materialism. Even with important differences between them, those approaches have also some key points in common. First of all, their battle against both technological and social determinism; then the redefinition of the agencies involved; also the resignification of the material aspects of media and its relation with discourses; and finally the redistribution of causalities and temporalities as well. We will reflect on this deep onto-epistemological questions in relation to the Protocol for Interdisciplinary Research, an on-going open document written as a result of a series of interdisciplinary workshops organized and hosted by Hangar, Centre for Artistic Research in Barcelona, under the auspices of the project Softcontrol (European Commission - Culture Programme 2007 – 2013). | |
