Postdigital Pasts

Abstract

As David Berry and Michael Dieter (2012) have described, postdigital refers not to life-after-digital but rather the ways in which computation has become ‘experiential, spatial and materialized; embedded and embodied’, part of the contested fabric of life. Postdigital pasts emerge from the ways digital cultural heritages are animated in the present and entangled within heritage discourse, new museology and beyond. Materializing these postdigital pasts, this lecture retraces a series of artistically-informed installation works exploring diverse themes including the cult of the replicant as a ‘post-original original’ (Davis 1995), intangible heritage as an archaeology of the body and, deep mapping as a navigational device where ‘everything is on the move’ (November 2009).

Berry, D. & Dieter, M. (2012). Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

David, D. 1995, The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995), Leonardo 28(5):381.

November V., Camacho-Hübner E., & Latour B. (2010). ‘Entering a risky territory: space in the age of digital navigation’, Society and Space, vol. 28, no. 4. pp. 581–599.