Note: The following segment has been deprecated. New media (and how this is certainly not a discussion thereof) is still important however; I am still considering what aspects of this segment to keep, and where they would best be included in the discourse. Thoughts?
Why do we "need" to reframe visual discourse in order to talk about contemporary art in its entirety? What's the old frame, and what's wrong with it? Stipulating, as the lawyers say, that a re-framing is indeed in order, how do we know that "that framework exists" in cyborg culture? Sure, we are all cyborgs now (personally, I can't wait to become fully transhuman!---transhumanism deserves its own comic, I think), but ... "we" are also all global yet local, all flesh, all immersed in any number of other contexts. Wheres' the argument for singling out this one context? (Is it even necessary; you could, alternatively, just ask: "What happens when we reframe visual art as the cyborgs we have become?")
ReplyDeleteI would argue that being global yet local, multi-contextual, flesh++, etc... are all inherent elements of the cyborg state. However, perhaps you are correct in that I could propose this entire theory as a question of framing, without arguing a need for framing. And yet I feel that places the discourse in the realm of "thought experiment." And, I think that it's more of an analysis of a current state of being than a thought experiment. I would hope that the outcome of this process would be the expansion of traditional notions of 'art' and 'artist' to redefine by a methodology of thinking vs production. Now this aspect of the argument is probably hackneyed as the theorists of late-capitalism, relational aesthetics, and conceptual art certainly freed the artist from the creation of objects and expanded the definition of term to a variety non media specific realms. But, I'm not sure that the art world has fully internalized those ideas of post-industrialism (post-production) in a way that works for the artist or the art-making non-artist. Perhaps this framing will allow that?
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