Artistic Research in the Network Society: from New Media to Post-media Art

Abstract

Artistic research today is challenging knowledge creation in contemporary society. Located in the contested territory between academic knowledge traditions and contemporary art practices, artistic research today has become an independent form of knowledge on its own. Although artistic research has entered academia quite recently, there are artists who have been actively working with new media technologies for several decades, using scientific approaches and combining art with science.

We will be tracing the phenomenon back to new media art and artistic explorations in the early stage of the Internet in the 90s, considering these in a way as predecessors of artistic research. We will also be focusing on the most important developments of the early Internet cultures and networked digital art, analysing them from the post-media perspective of today. What was so unique about the 90s Internet cultures and networked art that was exploring and developing new concepts such as immateriality, process-based, collaborative creation, real-time presence, and feedback mechanism? And what has changed today, when we have entered the age of post-media, characterized by rather different concepts – new aesthetics, neomateriality, objecthood, data visualization, and social network “imagery”? And last but not least, how do digital media technologies provide new tools and facilitate new contexts for artistic research?

We will be studying the cases of several exhibition projects by the Riga-based RIXC Center – Fields (2014) and Data Drift (2015) – as well as analysing artwork from Open Fields (2016) and the related young artist show Impulses (2016). These cases show that artistic research that uses science and technology as well as data as a new artistic medium is capable of creating new knowledge and reflecting on current realities, the complexity of our society, and the challenges of our time.