[ISEA2004] Paper: Troels Degn Johansson – Staging Relations: Relational Art and Network Technologies in Superflex’ Staging Strategies

Abstract

Setting off from an action research approach, this paper identifies and analyses the staging strategy employed in Copenhagen art group Superflex so-called relational art; a strategy that makes use of the Internet in order to connect people and facilitate dialogue, change, development, etc., in accordance with the general aim of relational art. Following a typology of the arenas that this staging strategy amounts to, the paper finally discusses how concepts of network in relational art become influenced by technology, and vice versa.

  • Troels Degn Johansson is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communications, IT-University of Copenhagen (ITU), and Head of Studies of the ITU’s Masters program in Design, Communication, and Media. Additionally, he is a co-founder of the newly opened ITU Center for Computer Games Research Copenhagen (game.itu.dk). His main research interests are aesthetics and representation with special reference to virtual environments in e.g. games, MUDs, visualization, and narrativity. His PhD thesis, “Landscapes of Communications”, (2002) thus maps out pictorial representation in web-based visualisation of change in landscape and urban space, by setting off from an  epistemological analysis of cybernetic geography. He has published extensively on  aesthetics, pictorial semiotics, and computer-mediated communications; most recently as a co-author of “Sense and Senses in Aesthetics” (Söderström, Helsinki, 2003).