[ISEA2015] Paper: Gerald Nestler – The Renegade or an Aesthetics of Resolution: A few thoughts on a techno-imaginative toolbox and its potential for digital art as -and beyond- critique

Abstract (Shortpaper)

Keywords: Art, algorithms, black box finance, resolution, renegade, dissent, insurrection, solidarity.

This paper traces the semantic field of the term resolution and its potential relevance in current techno-political discourse. Based on an artistic project engaged with the forensics of a market crash, I propose an approach – both artistic and political – for a radical material practice to (en)counter the black box of (automated) evaluation and decision-making. With an ambivalent, contingent and marginal figure at its heart – the renegade (a traitor inside and an educator outside systems) – it combines the varied meanings of the term resolution – from technology and visualization techniques and definitions; knowledge-production and decisionmaking; to discretionary competence and joint convention – to propose a multi-layered and transdisciplinary practice for rearranging (acting) against the “box.” By creating narrative instabilities, it works towards renegade solidarity that coagulates dissent into insurrection for profound socio-political change.

  • Gerald Nestler is an artist and writer with a critical focus on what he terms the “derivative condition” of contemporary social relations and life, in which financial narratives shape the present by preconfiguring the future. At the same time, he works and collaborates on “aesthetics of resolution” as potential counter-strategies. Nestler graduated from the Academy of fine arts Vienna, Austria (1992) and subsequently conducted artistic fieldwork as broker and trader. He has exhibited internationally since the late 1990s and received the Austrian state scholarship for visual art (2003). Selected publications: Yx (on finance as a field of artistic research, Schlebruegge.Editor, Vienna, 2007), Kunstforum International  issues 200/201 on art and economy (with D. Buchhart, 2010), Making of Finance (with A. Avanessian, Merve publishers, Berlin, 2015). He is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, UK.

Full text (PDF) p. 726-729