Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Tactical Media, Infiltration, Friction, Transparency, Détournement, Public Space, Appropriation, Medium Reflective Artwork, Electronic crowd.

This article analyzes different tactics used by contemporary artists usually interested in exploring our relationship with media and technology. It starts by acknowledging a desire for interactivity and transparency in contemporary society, art reception and in product and interface design. But it also recognizes a very particular techno-social context in contemporary occidental societies – the existence of an electronic crowd in which everyone appears permanently interconnected, receiving, producing and sending information. This context is considered here as a potential ground for artistic intervention and different medium reflective artworks/interventions are analyzed as examples of such aesthetic potential.

• Filipe Pais is an artist-researcher interested by the ways technologies affects our everyday lives. Currently he’s a post-doctoral researcher at Université Paris 8 (Labex Arts H2H), France, and at the research program Reflective Interaction from EnsadLab – Ensad (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs). The main topics of his research are in between others: the aesthetics of interactive art, free-play, aesthetic distances and qualitative methodologies applied to art experience.

Full text (PDF) p. 850-857