Panel Statement
Panel: Digital Aesthetics
The basis for contemporary digital, interactive, multimedia art were created in the sixties and seventies. It was conceptual art to lay fundamentals for the present state of art, together with its products (emanations): performance art, happening, installation art. The most important characteristics of conceptualism, which are relevant for the aesthetics of new media art are:
- rejection of the idea of producing beautiful objects/forms treated as vehicles for aesthetic values, replaced by textual artistic praxis; – dematerialization of artwork;
- split between material arrangement (artefact) and its semantic extension (artvvork);
- relations as new values.
Some of those features got new shapes (and entered into new structures) in post-conceptual, palimpsest-like artworks, which bridged conceptualism with formal art. But nowadays interactive arts accept again main conceptual principles. There are some changes, which do not damage, however, conceptual spirit:
- semantic object is being transformed into immaterial one;
- split between artefact and interface has been esablished.
In general, there is a sort of continuation between conceptual art and contemporary hypermedia art activities, as well as a close structural connection between them. This is a reason for the idea of building digital aesthetics on the conceptual fundamentals.
- Ryszard Kluszczynski (Poland), University of Lodz