[ISEA2011] Paper: Lioudmila Voropai – Theoretical Discourse on ‘Art, Science and Technology Collaboration’ and its Historical Development

Abstract

The paper analyses historical development of a discourse on “Art, Science and Technology collaboration” from the 1960s till the present. It reviews the key concepts used for a theoretical and cultural legitimization of this collaboration, and implications of the “collaboration”-discourse for a media art practice. The “collaboration”-paradigm had a pivotal role for a theoretical conceptualization of media art itself and brought into being a common in the late 80ies definition of media art as an “interdisciplinary synthesis of art, science and technology”. On the one hand it endowed media art with an ‘alchemistic’ charm, which was especially attractive for an affinity, common at that time, to Foucauldian ‘cabinets of curiosities’ and other pre-modern forms of the organisation of knowledge. On the other hand, it revived within a media art discourse a rooted in antiquity conception of art as producing téchne, where art is considered as a set of practical skills and ‘know-how’.

  • Lioudmila Voropai is an independent curator, art critic and researcher in media art. Currently she is enrolled in a PhD program at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne, Germany, and accomplishes her doctoral thesis about an impact of cultural policy on the institutionalisation of media art.

Full text (PDF) p. 2521-2526