[ISEA2010] Paper: Lanfranco Aceti – Transcultural Electronic Negotiations: The Redefinition of Public Art across Cultures and Media

Abstract

The paper will discuss how contemporary artistic engagements through technological tools in the realm of transcultural public art – particularly when based on contemporary media technologies – are forms strictly depending on and intertwined to the genius loci and the cultural context of the place to which the artworks refers.

Technology – when conceived and used as an aesthetic form of electronic transcultural negotiation – is not the only defining element of the artwork or the most important one. An artwork – even if technologically based – when moved from its original cultural context, is eradicated from and becomes unrelated to the place of origin. The artwork and its aesthetic are reduced to a reflection and transformed in the expression of an aesthetic artistic choice – explicable only within the framework of the chosen technological medium – that by globalizing the context purges any cultural specificity.

  • Lanfranco Aceti (IT/TR) works as an academic, artist and curator. He is Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, London; teaches Contemporary Art and Digital Culture at Sabanci University, Istanbul; and is Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (the MIT Press, Leonardo journal and ISAST). He is also the Artistic Director and Conference Chair for ISEA2011 Istanbul.

Full text (PDF) p. 113-115