TY - GEN

T1 - After The Tunnel: on changing ontology and ethology of the emerging art-subject

T2 - After The Tunnel: on changing ontology and ethology of the emerging art-subject

AU - Ag, Tanya Ravn

AU - Benayoun, Maurice

PY - 2020/10

Y1 - 2020/10

N2 - During ISEA1995, the Tunnel Under the Atlantic presented an artwork that Maurice Benayoun conceived at the time as a manifesto supporting virtuality as a medium. 25 years later, we propose a new understanding of the work and its emergence along with a reconfiguration of the ontological status of contemporary media art. Rather than mere object, as defined by normalized code of representation, the artwork can now be characterized as a subject with operational sensitivities that allow complex reactive behaviors. Real-Time processing of information has played a major role in this mutation. Virtuality – understood as design of the potentialities of the work – sensors and other input devices keeping the work aware of the existence of its ‘public’ and environment seem to have converted the interactive artwork into a sentient entity, empowered with perceptive functionalities and new cognitive capacities: memory, artificial intelligence, and intentionality. This transductive process leading to the evolution of the original art-object into the art-subject announces an expansion of what is considered the artwork’s milieu and potentiality. More recent works of Benayoun help us to envision the next steps in this evolution: opening the ontology of art further towards its subjective capacities and possible dynamic implications in society.

AB - During ISEA1995, the Tunnel Under the Atlantic presented an artwork that Maurice Benayoun conceived at the time as a manifesto supporting virtuality as a medium. 25 years later, we propose a new understanding of the work and its emergence along with a reconfiguration of the ontological status of contemporary media art. Rather than mere object, as defined by normalized code of representation, the artwork can now be characterized as a subject with operational sensitivities that allow complex reactive behaviors. Real-Time processing of information has played a major role in this mutation. Virtuality – understood as design of the potentialities of the work – sensors and other input devices keeping the work aware of the existence of its ‘public’ and environment seem to have converted the interactive artwork into a sentient entity, empowered with perceptive functionalities and new cognitive capacities: memory, artificial intelligence, and intentionality. This transductive process leading to the evolution of the original art-object into the art-subject announces an expansion of what is considered the artwork’s milieu and potentiality. More recent works of Benayoun help us to envision the next steps in this evolution: opening the ontology of art further towards its subjective capacities and possible dynamic implications in society.

UR - http://isea-archives.org/docs/2020/isea2020_Proceedings.pdf

M3 - Article in proceedings

SP - 29

EP - 40

BT - ISEA2020 Montreal Proceedings

ER -