Un/Becoming Digital: The Ontology of Technological Determinism and Its Implications for Art Education

摘要

Artists have been experimenting with analog and digital technologies since the 1960's; early examples include Billy Khiver's Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) and Nam June Paik (1966). While countless artists have since made highly innovative use of new media such as the computer, artificial intelligence (AD, biotech, the Internet and the World Wide Web, LED, motion capture, gesture tracking, CPS, open source, and robotics, artist/ theorists such as Penny (1995), Lovejoy (1997), Weibel (1996; 2001) and Wilson (2002) have cautioned against appropriating deterministic engineering models underlying such technologies.(l)These models, predominant in commercial industry, government and the military, embrace efficiency, commodity economics, innovation, progress, and privileging explicit (as opposed to ambiguous and metaphorical) knowing. However, each of these artist/ theorists has acknowledged the extreme difficulty artists have when attempting to critique or distance themselves from the institutional values embedded in the technologies themselves.