A Personal Story of Art and Technology

Abstract

The paper was presented within the Hothaus Series, a programme of four seminars organised by Birmingham based organisation Vivid in collaboration with the University of East England. The objective of the Hothaus series was to situate media arts within the larger traditions or art history and cultural theory, and to draw parallels between media arts, visual arts, science, technology and popular culture. Other speakers on the seminar included Nina Pope, Jem Finer, and Paul Ramirez-Jonas. The relation between human and technology is at the core of my research, and I describe several artworks by myself and other artists which question aspects of this relation. I pay particular attention to the concept of obsolescence and the various ways it can operate in the human-technology relation. For example Stelarc’s idea of the obsolete body and his attempts to become a cyborg by interfacing himself with various computer-controlled devices. In contrast, with reference to my own practice in the article, I concentrate on the presence of many recycled parts in the machines I build, and the contrast this creates between, on the one hand, the effort required for humans to keep up with the exponential speed of techno-scientific progress and, on the other, the creative possibilities of the debris left behind. This demonstrates that obsolescence is a significant aspect of human-technology aesthetics, and that it permits a range of aesthetic possibilities.