segunda-feira, 8 de dezembro de 2014

A long time ago: 1995

ANDRE SIER - Skate.Exe (2014)
Galeria Luís Serpa Projectos

Input to a conversation on Andre Sier's Skate.Exe

by ANTONIO CERVEIRA PINTO

There is a cold war between post-conceptual authoritarian and bureaucratic conservatism of so-called contemporary art and the return of tekne and metis. Not that Plato and Hegel were right in condemning art to vanish in the ocean of knowledge and/or destiny. Art to my mind is a manifestation of concrete subjectivity that stays behind and also beyond knowledge, and that takes objects, history and cognition as constitutive parts of its inherently synthetic nature.

We live today, more than ever, in a multidimensional time-space framework where material objects and living beings co-exist with and relate to a variety of an ever-expanding galaxy of virtual worlds.

I call this a post-contemporary culture, and post-contemporary art the art forms within.


“ (...) we’ve spent a lot of time talking about ends, rather than means, we have a huge intellectual deficit there.” (1)

“I like to imagine the museum of the next century as a rich and interactive network of multimedia databases (...)” (2)

“On a spring evening in May 1995 hundreds of people huddled together in a lecture hall at the University of Warwick for a chance to witness the Australian performance artist, Stelarc, who believed that soon we could not only take out natural organs and install improved artificial ones but also add a third hand and an extra ear. The interest this audience had in the speaker went beyond freak-show voyeurism to an actual concern with the future of their human-form. Those who had gathered together were told how their body was soon to become obsolete and it was time to question whether, “a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment.

This ‘extraterrestrial’ environment was ‘cyberspace,’ better known as ‘the internet.’” (3)

“Any escape from the contemporary requires an inhuman material lure, rather than an avant-gardist human hero to lead the way.” (4)

NOTES
  1. In “Speculative Design” by Benedict Singleton, in Speculative Aesthetics, Ed. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford. Urbanomic, 2014.
  2. In “Virtual Museums” by António Cerveira Pinto (1995), in Ex-Mater, Ed. MEIAC, 1997.
  3. In “About Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit”, 1995-. CCRU Website (2014).
  4. In “The Cosmic Addresss” by Tom Trevatt, in Speculative Aesthetics, Ed. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford. Urbanomic, 2014.
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