Postdigital Perspectives

Postdigital perspectives are addressed in my book
Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Stephen Wilson proposes that although the impact of digital technology is significant, it forms part of something much more momentous that is intertwined with the aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and socio-economic. Art is being redefined by a digital revolution linked to revolutions brewing in the realms of biology, neurophysiology, materials science, and cosmology that call for new directions.

Roy Ascott coins the word moistmedia as the symbiosis between dry pixels and wet biomolecules. Postdigital art will be devoted to creating moistmedia artworks from which new metaphors, new language, and new methodologies will arise. The dynamic interplay between digital, biological, and cultural systems calls for a syncretic approach realized through connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence.

Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss sees the postdigital artist as an intermediary, a catalyst between diverse fields of knowledge, ways of thinking, social models, and solution strategies based upon cooperation, communication, and interaction. Network culture not only changes modes of media production and distribution, but it transforms art from object making to art as processes of creating immaterial, rhizome-like structures of remotely connected individuals in online communities. “Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies.”