Media Art at UMAT

WHAT IS art? What is an object of art? Since at least the 14th century, but with increasing intensity especi-ally in European history, the concepts and objects of art have posed problems for technology. The demands of art continue to challenge and influ-ence technological means of production, throwing down the gauntlet, daring the new to come up with something defining and original that would be more than the equal of art, something that would be art. With each development in technology it seems that this challenge is repeated: the Quattrocento trickery of prosthetic frames and inverted light boxes, the perspectival viewing grids of the high renaissance, the camera obscura and the photographic image, the motorized viewing contraptions of 19th-century pre-cinema – the zoetropes, kaleidoscopes, panoramascopes, etc. All this develops alongside presses, gramophones, typewriters and broadcasting technologies, which are also occasionally challenged in their aesthetic dimension by the demand that they ascend beyond the merely aesthetic or the merely prosthetic. Whatever sense – or combination of senses – is appealed to by an aesthetic production, the technology is faced each time with this challenge. Nevertheless, it is often observed that a technical element subsists in the organized sonority of music, the illusive counterfeit of visual art, and the elemental tactility of sculpture, which does not differ in principle from the systematic productions of technology in its modern incarnations. A motorized technology, no less than any kind of medieval artisanship, can be turned to the aims of artistic production. The technological means of reproduction itself can become the source of artistic production and experiment. The intertwined histories of art and technology in the last century and a half might seem characterized by degrees of ambivalence, but in thi