Media Art: Hybridization and Autonomy

Abstract

In order to replace Media Art in its intercultural and historical context, the author attempts to define what characterizes it, beyond the sometimes great differences of its expressions. And what characterizes it is hybridization; a specific trait resulting from the crossing, in the artistic field, of technical, semiotic and aesthetic elements, whose provenance is heterogeneous. Hybridization is not specific to Media Art, it could even be considered as quite a constant feature of art in general. The first mass communication technologies favoured hybridization greatly, but with digital technologies, new forms of hybridization have emerged, of which the author would like to offer a typology. In particular, a hybridization between art and science, as, since then, science, through the means of computer languages, constitutes the most favoured of art´s tools and materials. The recent development of these computer languages, influenced by logical and formal models from cognitive science and technology, tends to endow computers, and consequently, art works with a new capacity: autonomy, the faculty possessed by living and intelligent beings to create their own laws. Drawing from cognitive science, in particular connectionism, the author offers a theoretical approach that can clarify the links between hybridization and autonomy around which the future orientation of art and culture is relying on.