Art as Research / Artists as Inventors (Introduction to the Session)

Abstract

Do “innovations” and “inventions” in the field of art differ from those in the field of technology and science? Do artists still contribute anything “new” to those fields of research – and did they ever in history? Which inventions changed the arts as well as technology and the media? These questions will be discussed in a frame from the 19th century until today, special foci of interest are: modernism and the birth of media technology 1840 – 1880; the utopia of merging art and technology in the 1920s and 1960s; the crisis of the “new” vs. digital media art innovations since the 1980s.