Post-Guten(morgen)berg: Soundings for a North/South Atlas of Art and New Media Histories

Abstract

A look at some of the ideas, concepts and theoretical models Rudolf Arnheim took up over the years to probe ongoing and emerging domains of visual experience, processes and technologies. Can his conceptual kit — made up of heterogeneous, at-hand terms such as vector systems, retinal presence, creative cognition, entropy, dissipative force — serve as a start up for a historical mapping of art/new media interactions? Some of his elemental image-ideas are unpacked: ‘Laocoon’ – the ‘convergence and mutation of genres’, closed art systems and open-ended hybrid practices; ‘Mittelmeer’ — ‘migrating’ centres and peripheries; ‘thermodynamic happenings’ — art possibilities, beyond the object, as episode, flow, temporality in relation to how new media developments have come to shape conditions of art production. His unswerving ‘epistemological focus’ is an inspiration behind charting the contemporary communicative sphere. With global migration —‘the migrant, alien, other in our midst’ — this space becomes one of ceaseless translation, transmutation, and transmission as an everyday experience. The artistic/ethical issues this spawns are scanned as ‘xeno-epistemics’ — ways of knowing the alien ‘other’ and ‘other’ ways of knowing.