2025-03-27 16:22 Note Type: online-article Tags: art, technology

All arts media are technologies. Oil paint is a technology, which allowed artists to work more flexibly. In this perspective we can include new media as a natural progression of this cultural evolution without falling into the trap of fetishizing the technological. Scientific instruments are technological embodiments, the microscope, telescope offer new embodiments which allow us to see things which could not be previously seen. More deeply, when we consider radio telescopes and particle colliders, it is not just that we see something hidden but that embodied interaction is what brings perception into being. Language and mathematics provide a further form of conceptual ‘seeing’. From this perspective the cultural significance of technologies, mathematics and scientific instruments, is that they create new embodiments, which bring about new forms of knowing and being. We are now entering a phase where the concept of embodiment extends beyond the augmented individual to internet scale computation, post human and non-human ecologies of interaction.

New technologies such as computer simulations, projectors and virtual reality, bring a new class of embodied experience into existence. The abstract can be made visceral in new experiential realities. Visualisation taps into the old visual pathways of the brain to bring insight to data from images, not just through aesthetics but enhanced forms of cognition (Feraco and Erdt, 2018).

This relationship between digital media, culture and remediation has profound consequences for curation and the concept of the archive and database as noted by Hayles (Hayles, 2013). The archive is transformed from a passive repository to an enactive space for experiential narrative creation and sharing.

Furthermore, the concept of embodied cognition underpins the theory of enactive learning and constructivism. Learning and cognitive development are not just processes of logical deduction but of action in the world.

References

https://www.mikestubbsart.com/criticality-imagination-interaction