Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, many European avant-garde artists were taken with scientific and technological developments such as wireless radio, film, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the emergent field of quantum physics which atomized the universe. The ephemeral, the intangible; the world seemed governed by imperceptible, granular forces that played with time, location, and perception. In response, figures such as Lazslo Moholy Nagy and Walter Benjamin, saw the artist as an seismic instrument calibrated to pick up the faintest of reverberations of this newly redesigned universe, something of a canary in a coal mine. Since that time, many artists (Alvin Lucier, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nick Verstandhave, Christiana Kubisch, and Di Mainstone, for example) have taken the frequencies of the natural world as their material. As instruments to amplify the imperceptible (such as EEG devices which read brain activity) become increasingly available to artists, what can they telegraph to us? In this paper, I argue that art which routes the intangible physics of the world (from the geological to the biological) into our perceptual register helps us tune into those faint reverberations which flutter and fluctuate around and through us, reminding us of the interconnectedness of the world and what is at stake if we ignore this netted existence.