Thirteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Because of the imaginative, sensitive and visionary work of many, the argument seems settled: art and technology are entangled beyond definition and contemporary art has no need of philosophical or sociocultural approaches that understand this relation. Or is it? Is this aspect of the fruitful relation an innocent one? Or we haven’t yet fully realized the probable future? Our contemporary mind has left us with nothing more than a profitable, productive yet hierarchical relationship in between visual images and technology. Nothing more than a farsighted technique to be embraced and built upon. Yet, a future of unavoidable substitution for the true meaning of words and an undistinguishable entanglement within Art, artist and “machines“ is yet to be experienced. Today we need to think and wonder: Is it that cyberspace -The areas in which habits and relations in between humans, animals and machines find themselves interacting- is now entangled with human culture as one, as a true cyberculture in which society’s needs and goals are entangled with science, technology and art? Is Ai going to acceptably -for human beings- produce human art by itself? Are the incoming organic-technologies, apparently opposites, going to be accepted as creative beings far beyond an elephant-painter and intimidatingly, for some, closer to a Cyborg-artist-avatar on the metaverse? The same curiosity that took first engineers, then artists, into manipulating computers and printers to produce complex images already in the 1960’s, feels categoric about a thread that, through algorithmic works, would erase boundaries in between art and technology.