New approaches to Art and visual culture
CHArt Nineteenth Annual Conference
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CONVERGENT PRACTICES New approaches to Art and visual culture |
James Coupe, Thames Valley University, UK
Celina Jeffery, Savannah College of Art and Design, USA
From Sculptural Consciousness to the Digital Sublime: Understanding the System Aesthetic
In 1932, Leon Underwood spoke about "sculptural consciousness", which was to do with the idea that certain materials suggest particular aesthetic solutions, and in some sense have a separate life of their own. This can be seen as an underlying theme in Jack Burnham's 1968 essay "Systems Esthetics", in which he refers to the "invisible" information within technological systems as having aesthetic properties.
The unfixed, "open" nature of a system aesthetic, wherein form and content present a fundamental shift from art as object to art as experience, has given rise to a notion of a destabilized artwork which resists art historical discourse. In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to explore the question of materiality and specifically, the sculptural notion of truth to materials in regard to the "system aesthetic".
Structured as a discourse between an artist and an art historian, this paper will consider cybernetics as the "ultimate stage of sculpture", dealing with issues such as autonomy, intentionality and visual syntax.