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The Fabrication of Art and Beyond: Making and Inventing in Digital Culture |
German Alfonso Nunez (The University of the Arts, London, UK)
How does artistic publications construct a field: A comparative case study between PAGE (CAS), CHArt Newsletter (CHArt) and Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil (SDJB)
In order to present a new proposal for the CHArt newsletter, this presentation wishes to survey very distinctive but yet pivotal publications within the computer art field: PAGE, the CHArt newsletter and the Suplemento Dominical. These three publications, despite being deceptively unrelated, were responsible for the dissemination of diverse computational concepts over different contexts and periods. In other words, each one was responsible for not only introducing but also shaping the way its readers understood the position of computers in the artistic and art historical fields. As independent and sometimes controversial forums of debate, these were publications not intended to foster a particular point of view but rather communities that, as history shows, were not necessarily cohesive ones. This heterogeneity however, we intent to show, was not a shortcoming of its editors or participants but instead illustrate the rich and varied nature of the field itself. Primarily a comparative historical research, this research intends to demonstrate the appropriation of computers in different historical moments: PAGE should cover the period between 1969 and 1971; CHArt will be focused between 1986 and 1989; Suplemento Dominical shall be seen between 1958 and 1961.
Finally, by demonstrating the boldness of these publications as well as its historical importance, we wish to anchor the new CHArt newsletter: now simply renamed as HATE. The new name is a nod to CHArt’s rich history. According to Will Vaughan the journal had a ‘tone of healthy irreverence in much of the reporting’ and, although CHArt was the chosen name, ‘some sympathy was felt for Tom Gretton's suggestion of HATE (History of Art in Technological Evolution)’ (1). Yet, we should also follow Vaughan’s words that ‘such irreverence did not, however, mean that the issues being debated were not taken seriously’ (1). Over this conception HATE will not, however, be a newsletter in the sense that it “charts” our members' activities or serve as a communication platform. CHArt itself has realized that aspects ‘of the newsletter's role has been in many ways superseded by the CHArt email discussion list’ (2). Hence, HATE will be a platform for presenting new and exciting research, reviews, opinionated essays, philosophies, applied software and programming languages, computational art works and, finally, discuss the history of art over the shadow of the (now) larger field of digital humanities.
Notes:
(1) http://www.chart.ac.uk/newsletter/summer2003.htm
(2) http://www.chart.ac.uk/newsletter.htmlBiography:
German Alfonso Nunez is a final year PhD student at The University of the Arts London and based at the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN). By way of Sociological theory concerned with the collective action common to social movements, his research focus at the historiographical and institutional development of Computational Art. He is also a member of the computational artist trio known as [+zero], nominated for the Brazilian PIPA prize awards in 2012. He has shown his artistic output and research in both Brazil and UK for the past eight years. Currently he is editing alongside Arno Görgen (Ulm University) and Heiner Fangerau (Cologne University) a handbook entitled “Popular Culture and Biomedicine: Knowledge in the life sciences as cultural artifacts” (forthcoming, fall 2016) and he is also a contributor to Studio International (UK).