reprise

By sarahendren

Jun 30, 2014

I read through some of the series of essays that set up the original mission of Abler, and I was struck again by the so-much-with-so-little that’s packed into this paragraph by Mitchell Whitelaw. It has staying power for describing the investigative or experimental or highly situated practices that can proceed from the arts, but also critical engineering, interrogative design, and much more. Worth reposting as a trenchant summary.

New media art self-consciously reworks technology into culture, and rereads technology as culture. What’s more, it does so in a concrete, applied way; it manipulates the technology itself, with a nonindustrial latitude that admits misapplication and adaptation, rewiring and hacking, pseudofunctionality and accident. New media art also fractures that technocultural material into millions of heterogeneous interests and agendas, specific investigations, aesthetics, approaches, and projects.

—Mitchell Whitelaw, in his Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life

Image: James Bridle’s Drone Shadow.