Art, Images and Network Culture
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Art, Images and Network Culture Art, Images and Network Culture (Ed.) Juan Martín Prada Translated by George Hutton Financed by: FEDER/Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities – State Research Agency, Spain / R&D Project “The Internet as a thematic area and fi eld of research in new artistic practices”. Ref: HAR2017-82825. Art, Images and Network Culture First edition: 2021 ISBN: 9788418392696 ISBN eBook: 9788418392139 Legal Deposit: SE 1926-2020 © of the text: Carlos Escaño Kepa Landa Maritorena Juan Martín Prada (Ed.) Henar Pérez Martínez Zara Rodríguez Prieto Remedios Zafra © of the translation: George Hutton © of this edition: Editorial Aula Magna, 2021. McGraw-Hill Interamericana de España S.L. editorialaulamagna.com [email protected] Printed in Spain Licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic format for non-commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. The Creative Commons license describes above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. Contents Preface Juan Martín Prada ......................................13 Towards a Theory of Social Media Art Juan Martín Prada ......................................17 1. Artistic practices and new online participatory platforms .......18 2. Social Network Art ......................................24 3. Other online relational spaces .............................29 4. Artistic practices and the ‘network-system’ ...................31 Digital identity in artistic practices on social networks. Real or invented subjectivities Henar Pérez Martínez ....................................35 1. Introduction ............................................35 2. Theoretical and ideological explanations of the globalised context ................................37 3. Mobility in the virtual space: places and non-places ...........39 1bÜ`£ ...................43 5. Modelled identities – real or invented? ......................45 6. Epilogue ...............................................52 7. References .............................................53 Three Decades of Art, Feminism and the Internet Remedios Zafra .........................................55 1. On cyberfeminist methods and creativity ....................61 2. On digitalisation as new feminisation .......................66 3. On screens and post-body subjectivity .......................69 4. On privacy and the new public-private sphere ................73 5. On activism, imaginative apprehension and feminist future .....76 6. References .............................................82 A Cartography of the Non-Place Zara Rodríguez Prieto ...................................85 1. The non-place and the city ................................89 2. Tours as transformation: the map. Random Encounters ..........93 3. Walking, sharing and conversing as practical use of space: You Get Me .............................................98 4. The non-placeÜAwkward_NYC/ Awkward Everywhere ....................................103 5. Conclusions ...........................................107 6. References ............................................109 Ecotones of Connectivity. Artistic proposals in the development of the physical/digital ecotone Kepa Landa ...........................................111 Ý£ .....................115 2. Telepresence ...........................................115 3. Augmented Reality .....................................120 4. Geolocation ...........................................124 5. Infodermis ............................................128 6. Conclusions ...........................................130 7. References ............................................132 Arts and the Commons. Practices of Cultural Expropriation in the Age of the Network Superstructure Carlos Escaño .........................................137 1. Prologue ..............................................138 2. Introduction: common artistic spaces between subjectivities ....138 3. Network Superstructure and Empire .......................139 4. Neoliberal hegemonic apparatuses: the appropriation of the common ...........................................141 4.1. 1st hegemonic apparatus: digital enclosures ..............142 4.2. 2nd hegemonic apparatus: Han’s digital panopticon. 143 4.3. 3rd hegemonic apparatus: software and ideological control . 145 5. Production, property and cultural commons in the network superstructure ............................146 5.1. Practices of cultural expropriation in the age of the network superstructure ........................148 6. In conclusion ..........................................153 7. References ............................................154 Bodies and Gazes Juan Martín Prada .....................................157 1. Ideal images ...........................................157 2. We Are Looked-at Beings ................................164 3. Reacting to the Gaze ....................................169 4. Can the dominant gaze be changed? .......................171 5. Placing ourselves in front of the camera ....................182 6. Between the cyber- ¯sjzw and the digital badaud ............189 7. Bodies on screens .......................................194 8. References ............................................199 Image-World Juan Martín Prada .....................................205 1. On Display ............................................205 2. Images of themselves ....................................212 3. The New Forms of the Spectacular .........................215 4. Appearance as an on-screen apparition .....................220 5. Images of a sea of data ..................................223 6. The Pulchritude of the Digital ............................225 7. Immediacy and Obsolescence .............................227 8. The Scattered Gaze .....................................233 9. Giving Time to the Image ................................236 10. The Snapshot ..........................................243 11. Images in the Key of the Present ..........................244 12. References ............................................247 About the authors .....................................251 Preface Juan Martín Prada The texts featured in this book have been written by members of the R&D project Internet como campo temático y de investigación en las nuevas prácticas artísticas (‘The Internet as a thematic area and Ü ¡ ` 2 £ ¤ One of the main objectives of this project has been to analyse the impact that the Internet and new connective technologies have had on the development of contemporary art over the last two decades. The aim, above all, was to determine the inherent critical potential of these new creative manifestations, including works both ‘on’ and ‘about’ the Internet, by discussing their contributions within an analysis of how subjectivity and experience are produced, i.e. Ü& £ has been to look into artistic practices that have used the Internet as Ü¢ £ Ý 1 all based on a view of digital connectivity as a key element in the articulation of the social, communicative and emotional interactions that arise in the present era. We thus continued with previous lines 13 of research into how the allegorical, subjectivising and interpretive aspects of artistic activity are always shown to have great potential for the development of alternative forms of experience, as well as Ý ¡ system has brought about. î¢ address a wide range of themes: the emergence and fundamental b` £Ü theme within artistic practice, the links between digital connectivity and the physical space (telepresence/teleproxemics, augmented reality, 1 between new artistic practices and digital activism, concentrating on two of the areas that have thus far proven to be particularly active and fertile: on the one hand, an examination of the forms of property and the digital commons, and on the other hand, the critical thematisations developed by cyberfeminist creativity. A second focal point of this research project, as addressed in the Ü £î& in general, and particularly social media, in terms of how images are created, circulated and received. We believed it was important to look into the transformations of the gaze and of the images’ modes of existence, in a context articulated by social media. This was an attempt to at least sketch out a theory about the visual, in a context increasingly conditioned by digital connectivity – such a theory is essential for developing an aesthetic, art-based theory in the post-digital era. This line of work, in any case, shares with the aforementioned one an ever-critical stance regarding the ways in which the economic colonisation of the network system’s communicative interactions take place, which today are almost always mediated or sustained by images. Finally, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the members of the research team for their work on this R&D project over the last three years, and particularly those who have participated in this publication. Likewise, I would also like to thank George Hutton 14 for all the intensive translation work that this book has demanded. &¢£î at the University of Cadiz for their support over the course of this project. I am especially grateful for the valuable collaboration with