Paper short abstract:

Desiree Foerster investigates artistic strategies of contamination of those established categories that serve the classical humanist understanding of the self, mediated by the technological interface.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates artistic strategies of contamination and abstraction of those established categories that serve the classical humanist understanding of the self, the governmental modes of law and discipline, that Michel Foucault described in the 1970s. Assuming that the conditions for the ways we think, the perspectives available, how we feel and experience, are increasingly constituted by technology, is contrasted with the aesthetic description and situatedness of the human subject in times of codification of life, synthetic biology, the encompassing availability of information, and human induced changes on planetary scale. The revelation of the technological constitution of our existence, gives view on a fragile situation in which aesthetic practices might have an epistemological effect: Technology today is more than prostheses and externalizations of bodies or minds; furthermore they implement themselves within the fundamental conditions of human experience, the being-in-the-world, and so constitute the possibilities of action, perception and feeling in a new extent. Consequently, a new sensibility of the aesthetic is being cartographied by the arts using exactly that media that are constitutive for the self-positing of the human under comprehension of heterogeneous enounciations. The interface used and produced by artists, may it be outside or inside living bodies, or inter/intra-connecting nonhuman matters, is investigated as the moment where the precarious is either being controlled, produced, made seeable, sayable, or subsurfaced. In analyzing artistic trans-/re-coding technologies and apparatuses, this paper looks at the necessary limitations and new demarcations that must be realized, in order to re-established a space for action.