Art, Images and Network Culture

Abstract

This book is edited by Juan Martín Prada, director of the R&D project entitled Internet as a thematic and research field in new artistic practices, coordinated by the University of Cádiz (2018-2020). The analysis of the impact that the Internet and new connectivity technologies in general have had on the development of contemporary art over the last two decades has been one of the main objectives of this project. Above all, the aim was to determine the critical potentials inherent in the new creative manifestations both "of" the network and "about" the network, elucidating their contributions to the analysis of the processes of production of subjectivity and experience that characterise network culture. One of the central axes of this study was therefore to address the study of artistic practices that have either made the Internet their specific context of action, or simply their main field or subject of reflection. All of these creative manifestations are based on a consideration of digital connectivity as a key element in the articulation of the social, communicative and affective interactions of our time. We thus continued previous research on how the allegorical, subjectivising and interpretative aspects of artistic activity are always loaded with potential for the development of alternative forms of experience and critical reflection on the habits induced by the network-system. Within the framework of this set of intentions, different texts are included here that deal with a wide range of topics: the emergence and fundamental aspects of "social media art", the question of online identity as a specific theme of artistic practices, the relations between digital connectivity and physical space (telepresence/teleproxemic, augmented reality, geolocation, etc.). The relations between new artistic practices and digital activism also find ample space in this publication, around two of the paths that have been shown to be most active and fertile so far: on the one hand, the study of forms of ownership and the digital commons; on the other, the critical thematisations developed by cyberfeminist creativity. A second central axis of this research project, to which we dedicate the last part of this book, has been centred on the analysis of the effects that the Internet in general and social media in particular, are having on the practices of creation, circulation and reception of images. We considered it essential to study the transformations of the gaze and the modes of existence of images in a context articulated by the social media. It was therefore a question of outlining, at least, a theory of the visual in a context increasingly conditioned by digital connectivity, essential for the development of an aesthetic theory and art in the post-digital era. A path of work that, in any case, shares with the aforementioned a critical stance on the ways in which the economic colonisation of communicative interactions in the network-system takes place, today almost always mediatised or sustained by images.