Going Digital: From Obsolete Body to Body as an Interface in New Media Art

Résumé 0

Ubiquitous computing and networking has brought about unprecedented changes in all the spheres of everyday life. Communication, access to information, cultural production, education, and even our sense of self is affected by the technological layer and its set of rules for social, cultural, and political, as well as aesthetic and artistic interrelations. Digital technology can no longer be considered a mere tool. Instead, it has become a constituent part of ourselves and the world we live in. This shift in our “going digital” may seem to have occurred smoothly, but in the past two or three decades only, we have radically reinvented and reinterpreted the existence in contemporary world precisely in relation to technological advances and breakthroughs. Through selected examples of pioneering and contemporary new media artworks which challenge the boundaries between art, science, technology, and daily life, I will focus on the issue of identity politics and the role of the body in digital interactions from Web 1.0 to state-of-the-art natural user interfaces.