Postdigital, in artistic practice, is a term that describes works of art and theory that are more concerned with being human than with being digital, similar to the concept of "undigital" introduced in 1995, where technology and society advances beyond digital limitations to achieve a totally fluid multimediated reality that is free from artefacts of digital computation (quantization noise, pixelation, etc.). The postdigital is concerned with our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms.
Theory According to Giorgio Agamben (2002), the postdigital is a paradigm that (as with post-humanism) does not aim to describe a life after digital, but rather, attempts to describe the present-day opportunity to explore the consequences of the digital and of the computer age. While the computer age has enhanced human capacity with inviting and uncanny prosthetics, the postdigital provides a paradigm with which it is possible to examine and understand this enhancement. In The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age, Mel Alexenberg defines "postdigital art" as artworks that address the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between high tech and high touch experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory, and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalization, between autoethnography and community narrative, and between web-enabled peer-produced wikiart and artworks created with alternative media through participation, interaction, and collaboration in which the role of the artist is redefined, and between tactile art and NFTs. Mel Alexenberg proposes that a postdigital age is defined in Wired by MIT Media Center director Nicholas Negroponte: "Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only in its absence, not by its presence. Face it - the Digital Revolution is over"
Music Kim Cascone uses the term in his article The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. He begins the article with a quotation from MIT Media Lab cyberpundit Nicholas Negroponte: "The digital revolution is over." Cascone goes on to describe what he sees as a 'post-digital' line of flight in the music also commonly known as glitch or microsound music, observing that 'with electronic commerce now a natural part of the business fabric of the Western world and Hollywood cranking out digital fluff by the gigabyte, the medium of digital technology holds less fascination for composers in and of itself.' Japanese theorist, Ryota Matsumoto adapts the postdigital discourse of Kim Cascone to their ingenious culture and construes Japanese social structure as the postdigital after the collapse of capitalist accumulation and the subsequent integration of their tradition with the pharmacology of digital age. In Art after Technology, Maurice Benayoun lists possible tracks for "postdigital" art considering that the digital flooding has altered the entire social, economical, artistic landscape, and the artist posture will move in ways that try to escape the technological realm without being able to completely discard it. From lowtech to biotech and critical fusion - critical intrusion of fiction inside reality – new forms of art emerge from the digital era.
See also Circuit bending Databending Digital Art Glitch New Aesthetic New media art
References
Further reading Alexenberg, Mel, (2019), Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media. Nashville, Tennessee: HarperCollins; ISBN 978-1-5955-5831-2. Alexenberg, Mel, (2011), The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press; ISBN 978-1-84150-377-6. Alexenberg, Mel, ed. (2008), Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 344 pp. ISBN 978-1-84150-191-8. (postdigital chapters by Roy Ascott, Stephen Wilson, Eduardo Kac, and others). Ascott, R. (2003), Telematic Embrace. (E.Shaken, ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21803-5. Barreto, R. and Perissinotto, P. (2002), The Culture of Immanence, in Internet Art. Ricardo Barreto e Paula Perissinotto (orgs.). São Paulo, IMESP. ISBN 85-7060-038-0. Benayoun, M. (2008), Art after Technology abstract of the text written by Maurice Benayoun in Technology Review - French edition, N°7 June–July 2008, MIT, ISSN 1957-1380. Full text in English. Benayoun, M., The Dump, 207 Hypotheses for Committing Art, bilingual (English/French), Fyp éditions, France, July 2011, ISBN 978-2-916571-64-5. Berry, D. M. (2014) Critical Theory and the Digital, New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1441166395. Berry, D. M. and Dieter (2015) Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, London: Palgrave. ISBN 978-1137437198. Birnbaum, D and Kuo (2008) More than Real: Art in the Digital Age, 2018 Verbier Art Summit. London: Koenig Books. ISBN 978-3-96098-380-4. Bolognini, M. (2008), Postdigitale, Rome: Carocci. ISBN 978-88-430-4739-0. Ferguson, J., & Brown, A. R. (2016). "Fostering a post-digital avant-garde: Research-led teaching of music technology". Organised Sound, 21(2), 127–137. Ferreira, P. (2024), Audiovisual Disruption: Post-Digital Aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Arts, Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8376-7416-3. Pepperell, R. and Punt, M. (2000), The Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology and Desire, Intellect Books, Bristol, UK, 182 pp. Toshiko, Saneoki. (2019). Postigital Theory of Giorgio Agamben, Ryota Matsumoto, Kim Cascone, Japanese Art and Design. Hachimato, Tokyo Institute of Art, Tokyo, Japan. Toshimo, Saniev. (2019). “Postdigital, Giorgio Agamben, Ryota Matsumoto” Tokyo University Press Media Research Journal Japanese Text. Wilson, S. (2003), Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. ISBN 0-262-23209-X.
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