[spectre] Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series
Ned Rossiter
n.rossiter at ulster.ac.uk
Fri Oct 8 13:41:01 CEST 2004
Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series
Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland
Tuesday 12 October, 2004
4.30-5.30pm, Venue: C102
Dr. Daniel Jewesbury <d.jewesbury at ulster.ac.uk>
Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
Abstract
"The Affects of Reality: Dialectical Aesthetics and Digital Media"
(i)
Question: Can art make a fairer, more just society?
The question, often voiced, betrays an angst on the part of the
questioner: why *doesn't* art appear to have the capacity to bring
about real social transformation? What should I, as an artist, be doing
to address this? *How can I make myself feel less guilty about my art?*
Talk about "the social role of art" is necessarily positioned somewhere
between two poles: one dictating that art must be capable of effecting
direct social change or have clear social use, the other arguing that
it must "transcend" the merely material. Neither position is viable. If
one cannot justify art *in its own terms*, one falls back on
instrumentalisms (couched in terms of dimly-defined "communities" or
"publics") in order to find a worth presumed not to be immanent in the
work itself. Instrumentalised approaches to art lead to patronising,
paternalistic assumptions about its "benevolence", and produce an "art"
devoid of any aesthetic merit whatsoever (however that is accounted
for).
(ii)
This paper gives an account of the "dialectical aesthetic", through
which it argues a case for art as a *non-instrumental* "good".
Appropriating the late work of Gyšrgy Luk‡cs (only available, in
English, through secondary sources), and combining it with other more
recent contributions, I theorise an *ethical aesthetic*, in which form,
content and context inflect and inform one another, a critical realism
beyond mere naturalism, with which to *re-envisage* (rather than merely
represent) the world, and through which to develop "consciousness" of
the contradictory conditions of that world.
The paper then asks whether the theorisation of a distinctive "digital
aesthetics" is desirable, or even tenable. By introducing certain
formal characteristics and social contexts of digital media (hypertext
and hyperlinks, globalisation, and so on) into the dialectical
aesthetic, it is demonstrated that the "new" media can never be
adequately theorised in "novel" technology-centered conceptualisations.
Bio
Dr Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer based in Belfast, and a
Research Associate in Digital Cultures at the Centre for Media
Research, University of Ulster. He completed his PhD at the Media
Studies department of the University of Ulster in 2001, writing on
potential theoretical relations between hybridity and non-linear
narrative media. It was the first piece of part-practical research
undertaken in the department, with practical outcomes comprising a
website and digital video installation based around the dislocated site
of London Bridge, in Arizona.
Exhibitions include Manifesta3, Ljubljana (2000), Urban Control, Graz
(2001) and various others across Europe and North America. He won the
Victor Treacy Award at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 2001. Recent
public art projects include Exchange (2003), a radio station and short
film produced with a diverse group of immigrants in Carlow, Ireland
(including asylum-seekers, refugees and migrant workers). One to Ten
(2002) was produced in collaboration with the Transport & General
Workers' Union, Flax Art Studios and the Routes Public Art Project; it
used interviews with bus workers and videos of bus journeys around
Belfast to explore the rapidly changing character of the city as it
undergoes redevelopment and regeneration. The work was presented in
cinemas across the city. He is currently engaged on two major projects:
Lisburn Road Archive, a photographic documentation of the middle-class
in a Belfast suburb commissioned by Belfast Exposed Photography (in
collaboration with Ursula Burke); and Bhowani Junction, a major film
installation project (in collaboration with sound artist Paul Moore).
The first part of the Bhowani project, the artist's book Of Lives
Between Lines, is published by Book Works. Jewesbury is a co-director
of Cinilingus, an independent film-screening organisation in Belfast,
and co-editor of Variant magazine (http://www.variant.org.uk).
--
Ned Rossiter
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media)
Centre for Media Research
University of Ulster
Cromore Road
Coleraine
Northern Ireland
BT56 1SA
tel. +44 (0)28 7032 3275
fax. +44 (0)28 7032 4964
email: n.rossiter at ulster.ac.uk
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