Art of Our Times
Name of applicant
Tanya Ravn Ag
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 1,475,880
Year
2019
Type of grant
Reintegration Fellowships
What?
‘Time-based’ art commonly refers to art that depends on technology and has a duration. This understanding of time as considered internal to art and art’s direct experience is useful for examining the work of art as ‘object,’ separated from its surrounding milieu. Today, however, art explores many different modes of existence and in many different places. From a reversed temporal perspective focused on art’s external relations that entangle art with objects, milieus and cultures, this project examines a contingent mode of art’s existence with technological culture. The project especially examines how art engages temporal mechanisms of connective, intratemporal experience today to re-cast and problematize an avant-garde perspective on art’s potentially ‘transformative’ qualities.
Why?
As art employs the technologies of our times, it behaves, operates and produces as much as it expresses and presents. A modernist avant-garde perspective on art’s reason of existence to stimulate cultural habit as difference rather than repetition and incorporating something new feeds a current critical moment for art: it casts art as potentially transformative. Today we see that art’s conceptual expansion from object to forum also involves a transfer of art’s transformative qualities to environments of innovation and anticipation of the future. From an intratemporal perspective on art, the project problematizes a fast-growing discourse in art and technology where art is treated, funded, and appropriated as a catalyst for change, for better or for worse.
How?
Through examination of multiple art examples that significantly operate through intratemporal experience I will develop an intratemporal ontology for art. With a focus on the art’s intratemporal (intersubjective, interobjective, and intra-active) dynamics, I will examine how the art engages with technology at both abstract and molecular levels to seek out referential relations with the technical milieu in which shared experiences are established intratemporally. I will discuss how these experiences connects us to different notions of time – memories of pasts, experiences of presence, anticipation of futures. The goal is to arrive at an understanding of art’s participation in connective cultural experience in perspective of human technogenetic evolution.