Absurdism
Published on December 14th, 2024
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Much of digital media art is absurd. Or, to put it another way, there is something about digitality itself that has a haunting sense of absurdity.
Much of digital media art is absurd. Or, to put it another way, there is something about digitality itself that has a haunting sense of absurdity. As a starting point, we can say that over the last few centuries Western culture repeatedly found technology, from mechanisms to automation, somewhat absurd. It is also the case that modernity itself, in the way it operates through the reflexive distance of rationality and its ruptures, has been perceived as headless, or rather soulless, and thus inclined towards the absurd. Consequently, art of the modern day and one that has seriously engaged technological media has inescapably had an element of absurdity about it or in any case had to deal with absurdism even if to try to overcome it completely. In what follows, we focus on digital media absurdity and draw upon artworks to saturate the notion of absurdism with a density that does justice to digital media art. Throughout this article, we will be giving pointers to a possible definition of digital media art absurdism, or alternatively the absurdity of digital art.
Image credit: Alexej Shulgin, FuFme.Inc, GenitalDrive mode, 1999
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