About

Digital Art Research Group

Digital technologies have shaped utopian and dystopian visions of global communication, financialisation, and surveillance, and have expanded our forms of perception. These developments have not only captured the imagination of artists, but also motivated them to become agents in the digitized world. Working across video and online platforms, digital artists have critically commented on themes such as privacy, civil liberties, cultural ownership, the economy and individual agency; at the same time, many have themselves become forerunners in the fields of science, technology, and activism. These practices have often had an impact outside the artistic sphere, cutting across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

The focus of this research group is therefore to investigate the role that digital art can play in helping us to understand, critique, and shape the impact of digital technologies on contemporary society. What, if anything, makes the practices in question recognisably artistic? How are established aesthetic concepts challenged when, for example, the work of financial activists is exhibited at contemporary art biennales, or when human rights tribunals rely on digital image analysis provided by architects and filmmakers? This group’s interest in the relationship between digital art and the spheres of science, technology and aesthetics will allow us to deepen our understanding of these processes via situated case studies, and to do so within an interdisciplinary context. Each term will be organised around two invited talks and two reading sessions.

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The Theme for Michaelmas Term is: Digital Art and Financialisation

Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk