Authors:

 Paul, Christiane.

Title:

 "Art, Science, and Communication in the Digital Age: Interspaces between the Virtual and the Actual"

Keywords:

 awareness of the culture, paradigm, intersection of science and communication
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Abstract:

 Developments in art, science and technology have a profound impact on our consciousness, sense of identity and understanding of reality. Consciousness relies on the awareness of both internal processes and external objects, states, or facts and we continuously attempt to locate and quantify our awareness through systems and representations. Artistic and scientific technologies of representation both reflect and structure the awareness of the culture we are imbedded in.

Developments in critical theory (such as poststructuralism and postmodernism) and in theoretical science (for example, quantum physics, modern psychology, chaos theory, fuzzy logic), as well as in art (digital, interactive artworks and virtual reality) suggest a paradigm shift for art practice from the object as a form of artistic truth to conditions of possibility. Scientific representations of "actuality" are reflected in the communication processes and art practices of digital culture (and vice versa).

In digital, interactive art, the disjunction and combination of visual and textual components emerges as an aesthetic. It is no longer this text or that image, but the relation, the suggestion, the space in between - the interspaces. What can the relations between spaces tell us about the meaning of difference in the digital realm, and what can those differences say about digital culture (the virtual) and the culture on this side of the screen (the actual)? Ideally, the aesthetics of digital culture can be explorations of what those relations in the virtual space of the computer are about and a communication of those explorations back to our physical space and time. Digital media offer us models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems. Digital media lend themselves best to an art of relation and to imagining topographies of relations that transgress those of the physical world.

The presentation will explore the interspaces between the virtual and the actual in the context of digital, interactive artworks that reflect the intersection of science and communication.
Paul, Christiane. paulc@inx.net Christiane Paul is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Intelligent Agent magazine, a print and online magazine that focuses on interactive media and technology in arts and education. Dr. Paul is the author of the hypertext Unreal City: A Hypertextual Guide to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (published by Eastgate Systems, Watertown, MA, 1995) and has written extensively on interactive arts, hyperfiction, and the use of hypermedia in education. She has worked as a consultant and editor in the educational field and as a curatorial consultant in the arts field and has been a judge at digital media festivals of video, film and digital media. She has presented at conferences worldwide and has taught at New York University and Fordham University, NY.