The Digital Drift in Art: from Media to the World as a Brain-Controlled Medium

With McLuhan we understood the technologies as many extension of the body; specifically the limbs and the senses. This extension affects the relative planet scale, the distribution of power and interrelations between people. Then came the digital era and its unexpected infiltration of all human activities, erasing boundaries between disciplines, fields of knowledge and categories of activities. In Arts, the pianist started to play violin and drums, the painter could sculpt and create architecture, the architect became a sculptor, and light designer and use music to give shape to monuments museums and dwellings. Artists, carmakers and surgeons may use the same tools, like robotic arms or 3D printing. The same computer host all we need to make a movie, write a book, challenge models from physics or biology. This openness between genres and practices may have affected more deeply our vision of the world and, like the scientist the artist is now at the crossroad of all the field of what humans can embrace.
In McLuhan’s model, electronic media make possible the extension of consciousness and of the central nervous system. These extensions imply potentialities that couldn’t be easily envisioned at this time.
Human kind is led by great narratives, probably, in the early ages, based on the original limitations of our understanding of the world and also descending from our ancestral survival concerns.
One of the grand narratives is made of omniscience and ubiquity, the capacity to perceive, interpret and control everything happening in the World. Converting the entire World into data and models makes possible the treatment of the information thus produced by natural or artificial brains. I call the process of converting the world into data: Sublimation. Sublimation is based on the model from physics of elements that go from solid state to gaseous state without going through the liquid state.
The second grand narrative is made of control over matter. The possibility to give shape to thoughts, controlling matter, objects and living beings, to act on the World just by thinking. This is what we do thanks to technologies like BCI, generative and evolutionist models and 3D printing. I call this process: Reification, “objectification” based, but not exclusively on Marx-Engels concept of commodity fetishism (Lukacs, 1927).
Bothe grand narratives, sublimation and reification are complementary to each other. This promethean project seems to have been, in the three monotheist religions, exemplified in the figure of God.
I will illustrate my talk with works created in collaboration with Tobias Klein, during the past two years, around the concept of Brain Factory.