Signs and Wonders: Art & Culture in the Digital Age

by Teixeira Coelho

Overview

Technology changes culture in all possible ways. In the external world and in our internal world, our feelings, our emotions, our judgment. And now there is a radical technology that is generating radical changes. When the powder was invented, opening the doors to fire arms, it must have been astounding, people may have felt at the brink of a catastrophe. The same with the steam machines being used in ships and trains. Speed was both frightening and exhilarating. And with the internal combustion engine there came almost limitless mobility — and it was huge and liberating. Current technology is even more impressive — because it has no physical bounds: it happens also inside our minds and bodies. This is immense — and all that is immense, Sophocles noted, may bring about a curse… Museums and art itself will change and are changing, the meaning of ethics is different from what it was a few decades ago, psychological issues are being addressed with the manipulation of images. It is a new world, it remains to be seen whether it is brave...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9786555191172
Publisher:	Iluminuras
Publication date:	09/03/2021
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Teixeira Coelho is a Professor Emeritus at São Paulo University (Brazil) where he coordinates a study group on Computational Cultures and Humanities at the Institute of Advanced Studies. He has published a number of books on art, culture and cultural policy besides being a novelist (he won a Telecom Award for Literature in Portuguese). A former director of the internationally known Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo and MASP- São Paulo Art Museum, he has been invited to different universities all over the world.

Table of Contents

Contents 1. The expansion of the digital domain, 11 History as a game, 13 Expanded experience and dimensionless experience, 18 Personal history as a game, 26 Game is old days, the thing now is direct access to the brain, 29 Instead of the word that says, the image that shows, 36 An unscientific age or an age in excess of science, 38 Humanity and Humanities, one and the same risk, 49 Computational subject, soul and mind, 51 2. Artificial Intelligence, artificial ethics, 55 The machine may be moral; asking what is moral may not be, 57 The wrong question, 61 Ethics from the past and ethics for the future, 62 Ethics, action and being, 66 Ethics or habit, 68 Roles for automated AI and automated ethics, 71 Advantages of an artificial ethics, 78 Values, determinism, probabilities and statistics, 80 Instability and the Zeitgeist, 84 3. Divine madness and the machine, 87 Technology changes culture. And art, 89 Technology and system breakdown, 92 Residual technology, 97 The eye, the lens, the number, 104 The art vectors, before…, 108 …and now, in the Age of eArt, 114 Art merges with life — and vanishes , 124 An art for artists only, 136 Technological disruption + a major natural accident, 141 Between the 17th and the 21st centuries, mediation, invention and imposture, 149 The Olympus of appearances, 150 4. Iconic images are fading away, 155 The reality of the object of and the subject for the sign, 167 Afterword In time, 181 … although there may be no time left, 183 Terms, concepts, ideas, allusions, 201 Images, 209 Copyright © Teixeira Coelho218