With Don Foresta and Edwige Armand
Tuesday 24 April 3:30PM Soderberg Lecture Hall, 116 Jenness Hall
Abstract: Why art is linked to the survival of humans in general. We start from an ancestral point of view and end with a look at the world today. The roots of art are to be found very far in the past of our species, hundreds of thousands of years, long before homo sapiens. We develop the idea that art is a product of instinct in the sense proposed by Bergson, that it is linked to the creation of perceptions essential for the evolution of our representations. Art in its earliest expression is linked to the premise of symbolic thought and the found object. Creativity comes from a crisis in perception, in the sudden incomprehension of the outside world and is a temporary solution to resolve these crises. Instinct is then mobilized to find an explanation, bringing in new information and thereby causing a shift in perception. In the beginning of life, cognition, perception, imagination, sensations are of the order of the unlimited incomplete. However, culture shapes intuition before actualization is arrived at. Creativity thereafter serves as a safeguard against the perceptual, cognitive normalization of the human being, creating disorder in the secure perceptual certainty that science and technology contribute to by inserting tools between us and the outside world to understand it. Technology, itself an expression of creativity, is our invented interface with the exterior, allowing us to better control it which, in turn, influences our perception of this exterior. By giving that technology a symbolic meaning, we make it an integral part of our culture and close the circle, only to start again. Much experimentation and artistic production of the 20th century was an exploration of interactivity. The notion of connection was and is a leitmotiv in current artistic creation that brings us to a kind of neo-animism, making it a new paradigm for the 21st century. The rhizomic idea – the network paradigm – better defines the relationship between human beings than the separate and replaceable parts of the mechanical era of the first renaissance.
About the Presenters:
Don Foresta is a research artist and theoretician in art using new technologies as creative tools and a retired professor of art and technology and art and science in France and the UK. He is a specialist in art and science. He is currently the international coordinator of the MARCEL network <www.mmmarcel.org>, a permanent, high bandwidth network for artistic, educational and cultural experimentation. Foresta began building the MARCEL network while artist/professor at the National Studio of Contemporary Art, Le Fresnoy, Lille France and inaugurated MARCEL during a fellowship at the Wimbledon College of Art in London in 2001. Foresta is a graduate of the University of Buffalo, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Sorbonne. Having both US and French nationalities, Foresta was named “Chevalier” of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture for having created the first department of video art in Europe.
Edwige Armand is Attaché Temporaire d’Enseignement et de Recherche in the department of Plastic Arts and Design at the Université Toulouse, after recently completing her doctorate in plastic arts at Toulouse. Her research focuses on how both body and world serve as cultural and artistic scenes of writing and as sites of interactivity, especially in relation to the transversality of artificial life, genetics and digital arts. Since 2009, Armand’s artwork has been exhibited throughout France and in NYC.
Free and Open to the Public. For more information, contact mscott@maine.edu.
Support by the McGillicuddy Humanities Center, UM Franco-American Program, the UMaine Honors College, and ASAP Media Service.