Ancient Greece did not have a word to describe art exactly. The word “Technae“, which Plato and Aristotle use most frequently in this context, has a very broad meaning, which in Plato essentially refers to the skill based on practice, knowledge and talent. In Aristotle, the term designates an attitude that brings about insight. Technae is a central concept in art development. With Duchamp’s readymade, however, the concept of art in contemporary art increasingly loses this sense of skill.
In return, technology is created with the help of devices and machines, is becoming more and more important in art. Technology thus absorbs the role of the craftsman’s skill, and the artist as an autonomous individual becomes a machinist. Although this mechanization runs through all areas of art, as can be seen.
Understanding of art in technology
Photography creates a new visual habitus that, regardless of whether you are a photographer, photographed or observer, captures and simplifies perception. This mode, however, already developed in the Renaissance, in which the artists had to repeatedly value themselves against the partially automated depiction of perspective.
In the image producer, a man-subject, who represents the mechanical-technical components, and an ego-subject, who represents the individual creative processes, exist side by side; both components are also transmitted to the viewer.
First the analog media and their development in modern times and then the numerical techniques and the contamination of all other forms of representation that goes with them. The analog media represent reality, while the numerical media are not records of something, but events, numerical objects. As such, they are utopian – without place, diamorphic – between two forms and achronic – that is, without their own time. Essential factors that distinguish numerical media from other image forms are their functioning in real time, interactivity and generalizing hybridization. This means that they work faster, the viewer becomes more and more involved in the creation, and there is more and more mixing of forms based on mathematical-logical models. The hybridization arises between “forms and genres, between images, between the object and the subject, between the subjects, within the subject itself, between the man and the ego, between the viewer and the author, between himself and the other, between reality and virtuality ”. Sense is created using mathematical models, which leads to a decomposition to the smallest units. The works of art are based on algorithms, which in turn are based on repetition and in which creative processes arise through random interventions.
According to Couchot, “nothing can come from outside the numerical”. This line of argument is often applied to capitalism, the economy and its products, from which some of the works of art it describes cannot be separated. Unfortunately, he does not mention the theory of the work of art as a product par excellence. The artist assumes the pedagogical function of adapting society to the technical shock by allowing his experiments to try out technical situations in an aesthetic way in which the viewer will find himself sooner or later. His argument culminates in a physiological definition of art. The numerical art of the virtual worlds is intended to restore “sensory jubilation”. This “perceptual trance”, which has been increasingly lost in contemporary art, similar tocustom paint by numbers it is a good work of art it still makes sense at the same time.
