MIS-SP invited me to give the inaugural lecture for the open art history course the institution will run over the next year and a half. I took the opportunity to consider methodological parameters for situating media art within art history studies.
In proposing a reflection “from ready-made to ready-media,” I am not suggesting the possibility of drawing an evolutionary line from Duchamp to certain media art practices, such as some forms of net art, video art and actions with locative media. That would mean falling back into the linearization of history we seek to avoid here.
What matters here is to question the vectors that allow us to understand the ready-made as a map of relations produced by the internal assemblages that constitute it. By assemblage, we mean the procedures and strategies for releasing becomings—open potentialities. This means understanding it as a set of relations that actualize themselves. To do so, we must undertake the reflective movement from the visible to the articulable and vice versa. This is what constitutes knowledge.
The idea is to reflect on relations using a method that enables us to understand historical multiplicities, accepting and understanding that processes are not linear, but punctuated by intervals, reactivations and breaks between tendencies.
The full text is here as a PDF, and the slides I used in the presentation—which, it seems to me, only make sense alongside the text and its annotations—are below: