One of the merits of the artists honored in the eighth edition of the Sergio Motta Art & Technology Award is their ability to resist the charms of techno-Parnassianism—technology for technology’s sake. This is one of the most common problems in creation with digital media.
The undeniable spread and welcome improvement and falling cost of technological programs and devices have been accompanied not only by new spheres of experimentation but also by a commoditization of marketing discourse. This commoditization shows the success of the visual rhetorics of what I have been calling “the age of cuddly capitalism”: a capitalism in which everything sounds onomatopoeic, happy, and rounded, like the logos and names of Web 2.0’s main social networks.
Countering this tendency is an interesting technophagic strand, or technological anthropophagy, marked by the critical and creative use of media. This strand may be the first outline of a new aesthetic practice that operates by combining high- and low-tech devices, circuit bending, equipment remodeling, and the integration of media of different ages.
This is not another retro slip, expressing merely cosmetic notions of recycling old equipment, which set the tone for industries producing consumer goods from refrigerators to cars.
As critic T. J. Clark has already observed, this kind of commodity styled after the past serves only to “invent a history, a lost time of intimacy and stability that everyone claims to remember but no one had.” The production of the artists selected for this eighth edition of the Sergio Motta Award—particularly those in the “early career” category—does not engage with this sanitized “revival.”
More promisingly, it seems to incorporate some of Brazilian art’s anthropophagic traditions—including those of earlier media artists—to question the limits of the interface, tactical strategies, sharing practices, and the challenges of the relations between art and science.
Curatorial statement for the eighth Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award.