Cristina Moraru
George Enescu National University of Arts, Romania
The Aesthetic Machine. Art and Technology
in Post-Humanist Times
We live as passengers of a long series of post-modern worlds: post-modernity, post-politics, post-Marxism, post-feminism, post-colonialism, and more recently post-cinema, post-humanism, and we constantly reposition our human condition. In the current biogenetic period of the Anthropocene, we are confronted with what theorists call the "post-human condition", in short, a positioning of man in accordance with a new way of living, structured by technology, whose functioning regimes were inoculated in the human area by hijacking everything that once constituted the grammar of 'being', that unique and intangible system of existential categories which belong to a Kantian aesthetics.
Consequently, post-humanistic aesthetics will dissociate itself from the abusive modern decree that everything must be approached from Anthropos. In particular, the Kantian classical interpretation of purely human beauty, anchored in rationality and taste judgment, will make place for an empirical vision, emphasizing both, the vital powers of man, and forces of the natural order or chaos. In this context, it can be considered that, although it has no understanding, a stone, a cloud, a tree have a form of perception, that opens the possibility of a certain type of experience.
And this is what activates the aesthetic machine. The bases had been put in place a long time ago with the advent of the Dadaist Celibate Machines (Duchamp, The Great Glass, 1923), the disjunction between machine and functionality being subsequently and definitively marked by the neo-avant-garde art of the mid-twentieth century. In contemporaneity, a whole array of artists populate the new paradigm: from conceptual artists to musicians-performers such as Grace Jones, with its complex role play simultaneously targeting the other, the other animal, the other non-human and the other technology (see here Corporate Cannibal symbol of the digital, post-cinematic epoch).
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Cristina Moraru is an art theoretician, curator and editor from Iaşi, Romania. She has a PhD in Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences at the "Al. I. Cuza" University, Iaşi, Romania and she is teaching seminars on Aesthetics theories and Critical theories of art interpretation at "George Enescu" National University of the Arts (UNAGE) Iaşi. She is the editor of the volumes published by the Research Center of UNAGE and (co)editor of the academic journal Studies in Visual Arts and Communication. She is a founding member of The Centre for Contemporary Photography (C_F_C) Iaşi, and she participated in international research programs at the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies", Freie Universität Berlin, at the National Center of Competence in Research of the University of Basel, at the Salzburg International SAFA, at the East European Performing Arts Platform Lublin, and other independent institutions. She published articles in academic journals and participated in conferences organized by national and international universities.