Person

Doctoral project: Resolutions: The political aesthetics of information in contemporary art

The past decade of contemporary art has seen an abundance of information-based art, with artists increasingly using scientific modes of inquiry, presenting bodies of data, and using informational and computational technologies in their artworks. I argue that this tendency produces an aesthetic paradigm in art: informational aesthetics. I locate this paradigm within the material conditions of contemporary art's "knowledge economy", wherein artists are conditioned as knowledge workers, and art is evaluated as a knowledge process, as information in itself.

Taking the critical stance that access to information and knowledge inscribes hierarchies in the artworld and thus has consequences for artistic autonomy, I compare how selected contemporary artists relate to and utilize technologies and aesthetics of information, and how and where this situates them within these hierarchies.