Person

Doctoral project: Resolutions: The aesthetics and politics of information in contemporary art

The past decade of contemporary art has seen an abundance of research- and data-based art, with artists increasingly using scientific modes of inquiry, presenting bodies of data, and using informational technologies as a medium. I argue that this tendency is a product of crises and insecurities around knowledge, but is also an aesthetic output of material conditions for art making, as artists today often depend on academic institutions or other knowledge economies for funding and exposure. Within this paradigm of art-making, art is evaluated as knowledge output, or as information in itself. Drawing parallels to particular moments within Conceptual art of the early 1970s, the dissertation focuses on the artist group Forensic Architecture as a definitive example of contemporary informational aesthetics.