New interfaces 02 / Jana Horáková: Art of new media as gestural art

MEDIUM Gallery, Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18, Bratislava

Jana Horáková's lecture will present the General Theory of Gestures (Flusser) as a productive theoretical framework for the analysis of new media art, which is defined as various scores and recordings of ephemeral, interactive events involving human and non-human players (Latour). Jana Horáková proposes to turn the attention in the debate about new media art from the description of the technical parameters of the media to the performative qualities of interactive art and to the search for "movements" and "gestures" in the global human-machine network. Flusser's categories of exploring interactivity from a dualistic perspective of control vs. freedoms will be combined with Bachelard's aesthetics of elements, specifically the poetics of water and air, which allow us to think about interactivity through the category of "intensity" (Deleuze). The aim of the lecture is to show how the performative concept of interactive art not only contributes to the refinement of the theoretical discourse that surrounds it, but also leads to the search for more sustainable strategies for the preservation of digital art as part of the cultural heritage of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jana Horáková works as an associate professor at the Institute of Musicology at Masaryk University and devotes her extensive research work to new media. She completed internships at MIT, Ars Electronica Center and Universität der Künste Berlin.

The interdisciplinary lecture series New Interfaces 02 in the dramaturgy of the head of the MEDIUM Gallery, Miroslava Urbanová, focuses on topics affecting our conditions of cognition in the interfaces of constantly updating technologies and in contrast to the desire for an authentic, visceral experience of the escaping here and now. It focuses primarily on the investigation and reflection of different types of spaces, their meanings, transformations, cohabitation within spaces: public space, digital spaces, topoi, spaces that remain seemingly untouched by people, or are totally and irreversibly transformed. The aim of the lectures is to provide a comprehensible approach to aspects of our lived online present in circles that reflect the posthumanist discourse, transformations in the perception of time and temporality, new artistic interfaces such as game art. At the same time, the lectures reflect the themes that appear in the dramaturgy of the exhibition plan of the gallery (and the reading club for VŠVU students What's the Point?), which carries a certain line of tension between the subject reacting to the new interfaces of technological progress, its effects on our perception of living and virtual reality and escape to the corporeality of experience.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.