[eccr] Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series

>Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series
>Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
>Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland
>
>
>Tuesday 12 October, 2004
>4.30-5.30pm, Venue: C102
>
>Dr. Daniel Jewesbury <(d.jewesbury /at/ ulster.ac.uk)>
>Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
>
>Abstract
>
>"The Affects of Reality: Dialectical Aesthetics and Digital Media"
>
>(i)
>Question: Can art make a fairer, more just society?
>The question, often voiced, betrays an angst on the part of the 
>questioner: why *doesn't* art appear to have the capacity to bring about 
>real social transformation? What should I, as an artist, be doing to 
>address this? *How can I make myself feel less guilty about my art?*
>
>Talk about "the social role of art" is necessarily positioned somewhere 
>between two poles: one dictating that art must be capable of effecting 
>direct social change or have clear social use, the other arguing that it 
>must "transcend" the merely material. Neither position is viable. If one 
>cannot justify art *in its own terms*, one falls back on instrumentalisms 
>(couched in terms of dimly-defined "communities" or "publics") in order to 
>find a worth presumed not to be immanent in the work itself. 
>Instrumentalised approaches to art lead to patronising, paternalistic 
>assumptions about its "benevolence", and produce an "art" devoid of any 
>aesthetic merit whatsoever (however that is accounted for).
>
>(ii)
>This paper gives an account of the "dialectical aesthetic", through which 
>it argues a case for art as a *non-instrumental* "good". Appropriating the 
>late work of Gyargy Luk!cs (only available, in English, through secondary 
>sources), and combining it with other more recent contributions, I 
>theorise an *ethical aesthetic*, in which form, content and context 
>inflect and inform one another, a critical realism beyond mere naturalism, 
>with which to *re-envisage* (rather than merely represent) the world, and 
>through which to develop "consciousness" of the contradictory conditions 
>of that world.
>
>The paper then asks whether the theorisation of a distinctive "digital 
>aesthetics" is desirable, or even tenable. By introducing certain formal 
>characteristics and social contexts of digital media (hypertext and 
>hyperlinks, globalisation, and so on) into the dialectical aesthetic, it 
>is demonstrated that the "new" media can never be adequately theorised in 
>"novel" technology-centered conceptualisations.
>
>
>Bio
>
>Dr Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer based in Belfast, and a 
>Research Associate in Digital Cultures at the Centre for Media Research, 
>University of Ulster. He completed his PhD at the Media Studies department 
>of the University of Ulster in 2001, writing on potential theoretical 
>relations between hybridity and non-linear narrative media. It was the 
>first piece of part-practical research undertaken in the department, with 
>practical outcomes comprising a website and digital video installation 
>based around the dislocated site of London Bridge, in Arizona.
>
>Exhibitions include Manifesta3, Ljubljana (2000), Urban Control, Graz 
>(2001) and various others across Europe and North America. He won the 
>Victor Treacy Award at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 2001. Recent 
>public art projects include Exchange (2003), a radio station and short 
>film produced with a diverse group of immigrants in Carlow, Ireland 
>(including asylum-seekers, refugees and migrant workers). One to Ten 
>(2002) was produced in collaboration with the Transport & General Workers' 
>Union, Flax Art Studios and the Routes Public Art Project; it used 
>interviews with bus workers and videos of bus journeys around Belfast to 
>explore the rapidly changing character of the city as it undergoes 
>redevelopment and regeneration. The work was presented in cinemas across 
>the city. He is currently engaged on two major projects: Lisburn Road 
>Archive, a photographic documentation of the middle-class in a Belfast 
>suburb commissioned by Belfast Exposed Photography (in collaboration with 
>Ursula Burke); and Bhowani Junction, a major film installation project (in 
>collaboration with sound artist Paul Moore).
>The first part of the Bhowani project, the artist's book Of Lives Between 
>Lines, is published by Book Works. Jewesbury is a co-director of 
>Cinilingus, an independent film-screening organisation in Belfast, and 
>co-editor of Variant magazine (http://www.variant.org.uk).
>
>
>
>--
>Ned Rossiter
>Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media)
>Centre for Media Research
>University of Ulster
>Cromore Road
>Coleraine
>Northern Ireland
>BT56 1SA
>
>tel. +44 (0)28 7032 3275
>fax. +44 (0)28 7032 4964
>email: (n.rossiter /at/ ulster.ac.uk)

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