Augmented Authorship

Access the live event on Zoom here.  

Participating speakers
Tega Brain, Julie Carpenter, Keiken, Lachlan Kermode (Forensic Architecture), Sam Lavigne, Lauren Lee McCarthy, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Protektorama (Johannes Paul Raether), and Nishant Shah.

Today, digital tools have shifted the relationship between work and author in the implementation of artistic strategies. The images that surround us are no longer subject to authorial control but are autonomous byproducts and evidence of our role as communicative participants in contemporary digital society. The online symposium will examine the role of current digital technologies in shaping new forms of authorship and will discuss the capabilities and limitations of this kind of augmented authorship. 

In two panels, leading artists, experts and theorists in the field will discuss methods of digital work in which the role of the author is—partly or entirely—expanded and will examine the capacity of artistic practices to investigate the mechanisms of our fragile digital society.

Hosted by Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Lucerne School of Art and Design and HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).

The online symposium is public and free and will be held in English as a Zoom webinar from 1:30 to 5:30 CEST. Links to the live event, together with the detailed programme and information are available on the website.

Let it happen: accept the image? 
The digital tools that we now have at our disposal have come to dominate everyday life in the current media landscape and have shifted the relationship between work and author in the implementation of artistic strategies. The lockdown following the COVID-19 pandemic made this all the more evident: the many images that surround us every day seem to pop up in our communication feeds without any involvement on the part of the author; they are no longer subject to authorial control, they seem to be autonomous byproducts and, at the same time, evidence of our role as communicative participants, bound up as we are—and this includes artists—in the media-dominated mechanisms of contemporary society. 

But the climate of social and technological development in which we live can actually help artists find new strategies of authorship as they examine their own attitudes towards the self-empowerment of image-making and the intentionality of their images. As agents integral to our digital society and the current crisis, artists are inextricably tied up with the images and iterations of images they produce, so they need to rethink their practices and positions. The critically reflective deployment of new technologies is also helpful in the context of critical visual studies, where the parameters of pictorial concepts of perception can be made visible and comprehensible whether they stem from the natural sciences, from the art world, or from everyday life.  

Expanding concepts of production to the point where the work, if not self-generating, can be created or at least co-created by other entities will establish new positions as we negotiate prevailing structures—images, art, society—and their limitations. 

Concepts of digital participation generate new work—and vice versa 
How does all this give rise to new definitions of authorship? What are the new capabilities and the new limitations of this kind of augmented authorship? How do these new artistic strategies differ from other, analogous conceptual positions and artistic practices? 

The digital technologies used in the creation of such works provide some guidance on how to find nuanced answers to these questions. From our communication feeds and the structures of our social media platforms, through data accumulation and blockchain technology to program-controlled design, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, today’s artists—besides virtual forms of spatial expression such as VR and AR—have at their disposal an ever-expanding range of technologies that can be developed for and applied to new forms of empowered, connected and critical authorship.