This collection of essays and projects outlines a practice that challenges the World and how it could be through a kind of future-making, and/or other world making by creating alternate realties as artworks that are simultaneously ontological propositions. In simplified terms the concept of techné is concerned with the art and craft of making - in particular, a kind of practice that embodies the enactment of theoretical approach that helps determine the significance of the work, how it was made, and why. This volume focuses on the involvement of the techné of worldmaking in participatory art practice. Such practice can be found in all areas of art, particularly: interactive, generative, and prosthetic art, architecture, and music practices that depend for their vitality and development on the participation of their observers.
Organized into four sections po(i)etic, machinic, cybernetic, and ethic Worldmaking as Techné explores the aesthetics, systems, methods, and ontological underpinnings of a worldmaking based practice. Each section contains historical texts alongside new texts, each carefully chosen to highlight the integration of theory and practice in approach. While the foundation of this worldmaking is deeply philosophical, there is a need to connect this work to the World of our everyday experience. As we contemplate issues of why we might want to make a world, we are confronted with the responsibilities of making the world as well.
About the Author
Alberto de Campo is a composer and performer and teaches Generative Art/Computational Art at the University for the Arts, Berlin. Mark-David Hosale is a media artist and composer and Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Fine Arts Faculty of York University, Toronto. Sana Murrani is an experimental architect and Lecturer in Architecture at Plymouth University (UK). Contributors: Philip Beesley, Laura Beloff, Peter Blasser, James Coupe, Alberto de Campo, Heinz von Foerster, Felix Guattari, Mark-David Hosale, Kathrine Elizabeth Johansson, Sang Lee, Sana Murrani, Marcos Novak, Dan Overholt, Andrew Pickering, Esben Poulsen, Chris Salter, Nicolas Schöffer, Edward Shanken, Graham Wakefield. Foreword by Roy Ascott.
