Interlacing documentation and critical analysis of online art – online talk/discussion

Join us online (https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/82837559868) on Friday 20 October at 10.00 (UK time/11.00 CET) for a talk by Inge Hinterwaldner, “Interlacing documentation and critical analysis of online art – problem or chance? A demo with model building and assembling”. This is a joint event with the Networked Images research group at University of Amsterdam, and a chance to explore our mutual interests.

Abstract: Net art is precariously exposed to a very volatile environment. Often enough, a work does not survive the changes in software, hardware or services long enough to be confronted with the publication that was written about it. Has academia reacted – through its publication formats and strategies – to the fact that its objects of study are subject to software obsolescence? Is this reflected in the way it publishes? Based on an analysis of contemporary forms of publication that have computer-based art forms as their content, this contribution is intended as a proposal to explore new possibilities. It presents the prototype of an interactive ‘walk-in’ environment that is intended to fulfil several functions at once: to present a complex programmed work of art in a structurally detailed and comprehensible way, to develop theses and draw conclusions about them, to attract several audiences that could not be reached by text-only outputs, to investigate the acquisition of knowledge through (virtual) movement. In this walk-in article, knowledge is condensed on three levels: in the production of models, in the arrangement of the image/text structure and in the bringing together of several perspectives. Subsequently, other epistemic and heuristic concepts are compared with this proposal, such as “digital twin”, or specific approaches like “simulation as review article” or “forensic architecturing”.

Bio: In 2009 Inge Hinterwaldner received her Ph.D in art history from the University of Basel with a thesis on interactive computer simulations (The Systemic Image, German: Fink 2010, English: MIT Press 2017). Fellowships and grants allowed her to pursue her research at MECS in Lueneburg (2014), Duke University in Durham (2015), and MIT in Cambridge/MA (2016). 2016-2018 she was professor for modern and contemporary art in the Department of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Since October 2018 Hinterwaldner holds a professorship for art history at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. 2023-2024 she is Senior Fellow at Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on interactivity and temporality in the arts, computer-based art and architecture, tectonics of programmed art, image and model theory, expressiveness of fluid dynamics, and the interdependence between the arts and the sciences since the 19th century. She is PI of the research group “Coded Secrets: Artistic Interventions Hidden in the Digital Fabric” (2022-2027), dealing with net-based artworks from a variety of perspectives and disciplines: art, art history, computer science, media informatics, digital conservation, and visual cultural studies.

Image: Visualization of the impact of a functional complex in the artistic web browser “.com” by JODI.

Reading: Inge Hinterwaldner, “Digging deep to meet artistic interventions hidden in the digital fabric”, in: The Project Repository Journal (PRj), Vol. 15, October 2022, pp. 100-104. https://www.centreforthestudyof.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Hinterwaldner_EDMA-PRj15_COSE_5Pg_01_03-1.pdf