15-20 Minute Paper
Ashley Scarlett
PhD Candidate
University of Toronto
Biography
Originally from Edmonton, Ashley is currently attending the University of Toronto as a PhD Candidate at the iSchool. Working in close collaboration with Semaphore, a U of T based New Media maker and research cluster, Ashley’s work maps out and explores informational materiality as it is expressed in contemporary new media art.
Abstract
While technological materials are typically incorporated in ways that are constitutive of new media works, these technologies and their potential uses are always evolving. This has lead not only to an ever-fleeting articulation of new (and newer) media assemblages, but also, as technologies have become informational, and therefore increasingly algorithmic and affective (Hansen 2006; Thrift 2005; Manovich 2003), the very materiality of new media materials has come into question. Questioning the materials of new media art will not only provide a richer understanding of the discipline but it also has the potential to provide critical new insight into the intersection of information and materiality.
Building on philosophical intersections of information and matter, and drawing upon interviews and studio visits conducted with new media artists as part of my doctoral research, this paper reveals and explores the potential role that new media materials might play in overcoming the conceptual aporias present within broader discourses on informational materiality. It not only tentatively introduces novel (and grounded) philosophical meditations, with significant implications for the future of fields such as information and technology studies and “new materialisms,” but it also seeks to further legitimize art and making practices as rich sites for meaningful research with novel ends.