Image, (con)text and technological performativity. Joan Jonas, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Antoni Muntadas.

Abstract

The main theme exposed in this article is articulated on the centrality that the new media have assumed in the academic research of contemporary art theory. The case studies analyzed derive from a direct knowledge of the experiments conducted at the Comparative Media Studies, the Media Lab and the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the state-of-the-art institutions on contemporary debate that sees new media and artistic creativity relating in a single field of research. Some of the visual artists examined here were members of the MIT community, contributing not only to the prestige of the institution, but also to a paradigm shift in the method by which a work of art is created, designed and perceived. Joan Jonas, New York artist and lecturer emeritus at ACT, has conducted avant-garde visual experiments aimed at combining the relationship between language and image, always using new performatic and digital aesthetics with which to narrate her personal visions. The artists Krzysztof Wodiczko and Antoni Muntadas, for over forty years at ACT have dedicated part of their research to the analysis of the interrelation between technology, artistic languages and social communication. Their artistic production stems from the use of new technologies that make it possible to overlap between literary and visual codes, thus proposing an alternative to the long tradition that separates the arts relegating them to autonomous practices.