A talk with Maurice Benayoun
Description
Media art practice may look like the exploration of a Terra Incognita. Finding new paths, building roads and rails, discovering new minerals, new solutions, and the natives and their fantastic capacity for adaptation.
Should we terraform this territory to make it look like what we knew? Should we apply skeuomorphism to feel at home? Should we learn from or eradicate the natives? We start building maps slowly, and the land constantly evolves. If this Terra Incognita is the ever-changing technocentric world we live in, we may have to get used to it.
The role of the artist, often dubbed as the avant-garde, the pioneer, sticking to the military metaphor is daring. Taking the risk of being misunderstood and ostracised, then, for the lucky ones, pointing a flashlight to shed light on the dark. As with CGI, VR, AR, NFT, EEG, UX, and AI, new mediums have become as enigmatic as their acronyms. Some artists, pioneers of the genre, see glittering and colorful gems in their findings; others try to figure out how they will change the society and world we live in. The unknown territories of emerging technologies are inhabited, and before condemning them, we should understand that the natives are our offspring: the art-subjects.
This talk will present 40 years of personal exploration of the impact of technology on artistic practice, questioning the solutions and the issues it raises.
About the Artist
Maurice Benayoun is a French pioneer, contemporary new-media artist, curator and theorist based in Paris, Hong Kong, and Nanjing. His work employs various media, including (and often combining) video, computer graphics, immersive virtual reality, the Internet, performance, EEG, 3D Printing, large-scale urban media art installations and interactive exhibitions. Often conceptual, Maurice Benayoun’s work constitutes a critical investigation of the mutations in the contemporary society induced by the emerging or recently adopted technologies. He is currently a Chair Professor and Head of the Art and Architecture Intelligence Lab at Nanjing University, China.