Topologies of Art in the Information Age

Developments in recent years in electronic art and the new media can be characterized in many ways, among them with discourses based on their development in parallel with the technologies they use or based on the development of specific features such as interactivity, communication, synaesthesia and their relationship with the virtual. This article proposes a hybrid perspective, along the lines of the discourse of Edward Shanken, with new media art and contemporary art – especially as related to vanguard movements such as kinetic art, conceptual art, performance, the Fluxus movement, Dadaism, Situationism and experimental film – being more simultaneous than continuous. Media art and contemporary art both develop from a topological thought – as expressed by authors like Bergson, Deleuze, Serres, Agamben and Latour – that is pushed into movement. Objects and stable boundaries disappear and we have, rather, a complex world, with relationships, intensities and connections as defining elements and with an ability to simultaneously generate new, mutable territories. In this setting, life feeds on information exchange and art leaves behind the stable place it formerly inhabited to venture into the creation of new contexts and forms of interaction and the production of emergent meanings, and taking account of the kinetic and immersive spaces of multimedia installations, urban space and virtual and ubiquitous web space, the coexistence of urban and web space in augmented reality, and, finally, the ecology of a connected world where technology, life, culture, nature and the local – with its global implications – are all brought together.