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The Technoaesthetic of Gilbert Simondon
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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Technological turn of art and aestheticization of technical objects add speed with the development of cutting-edge technology. The border line between the aesthetic and the technical is annihilated, and techno-aesthetical reality which is emerged as a mixture of both at the equal level instead of aesthetical reality asks for a new language of thought. The corelation of technology and aesthetics have remained in the dark not to be considered beyond instrumental use of technology for extension of art. What is indeed the relation between the aesthetic and the technical? If a new aesthetics which incorporates the artistic activity and the technical activity is possible, what features does it have? G. Simondon suggested an answer and opened a new possibility of aesthetics under the concept of ‘technoaesthetics’. His technoaesthetics presupposes an essential relation of the aesthetic reality with the technical reality. For him, a work of art is a indistinguishable mixture of the technical and the aesthetic, and its production is itself counted as a technoaesthetical praxis. The technoaesthetical works connect the sacred and the technical transductively on the basis of original encountering of the nature and the human beings. The technoaestethics is not the aesthetics of ‘imitation and contemplation’ which presupposes a discrimination of form/matter or subject/object, but the one of ‘action and experience’ which integrates such a discrimination into one and the one of ‘dynamic operation’ which is based on a bodily, sensory-perceptive interaction among the human, the world, and the work. An object can show its beauty when, being ‘inserted’ both in the natural world and in the human life, it realizes its own entelechy excellently. Simondon's technoaesthetics which has positive attitude to aesthetical potentiality of technology makes itself different from the media theory of V. Benjamin and the negative philosophy of technology of Heidegger in that it provides a new possibility of aesthetical thinking that can make us take a view of Bach and Stockhauzen as well as art and industrial design under a single conceptual scheme.
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