artmedia 8: Communication Aesthetics and Technological Time

The article, published by artpress in December 2002, presents a manifesto-like text from the artmedia 8 conference, likely by an artist or theorist, arguing that communication aesthetics is exclusively tied to distance communication technologies and neo-technologies. It asserts that no communication aesthetics existed before or without these technologies, and that such aesthetics are empty of intention, information, or signification, operating purely through machinic connections. The text critiques 20th-century artists like John Cage for mistakenly believing they liberated 'pure time' through technology, contending that only the time of technology itself emerges. It frames communication aesthetics as revealing the time of new communication technologies, characterized by an indiscernible energy flow between organism and machine, subject and species, leading to their mutual dissolution. Citing Plato's Republic and Robert Smithson's 1960s Yucatan Mirror Displacements, the text argues that Smithson showed a declining flux, whereas communication aesthetics now shows the nascent flux of electronic technologies and human life.