Digital re-mediation in contemporary sculpture praxis : human-technology co-creation

Abstract

Digital Re-Mediation in Contemporary Sculpture Praxis: Human-Technology Co-Creation," presents a hermeneutic interpretation of the praxes of traditionally trained sculptors now working in a postdigital (analogue-digital) reality. It examines digital technology’s mediating role to show how the infolding of digitised bodies and embodied technologies form a co-creating nonlinear affective intra-action between the sculptor, digital device, and material. In this re-mediated hybrid reality, sculptor-digital technology relations respectively characterise a postdigital reassemblage defined by the notion of agentic matter constituting a performative sense of becoming-with the digital. Postphenomenology and New Materialism are used to theorise digital fabrication technology’s multistable conditions of use and interpret sculptors’ intentions and materially situated relationality with the device. The study shows sculptors’ embodied interactions occur through, with, alongside, and towards digital technologies, and the neomaterial aesthetic arising from this agentic entangled system of physical and non-tangible matter reterritorialises contemporary sculpture within the digital paradigm.