The Hyperaesthetics of Technology

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

Analog and digital technologies are an immanent part of postmodern lifeworld’s around the globe, and they are a fundament or – in some cases – driving force for mass media, telecommunication, art, and design. This omnipresence and ordinariness of technology make it very difficult to take sides: the defender determines a specific value of technology for creative processes and the opponent proclaims a general worthlessness of technology for artistic creation. This essay focusses not on different judgements, but it will analyze some important aspects of the structural dynamic of technology in the context of a creative mediatization. This means, that a work of art, a design concept or a communication medium has to be understand as a specific aesthetic artefact that enables a perceptual relation or interaction of a technological repertoire, a specific mode of representation and a sensory awareness of the recipient.

This interconnection can be understood within a phenosemiotic sign relation that allows an analytical structuring of aesthetic processes as embodied and perceptual processes. This phenosemiotic analysis gives insights in the specific interconnectedness of technological processes, sensory and perceptual dynamics and the construction of meaning in a cognitive perspective that is always embedded in the bodily processes of reception. Additionally, the phensosemiotic framework is also able to give insights into a possible redefinition or enhancement of the concept of aesthetics in general, which is highly correlated with the sensory processes of the recipient: This means, that postmodern artefacts of mediatization are more and more pushing the boundaries of perception and are simultaneously expanding the structural horizon of a classical aesthetics toward a technological-driven hyperaesthetics.