This book explores the ways in which artists use technology to create
different perceptions of time in art in order to reflect on contemporary
relationships to technology. By considering the links between
technology, movement and contemporary art, the book explores changing
relationship between temporality in art, art history, media art theory,
modernity, contemporary art, and digital art.
This book challenges the dominant view that kinetic art is an antiquated
artistic experiment and considers the changing perception of kinetic art
by focusing on exhibitions and institutions that have recently
challenged the notion of kinetic art as a marginalised and forgotten
artistic experiment with mechanical media. This is achieved by
deconstructing Frank Popper's argument that kinetic art is a precursor
to subsequent explorations in the intersections between art, science and
technology.
Rather than pandering to the prevailing art historical assumption that
kinetic sculpture is merely a precursor to art in a digital culture, the
book proposes that perhaps kineticism succeeded too well, where movement
has become a ubiquitous element of the aesthetic of contemporary art.
If, as Boris Groys has recently suggested, installation has become the
dominant mode of art in the contemporary age, then movement in real time
with the viewer is used to aestheticise and explore the facets of our
peculiar time.