physical virtual

A conversation about the impact of the internet on contemporary visual culture with some of London’s leading young voices in digital media and post-internet art.

The panel comprised Paul Hobson (Contemporary Art Society Director), Sarah Page (Contemporary Art Society Membership Programmes Manager), Attilia Fattori Franchini, a bright and rising curator working with digital media and co-director of online gallery, bubblebyte.org, and acclaimed artist and member of the collective, LuckyPDF, Yuri Pattison.

It is not enough to imagine post-internet art as being only computer or internet based, but rather it can be identified as any art that is influenced by the internet and digital media. Informed by questions around the collapse of the traditional physical exhibition space, the reproducibility of the digital image, decentralised authorship, and further into ideas around the development of attention as currency. Post-internet art is a subject of our contemporary moment and we delighted to invite your views, questions and thoughts on it in an evening of discussion and debate.

Image: Yuri Pattison, Focal Plane (detail), image courtesy the artist, 2013.

Talk - Conversations on Contemporary Art: Post-Internet Art

What is a (hard) problem? Can we know which problems do not have solutions? Is scheduling flights a hard problem? Is assembling cars an easy problem? Theoretically, are there more problems (uncountable) than solutions (countably many)? Are algorithms well defined? Are they a finite description for infinitely many possible inputs & processes? What is not an algorithm? Can processes be algorithmic and not computational? Does it matter how algorithms are embodied? Is every algorithm a Turing Machine? Is there a difference between equations and algorithms? Can algorithms be approximate? Where do heuristics come from? Are comparisons the easiest measurement? Do physical symbols always underlie any computation? Are the best algorithms exponential? Is there infinite richness of algorithms, & are computers infinitely reconfigurable machines? How is the real world abstracted (& discretized)? Do problems need analog computing, since (real life) variables are usually (?) continuous and not discrete? Is a recipe, then, an algorithm? Is the brain a computer? Is the world analog or digital? Do algorithms have an ontology? Are algorithms abstractions? Are they here to stay? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from logic & theoretical computer science (Prof. Anuj Dawar, Cambridge University, Cambridge), & operations research & industrial engineering (Prof. Ashok K. Mittal, ex-IIT Kanpur, New Delhi). Listen in....

Ontology (Form and Content)

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