Abstract
The insistent interrogations by digital artists of the fluid spaces that have been created by new and sophisticated technologies do not only concern novel kinds of spatial awareness. They even more specifically attempt to map the new forms of human positions and positioning produced by our active and continuous interchanges in real-time, which implies nothing less than new modes of subjectivity. Although maps have to some extent always fulfilled these functions, what is different today are the technologies at our disposal which not only generate new dynamic spaces but also demand the development of new mapping strategies allowing for both improvisational and subjective positioning in constant negotiations for space. I would go even further and suggest that the works by these artists imply that the subject-object framework be relinquished for that of an implicated agent and an expansive field in which the agency of any identifiable presence is intertwined with other agencies.
This pragmatic approach implicates a dialogic and communicative self immersed in incessant recontextualization and, therefore, involves mappings of the intermeshing between agents responding to their environments in ceaseless participation. Pragmatic-semiotic research and cyberart converge here as such an approach would seem to carry the potential not only for theorizing different fields of research but also for a fruitful dialogue among cultural theory, technicity, and digital art. This will be discussed by examining the works by digital artists Stelarc, Rejane Cantoni and Daniela Kutschat.
Ljungberg, Christina