Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series
Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland


Tuesday 12 October, 2004
4.30-5.30pm, Venue: C102

Dr. Daniel Jewesbury <[log in to unmask]>
Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster

Abstract

"The Affects of Reality: Dialectical Aesthetics and Digital Media"

(i)
Question: Can art make a fairer, more just society?
The question, often voiced, betrays an angst on the part of the 
questioner: why *doesn't* art appear to have the capacity to bring 
about real social transformation? What should I, as an artist, be doing 
to address this? *How can I make myself feel less guilty about my art?*

Talk about "the social role of art" is necessarily positioned somewhere 
between two poles: one dictating that art must be capable of effecting 
direct social change or have clear social use, the other arguing that 
it must "transcend" the merely material. Neither position is viable. If 
one cannot justify art *in its own terms*, one falls back on 
instrumentalisms (couched in terms of dimly-defined "communities" or 
"publics") in order to find a worth presumed not to be immanent in the 
work itself. Instrumentalised approaches to art lead to patronising, 
paternalistic assumptions about its "benevolence", and produce an "art" 
devoid of any aesthetic merit whatsoever (however that is accounted 
for).

(ii)
This paper gives an account of the "dialectical aesthetic", through 
which it argues a case for art as a *non-instrumental* "good". 
Appropriating the late work of Gyšrgy Luk‡cs (only available, in 
English, through secondary sources), and combining it with other more 
recent contributions, I theorise an *ethical aesthetic*, in which form, 
content and context inflect and inform one another, a critical realism 
beyond mere naturalism, with which to *re-envisage* (rather than merely 
represent) the world, and through which to develop "consciousness" of 
the contradictory conditions of that world.

The paper then asks whether the theorisation of a distinctive "digital 
aesthetics" is desirable, or even tenable. By introducing certain 
formal characteristics and social contexts of digital media (hypertext 
and hyperlinks, globalisation, and so on) into the dialectical 
aesthetic, it is demonstrated that the "new" media can never be 
adequately theorised in "novel" technology-centered conceptualisations.


Bio

Dr Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer based in Belfast, and a 
Research Associate in Digital Cultures at the Centre for Media 
Research, University of Ulster. He completed his PhD at the Media 
Studies department of the University of Ulster in 2001, writing on 
potential theoretical relations between hybridity and non-linear 
narrative media. It was the first piece of part-practical research 
undertaken in the department, with practical outcomes comprising a 
website and digital video installation based around the dislocated site 
of London Bridge, in Arizona.

Exhibitions include Manifesta3, Ljubljana (2000), Urban Control, Graz 
(2001) and various others across Europe and North America. He won the 
Victor Treacy Award at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 2001. Recent 
public art projects include Exchange (2003), a radio station and short 
film produced with a diverse group of immigrants in Carlow, Ireland 
(including asylum-seekers, refugees and migrant workers). One to Ten 
(2002) was produced in collaboration with the Transport & General 
Workers' Union, Flax Art Studios and the Routes Public Art Project; it 
used interviews with bus workers and videos of bus journeys around 
Belfast to explore the rapidly changing character of the city as it 
undergoes redevelopment and regeneration. The work was presented in 
cinemas across the city. He is currently engaged on two major projects: 
Lisburn Road Archive, a photographic documentation of the middle-class 
in a Belfast suburb commissioned by Belfast Exposed Photography (in 
collaboration with Ursula Burke); and Bhowani Junction, a major film 
installation project (in collaboration with sound artist Paul Moore).  
The first part of the Bhowani project, the artist's book Of Lives 
Between Lines, is published by Book Works. Jewesbury is a co-director 
of Cinilingus, an independent film-screening organisation in Belfast, 
and co-editor of Variant magazine (http://www.variant.org.uk).



--
Ned Rossiter
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media)
Centre for Media Research
University of Ulster
Cromore Road
Coleraine
Northern Ireland
BT56 1SA

tel. +44 (0)28 7032 3275
fax. +44 (0)28 7032 4964
email: [log in to unmask]