Art has always dealt with complexity, the artworks’ making often required complex processes, abilities, knowledge and intellectual as well as technical skills. Today, thanks to sciences and technologies, the most compelling contemporary...
moreArt has always dealt with complexity, the artworks’ making often required complex processes, abilities, knowledge and intellectual as well as technical skills. Today, thanks to sciences and technologies, the most compelling contemporary art forms can refer to complex poetics. It becomes possible to express theories, topics, ideas, visions of the world, even critically, integrating different disciplines and tools. Art can discuss the complex issues between humanity and the phenomenal world, inherent to the environment, to the living beings, to the idea of Nature. From this point of view, and more effectively than other disciplines, art becomes a philosophy of contemporaneity.
Through sciences and technologies humanity is shaping up a vast and complex emerging panorama made up of new devices, machines, algorithms and new life forms. Art has always represented the living and Nature, and humanity, since its origin throughout its evolution, has always been representing, simulating, modifying and reinventing Nature, for many purposes. Nature and the living have been the inspiration, the solution and the event horizon in human activities, in solving practical problems to achieve protection, knowledge and effectiveness in the phenomenal world. And also in inventing narratives, in generating new aesthetics, in creating new art forms.
Today Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Smart Algorithms, Synthetic Biology, Genetic Engineering, Biotechnologies, Nanotechnologies, Internet of Things, De-Extinction and other disciplines are expanding the boundaries of life and evolution. Many artefacts, devices, machines, entities are becoming increasingly powerful, complex, autonomous and independent. Scientific evolution has led to the ability to deeply modify the existing organisms and to create new ones, new species that would have never evolved. We are going to assist to the extension of the idea of life and life forms from the organic domain to a complex landscape with organic, inorganic and mixed life forms. Through sciences and technologies humanity is creating a sort of “Third Life”, originating from human knowledge and culture, which is independently and autonomously evolving, expanding Nature from within its own domain. These emerging life forms can be called “Third Life”, being the “First Life” the biological life, and the “Second Life” the life in the symbolic dimension.
In this profound transformation, many topics from the past appear as outdated and inadequate, while new topics are emerging. These processes seem to push forward the human knowledge and awareness, as well as its boundaries and goals, and at the same time they are undermining the centuries-old centrality of humanity. Will these processes be able to illuminate on a possible evolution? Will art, as in the past, succeed in anticipating and providing a reliable vision of these complex transformations?