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I don’t like being morbid but I find the topic of a digital afterlife extremely fascinating. Being present and engaged in life is a great way to live; however, it’s difficult to not think about the things which seem beyond our control. It’s already difficult to keep my life in order and I see myself as a pretty organized person. Why do I need to think about what happens to my digital possessions? Does it matter? Will it matter? After some consideration, I realized I’ve got a bit of…
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What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life. ~ Michel Foucault, Philosopher, social theorist, and historian
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Lately, I’ve been exploring language and its role in our perception and understanding of art. I thought I would dig through some Wittgenstein text to whet my appetite for some much-needed philosophical art writing I’m working on. Here’s an excerpt of what I’ve been noshing on… We are handicapped in ordinary language by having to describe, say, a tactile sensation by means of terms for physical objects such as the word “eye”, “finger”, etc. when what we want to say…
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In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation, and not through an ever falsifying photography, does art give empirical reality its due, the epiphany of its shrouded essence and the merited shudder in the face of it as in the face of a monstrosity. The primacy of the object is affirmed aesthetically only in the character of art as the…
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It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival, determinist mode, the “active”, critical mode, the analytic mode – the distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the end and the means. It is in this sense that one can say: TV is watching us, TV alienates us, TV manipulates us, TV informs us…In all this, one remains dependent on the analytical conception of the media, on an…
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Lately, I’ve been diving back into my philosophy text from undergrad days and re-exploring ideas that made little sense to me back then. I wouldn’t exactly say that the same ideas are understandable now but experience has led me to think much more critically. The most interesting aspect of what I’ve been reading has to do with this French philosopher named Jean Baudrillard and how he believes that meaning is derived from knowing what something is NOT. Basically, a dog…
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Another (recent) short paper I wrote on artist, Fernando Botero, for the course, Contemporary Art: History and Theory taken at UC Berkeley Extension (for Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Visual Arts). ************************************ One of the fundamental lessons in drawing class entailed drawing untold numbers of fruit, boxes and bags. The exercises were required to instill the importance of actually depicting what existed in reality versus what the mind believes or thinks exists. I was often reminded that we first see everything the…
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writer | artist | scholar
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 