Our Post-Digital Age demonstrates multiple expansions of the sculptural, which entail an understanding of materiality and plasticity that goes beyond established categories and classical object aesthetics. Augmented reality sculpture is such an expanded form that leads to an overlapping of different realities as it seems to occupy space and enables active participation by the audience, who decide on the temporary placement, number, and size, thus leading to new modes of perception.
Using the example of artists such as Tamiko Thiel, Anne Duk Hee Jordan and Entangled Others, my talk aims to explore how the aesthetics of a so-called “eco-pop” unfolds between digital consumer and pop culture, game aesthetics and kitsch, whereby the inherent style and iconography enfold particularly in the aesthetic environment of social media worlds and digital image cultures. I like to show how artists are turning away from the seemingly dystopian narrative of the Anthropocene in favor of positive and playful narratives of their programmed, fabulated imaginary worlds.
Ursula Ströbele is professor for art history at Braunschweig University of Art, curator and writer. She holds a PhD about the sculptural reception pieces of the French Royal Academy (1700-1730) and was habilitated about the sculptural aesthetics of the living since the 1960s, such as by Hans Haacke and Pierre Huyghe. She is co-founder of Art Material Ecology. Working Group for the Study of Material Flows and Ecologies in the Arts; recently she started her new project Ecologies of Sculpture. Research focus: sculpture and sculpture theory, queer ecologies, and infrastructural studies of production and transport.