New Media Arts Hybridity: The Vases (Dis)communicants Between Art, Affective Science and AR Technology

Abstract

Following Annie Coombes’s and Avtar Brah’s (authors of Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, 2000) request that we not merely apply but in fact historicise hybridity, and arguing that the art and science explorations of new media art have produced some of the strongest new media hybridities to date, the author focuses on one of the important fields of investigation currently linking media art, science and technology: augmented reality or what should be called augmented perception of time and space. This aesthetic field of investigation has led to a reassessment of representation, one that is not without (1) sharing some of the fundamental concerns of current neuroscientific investigation of mental processes and (2) questioning the image/real continuum principle at the core of recent augmented reality technology research. The article examines media artist Bill Viola’s The Passions series (2000-2001) to contend that new media’s original contribution to the practice of hybridity lies in the interaction that it both articulates and encourages with affective sciences, an interaction that redefines representation as an approximation, a facilitator - a projection screen for complex mental processes.