Cognitive Assemblages in Ecological / Digital Art

EasyChair Preprint 1215

Abstract

This essay considers cognitive assemblages, as represent-ed in several recent works of digital and ecological art, which themselves reflect upon contemporary environ-mental crises. The investigation is framed by the work of theorists N. Katherine Hayles and Timothy Morton in considering ideas of assemblages of cognition distributed between humans, non-human lifeforms, and machines, and the hyperobjects thematized by the works. The essay explores how these concepts can be read through installa-tion artworks by artists including Phillipe Parreno, Kobie Nel, and Pierre Huyghe. How are digital artworks helping us to think through ecologies of distributed cog-nition during the contemporary period of planetary crisis in which they operate?

Keyphrases: Immersion, Micro-organism, Timothy Morton, climate change, cognitive assemblage, cyber-semiotics, distributed cognition, ecological art, ecology, electronic literature, installation, kobie nel, life form, machine learning, metaphor, nature, neural network, non-human, phillipe parreno gropius bau

@booklet{EasyChair:1215,
  author    = {Scott Rettberg},
  title     = {Cognitive Assemblages in Ecological / Digital Art},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1215},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}