PENTTI MÄÄTTÄNEN   

Digital surface

Continuous search for new means, methods and meanings is one characteristic feature of contemporary art. Digital equipment has been changing life, society and culture for decades, and visual arts is no exception. The strive for unchanging values and disinterested aesthetic experience, which has been typical for modernist thinking, has given room for postmodern pluralism and relativism. This development can be analyzed with the help on the semiotic theory of C.S.Peirce, who has been characterized as the first postmodernist thinker because of the fact that in Peirce’s thought there is no split between mind and body, nature and culture as in the modern philosophy since Descartes. An unfoundationalist theory of meanings and that can be developed on the ground of Peirce’s semiotic approach can be used in this analysis. A Peircean notion of embodied experience has also certain similarities with Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of producing and experiencing space. The purpose of my research is to discuss certain features and phenomena in contemporary visual art on the background of this theoretical framework.

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