As we enter the post-pandemic world, we are being urged to reconsider the systems (including science) and anthropocentric values that have formed the basis of modernity. Today, science and technology pose philosophical and ethical questions, such as: “What is reality?” “What is man?” and “What is life?” The present era is also considered to be in the “Anthropocene,” a geochronological age marked by the irreversible impact humans have had on the global environment. Under such circumstances, what kind of relationship can media art have with science, technology and society?
Currently, media art is actively collaborating with various disciplines such as geology, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography, in addition to cutting edge fields such as computer science (AI), astronomy and the life sciences. In this class, we will examine the impact of science and new technologies on the aesthetics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically, Castro will be covering media art within the field of the life sciences and Shikata will be covering the fields of natural science and humanities in relation to media art. Castro will focus on the origin(s) of life, the border between life and nonlife, wet artificial life, and alien life, as well as the fields of chemistry, biology, synthetic biology and astrobiology. Shikata will deal with aspects of AI, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, gender studies, and indigenous studies. Matsui and Matsuda will deal with the relationship between extremely private expression and society, and the ways of seeing mundane natural phenomena from an aesthetic perspective.