THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT/OF ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL MEDIA
Text topic: Digital Media Technologies
Text author: Предраг Родић
The digitization rush has left the hypertext as a computer-generated text in its wake. The broadening of the hypertext concept brings us to the possibility of a new interpretation not only of artistic practice, but of the theory and politics of that practice, correspondingly. When the sign (iconic, indexical, symbolic) became “fundamental” for thinking, the status of knowledge changed. With artistic practice as an example, that can be seen in the reconstruction/destruction/deconstruction of a work into a text and of the text into a hypertext. The rhetorical figures of the hypertext bring about a new hermeneutics of the code. The code, as a mode of linking lexias (units of reading), past traces of the archive or the database, translates the entire Gutenberg Galaxy into a Hypertextual Galaxy. The event of remedialisation or the digital McLuhan, reminds us that an artistic practice has always been an emphasized (hyper) process of virtualization and of creating the artistic as a media/discursive construct. The hypertext thus becomes a broad platform for reading/writing both in science and education on the one hand, and in literature, film, visual arts, theatre, fashion, nutrition and photography on the other hand. The work of art/text/hypertext can also be viewed as a paradigm in the construction of knowledge.