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Arts Division
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Film and Digital Media Department
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Art
Aesthetics
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Porter College Academic
D128
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Dr. Edward Shanken is Professor of Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a member of the NANO research group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research explores the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. Viewing art as a “psychic dress-rehearsal for the future,” his work examines how visionary artistic models offer tangible glimpses of alternative futures in the present. His recent research addresses AI and visual culture, ecological art as speculative design, and Indigenous cosmologies and rituals as technologies of healing. He is curating an exhibition on technoshamanism opening in 2028 at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut.
Dr. Shanken is the author of Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon, 2009), Systems (2013, MIT), Inventar el Futuro: arte -electricidad - nuevos medios (Departamento de Ficción, 2013), and Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (U Cal Press, 2004). Prior to UCSC, he held faculty appointments at Rhode Island School of Design, University of Washington, University of Amsterdam, and Duke University. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Duke University, an M.B.A. from Yale University, and a B.A. from Haverford College.
Personal statement:
I believe that by opening our hearts more fully to ourselves, we can open our hearts more fully to other beings and to the Earth. While attempting to integrate joy and wisdom, I discovered that joy contains its own wisdom, and vice versa. Ultimately, I try to love everybody and tell the truth. I am best known for my writing about art and technology, which is informed by my artistic practice as a pianist and dancer. Into the light!
My academic work seeks to create and share knowledge. Over the years, my intention has shifted to focus on integrating joy and wisdom. Like Jack Burnham, who thought of art as a “psychic dress rehearsal for the future,” I’ve been especially interested in the ways artists create working models that offer us a taste of alternative futures in the present. Throughout history, artists have often developed and employed emerging technologies and scientific ideas in this pursuit. Burnham also thought of artists as “deviation amplifiers” and I admire how artists are involved in “perverting technological correctness” to use the words of Raphael Lozano-Hemmer. By deploying technology in a metacritical way, artists offer profound insights into emerging technological modalities and social practices. Although many artists are superb problem solvers, many are also outstanding trouble-makers, who identify problems and push them to a state of hypertrophy, revealing their strangeness. This idea parallels Alva Noë’s notion of art as a “strange tool.” I believe that art, at its best, offers deep insight – a type of knowledge that Gregory Bateson likened to wisdom – that can help build a more compassionate and peaceful future.
Links to his publications are available via his website, ArteXetrA: Contemporary Art and New Media.
Nothing to Hide: Art, Surveillance, and Privacy, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT 2017. Curator.
See http://artexetra.com for full presentation information
See http://artexetra.com for full publication information
See https://artexetra.wordpress.com/videos/ for links to keynotes and other lectures.
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