Project Description
Art Imaging and Imagining is a process of creation that moves beyond the traditional boundaries set by artificial academic taxonomies in the fine arts. Art Imaging and Imagining brings back into the fine arts the ‘blue sky’ research and investigations that explore and delve at the intersections of art, science, technology and culture. What are the contemporary evolutions and trends in the fine arts?
Is still plausible to have discourses that see the ‘digital’ as antagonistic to a ‘purity’ of the arts? What does aesthetic purity means? Have traditional artistic media, such as sculpture and painting, sectioned themselves off from contemporary society and its challenges, producing inadequate responses to the complex reality of today’s world?
Why should nano-art be considered a lesser form of art than painting? And why should we replicate models of hostility in the fine arts that have generated debates and restrictions that look obsolete?
Every time a new technology, approach or investigation of the world through imaging has been pursued, artists (from Leonardo da Vinci to contemporary artists) have been shunned, sidelined or persecuted. Is the cinematic image an art form? Is performance an art form? And what about video? What about computer art and digital media? These debates have been an hindrance to the development of art, pitting a romantic and romanticized perception of art and the artist versus one that is exploratory, challenging and experimental and traces back its root to Leonardo.
Art Imaging and Imagining as a research cluster will launch a series of international initiatives and support the development of a scholarship in the fine arts able to finally brake free from the stranglehold of an ‘accademia delle belle arti’ narrowly focused on itself and its faded image of a society, modus vivendi and modus operandi that no longer exist.
Project Leaders: Lanfranco Aceti and Paul Thomas.
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