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(Jack Burnham, 1969)

Considering the extensive use of digital technologies by media artists, Burnham’s early contention is now being revalidated while gaining new meanings. As new technologies continuously intervene and expand the familiar boundaries of artistic media, the experience of art’s consumption, and consequently the social politics of the art-world, we seek to explore how computational technologies are employed to establish a sense of ARTificiality. In this context, ARTificiality relates to artistic explorations of artificial, mediated, or expanded forms of embodiment. Embodiment here is considered in its broader meaning, to approach both the physical and sensual realms of expression as well as the psychological aspects of identity construction in relation to digital technologies.

Each paper re-considers dichotomies familiar in art’s theory discourse, such as artificial vs. natural; actual vs. virtual; and fake vs. authentic, while using them to analyze the embodied experience in artistic installations involving four different digital technologies: Augmented reality art (Efrat), Robotic art (Ehrlich), Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (Weinberg), and Social Media interventions (Goldberg). As these forms of art tend to migrate from traditional exhibition spaces to being directly integrated with the fabric of everyday life, we explore how they bring forth and reflect on the contemporary ARTificiality of the human condition.