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The Impact of the Visual Arts on Technology
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The Impact of the Visual Arts on Technology

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752). This special issue belongs to the section "Visual Arts".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2025) | Viewed by 4642

Special Issue Editors

Dr. EL Putnam

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Media Studies, Maynooth University, W23 F2H6 Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
Interests: digital studies; philosophy of technology; aesthetics with a focus on performed engagements with technologies and embodied experience
Dr. Andy Broadey

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Fine Art, School of Arts and Media, Preston Campus, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, UK
Interests: post-conceptual & post-relational installation art; capitalocene; de/globalisation, deleuze and guattari

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Art’s modes of production have always been interwoven with the processes of technological development. This can lead to the impression that in our moment of technological acceleration, proliferating digital media are leading artistic development, and artists are playing catch-up to new forms of technology. Yet, the modes of artistic production also mediate art’s capacity to generate critical and creative use-value, an argument famously made by Walter Benjamin in his canonical essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Recently, in his book Art and Cosmotechnics, Yuk Hui has urged us to engage with art in such a way as to support the development of un-imagined or not-yet-existing relations of social forms. He states, "Art must lead an epistemic revolution. It is not about using augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to produce new media art, but rather about how to use art to produce AR, VR, and AI. Media art, while promoting the use of digital media, may have yet to supersede the conceptual frameworks that previously structured it" (Hui 2021, 238). Hui hinges art’s transformative capacities upon its facility to expand what we can know and what we can do with technologies, which he imagines in tandem with Foucault’s notion of dispotif. Hui redefines this term with the aim "to reintroduce a form of life and reactivate a locality” (Hui 2016, 31). We argue for a reappraisal of visual arts in creating new dispotifs by informing technological relations. To this end, we frame this Special Issue around the question: How do the visual arts lead to new ways of thinking and becoming with technology?

We are seeking contributions that pertain to artistic practice, histories of art, and/or philosophical models for art and aesthetics.

Possible topics include the following:

  • Visual arts as (re)activating localities for technologies;
  • Art, technology, and decoloniality;
  • Art, technology, and anti-ableism;
  • Queering technologies with art;
  • Art as speculative inquiries of technologies;
  • Technoaesthetics;
  • Social implications of technologies explored in art;
  • Art as revealing bias in technologies;
  • Anti-computing and other critiques of technologies;
  • De/construction of apparatuses through critical art practice.

References:

Hui, Yuk. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd.
Hui, Yuk. 2021. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis, MN: e-flux books.

Dr. EL Putnam
Dr. Andy Broadey
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • visual arts
  • philosophy of technology
  • technoaesthetics
  • philiosophy of art
  • speculative inquiry
  • cosmotechnics
  • dispotif
  • critical art practice

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 1785 KB  
Article
Living Rhythms: Investigating Networks and Relational Sensorial Island Rhythms Through Artistic Research
by Ann Burns
Arts 2026, 15(2), 31; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15020031 - 3 Feb 2026
Viewed by 538
Abstract
Awaken, aware, arise, perform, pause, and repeat. The actions of the everyday. Without it, we fall into dysregulation. This paper seeks to examine creative research developed as an experiment during COVID-19, an audiovisualscape in virtual reality (VR). Rhythmanalysis+ is a social, ecological, and [...] Read more.
Awaken, aware, arise, perform, pause, and repeat. The actions of the everyday. Without it, we fall into dysregulation. This paper seeks to examine creative research developed as an experiment during COVID-19, an audiovisualscape in virtual reality (VR). Rhythmanalysis+ is a social, ecological, and sensorial enquiry into materiality, grounded in archipelagic thinking, through the lens of Rhythmanalysis, a form of analysis focusing on the everyday, through the lens of cyclical and linear rhythms. (Lefebvre). The research will also draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, a botanical and philosophical investigation into networks. Networks form the backbone of the research. Lars Bang Larsen also argues that networks offer a distinctive view on how factual, speculative, historical, and non-human elements envelop and intertwine. Glissant’s archipelagic thought promotes transformation, multiplicity, and a sense of unpredictability. For this work, four inhabitants from Sherkin, a small island off the southwest coast of Ireland with a population of 100, became the research focus. Across four weeks, islanders gathered data from their daily sensory rhythms. Flight patterns of birds and bats were recorded, daily tasks noted, pathways cycled. Relational impacts of animal-odour on farming, weather, and tides were processed remotely, and an immersive cartographic score was created as a direct response in a three-dimensional virtual space. Rhythmanalysis+ analyses our newly altered perceptions of time and space as a material within a virtual world. VR, created as a gaming platform, is being pushed by art itself, forcing us to relook at the natural world, which is not static, but relational. Fluid but equally extractive, it is important to look at technology’s impact on all that is human and how it is perceived within the body as it is reframed digitally. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of the Visual Arts on Technology)
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33 pages, 5303 KB  
Article
Generative Artifacts: Chinatown and an Ornamental Architecture of the Future
by Jessica Hanzelkova
Arts 2025, 14(6), 155; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14060155 - 28 Nov 2025
Viewed by 1579
Abstract
This article proposes the term ‘generative artifact’ to define a new method of imagining the future, one derived from artistic and architectural interpretations of non-linear time, material exploration, and relationship building. This contrasts the imagining that happened in the past by European and [...] Read more.
This article proposes the term ‘generative artifact’ to define a new method of imagining the future, one derived from artistic and architectural interpretations of non-linear time, material exploration, and relationship building. This contrasts the imagining that happened in the past by European and North American dominant culture, born out of fears of a declining Western hegemony and resulting in socially constructed hierarchies based on race. To investigate this historic and outdated imagining of culture, we trace the history of Chinatown and the ornamented feminine body as a physical example of hypervisibility in the North American city. First, we examine the current discourse on Chinatowns’ Orientalist aesthetics, legitimacy through institutionalized nonspecificity, and architectural/artifactual heritage, which serve as a mirror and moor for the Chinese diaspora today. Here, we find clues on how to navigate and leverage the spectacle of the racial image, the continuous merging of person and thing, and the tropes that the racialized body might find itself answering for. To illustrate the potential of the generative process and through the lenses of Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of ornamentalism and Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism, this article places Chinatown adjacent to the worldbuilding and artistic practices of seven contemporary artists and architects. This includes Astria Suparak (performance critique), Curry J. Hackett (AI, installation), Shellie Zhang (sculpture), Lan “Florence” Yee (textile), Debra Sparrow (weaving, murals), Thomas Cannell (sculpture), and the author (performance). All are from varied cultural backgrounds who create ‘generative artifacts’ in their creative practices—works that playfully slip between sign/icon, high/low tech, and authentic/invented culture to point towards a path to imagining more expansive futures. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of the Visual Arts on Technology)
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13 pages, 449 KB  
Article
Entangled Networks: Metaphor as Method, Matter, and Media
by Alis Oldfield
Arts 2025, 14(6), 152; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14060152 - 26 Nov 2025
Viewed by 912
Abstract
This article examines how metaphors operate in digital media not as descriptive analogies but as structuring forces that shape how technologies are designed, understood, and inhabited. Building on Marianne van den Boomen’s theory of digital material metaphors, it argues that metaphors such as [...] Read more.
This article examines how metaphors operate in digital media not as descriptive analogies but as structuring forces that shape how technologies are designed, understood, and inhabited. Building on Marianne van den Boomen’s theory of digital material metaphors, it argues that metaphors such as the “desktop,” “cloud,” and “frontier” encode social and ideological assumptions into the infrastructures of computation. These metaphors render digital systems legible while concealing not just the procedural computation that van den Boomen terms depresentation, but the material, ecological, and labour conditions that sustain them. Using my practice-based work c(o)racle, 2025, as a case study, the internet is explored as a metaphorical and material terrain that connects networks of data, water, and craft, interrogating the dominant metaphor of cyberspace as immaterial and untethered, in dialogue with Tim Ingold, Lakoff and Johnson, Henri Lefebvre, and Yuk Hui. Drawing on S. J. Tambiah, Bruno Latour, and Elizabeth Wayland Barber, the essay situates metaphor within broader histories of making and mediation. By activating metaphor as both method and medium, the study proposes a critical reorientation toward digital space as an entangled, situated, and contested environment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of the Visual Arts on Technology)
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