Teacher: Tanya Ravn
Video from the Make a Difference Conference 2024.
Tanya Ravn presents the aesthetic field, which has typically engaged with artistic expressions and cultural artifacts, and with deepening our understanding of the sensory and emotional dimensions of human experience, is challenged by a technically generative condition for the production and mode of existence of aesthetics. This raises new didactic challenges in learning and teaching and creates a need for new methods of aesthetic analysis.
During the talk Tanya presents techno-aesthetic analysis, a new analytical and didactical approach to study aesthetic phenomena under these conditions, aimed at teaching in the humanities and particularly in the aesthetic disciplines. Informed by philosophy of technology, her conception of “techno-aesthetics” is particularly based on Gilbert Simondon’s evolutionary exploration of the relationship between technology and aesthetics as mediating human intra-action with the world. Techno-aesthetic analysis takes a step back from the classical phenomenological analysis of what appears to us, to examine the aesthetic phenomenon through a technical-cultural relational mode of existence and context of meaning. Techno-aesthetic analysis focuses on the connection between the aesthetic phenomenon, understanding how it is conditioned by technology and algorithmic culture, and reflection on the phenomenon’s creation and mode of existence in a digitized global context.
What was your motivation?
Tanya’s approach to techno-aesthetic analysis has been developed through exercises and didactical experiments during the MA course “Anticipative Aesthetics” at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, during the fall of 2024.
The analysis model and concrete exercises have developed from the following questions: How can we critically and reflectively examine digital aesthetic objects from a relational understanding of their creation, modes of existence, and cultural significance? How can analytical methods be adapted to include a deeper technological understanding of digital aesthetic objects, extending beyond traditional methods focused on interpretation and contextualization? How can an interdisciplinary approach combine aesthetic studies with technological perspectives and issues affecting the aesthetic field? How can aesthetic and sensory aspects of learning be critically and reflectively activated in a digital learning context? What perspectives does this offer for digital literacy through teaching in aesthetic disciplines?
What was the outcome for you - and the students?
Students experience that course content and methods in various ways expand their understanding of literature as a concept, object and field. Furthermore, that the course’s analytical and methodological approaches (with operative image, chatbot prompting, close reading of AI-generated text etc.) will be an inspiration for doing analyses in the future.
