Maya Rochat / The Digital Condition and the Transvaluation of the Aesthetic

STATEMENT

In the post-internet era, the quantity of available images has reached a mass that can hardly be quantified. Consequently, the attention dedicated to every visual is replaced by the predominant perception of a continuous flux. 

During the 3 days, we’ll question the value of the contemporary image, using strategies of détournement and deconstruction to form complex transmedia structures. These re-introduce duration and vitality as issues blurring the borders between analogic, manual and digital.

BIO

Maya Rochat is a multidisciplinary artist, who works in the fields of photography, collage and installation. Maya takes us into her own universe, a world mainly concerned with her immediate surroundings, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. Her work forms a vast web of intertwined images whose energy disturbs our habitual codes of interpretation and perception.

Maya Rochat regularly exhibits in institutions of great significance such as Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Fotomuseum (Winterthur), Fotohof (Salzburg) and Centre pour la Photographie (Geneva).

How does the digital condition change and transform aesthetic concepts? Traditional markers of the art work and of aesthetic experience – originality, mimesis, aura, the ludic, and so on - are today saturated and informed by new technologies and media. According to Bruno Latour aesthetic concepts such as the aura ‘migrate’, as their significations are thus re-appropriated and their values displaced. 

At the same time, we can assume that the digital realm offers experiences, procedures, machines, perceptions, and temporalities that have been made available as a kind of raw material from which artists can create new aesthetic tropes relevant to contemporary life. This is obviously true for new strategies for image processing and digital animation, but also for the artistic use of the rhizomatic, for instance. 

The artists and lecturers invited in the POOL:CH (October 26-27-28) and in the Master.symposium (November 27) will in this way engage our digital condition as a historical and conceptual negotiation, a highly dynamic push and pull with the aesthetic concepts of yesterday and tomorrow.