Postdigital artistic positionality and its potentials for cultural education

Abstract

In 2002, in Culture in Bits, Gary Hall described challenges to the ‘identity’ of cultural studies, pointing to the debate between political economy and cultural studies. Rapid technological change has distracted us since, but these challenges remain. Furthermore, recent developments surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic have also revealed complex interconnections across viral biology and information science, with the global lockdown giving rise to related postdigital artistic activities. In Algorithmic Culture Ted Striphas discussed a delegation of the work of culture to computational processes, which significantly alters the practice, experience, and understanding of culture. This article examines to what extent postdigital art practices offer a form of resistance to political economic ‘illusions’ of democratic forms of public culture found across the Internet, and at which price. If humans and technology are acknowledged as part of a collaborative artistic process, can this address issues pertaining to power, exploitation, and emancipation, in our postdigital age? We conclude that when artists engage with their personal postdigital positionality, this brings such possibilities a little closer in these uncertain times.