Keywords

1 First Words

Starting with an autoethnographic perspective, merging the creation of the Digital River installation (VV.AA. 1997) and the concept of the Playmode exhibition in Portugal (Gouveia 2019) and Brazil (Gouveia 2022), I will tell a personal story to inquire into the role of interaction technologies and the internet in shaping our contemporary artistical and cultural playful reality. The goal is to suggest that our perception relates to gaming technologies and that the internet plays an important role in defining us as global and planetary citizens. There is no precedent in human history for such dissemination of information and connectivity before the spread of networked playful technologies. That fact made us consider the role of interaction in our lives and how it changes our physical and artificial environments. Starting from a personal and political journey to a broader context where the age of integrated arts and technologies merge with play to find possible ways to survive in a damage planet. Feminist theories, dark ecology and open possibilities promote dignity and care for future survival.

Speculative thinking can encourage integrative views where arts and sciences are key to generating alternative ways of dealing with fear and anxiety. Speculative feminism avoids grand narratives and certainties, emphasizes vulnerability and coexistence, and for that matter can be a tool to stimulate humility and respect among humans and other species. Play and gaming can integrate women studies to generate convergent and sustainable futures. Speculative arts-based research deals with processes instead of objects with the aim of instigating resistance against modern delusions.

2 Introduction and Background: The Invisible Early Years, Shaping the Personal and the Political Journey

This text will use autoethnography (Ellis et al. 2011) as a tool to describe and analyse personal experience and to make visible a broader cultural context and changes in artistical practices with the rise of the internet as a mass medium (Bolter 2019). In this context, relational ethics and personal narratives are a tool to challenge canonical ways of doing research and representing others. Research becomes a political and socially conscious act. So, for that matter, the researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. The aim is to describe a personal experience as a media artist and designer, scholar and curator in the age of global networks. This story begins in the 1980s and takes place during the digital transition where exploratory experimentation with technological devices merged with people from various geographic locations started to unfold and took a lead role. Some of these experiments were processes with the aim of understanding a personal journey through an interconnected world as a woman in a male centred society.

Computer science became widespread in the late 1950s. Distant and distributed networks, based on data and message blocks, gave rise to the project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), of the US Department of Defense, who developed the ARPANET project. Commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. ARPANET was deactivated in 1990, but it left traces for the future. After the creation of a computer network, the internet, it was necessary to provide access to documents. So, investigations carried out within the scope of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the well-known CERN, in Switzerland, by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989–90, resulted in the World Wide Web. Thus, hypertext documents were linked in a complex information system, accessible from any node of the distributed network. Since the mid-1990s, the internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication via e-mail.

Instant messaging, voice calls using the internet protocol (VoIP), conversations or video chats and, finally, the World Wide Web, with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services and online shopping sites, paved the way for a global world.Footnote 1 There is no precedent in human history for such dissemination of information and connectivity. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at ever higher speeds over optic fiber networks. The takeover of the global internet communication landscape was historically rapid and continues to grow, driven by ever-increasing amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment and social networking services. However, the future of the global network can be shaped by regional differences and thinking about access is critical.

As the science fiction American writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, observes: “(…) War in the age of the internet, the age of the global village, the age of drones, the age of synthetic biology and artificial pandemics—this was not the same as war in the past” (Robinson 2020, p. 26). Things are out of control. Unconscious and conscious thoughts. Desires. Cognitive errors. Unavoidable mistakes. Representational drift (Yong 2021) and neural plasticity. Vision, smell and sensory hubs. Anchor bias. Confirmation bias. Imagination acts that bring us back to schemes applied to the flux of events. For the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, the “notion of a repertoire of innate modes of thought and behaviour shared by all human brains as a precondition for the creation of large brain networks is to some extent similar to the basic concept of the collective unconscious, originally proposed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung” (Nicolelis 2021, p. 342). And the author continues, “the fact that a large number of people are willing to die in the name of allegiance to symbolic entities, such as the homeland, a particular political ideology or an economic system, is further proof of how powerful—and deadly—can be mental abstractions and the belief in defining behaviours and collective destinies” (ibid.).

A purely mathematical description of reality may not be sufficient to describe all the complexity and richness of the human and non-human universe and mental abstractions have played an essential role in choosing the direction of the entire history of our species. According to Nicolelis, the interior of our brain works on its own or as part of neural networks. We should then avoid attempts to divide the past into periodsFootnote 2 and assume the nonlinear dynamics of our planet (De Landa 2000) and the plasticity of our brains (Eagleman 2021). Nature secrets are, according to the neurologist A. J. Lees, nonlinear and it is advisable to spend some time in thought. Although the internet is a strong tool, “it has also become the most potent anxiety-provoking system” ever created and it changed even the medical consultation (Lees 2022). The process of paradox development, adverts Ian Morris, means that rising social development creates the very forces that undermine it. Thus, “history is not just one damn thing after another. In fact, history is the same old same old, a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems that call for further adaptations” (Morris 2010, p. 560).

Kim Stanley Robinson (2020, p. 407) asks, “Wasn’t the internet like our nervous system now?” And the author speculates, “Have you heard that the warming of the oceans means that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in fish and thus available for human consumption may drop by as much as sixty percent? And that these fatty acids are crucial to signal transduction in the brain, so it’s possible that our collective intelligence is now rapidly dropping because of an ocean-warming-caused diminishment in brain power? That would explain a lot” (ibid., p. 459). Humans are facing the red death syndrome, meaning the “assertion that the end being imminent and inevitable, there is nothing left to do except party while you can” (ibid., p. 297).

The installation Digital River, a river out of Eden, was created in 1997 (Fig. 9.1). The author of this text attended a digital arts postgraduate course in Porto, in the north of Portugal, where she learned motion graphics, 3D software, and programming languages, with a group of Portuguese, American and Asian-American teachers from the Escola das Artes da Universidade Católica do PortoFootnote 3 and Loyola University Los Angeles.Footnote 4 The created mixed-media environment was presented at the National Young Creators Show in the same year, and it was composed of three digital paintings, a website, and a video. The concept was developed from gained knowledge in digital cultures and screen-based motion graphics software. The goal was to speak about on-screen identity and plasticity, various personas and masks, and it was inspired by two books: Sherry Turkle’s Life on Screen (1997) and Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control (1995 [1992]). Ideas about simulation, post-Darwinism, nature, bodies and synthetic evolution were mixed with Turkle’s enthusiastic screen pioneer research.Footnote 5 In the installation, new age music and flashy imagery of recorded children appear on computer and TV screens (Fig. 9.1). It was also inspired by a Wired magazine article (Schrage, 1995) about Richard Dawkins’ book River out of Eden. Through the decontextualization of the scientific text, which appears as an inspiration poem for three paintings, a virtual environment of artificial creatures was built. The video proposed a reflection about the contemporary entertainment culture in which children end up becoming reflections of the digital screen. On the website, the theme of cyberculture was explored through a hypertext under permanent construction where the excess of information in contemporary society was questioned.

Fig. 9.1
Two monochrome photographs exhibit a digital painting of the river, a table, a television, and a monitor, as well as website information.

Installation overview Digital River, a River Out of Eden: three paintings, a website, and a video. National Young Creators show, 1997, Guarda, Portugal. @Patrícia Gouveia

Full size image

For that hypertext web work, the fictional character P. was created, a human being who felt absolutely nothing, a person who vegetated in a world she/he knew only through images, a world where everything was sent by mail, the food pills together with the corresponding diskette, the updated medical exam and new image helmets. Everything is at disposal through the central services of the networks. P. barely knew her/his/their street, but had vast knowledge about the entire world; they had no embodied and physical experiences besides rich images available through screens. At that time a non-gendered character was created which also reflected first impressions about the web as a gender-free space. The brand-new cyberspace, previously analysed during a one-year sociology course at Lisbon University Fine Arts Faculty (FBAUL), could became a space of oppression if people did not realize its potentialities but also its dangers. The internet without borders, which opened possibilities for those in countries on the global periphery, could became an empty vessel for uninformed content. Digital River was created before the Etoy.CORPORATION toy war (1999)Footnote 6 and the collapse of the dot-com bubble (2000),Footnote 7 where speculation took advantage of internet-based businesses and practices, and digital artists started to see their work questioned by systems of elite legitimation like most galleries and museums. In those years the artist/author was still enchanted by the Electronic Frontier FoundationFootnote 8 and John Perry Barlow chants. I managed to work with digital tools to the web, for the web, with the web and all its promises. At that point I knew I agreed with Virginia Woolf’s (1947, p. 197) statement that “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

The internet could free women from the constraints of place, but it could also contribute to their invisibility in a patriarchal society where technology is created and produced by men for men. According to Preciado (2019), technology and sex are strategic categories in European colonial anthropological discourse. In this apparatus masculinity relates to technological devices and femininity relates to sexual availability. Feminism that rejects technology as a sophisticated form of male domination over women’s bodies ends up assimilating any form of technology to patriarchy, repeating, and perpetuating the binary oppositions of nature and culture, feminine and masculine, animal and human, and primitive and developed, among others. According to Robinson, the internet’s rapid colonization and capitalization of the mental life of so many people occurred rapidly; if the status of women is fundamental to the success of any culture it is strange how many of the old forms of patriarchy remained, and “among the worst of the outstanding wicked problems were patriarchy and misogyny” (Robinson 2020, p. 483).

Maybe we need to invent a whole new internet ecology (ibid., p. 281) to make sure we don’t “get stuck in the uncanny because of the prevalence of misogyny” (Morton 2018, p. 118).

Internet history intersects with computer science and pioneers of telematic arts. The French term “télématique” (a merged word between two French words: télécommunications and l’informatique), which refers to the combination of techniques and services associated with telecommunications and information technology, was introduced by Simon Nora and Alain Minc, in 1978, in a report to the then French Republic President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. This report became an international bestseller, helping to show how new technology could reshape society and how political systems adapt to these changes; in this sense, it was essential for understanding the impact of the telematics condition on society (Nora and Minc 1978).

In the 1980s, the term telematic art began to be used by the English artist Roy Ascott, but this only gained momentum in 1990 when the term was published in his article “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?” (1990). The telematic embrace suggests that meaning is the product of the relational interaction between an observer and the system, a state of flux, an infinite change and transformation. In 1984, the term cyberspace was anticipated by the novelist William Gibson in his book Neuromancer. The concept or the possibility of a digital territory was thus created by Gibson, but it was only in the late 1990s of the last century that it began to be mapped and occupied by people and their newly created virtual technologies. The internet paradox had been apparent since its very origins. Following Kim Stanley Robinson, in the “history of technological improvements (…). Better car miles per gallon, more miles driven. Faster computer times, more time spent on the computers. And so on ad infinitum. At this point it is naïve to expect that technological improvements alone will slow the impacts of growth and reduce the burden on the biosphere. And yet many still exhibit this naiveté” (Robinson 2020, p. 165).

3 How Arts, Internet and Playful Interactions Shaped Our Reality

In his book Dark Ecology, for a Logic of Future Coexistence, Timothy Morton considers “Art is thought from the future. Thought we cannot explicitly think at present. Thought we may not think or speak at all. If we want thought different from the present, then thought must veer toward art” (Morton 2018, p. 1). In that sense ecology is thinking of beings on several different scales, none of which has priority over the other. Morton suggests that scientists are now beginning to figure out something we know in arts and humanities for a long time that we are entangled with the data we are studying. For the author, “if we can explain mind in terms of brain there is no mind at all: the mind is pure illusion. The mind, on this view, isn’t even an emergent property of the brain (…)” (ibid., p. 31). So, “to be real is to be contradictory, to be member of a set that doesn’t include you. To be real is not to be easy to identify, easy to thing, metaphysically constantly present” (ibid., p. 36). Criticising a 12,000-year machination created by agriculture through agrilogistics, meaning a specific logistic of agriculture that arose in the Fertile Crescent, Morton highlights the toxic environment where big data makes bigger farms with the purpose of “growing and nurturing theories of ethics based on self-interest” (Ibid., p. 45).

Exit room. Death drive. Easy think ethics. More people are better than happier people. Death culture. Executing an algorithm without a head (ibid., pp. 53–54). According to Morton, “celebrations of deracination and nostalgia for the old ways are both fictional. It is as obvious to any indigenous culture as it now is to anyone with data sets about global warming that these were stories white Westerners were telling themselves, two sides of the same story in fact” (ibid., p. 11). Infected with convenient stories or cultural viruses, Morton interrogates, “thoughts themselves are independent entities, reducible neither to brain nor to mind—just as pigs are independent entities reducible neither to parts of pigs or prepig ancestors or the ecosystems of which they are members?” (ibid., p. 67). He suggests that we are hallucinating when we separate rather than integrate parts of a holistic and connected system and considers “that what happened was not entirely internal to the human (mind or brain) or external to the human (environment), but was rather a weird entwined fusion of both, a twisted turn of events (…)” (ibid., pp. 67–68). For Morton, classification systems which considered things separately from their connections and aggregations are based on fear, an ontological anxiety, where people know they are related to others and simultaneously find that this consciousness of being intertwined makes them fearful of one another.

Ambiguity erasure is something that women have known about for ages; playing with it is a form of resistance and mystery and mystery is the opposite of mystification. In this sense for Morton, comedy becomes the genre of coexistence, “we need a politics that includes what appears least political—laughter, the playful, even the silly. We need a multiplicity of different political systems. We need to think of them as toylike: playful and half-broken things that connect humans and nonhumans with one another” (ibid., p. 113). Making toys lead us to transdisciplinary collaborations between arts and sciences and to a revaluation of philosophy, politics and humanities. Our present, with the rise of automation and artificial intelligence technologies, makes us think how “walking on water in dreams is much less tiring than marching along the paths of the earth” (Beauvoir (2015 [1949], p. 330).

At the Playmode exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal (2016–2019), and in four Brazilian cities, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasilia (2019–2023),Footnote 9 co-curated by the author of this text, the aim of the artistical concept was to inquire into future possibilities for arts and play in the age of globalization. The exhibition proposes a manifesto (Lack 2017)Footnote 10 about interaction and participation merged with play and gaming and it shows how artists could play a role to engage people in a shared speculation about the future. Agreeing with Robinson, we can ask: “Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet? Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself” (Robinson 2020, p. 166).

Internet art should not be confused with art on the internet, which is a completely totally different thing. Internet art intertwines with aspects related to access to technology and cultural decentralization. Internet art creation, production and consumption belongs to a brand-new planetary world. In this way it shows, in an expressive way, how media spheres increasingly function as public space (Moss 2019). Some authors emphasize network connectivity and, therefore, adopt the term net.art instead of internet art, emphasizing network connections to the detriment of understanding the internet as a medium. However, there is already a consensus considering that internet art marks a set of works that, in their genesis, are different from previous forms of meaning creation and production. Online artefacts such as email projects, software applications for the network, individual websites or, more recently, artistic experiences and performances that take advantage of social networks, augmented or virtual reality. Thus, it became an aesthetic that radically combats the creation and production of objects and the cult of individual practices, proposing collaborative networks that value the culture of the web.

If art history and communication sciences have different understandings of a medium such as the internet this is because video art has transformed mass media devices, such as, for example, television, into an individual artistic expression medium of communication. However, internet art does not reformulate, redirect or deviate (détournement) only the meaning and aesthetic interpretation of the works, as another artistic tool; rather, it uses the web as an opportunity to radically change art and its processes. For communication sciences, technical objects are cultural artefacts, and the machine integrates the technological device in a broad way.

Thus, in tune with Moss, it a definition of culture is proposed that no longer allows the division between cultural and technical, as humans regulate their relationship with the world and with themselves through a process of individuation. The concrete or evolving technical object approaches a mode of existence close to natural objects, tending towards coherence and, in this sense, the technical mentality goes hand in hand with the technical culture. Ceci Moss, based on the French philosopher, Gilbert Simondon, and the Italian activist critic, Tiziana Terranova, considers that the expanded internet refers us to the concept of informational milieu and, in this context, “for Terranova, Simondon’s ideas are compelling precisely because of his understanding that information is not the content of communication but an unfolding process within its material condition. Informational processes exist in the environment in a way that is inherently ‘immersive, excessive and dynamic’ and that points toward an interpretation of information that is not reduced to mere signal and noise” (Moss 2019, p. 23).

Internet arts merged global cross-cultural sensibilities with an openness to the world as a planetary and inclusive space. Unlike social media arts, internet artistical practices are, since the 1990s, based on live archives, activism, participation and the fight against the lack of inclusion on a planetary scale. Internet artistical practices can be fundamental to the integration of excluded young populations, for example, in Asia and Africa.

In 2022, two of the biggest contemporary art events in Europe, Documenta fifteen in Kassel (VV.AA. 2022) and the Venice Biennale (VV.AA. 2022), opened their strategies to the views of curators and artists from other latitudes or genders, in an economy of solidarity, attention and empathy. Documenta fifteen was curated for the first time by a collective of artists from Asia. The Ruangrupa collectiveFootnote 11 used the word lumbung, an Indonesian word that refers to a rice barn, as a concept that triggers a whole collaborative artistic practice in which a system of values is built where the accumulation of capital from crops/creations is collectively governed. Also, this year, Venice Biennale, after 127 years of history, curated by the Italian Cecilia Alemani, presented an exhibition in which women dominated the event, highlighting neglected cases while investigating themes such as gender plasticity and ambivalence, colonialism and patriarchy. The purpose of these events is to show how a more sustainable future, in terms of inclusion, is possible. The integration of those who have been systematically relegated to the margins in these art events is key for future inquiry.

Public life in the twentieth century, warns Ortega y Gasset (1989 [1929], p. 39), “is not only political, but, at the same time and even above all, intellectual, moral, economic, religious; it comprises all collective uses and includes the way of dressing and the way of enjoying.” In this context, the crowd became visible and the masses, that is, those people who feel like everyone else and who are part of a vast group of individuals, grew up and organized themselves in movements often typical of extemporaneous humans without memory or historical awareness. Although we live today in a very different reality from that of the “classical era” of mass politics from the mid-twentieth century to the end of it. Contrary to the scenario then, when people’s loyalty to traditional parties was much stronger and political battles were mainly fought over economic and state redistribution, our political systems today are facing enormous changes (Eatwell and Goodwin 2019, p. 199). American culture, according to Ortega y Gasset (1989 [1929]), had some prominence in the twentieth-century historical period by paying special attention to popular culture and artistic works from mass culture that, in a way, were catalysts of an idea of social progression making room for a world that suddenly grew and extended to the entire planet.Footnote 12 Internet arts and culture helped shape this environment and “many citizens are now living in a political world that is more volatile, fragmented and unpredictable than at any time since the birth of mass democracy. And it is unlikely that these changes will be reversed soon” (Eatwell and Goodwin 2019, p. 200). Technical objects are disguised as a commodity and, therefore, reveal their double sorcerous character, hiding their religious reflection. Only when working conditions and practical life allow human beings to have transparent and rational relationships with their fellow human beings and with nature will the mystical cloud tend to disappear (Marx 1975 [1867]).

According to Harrison Fluss (2019), the contradiction between reason and values, or between instrumental rationality and what has intrinsic value, covers the limited forms of bourgeois reason, or positivism, which give rise to its own romantic antithesis. Within the limits of the market, one cannot see anything beyond the contradictions of capitalism.

Hegel and Marx showed that it is possible to have a dialectic of reason that can redeem what is relevant in art and religion for human life. In other words, one can extract the rational kernel of a tradition from its mystical envelope. The aim of Marx’s critique was to translate religious and political struggles through “self-conscious human form.” Dialectical reason, as a substantive form of rationality, can determine what human needs and interests are without superstition. But those who see reason only as instrumental will be condemned to the dilemma of looking for archaic values for their answers, instead of looking to the “poetry of the future” (as Marx said). Dialectics, as an art that rescues reason in what is apparently irrational, can help to reposition the role of popular mass culture and integrate specialists into the wider scope of knowledge, since sometimes they are effectively the ones who have the reason on their side, revealing the blindness of the elites who hold power, and so it is no wonder that Hegel and Marx saw comedy as a superior form of reason compared to tragedy (Fluss 2019). The cynic, that is, the one who has never created or done anything, parasites civilization as a “satisfied boy,” using Ortega y Gasset’s terminology, and bitter cynicism (Haraway 2017) proliferates in contemporary society through multiple apocalyptic visions that foster fear and inertia. Awakening the ghost of Diogenes, the one who disdains and dismantles the various power relations, perhaps makes sense (Sloterdijk 2011 [1983]).

4 Play and Gaming Can Integrate Women Studies to Generate Convergent and Sustainable Futures

The dissemination of the network culture and the internet, in the 1990s, made it possible for some women to appropriate the medium and use it to establish international connections and create works from there. The expansion of the internet has unleashed and given visibility to a set of performative practices of feminist origin, online and offline, which were made explicit through renewed and diversified types of feminisms: cyber, eco, techno, xeno… The internet without borders, boosted by globalization, has made it possible to share knowledge and create collaborative projects. Women, mediated by technological symbioses and stimulated by the need to be alert to biological and planetary sustainability, which could no longer support modern dualities, played a fundamental role in the first decade of internet implementation. Today, these practices are less dispersed and the convergence present in post-human feminism (Braidotti 2022) allows us to anticipate and predict possible futures that are based on creative and artistic speculations. With humility and determination, the arts can and should contribute to living with dignity on Earth, demystifying visions that only propose catastrophe as a possibility.

In this context, states Haraway (2017), the Anthropocene and Capitalocene histories are too stilted and both Marx and Darwin contributed to their demystification by creating possible alternatives without determinism, teleology and pre-defined plans. For Haraway, the human is a composite constituted through its relationship with life, the earth and other species, in a poetic symbiosis or sympoiesis, a suitable word to name situated, complex, dynamic and responsive historical systems. Sympoiesis involves, extends and generatively amplifies the concept of autopoiesis. If modernism was made explicit by an emphasis on the mechanism of autopoiesis, which makes living beings autonomous and characterizes them as such, the eco- and techno-feminist movements of recent decades emphasize the symbiotic relationship between multiple species as a living art, an emerging and extended synthesis that merges arts, sciences and biology. Thus, human and non-human ecologies, evolution, development, history, affections, performances, technologies and everything that is deemed pertinent are brought together. An ecology inspired by a playful feminist ethic of response-ability that promotes intricate relationships and coalitions between arts, sciences and technologies, uniting codes and algorithms, creativity, and community involvement. A proposal for artistic creation that helps us to live better on a damaged planet. The awareness that we are faced with the problem of living in a complex world suggests that human beings live and die with dignity and together on earth.Footnote 13

The balance between reason and emotion in a biocultural continuum is shaped in contemporary feminist materialism, in reaction to postmodernism, and it rests on the premise of a nature–culture continuum that is technologically mediated through a heterogeneous ecology that includes the organic and the non-organic. Bio-power has moved to a logic of information dissemination whose bodies are transformed into techno bodies that are permeated by the vicissitudes of the environment, are socially responsible and affectively connected. These bodies are simultaneously real and virtual and are diluted through exposure and disappearance to multiple techno-biogenetic networks mediated by computing. These cyberfeminist experiments, which date back to the 1980s, were a consequence of internet and new media culture. It is important to highlight the legendary Australian art collective VNS Matrix which, in 1991, published the Cyberfeminism Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century. Cyberfeminism, Braidotti (2022, p. 145) points out, “is in some respects a predecessor of post-human critical feminism because it includes an intimate and productive relationship with the technological universe, breaking with the recurrent tradition that advocates a utopian hope or a deep suspicion with technology.”

Techno-feminism addresses the social effects of science and technology, especially among those on the margins and the excluded, considering the eco-feminist ideal of sustainable interdependence. Studies of technoscientific feminism aims to reconcile the various souls of feminist theory with rigour and creativity. Thus, the tensions between biological essentialism and discursive constructivism are being integrated through new constellations that combine life with technology to create a new epistemology that leads to an ethics that defines new policies.

For Moss, today’s internet, compared to that of the 1990s, is more mobile, ubiquitous and mainstream. Artists and critics react to these changes. Moss suggests, “recognizing the decline of Clement Greenberg’s concept of medium specificity that understood art according to the essence of its medium as determined by its material properties, and the difficulty hybrid media (like the computer) present to the establishment of ‘pure’ art forms like painting or sculpture, Krauss argued that instead artists must ‘purify’ art itself away from the infringement of fashion and kitsch” (Moss 2019, p. 25). Answering the question “what can art be in the context of the 21st century?,” Ceci Moss puts forward the idea of an expanded internet art, something like a continuous that exists in a distributed system, an artistic work without object or centre, without an autonomous and singular existence. In that fashion, internet art is always in motion, always in circulation, in assembly and dispersion (ibid., pp. 38–39). The concept of flux describes immanence as opposed to transcendence, where the milieu is a condition of existence. Thus, the living organism participates in and helps to shape the milieu.

If cybernetic theories had mechanistic tendencies, their application to human societies, through systems theory, extended the idea or belief that the universe works in the manner of automatons, forgetting that science itself maintains an intrinsic relationship with perception. The immanent conditions of individuation are indeterminate and reside in a process of invention that is not predictable, but rather is open to disturbances, improvisations and adjustments in a generative chaos. Information does not exist by itself without the meaning generated by individuals and any technological invention emerges in tune with the needs and experiences of humanity. Through a process of ontogeny, there is a symbiosis between technology and the contemporary informational environment. The informational milieu restructures the production and existence of creative expression, and a paradigm shift seems to arise where meaning is no longer about signs, but rather about milieu signs. The process of permanent innovation presupposes a divorce between the rhythm of cultural evolution and the rhythm of technical evolution since technique evolves more than culture. Anchored in Bernard Stiegler, Moss suggests that we should stop considering technology as purely utilitarian or a threat to humans and that we must focus instead on thinking about how the explosion of new technologies alters the human experience.

5 Conclusion: Speculative Arts-Based Research: From Objects to Processes, Resistance Against Modern Delusions

Contemporary artists work productively from the symbiosis between information technologies, the environment or context in which they are inserted and human experience. Moss’s analysis of Les immateriaux exhibition, by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput, which took place in 1985 at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, should be highlighted. The concept of this exhibition takes us back to Jean-François Lyotard’s concern with the power of new technologies to inscribe themselves in collective human memory, in a time and space in which this inscription will promote deterritorialization. Lyotard worked to promote the idea of an exhibition as a work of art, showing how connections between matter, mind, time and memory are reconfigured, and highlighting how new technologies extend our capacity for memory while working on a scale outside the human perception. At the Playmode exhibition in Portugal and Brazil, our aim was to show how central play, gaming, interaction and participation were key concepts in shaping human contemporary perception and enhance the ability to resist.

Resistance is an art that bears witness without prejudice; it is generated not in reaction but rather in relation to contemporary circumstances and developing sciences and technologies. Without immediate judgments or decontextualized epistemological biases, it is intended to generate greater attention and care through an approach that considers the fluidity, performance and context of identity categories, emphasizing social contextualization instead of social categorization (Shaw 2014), since the latter is based on an old-fashioned idea of identity as an essence so widely criticized by postmodernism. We are dealing with what Ndikung called performative knowledge events that promote spaces of care. These spaces emphasize relationships and multiple perspectives between things, people, thoughts and forms of knowledge, bringing together areas such as curatorship and anthropology, which end up being more than the sum of the parts that make up the relationship. The illusions and disappointments of care and empathy suggest spaces for sharing and exchange in constant evolution and mutation and are no longer limited to the cult of artists and works of art that, after all, do nothing more than feed the failing neoliberal market of contemporary arts (Ndikung 2021).

For Fernando Domínguez Rubio (2022), the unnatural ecologies of the modern museum operated through the primacy of the artistic object which, according to this dogma, must be a readable, singular and authentic product of the artist’s creative intention and agency. Now, digital objects put this paradigm in crisis through displacements that denounce their fragility as originals and, often, as collective works, promoting, as an alternative, notions of copies always predisposed to updating to avoid obsolescence. These aspects cause problems and challenges to conservation, as digital objects operate in a different regime from that of modern artistic aesthetics, refusing the separation between subject and object of enjoyment. In this context, a type of interpretive conservation will be necessary, which leads us to the ability to interpret multiple iterations of the same work, as already happened, for example, in the history of games and performance. Thus, it is possible that the work is kept through various living and documentary records that refer us to different perspectives to preserve that memory in a hybrid way. This memory (record) can consist of images, texts, movements, interactions, sounds… The idea of a stable object gives rise to the artistic work in constant circulation, which multiplies and regenerates in channels of equivalent objects. To survive, the work will then have to continually regenerate itself, move from a discrete object to a distributed object and, for this to happen, conservators, curators, technicians and artists are called upon to interact with each other to give shape to projects each time more complex. We are witnessing, through digital culture, a paradigm shift where what was considered modern artistic aesthetics, that is, the unique, singular and authentic object, is no longer applicable and, therefore, we are faced with a different artistic order that is based on circulation, dissemination, and constant creation of partial and fluid objects.

In this dynamic environment we should realize that reason and emotions are not separate entities and we should maybe acknowledge the power of stories in shaping cultural values and political societies. As Ursula K. L. Guin work poetically demonstrated, happiness is related to reason and only by reason can it be conquered (Le Guin 2018 [1969], p. 221). Because (ibid., p. 216),

Light is the left hand of darkness

And darkness, the right hand of light

(...).