The post digital artist – artisan: adaptation, resistance and resilience

With the advent of AI and soon of AGI, all kind of professions, including artist and coders, are rethinking their raison d’être in the future of societies. Big Data, social networks, hyperconnectivity, privatization, etc. have created new types of problematics such as mass surveillance through data exploitation, information bias, misinformation, censorship, cultural invisibilization and erasure just to name a few.

Who and how will shape our futures in the postinternet and postdigital1 era? What roles can digital artists play in our future digital governance(s)?

Though one can argue that thanks to digitalization, human and societal development is advancing at a pace never seen before one can also argue that this technological accelerationism has caused a vast share detriment to humanity, individuals and societies alike, and also to our environment. This is not a techno-pessimist complaint nor a Luddite abnegation to new technologies: this is merely the identification of an unfairly unbalanced system that, I believe, artists have the ethical responsibility to address. The postdigital seen as a double edged sword is a dialectical opportunity to iterate on plausible futures.

This project aims to investigate and experiment on how already existing artistic and artisanal practices can be linked together and be reoriented in a resilient and adaptative manner to overcome or counteract the newly emerged challenges and/or negative aspects (whether perceived or real) that a global digital hyper capitalistic society poses. I will depart from the assumption that creative coders are a type of modern artisans and will search to establish a link with traditional artisans. For practical reasons, I will frame the artistic experimentation to a small portion of the Colombian artisan scene in the context of a global sociopolitical panorama. I will also not search for generalizations or conclusive answers: I understand this research as the possibility to try context- specific experimentations sustained by a theoretical and academic framework.