The Given and the Made: Thinking Transversal Plasticity with Duchamp, Brecht, and Troika’s Artistic Technologies

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

Abstract

The work of Marcel Duchamp, George Brecht, and Troika is in direct dialogue with science as a socio-cultural nexus, not in a straightforwardly collaborative way but in a manner that distils an artistic technology from a transposition of the existing social-scientific technologies. This chapter argues that Duchamp’s erotic accidentals in n+ dimensions, Brecht’s event scores (four-dimensional performative ready-mades), and Troika’s dice-based cellular automata challenge three socio-scientific dogmas that order the world.

These are: 1) space is inert and three dimensional and time is ‘added’ as the fourth dimension; 2) language is static and atemporal; and 3) evolution is temporally linear – phenomena develop from simple to complex. Duchamp, Brecht, and Troika’s artistic technologies, by contrast, articulate transversal plasticity while also revealing the underlying indeterminacy of space-time, as a phenomenon and concept.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationContingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies
EditorsNatasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell, Dominic Smith
Place of PublicationLondon and New York
PublisherRowman & Littlefield International
Chapter9
Pages143–161
Number of pages19
ISBN (Electronic)9781538171592
ISBN (Print)9781538171578
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2022

Publication series

NameMedia Philosophy
PublisherRowman and Littlefield

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