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

TY - CHAP

T1 - The Given and the Made

T2 - Thinking Transversal Plasticity with Duchamp, Brecht, and Troika’s Artistic Technologies

AU - Lushetich, Natasha

PY - 2022/12

Y1 - 2022/12

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

UR - https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171592/Contingency-and-Plasticity-in-Everyday-Technologies

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

SN - 9781538171578

T3 - Media Philosophy

SP - 143

EP - 161

BT - Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies

A2 - Lushetich, Natasha

A2 - Campbell, Iain

A2 - Smith, Dominic

PB - Rowman & Littlefield

CY - London and New York

ER -