Transformations of the Contemporary Art Practices in the Context of Metamodern Sensibility

Abstract

The paper studies the changes of contemporary art practices in the conditions of metamodern sensibility within the context of the newest digital technologies that enable us to expand the understanding of environment and the role of an individual in the development of information space, as well as the further ways of transformations of metamodern sensibility in the current circumstances. The problem of metamodern sensibility, on the one hand, highlights ethical and aesthetical foundations of art that are essential for parting with postmodernism. On the other hand, it allows aligning both modernist and postmodernist mindsets with the strive to understand transhistorical means of expressiveness, interconnections of all previous cultures, and their dialectic synthesis. Important features of metamodenism were determined: sensibility in the context of information technologies, the turn of the art practices to digital, global or local networks; the focus on a posthuman and its development as a result of the modern technological progress. In this framework, a number of art practices were studied that are specific due to their radical difference on the level or the recipient’s perception of sound, color, video, body, and space. Hence, not only the construction of new audiovisual time-space occurs but also the construction of the artist’s Self, with the recipient being included as the co-author of the artwork. It has been concluded that the use of digital and analog technologies in art practices expands the human understanding of the audiovisual information space in our environment, as well as the common beliefs about the limits of creativity, including the idea of ecological knowledge. Transformations of information and audiovisual space causes the urgent need for modern humankind to invent the new ways of cognition of the personal inner world, of the instruments of self-expression in the new socio-cultural conditions of life, and an updated understanding of the core of this new sensibility in the art practices from the viewpoint of its multifacetedness and polyphonic nature.