This is a very interesting blog post by Elliott Mickleburgh on « Speculative Engineering: The architecture, philosophy and Internet art of a hybridized reality ».
The article analyses and celebrates the interfacing and integration of matter and data, of actual and virtual, which characterises what Lyotard called the « postmodern condition ». This new condition is based on the « epistemological erosion » of the mythological barriers of demarcation edified and imposed in the past, and that were not really undone by modernism, but merely reversed or transgressed.
According to the Elliott Mickleburgh, the new works of art are based rather on the fluid structures and transversal paths across membranes that do not function as binary oppositions or as impermeable barriers. They are based on composition rather than separation or opposition, on hybridisation and pluralist proliferation rather than purification.
The vision articulated in this article has much more to do with Bruno Latour’s philosophy of hybridisation as summarised in WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MODERN than with Graham Harman’s object-orinted ontology, which is based on a rigid demarcation and separation between a hypothetical intellectuallly posited real object and artistically composable, empirically observable or scientifically theorizable sensual objects.
For details see: REVIEW OF GRAHAM HARMAN’S « THE THIRD TABLE »
For the comparison with Latour see: HARMAN’S THIRD TABLE (II): comparison with Latour and Laruelle
AGENT SWARM 