Ephemeral Objects is a blog exploring the idea of art criticism for the post-material world. It is written by Andy Horwitz: critic, curator and founder of Culturebot Arts & Media. It is made possible through the funding of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.
It includes essays, interviews and critical theory on the context, creation and comprehension of non-material art objects.
Ephemeral Objects is predicated on the following idea:
Until recently the human being’s experience of the world was primarily material, though an unseen layer of non-material operations was widely assumed and explored through the study of philosophy, physics and metaphysics. Art created from, and existing as, material objects has been a dominant form of creative expression with even performing arts largely predicated on interpreting the human experience of the material world. As society has moved from the push delivery systems of mass media to the immersive, interactive worlds of ubiquitous social media, our experience of the world is increasingly predicated on infinite unseen digital operations. The computing languages that allow these digital operations are most frequently written according to the principles of “object oriented programming” – a programming paradigm that represents concepts as “objects“. Recent years have seen the advent of the term “performance object” to refer to certain complex works of time-based art, and the idea of the “social object” has taken on wide significance. My project is, over the course of a year, to write a series of essays articulating a framework for aesthetic and critical engagement with non-material objects, attempting to map the foundational concepts of object oriented programming onto the foundational components of performance and social objects. The desired outcome is to begin imagining a language of critical discourse that pushes the existing vocabularies of visual art and performance criticism into new, hybrid modalities.