Media art: aesthetic and social system

Abstract

This article is a scan of ways in which the Media art production is constituted as aesthetic and social system, based on concepts from german cyberneticist sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Opening the discussion pointing the relations between the Media Art and Cybernetics, the article provides examples to illustrate how the creative and receptive processes in this area are based on communication processes, described by Luhmann as necessarily autopoietic processes and whose effectiveness is made highly unlikely. This discussion is the basis of our argument about the understanding of Media Art production, and form that we bring up critical points and work out suggestions for how to conduct such a complex activity at both the micro (individual goals) as the macro level (overall goals). Our conclusions point to the importance of Second Order Cybernetics in the understanding of Media Art as a social and aesthetic system and to the utopian nature of our propositions.