Abstract
The duende is that mysterious presence in art which makes our hair stand on end, causes our blood to quicken, and our breath to change; the force “everyone feels and no philosopher has explained,” so sayeth Goethe; “a struggle, not a thought” so sayeth poet and activist Federico García Lorca. This paper draws on studies of technology, Western secularity, and indigenous epistemologies to investigate the duende as a “more-than-human” agency, one that we can collaborate with to put pressure on what “art” means now. In the transition to modernity, our relationships with more-than-human beings sunk beneath explicit discourse about reality. As AI acts as a mirror for what modernity values most about human capabilities, the duende reminds us of the importance of seeing the language of the narrativizing mind versus being in the action of the sensing body. This paper argues against a mechanistic view of the earth, world, and ourselves. We are participants in a living cosmos, one that is alive with communication and collaboration. Our inheritance is not limited to scientific materialism: our other inheritances, including animism and the wisdom found in our bodies and art-making, may be up to the task of handling the shifts we’re experiencing with AI. By acknowledging our co-creative participation in a more-than-human cosmos, and the commitments that entails, we might find modes of art-making through animistic practices of relation; and, we may heal the rupture between tech (technology/technique) and art that lives in the space of rupture between thought and struggle.
Presenters
Jessica WittigAdjunct Professor, Religious Studies, Iona University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
New Media, Technology and the Arts
KEYWORDS
Natureculture, Animism, Duende, Art, Secularity, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
