The ANU Computational Culture Lab, School of Art & Design, invite you to join us for an Research School of Humanities & the Arts Distinguished Lecture, Art as Metadiscipline, presented by Prof Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths College. Supported by funding from the Research School of Humanities and the Arts.

Presented in-person and online via Zoom.

Twenty-first century artists have increasingly worked on the problems and the modes of enquiry of other disciplines and fields. The findings, styles of thought, and habits of operation and conduct of the sciences, sociology, mathematics, literature, governance and education, amongst others, have become resources for reworking and expanding. They are used to probe questions of power, imagination and invention, but also to rework the condition of the aesthetic more broadly.

This expansion of art has multiple roots. Some are to do with the changing terrain of post-conceptual art and its multiple tendencies in the context of the changing condition of the disciplines more broadly, including developments such as the new humanities or posthumanities. Other factors include an engagement with sciences and the adoption and alteration of their working methods or their interpretation at a tangent to more traditional forms of interdisciplinarity. This includes approaches ranging from treating disciplines and their objects as “found objects” or elaborating techniques of mutual interest. Others rework the idea of art into a process of learning and becoming in education or in forms of political and ecological direct action or speculation. Importantly, digital media and computing provide both a conduit and terrain for these shifts, as well as a key subject of and means for art's widening reformulation.

These tendencies suggest that art is emerging as something that can be called a meta-discipline: a mode of work whose operation includes both working in other disciplines and acting upon them. Mathematics and philosophy have been key meta-disciplines for a long period. They work in and on both the conditions of possibility and the working matters of other fields.

Art has historically been allocated the role of working on sensation and feeling via representation. In the present, art also works on concepts, institutions, techniques and information, including the workings of these prior-metadisciplines. This talk will examine aspects of the genealogy and potential of this tendency.

Matthew Fuller is a cultural theorist who works on art, science, politics and aesthetics. His books include How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (Bloomsbury 2018), How to Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software (Polity 2017), with Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minnesota 2019) and with Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (Verso 2021). He is a member of the editorial collective of Computational Culture, a journal of software studies http://www.computationalcultur... As an artist he has worked with group such as I/O/D and Mongrel as well as other collaborative and independent projects. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Image: Forensic Architecture, Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana, 2020.