Historical Questions on Being and Digital Culture

Abstract

This chapter discusses poetic and imaginative experience in relation to being, aesthetics and technology. It considers ways in which art’s past and future in the gallery and museum is connected to the language and ideas of technological development, and questions of technology and the loss of meaning. The technological focus of discussions of digital art limits the possibility of understanding it. What art communicates about meaning is lost, and with it the poetic dimension of experience. The discussion draws upon selected writings of Marshall McLuhan and Owen Barfield in the historical questions of art, science, philosophy and the imagination. The aim is to examine art, technology and meaning within questions of art’s meaning amidst its technological developments, and creativity and the imagination. If art is to be evaluated increasingly alongside its technological properties, then its meaningfulness can be understood poetically as well as technically. The historical development of technical understanding in philosophy and the sciences, of which art and technology are largely a continuation, will be considered within the poetical and spiritual questions of experience towards different perspectives on the idea of art and the museum.