| This dissertation inspects Computer Art, the mauvais enfant of art history, from its genesis to its diffusion and branching into other movements while going through certain transformations in order to become a part of the mainstream art production. Most notable among these are the New Media Art, which had to shed the collaborative aspects and scientific inquisitiveness of the original movement while acquiring a much needed critical edge, and what I chose to term Technoscience Art, which retained the scientific aspects with the hope of becoming a conflux of art, sciences and technology, yet suffered under the linguistic hurdles of interdisciplinary research. My main argument is that these transformations happened due to an unspoken disownment of Computer Art by art circles, caused mainly by its associations with the rigid methodology of scientific research, as well as with the age-old fear of computers gaining human traits like creativity, intuition, and a sense of aesthetics and order. The combination of these two aspects forces Computer Art to become entangled with the definition of art, as it attempts to quantify artistic production and aesthetic feelings, and more importantly, as it implicitly questions the assumptions of what makes art a human endeavor.;Computer Art is plagued by several problems faced in collaborations between arts and sciences. These problems are especially prominent in the scholarly publications that demarcate scientific approaches to art and artistic approaches to science, manifested in particular in the journal Leonardo, which has an explicit agenda to re-structure Computer Art as a bridge on the intersection of arts, sciences and technology and to render this intersection vital through putting the aforementioned human traits at its core. Consequently, Leonardo is selected as a case study, in addition to the newly emerging field of neuroesthetics, whose positivist approach to capture neural correlations of aesthetic feelings endangers the classical understanding of art, and evokes a host of illuminating reactions from art historians.;In conclusion, I emphasize the need for collaborative alliances between the artist and the scientist for which Technoscience Art emerges as a promising venue, to put the ever expanding tools of technology into use for artistic production, but also to develop a critical aspect in today's scientific research, which will eventually shape the future of our society. |
