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Crucially, pure experience is not made by or filled with things or places such as “subject” and “object” but is generated through relations and processes, which [William] James terms “co-ordinate phenomena” organizing its space-times (1977, 199). So too do relations organize the space-time of computational experience and its weird yet powerfully generative topologies. Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

This, according to [Sven] Lütticken, means that, “[a]esthetic art” is aesthetic practice to the extent that it questions and challenges the relative autonomy of art. The aesthetic is the constant questioning of art and, more precisely, of claims for art’s autonomy, counteracting its reduction from persistent problem to ideological given.” Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Contemporary works of art are difficult to recognize as art from the perspective of modern aesthetic theory because, at a formal, objective level, they can neither be included under the tradition of a particular art form, nor do they limit themselves to the traditional artistic media, but assimilate new technologies and industrial modes of production, among other things, in artistic practice (…) Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

I argue that the exhibition form is constitutive of the work of art — which is why “exposition” might be a more appropriate term than “exhibition,” as the latter may perhaps be taken to refer to something pre-existing, i.e. a re-presentation or display. Any work of art has a structure of address — an Appellstruktur in the terminology of Wolfgang Iser — that informs the ways in which it can be received. It is thus, in a fundamental way, addressing and exposing itself to a public of indefinite strangers. Subsequently, the curator can make it address a public at another level and in any given context, but the first moment of exhibition already occurs in and through the address of the work “itself” — a work of art always already involves an act of exhibition in its initial address to someone, a you, an audience, readers, listeners, spectators, participants, collaborators. It is open to be “received” by anybody who is able to enter into its structure of enunciation, and who will actualize or concretize it. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

In addition, West stresses that exhibitions are the media of art’s public realization: “as media, art exhibitions should be conceived of as affirmative in their mediating functions. They are spatial and technical arrangements through which artworks are publicly realized.” Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

According to curator Bruce W. Ferguson: [E]xhibitions of art are, by virtue of their visible prominence, structurally intrinsic and perhaps psychologically necessary to any full understanding of most art. Exhibitions can be understood then as the medium of contemporary art in the sense of being its main agency of communication — the body and the voice from which an authoritative character emerges. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

The act of exhibition makes something/the work present but, at the same time, it creates a distance, precisely because the appearance of the work has been arranged and addressed to someone/us; what is exhibited is given as having been organized and deliberately made available to appear to us. This distance to the object presented installs a difference and an indeterminacy with regard to its status and meaning. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Pensive images invite us to pay attention to the image, to how it becomes an image, and how it functions, to what it does — what it affirms and makes seen, and what it blinds us from seeing and renders invisible. The notion of the pensive image refers to a zone of indeterminacy between the passive and the active, between the image as duplicate of a thing — as a representation or reproduction of the world — and the image as artistic operation — as creative agent — and also to a zone of indeterminacy between non-art and art; between the image as part of society’s image circulation, parading as a representation, on the one hand, and the image as resistance, a space for imagination, on the other. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Paglen’s work demonstrates that deciding what images mean is the root of power. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

According to Paglen, digital images are revolutionary because they are fundamentally machine-readable and can only be seen by humans in special circumstances and for short periods of time. This machine-readability of digital images allows for the automation of vision on an enormous scale. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

W.J.T. Mitchell’s distinction between a picture and an image might be useful in this context. According to Mitchell, a picture is a material object, which can be burnt, broken or torn, whereas an image is what appears in a picture, and what survives its destruction; in memory, in narrative, in copies and traces in other media. The picture is the image as it appears on a concrete material support or in a specific place, it is the embodiment of an image. An image can be thought of as an immaterial entity, a phantasmic appearance that comes to life via a specific material support. To this I would add that an image is dependent on recognition — in like with Walter Benjamin’s notion of “the image in the now of its recognizability” — an image is dependent on the involvement of a human agent it is something that develops out of the spectator’s relation with the image. Or, as Jean-Luc Godard puts it with reference to his artistic practice of montage: “But an image doesn’t exist. This is not an image, it’s a picture. The image is the relation with me looking at it dreaming up a relation at [sic] someone else. An image is an association.” The spectator, so to speak, animates the image. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

“We are not,” Jacques Rancière remarks, “in front of the images; we are in the middle of them, just as they are in the middle of us. The question is to know how to circulate among them, and how to get them to circulate as well.” Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

The society of the spectacle not only concerns an accumulation of images: “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord explains in paragraph 4 of The Society of the Spectacle, “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Yet, as art historial Claire Bishop remarks, social relations today are not mediated by monodirectional media imagery (as theorized by Debord in 1967) but through the interactive screen, “activating” and training us as “prosumers” who coproduce content, rather than passively consuming what has been devised for them — but who, most of the time, only act as nodes of circulation. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

We are currently witnessing fundamental changes in the conditions and the status of images: more and more images are networked; cameras and screens (portable and fixed) are everywhere; image data is geotagged; databases can be navigated in real time; the prevalence of operative images and “machine vision” detached from human control and sense perception is increasing rapidly, etc. These transformations are, of course, closely connected to the digitalisation and the digital production of images, which has raised a number of interesting questions about their material support and the infrastructure of their dissemination, about connectivity, circulation, distribution, formats, etc. At first glance, these changes are happening primarily at a technical and infrastructural level — the digital transformation of the image from geometry to algorithm, from projection to processing, from a passive, fixed representational form to being active and multiplatform. This chapter, however, focuses on how such changes also problematize the cultural and social significance of images and the role of the human subject; the ways in which they shift how we see — or do not see — the world, ourselves, and each other. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

The dominant modern conception of time is based on continuity and progress. History — unified, since the late eighteenth century, in the collective singular, as shown by historian Reinhart Koselleck — was seen as a continuous process toward a qualitatively different future; a process that could be planned, created, and accelerated by humans. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Bourriaud therefore defines “art” as a: 1. General term describing a set of objects presented as part of a narrative known as art history. This narrative draws up the critical genealogy and discusses the issues raised by these objects, by way of three sub-sets: painting, sculpture, architecture. 2. Nowadays, the word “art” seems to be no more than a semantic leftover of this narrative, whose more accurate definition would read as follows: Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Interestingly in this context, philosopher of media and communication Marshall McLuhan, with reference to the influence of media on our perception of time and history, declared in 1969 that: “Just as there was no history when there was no linear time sense, so there is post-history now when everything that ever was in the world becomes simultaneously present to our consciousness.” According to McLuhan, linear history began with writing and ended with television. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

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