Cindy Sherman's Self-Portraits and the Selfie Culture | HENI Talks

Contemporary art increasingly incorporates digital culture and emerging technologies. Young artists absorb current cultural developments and express them through digital media and NFTs. Digital archiving preserves artwork through systematic documentation since the late 1990s. Digital creation processes, including 3D animation and AI, represent legitimate evolution in artistic practice. Performance art serves as powerful political statement when artists use real actions rather than simulated performances. Authenticity is crucial—artists never pretend to be someone else but perform real actions conveying genuine messages. Some performances are documented as video to preserve historical context.

This section explores how contemporary performance art intersects with digital technology and blockchain. The instructor discusses using the body to explore relationships between human bodies and social bodies, addressing politics, ethics, identity, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. The lesson introduces how performance art and blockchain technology create new possibilities for displaying, collecting, and selling transformative live acts. The 'Fight for the Freedom Project' example demonstrates how performance art can be documented as NFTs and commercialized in innovative ways. This represents a new frontier in how performance art can be preserved and experienced in the digital age.

Three contemporary performance artists respond to digital culture's challenges: Kenneth Collins creates durational works in boxes where performers hear each other through headphones while audiences see mirrored reflections, revealing narcissistic self-surveillance; The Oven stages controversial projects like 'Guilty Landscapes' where performers live in boxes with projected social media interactions, exploring privacy boundaries; Chris Kluwe examines how technology standardizes human behavior through works like 'ISOs.' These artists highlight how digital culture forces us to negotiate blurred lines between public and private, physical and virtual, and raises ethical questions about performance, surveillance, and human identity in an age of constant connectivity.

Contemporary performance art addresses contemporary issues of power, capital, and community engagement. Tanya Bruguera's 'Whisper' (2009) involved public speech under military supervision, exploring mass communication control. Santiago Sierra questioned inequality by paying individuals $30 for tattoos, examining how capital exploits disadvantaged people. Francis Alis organized 500 volunteers in Lima to move a mountain, challenging power relations and ecological concerns. Modern performance invites ongoing participation beyond the initial event, such as time banks exchanging minutes instead of money, or proposals for living sculptures. The boundary between art and life dissolves as artists invite audiences to continue creating their own works.

Contemporary performance art increasingly utilizes live digital composition through laptops, where artists manipulate sound and images in real-time before audiences. This approach creates unique, non-repeating experiences for each presentation. The artist conceptualizes visual art as 'painting in motion,' focusing on form, construction, and image creation rather than linear narrative. Digital video serves as the fundamental tool, offering advantages in information access, equipment sophistication, and image recombination possibilities. The artwork creates immersive experiences where viewers become part of the piece, isolated from external distractions. The artist adapts the work to specific presentation conditions, demonstrating how contemporary performance art integrates technology, visual art principles, and audience immersion to create dynamic, site-specific experiences.

Critical theory faces a crisis because its core method of demystification has been co-opted by enemies, betrayed by its own practitioners who reduce it to conspiracy theories, and absorbed by capitalism for commercial purposes; the solution requires shifting from destructive critique to reparative practice that protects and cares for reality rather than debunking it.

Foster analyzes how theoretical approaches have been displaced by market forces across generations. In the 1930s-1950s, political progressivism displaced into art; in the 1970s-1980s, theory became the primary site of critical engagement. While theory developed its own academic niche market, this displacement raises questions about whether theoretical work has lost its critical edge. Foster cautions against models of assimilation and commodification that oversimplify the relationship between art, theory, and market forces, arguing that such frameworks may prevent recognition of ongoing critical potential in seemingly absorbed works.

Hal Foster challenges Peter Burger's thesis that the neovanguard represents the vanguard's spectacular failure and institutionalization, proposing instead that neovanguard practices should be understood through a Freudian concept of 'deferred action' (Nachträglichkeit) and a theory of 'parallax' that examines how historical practices are reinterpreted and resignified in contemporary contexts, rather than simply repeated or failed.

Hal Foster, a prominent art theorist, critiqued Burger's argument by pointing out that Burger was making predictions from a present perspective without knowing the future impact of artistic movements. Foster argued that the significance of vanguard movements cannot be fully understood until their long-term effects are observed. He also noted that we can only recognize the impact of historical movements because we now have the perspective of subsequent movements. Therefore, to claim that no new vanguardias can emerge is premature because we don't yet know what future movements will reveal about the impact of current ones.

Hal Foster presents his comprehensive analytical framework for understanding 20th century modernity through three key periods: the mid-1930s, mid-1960s, and mid-1990s. These periods correspond to three central themes: subjectivity, alterity (the other), and technology. Foster examines how the subject is constituted through psychological and cultural processes, how the relationship with the other has evolved, and how technological systems have transformed human experience. He introduces the concept of 'the paradox of immediacy produced by mediation' - how modern technology creates apparent closeness while actually producing distance. He identifies three key 'escissions' (splits) in contemporary experience: space-temporal (mediation creating false immediacy), moral (disgust reduced by fascination), and bodily (the ecstasy of dispersion rescued by disincorporation fantasy). The contemporary subject is described as 'disfunctional' and trapped between 'obscene proximity' and 'spectacular separation' - positioned as a spectator before screens that connect while maintaining distance to avoid trauma. Foster proposes that paranoia could serve as an effective concept for connecting the three historical periods he analyzes, referencing Lacan's 1932 doctoral thesis on paranoid psychosis and connecting paranoia to the fascist fear of the other as something excessively close. He discusses Peter Sloterdijk's concept of 'cynical reason' from his 1980s book, which describes a form of reason that renounces genuine engagement with the world, using cynicism as a protective shield. Foster critiques this view, arguing that cynicism is actually a fundamental form of management and governance in contemporary society. He analyzes how social issues - racial violence, inequality, social unrest - are transformed into media spectacles, using examples like the LA riots and Bogota trial. This transformation creates a new form of social engagement where suffering is consumed as entertainment. Foster identifies the 'enigma of the subject' as the central question in contemporary theory, relating to the subject's relationship with their bodily image, cultural others, and technological prostheses. He discusses the contemporary obsession with bodily image, including plastic surgery, social media presentation, and the constant curation of online identity. He references the concept of 'neuro-totalitarianism' that demands constant self-presentation through social media filters. Foster argues that contemporary criticism has lost the 'correct distance' that characterized earlier critical traditions, referencing Benjamin's concern that things now 'press too closely' on human society. He discusses Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and how technological reproduction changes art's function and meaning. He connects Benjamin's analysis of the 'optical unconscious' and 'distracted perception' to Alois Riegl's work on the transition from optical to haptic vision in art history, which influenced Deleuze's analysis of Francis Bacon. He discusses Panofsky's 'Perspective as Symbolic Form' (1939), which argues that perspective is a precondition for art history - the modern system of perspective enabled artists to create comprehensible images, just as the modern concept of history requires intellectual distance between present and past.

Deepfake technology enables AI programs to take one person's face and apply it to another's video frame by frame, and can also manipulate voices to make people say specific things. When deepfakes emerged, they were popularized by celebrity face-swapping on pornographic content, causing significant public outrage. In 2018, it was discovered that vote and view counts on platforms like Reddit and YouTube are faked and manipulated by companies themselves to push desired agendas. Algorithms increasingly control online content, social media, news, and shopping by capturing user attention and steering behavior toward profit-generating avenues. Every user interaction creates a behavioral model that predicts future actions. The Post-Truth Era describes how objective facts become less influential than emotional appeals and personal belief, driven by AI bots and government-controlled systems feeding curated information. This represents a fundamental shift where emotional resonance outweighs factual accuracy in shaping public opinion.

Deepfake technology has advanced to the point where most people cannot distinguish AI-generated content from authentic material. This technology enables sophisticated fraud, including voice cloning for financial scams (demonstrated by a $35 million theft using a cloned bank executive's voice) and social media impersonation. The technology is now widely accessible and affordable, making such attacks increasingly feasible. Beyond fraud, deepfakes enable non-consensual content creation, including fake intimate videos from just a few photos. This has ushered in the 'post-truth era' where nothing can be trusted as authentic—screenshots, voice recordings, images, and videos are all potentially manipulated. Deepfakes have become weapons in geopolitical warfare, as demonstrated during the Ukraine-Russia conflict where fabricated videos of leaders were deployed to spread misinformation. This has created a fundamental crisis in digital evidence and information trust, where even legal systems are unprepared to handle such challenges.

We are living in a post-truth era where billionaire-funded disinformation campaigns systematically undermine public understanding of reality. Social media platforms like Twitter have been transformed into disinformation central paradises designed to spread lies. The challenge facing truth-tellers is fundamentally asymmetric: we create YouTube videos and reasoned arguments while opponents have billions of dollars constructing social media landscapes aimed at ruining epistemology. The situation will only worsen with AI and deepfake technology, which will make sophisticated misinformation easier to produce and harder to detect. This technological arms race creates an uneven playing field where truth-telling cannot compete with deliberately engineered disinformation campaigns designed to manipulate public perception.

Modern algorithms maximize attention by showing content confirming existing beliefs, creating automated global-scale confirmation bias. Troll farms produce disinformation through fake accounts, while astroturfing creates artificial grassroots support, making the question not 'what people think' but 'what powerful organizations want people to think.' The post-truth era occurs when objective facts have less influence than emotional appeals. Algorithms promote content generating strong emotions regardless of truth. Deepfakes use AI to create indistinguishable fake videos, undermining trust in all recorded evidence. This creates situations where any compromising video can be dismissed as fake, making truth verification impossible.

Artificial intelligence technology has advanced to the point where generated content is nearly indistinguishable from real media. In videos purporting to prove conspiracy theories false, AI-generated content can show impossible physical phenomena such as liquids not moving when they should. This creates a post-truth environment where verifying authenticity becomes extremely difficult, even with magnifying glass analysis. The technology continues to improve, making detection increasingly challenging.