Art as Metadiscipline – Talk by Matthew Fuller

In recent decades 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. This condition has multiple roots. Some are quantitative, due to the

expansion of art schools and the sheer volume of people trained and prompted to rework ideas in a reflexive manner characteristic of contemporary art. Others are to

do with the changing terrain of post-conceptual art and its multiple tendencies. Some of the latter include an engagement with sciences and the adoption and alteration of their working methods. This includes approaches ranging from treating disciplines and their objects as “found objects” or of 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. These tendencies suggest that art is fragmentarily emerging as something that might be called a meta-discipline: a mode of work whose operation includes both working in other disciplines and to act 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, technology, 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). With Rosi Braidotti he was editor of the Transversal Posthumanities special issue of Theory, Culture and Society. As an artist he has taken part in multiple collectives and collaborations. He is a member of the editorial collective for Computational Culture, a journal of software studies and is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.