Philosophical Prepositions: Ecotechnics Là Où Digital Exhibition

Given digital transformations in representation, virtuality, and artistic experience, how might philosophy continue to provide a productive avenue for thinking the relations between art and technology? Following a brief summary of recent French philosophical accounts of art and new technology, this essay explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s expansive thinking on technology in the digital moment. While Nancy would be the last philosopher to deny the negative socioeconomic features of the global network, he might be the first to insist that it be inhabited philosophically through the thought of exposition in order to permit technique to figure differently. Throughout his texts, Nancy mobilizes the prepositional construct là où to figure the open touch of art and to render heterogeneous the most traditional concepts of state and world, particularly as these concepts are now enveloped with the fractal skin of digital technology. This essay further suggests that Ryoji Ikeda’s digital installation, “The Transfinite,” performs Nancy’s distinction between the hegemonic tradition of technologie and the exposition of écotechnie. Écotechnie activates the spacings of touch, proximity, and (près)positionality that constitute the potential energetic horizons of technology. The parameters of écotechnie shake and disturb predetermined assumptions about the culture, capital, and violence of technology and its relation to art and philosophy.