Meaning and reference in contemporary art. The case of electronic and digital arts

Abstract

With this text I intend to establish a relationship between the semiotic-hermeneutic ways of making art and the experiential happenings that give rise to artistic productions, including the heirs of science and technology: electronic and digital arts. This will make an analysis of the notion of mimesis, I will argue that we are witnessing a supported art semantic dimension in its reference to the everyday world. For this mention some traditional art and, especially, will stop looking at what is considered the first digital artwork Ninety Parallel Sinusoids by Michael Noll, and in more recent ones Esto no es un Magritte by Uruguayan Fabián Barros, and Esto no es América by Chilean Alfredo Jaar. The three works are chosen in order to analyze their benchmarks. So finally I hope to show that the relationship between man and the world still has ways of representation in art, and that despite all the twists and syntactic changes that can occur, the art is still a way of interpreting the world and what it burden of meaning.