Co-operative Art Techniques

This project focuses on the select group of art techniques defined by the constitutive nature (and their co-operative implications) of specific factors or components that are neither generated nor fully controllable by the executing artist. These techniques have been widely overlooked as an essential and dynamic part of pictorial techne – understood as the totality of knowledge, skills, and instruments and their targeted, although not completely controllable, application. This research is thus interested in analyzing the image phenomena through which the technical constitution of ‘art’ was and continues to be fundamentally and systematically expanded. Based on a range of case studies, the project will show how this specific aspect of the techne of the fine arts was exposed (or hidden) in their aesthetics and how these co-operative moments informed the status of the selected artistic work practices within both a wider framework of value and the hierarchies of visual media and human artes. In a second phase, this research questions to what extent these co-productive image processes – in response to their multiple causes and not-exclusively human authorship – shaped some of the long-standing art historical narratives from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.