The Next Thing

To the extent that art engages with our cognitive-affective understanding of the world and the value we confer upon its disparate particles and processes, the significance of this study is that it promotes critical discourse within the sciences and the humanities towards the preservation and enhancement of human life in an evolving universe. * Leonardo *
The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-first Century represents the often subversive visions of contemporary literary and visual artists, critics, and philosophers on the experimental arts of the future. In search of a paradigm shift that takes art beyond modernism, structuralism, post-modernism and post-historical ideologies, these writers grapple with new possibilities as artists take their searches into scientific laboratories of biotechnology and challenge previous assumptions concerning the meaning of body, self, nature, and culture. -- Curtis L. Carter, Professor of Aesthetics, Marquette University Department of Philosophy
The themes that permeate these essays and images – art as aesthetic fiction, the inseparability of art and life, the past as loss and the future as open, the intertwining temporal dimensions of works of art, the explosions of public access to art and the simultaneous shrinking of critical public writing, the critical art of the future, writing as a mélange of ascendancies, Kindlefication, the impact of physical locale and physicality, the centrality of affect, migratory aesthetics, objects as interactive subjects, axonometry, the destabilizing tensions between fiction and world, memes and micro-memes, ana-materialist realities, alternate art realities – restart the conversation in the visual and performing arts that has been for too long silenced by the noise of instantaneity on the internet and functionalism in the creative arts. It is to be hoped that this book is a sign that the halcyon days of art and art makers lie ahead. -- Dorothea E. Olkowski, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado
The Next Thing assays what Blanchot called le livre à venir, the book to come: a book on the real future, the unpredictable one, which is happening now. Traces of this future are already in every contemporary artwork, and this volume — against the search-and-destroy backdrop of neuroscience, ontological shifts, and drone surveillance — examines the unexpected transpecies we already are, from aesthetic fiction to becoming mouth-breast. It unearths the art of our species through the species of our art. -- Matian Viegener, Artist, Author of "2500 Random Things About Me Too"
This anthology performs the much-needed task of mapping the art of this new century. Pablo Baler covers a variety of critical and theoretical modalities of contemporary and future states of art, theory of art, cultural theory and science. His selection of essays offers a global and a transdisciplinary view between “today” and “tomorrow.” This will be essential reading for artists, curators, art historians and cultural theorists. New and brave anthology. -- Misko Suvakovic, Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Art, Belgrade