The Post-Conceptual Digital Era (2000–Present)

This chapter will consider the period from 2000 to the present day and discuss how the artistic reality of the early 21st century has been one of post-conceptualism. Whilst the legacies of conceptualism and postmodernism remained, so far the 21st century has not had a dominant artistic ideology; rather, this century has seen a proliferation of hybrid practices with many offshoots and (sub)genres. Covering a broad series of topics from virtuality, to post-humanism, to cybernetics, to systems art, this chapter will chart how Live Visuals is situated within this wider, more pluralistic creative culture, whilst also covering the historical advancements of the 21st century (VJing, audio-visual performance, etc.). Key Live Visual works such as Klip Collective’s What’s He Building in There? and Universal Everything’s Infinity will be used to illustrate how post-conceptualism has yielded a promiscuous blend of the formal and the conceptual that was previously not reconciled or even reconcilable in modernism or postmodernism.