In times of the post-medium condition in contemporary art and media convergence in culture at large, media practices are no longer bound and limited to a certain medium-specific form and its materialities. The habits of practices such as photography, painting and software (e.g. Photoshop and Illustrator) are linked to specific forms of thinking and perception that can be applied to all other materials and media. Therefore, painting and image software can be seen as states of mind that can influence each other or even converge in the artistic practice. 

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In my presentation, I want to argue for media as a state of mind and explain - with examples from contemporary post-digital painters including Vivien Zhang, Olie Epp, Leonhard Hurzlmeier and others - how artists use a painterly thinking in the use of image software and a software-like thinking in their painting practice. To develop the foundation for this production-aesthetic perspective, I will combine arguments around the discourse on painting with positions from philosophical aesthetics

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Since late modernism, painting has increasingly been understood as a practice that is more and more detached from its medial form of paint on canvas: the fringing (Verfransung) of the arts (Adorno), the expanded field (Krauss), critical limbo (Rowley, Pollock), embodied thinking (Hudson) and apparatus resp. dispositif (Daxler) are all attempts to rethink the medium-specificity of painting. The concept of painting as a state of mind takes this approach further, but focuses more on a specific mode of perception by understanding philosophical aesthetics mainly as a theory of 'aisthetics' in reference to the Greek aisthesis as the science of perception. Two central arguments provide the framework for this theoretical elaboration: (1) The implications of the digitalization for contemporary painting practice can be better understood with a focus on specific image software and its inner logics as defined by Lev Manovich; (2) the philosophical concept of the aesthetic attitude as an abstract definition of how we encounter art will be replaced by a certain form of perception that guides our understanding. In the presentation, I will show with examples that painting can be an invitation to comprehend and reenact a certain media-based form of perception.

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Till Julian Huss holds a PhD in Art and Image History from the Humboldt-University in Berlin and is research assistant for art and media theory and philosophy in the Art & Design Department at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences in Berlin. His research focuses on visual metaphors and metaphorical thinking as well as forms of temporality in the arts and media cultures.

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Outputs include: "Art playing the game of design and design playing the game of art? Notes on public art and social design." In: Public Art Magazine Shanghai. [forthcoming 2021] "Picturing Modern Urban Life. László Moholy-Nagy and the Metropolis" [engl./chinesisch]. In: Jun Jiang (ed.): "The Publicness of Everyday Life." Shanghai 2018, pp. 99-128.