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.