Information, Communication and Art

Abstract From Karl Marx to Martin Heidegger, the dialectical relationship between technology and art has become an ontological question of social reality. Marshall McLuhan’s theory of cool-hot media provides an analytical framework for the information age. “Cool-hot media” is McLuhan’s truly original concept. However, while McLuhan determined electronic media to embrace printing media which was regarded as a typical representative of hot media, he could not foresee that electronic media is properly speaking the latest representative of the split type of hot media. Through Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems which underlies formalization and Embodied Cognition Theory, this article argues that there exists an ontological difference between computers and human existence and explores the position of art from the contemporary cool media perspective. This contribution is not only intended to be a philosophical critique of the philosophy of technology of the media age, but also a repositioning of contemporary art and its function from the media perspective. The technological division and abstraction represented in hot media becomes the basic premise for a holistic approach to computer science and artificial intelligence. Their rich information context leads to multiple interpretations of meaning instead of a one-dimensional definition; the everyday actions of cold media have become a type of life art in a broad sense, and manifest their social function as an art of the information age, i.e. to balance the cognitive narrative of hot media and to ensure that its communication does not suppress the audience’s individual creativity, so that they can maintain their subjectivity by tracing the source of information. Art facilitates active audience participation and so allows participants to overcome a one dimensional way of thinking and promotes imagination and creativity in liberal arts education. Following the rules of art, cold media obtains its greatest significance as the guardian of the free subjectivity of all humans, which is alien to modern technology. Cold media and hot media balance each other to create a new way of producing and living that not only discovers but also safeguards the world.