Man‐Machine and Machine‐Man in Art: Meeting in Digital

Digitalization has given rise to a substantially new civilizational and existential situation. The mankind development was associated with the creation of collective memory in the form of culture as a system for generating, storing and transmitting social experience, including the creation of an artificial environment. For the main part of history, man likened the world to himself, which made the world understandable. However, over time, the tools and means became less and less anthropomorphic. The world has increasingly become like complex mechanisms. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the relationship between man and machine has become one of the main themes in art. They gave rise to a wide horizon of aesthetic comprehension of this topic: from the pathos of transforming reality (including the person himself) to alarm and horror. However, modern digitalization creates an artificial environment that involves not only the natural environment, but also the biological nature of man. The person himself turns into an artifact. Moreover, under the conditions of digitalization, culture turns into a kind of machine, when reality appears as the realization of a “transcendental” digital code, which acts as an original source for any number of artifacts as its copies. This situation cannot but affect art and aestheticization, which are reduced to the flow of processing digitized data. It is not about new digital technologies in art. It is about changing the format of the entire process of artistic creation and aesthetic reception. A person is transformed from a user of consumption and creativity options into one of the options for a digital mega-machine.