Tangibility, Presence, Materiality, Reality in Artistic Creation with Digital Technology

The democratization of Computer Arts and Computer Music has, due to dematerialization (virtualization) consequence of digital technologies, considerably widened the boundaries of creativity. As we are now entering a second phase that has been labeled “post-digital”, we are called to reconcile this openness with notions such as embodiment, presence, enaction and tangibility. These notions are in our view inherently linked to creativity. Here we outline some approaches to this problem under development within the “European Art-ScienceTechnology Network” (EASTN 1 ). Several areas of artistic creation are represented (Music, Animation, Multisensory Arts, Architecture, Fine Arts, Graphic communication, etc.). A main objective of this network is to establish common grounds through collaborative reflection and work on the above notions, using the concept of tangibility as a focal point. In this paper we describe several different approaches to the tangibility, in relation to concepts such as reality, materiality, objectivity, presence, concreteness, etc. and their antonyms. Our objective is to open a debate on tangibility, in the belief that it has a strong unifying potential but is also at the same time presents challenging and difficult to define. Here we present some initial thoughts on this topic in a first effort to bring together the approaches that arise from the different practices and projects developed within the partner institutions involved in the EASTN network.