This catalogue for a show at HMKV Dortmund explores techno-shamanism in the arts today, taking Joseph Beuys, who cultivated the figure of the shaman throughout his career, as the starting point. In addition to viewing shamanism itself as a form of technology, this artistic approach uses (speculative) technology as a way of discovering shamanic powers. Contemporary artists are updating Beuys’s strategies and themes for the digital age, deploying many of the same tropes. These acquired iconic status in Beuys’s oeuvre, and were aimed at healing and transforming society, cultivating a spiritual approach to the environment, and subverting power structures and the logic of capitalism. The positions introduced here combine aspects that appear diametrically opposed: technology and shamanism, technical progress and esotericism, rational modernism and the mystical tradition. Today’s artistic alchemists are engaged in a quest for “rare-earth elements� and metals, a fusion of the environment, technology, and artificial intelligence in order to create a technical/mythological description of the cosmos. Included here are works by: Morehshin Allahyari, Joseph Beuys, Mariechen Danz, Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy, Lucile Olympe Haute, knowbotiq, Sahej Rahal, Tabita Rezaire, Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Rütten, Transformella (aLifveForm fed and cared for by JP Raether), Suzanne Treister, Anton Vidokle. Text in English and German.

Digital technologies have profoundly impacted the arts and expanded the field of sculpture since the 1950s. Art history, however, continues to pay little attention to sculptural works that are conceived and ‘materialized’ using digital technologies. How can we rethink the artistic medium in relation to our technological present and its historical precursors? A number of theoretical approaches discuss the implications of the so-called ‘Aesthetics of the Digital’, referring, above all, to screen-based phenomena. For the first time, this publication brings together international and trans-historical research perspectives to explore how digital technologies re-configure the understanding of sculpture and the sculptural leading into the (post-)digital age. Up-to-date research on digital technologies’ expansion of the concept of sculpture Linking historical sculptural debates with discourse on the new media and (post-)digital culture