Most of what I see in conceptual art these days revolves around the death of the author. One artist makes a contraption that creates interesting abstract paintings when you vibrate the floor as you walk by, another attaches a pencil to a tree branch so the wind allows it to draw, or someone culls the internet for found images to arrange in an archive. All this is interesting and inspiring, however, what is the next step? Why is it that conceptual art has been stuck in the machine influenced, author-less void for the past 20 or so years?
Part of the answer must lie in the obsession we have with vast strides that have been made in the realm of technology and how much of an impact it has had in daily life. Someone once told me that people tend to look backward into history as they live in the present and truly great artists are the ones that can look clearly at the present to give us ideas of the future. While I must agree that technology has taken us into a new realm of interactive art that highlights the interaction of the viewer or something “other” than the artist in order for it to be successful, I am skeptical to accept the idea that only (seemingly) author-less art can come from this knowledge. It seems that the most effective thing any socially based artwork/network has ever done is to make the person interacting with it feel that they are special and a creator themselves, which propagates the cycle of authorship.