Mario costa

Mario Costa has a great academic career. He was a professor of aesthetics at the University of Salerno , taught the methodology and history of literary criticism at the University of Naples, and the ethics and aesthetics of communication at the University of Nice - Sofia Antipolis. He is the author of about twenty books and many essays that have been published in Europe and America. In 1985, he founded Artmedia, a laboratory for media and communication aesthetics, at the University of Salerno, in the Department of Philosophy. As director of Artmedia, he developed an active work in promoting neo-technological art and contributed to the organization of many conferences and events in Naples, Paris , Cologne , Toronto, Tel Aviv and Sao Paulo.

His main work took place in two directions: 1) the sociopolitical and philosophical interpretation of the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century, and 2) the development of the philosophy of technology through the analysis of changes introduced by new technologies into art and aesthetics.

Following the first research path, beginning in the 1960s, he gave philosophical and aesthetic interpretations of several avant-garde movements in art and literature. Especially relevant are his works on Marcel Duchamp, lettrism, schematism and the functions of the contemporary art of criticism.

Regarding the second path, his work mainly concerned 1) the social and ethical consequences of technological communications, and 2) changes in the sense of “aesthetics” and “artistic” due to the influence of new electronic and digital technologies. This forced him to propose radical changes in this theoretical field, which was based on such concepts as “technological sublime” and “fluxus”.

In the early 1980s, Costa began a study of media and communication technologies, the first result of which was the aesthetics of communication : a theory that conceptualizes the possibility of an aesthetics of simultaneity from a distance. The basic principles of this theory were established in 1985. In the 1990s, Costa defined the most important, comprehensive, aesthetic and philosophical theory of new media, which he described as "technological sublime." He traced the history of the sublime and its metamorphoses: rhetoric exalted by ancient philosophy, the natural sublime of the 18th century, the industrial-urban sublime of the present, and what he considers to be the last form of the sublime, namely the technological sublime. He argued that the excess in which the sublime manifests itself is represented by all new electronic and digital technologies of image , sound , writing , communication and space . According to Costa, new technologies that develop as a self-regulating technological system, imply, on the one hand, the weakening of the subject and the disappearance of art and all related categories (beauty, style, artistic personality, self-expression, etc.). On the other hand, new technologies underlie a new aesthetic dimension, technologically elevated, which is defined by new categories: de-subjectivization of aesthetic production, hyper-subject and suppression of the symbolic and semantic.

According to Costa, the entire theoretical apparatus developed by traditional aesthetics since the 18th century has become completely outdated and useless for understanding modern art. The emerging techno-anthropological state and its most significant aesthetic products need new explanations and theories in which the “form”, that is, the main categories of traditional aesthetics, is finally replaced by the “flux” category.

Costa has expanded its reflection from the “cinematic stream” to the modern “technological aesthetic flows”, which was made possible thanks to the advent of digital technologies and networks. He came to the conclusion that technological flows can also highlight the essential aspects of modern ontology, closely related to our experience of time and existential relationships.