Digital Aesthetics: Introduction
Claudia Giannetti

The early twentieth century saw the formation in various fields of new theoretical approaches sharing a skeptical attitude towards the fundamental certainties that had profoundly influenced occidental culture and science. Towards the mid-twentieth century concepts like truth, reality, reason and knowledge became central in an intensive contest between rationalism and relativism. In the course of this debate, several theories were dissociated from the self-referential character of their scientific disciplines and increasingly placed in correlation with other fields. Examples of metadisciplinary models include the cybernetic analysis of message transmission and man-machine communication or, more recently, postmodernist philosophy and its notion of ‹contaminated,› ‹weak› thinking. [more]