Review: audio/visual makings. Practice-based research, post-digital hybridisation & techno-criticism

Anchored by the Pedro Ferreira’s own practice-based research, Audiovisual Disruption: Post-Digital Aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Arts (2024) explores critical making as a way to address the impact(s) of digital technologies, in/through contemporary arts, and IRL. In this sense, the book’s theoretical-conceptual foundation, carefully set throughout its initial chapters, proceeds to be (de)materialized in the analysis of artistic projects that explore post-digital hybridisation, thus, challenging static categories of digital aesthetics, referenced from the analysis of Christiane Paul and Alexander Galloway. When trying to avoid insider-outsider, on and off, and other meta-existentialistic dichotomies, the author positions himself (as well as his audio/visuo/logical work/s) somewhere in between: media, medium, arts and techno-criticism. In this review, we synthesize Pedro Ferreira’s perspective, briefly relating it to other critical approaches, namely the idea of “multiple makings”, as proposed by Simon Bowen, and Tim Ingold’s “ways of making”.