Modification of the Aesthetic-Semiotic Structure of Screen Culture: Historical Context

Abstract

The article examines the modernisation of screen culture’s aesthetic and semiotic structure based on the synthesis of technology and creativity.
The relevance of the problem lies in the fact that the existence of contemporary artistic culture is somehow connected with the transformations of media environment in the 20th–21st centuries where the screen acts as the main formgenerating “material medium”. Being a new communicative paradigm, screen (audio-visual) culture is a phenomenon of the information age, standing out from conventional arts. Screen production, represented today by old and new media, is global in nature, actively influencing the individual and the society and changing the socio-cultural space of the world.
The artistic-semiotic structure of screen culture in the course of its evolution has passed through three historical and aesthetical periods. The first one was the era of modernism whose aesthetics was closely connected with scientific and technological progress and the emergence of a new type of culture based on the synthesis of technology and creativity. The phenomenon in question is photography and cinema that outshone the centuries-old classical culture. The second period, which began in the 1960s–1970s, being associated with the formation of postmodernist aesthetics, was caused by the transition of culture from modernism to the information age, which brought it to an artistic deadlock due to the overabundance of information. The third period (the turn of the 20th– 21st centuries), connected with the transformation processes of globalisation and digitalisation, can be defined as “computer-centric”, where the forms of digital info-aesthetics prove to be most demanded in the cultural sphere.
Reflecting on the impact of computer technologies on screen culture, it should be noted that digital aesthetics changes human conscience and the way people perceive reality. That is why the study of this process is one of the most relevant tasks of the theory and practice of screen creativity.