A Relational History of Art: 8 Distributed Construal — Postmodern and Digital Reflexivity

If modernism marked the turn inward, reflecting upon the conditions of meaning, postmodernism and the digital age mark the turn outward: toward distributed construal. In this phase, meaning is no longer located primarily in the singular act of the artist or in the material trace of the work; it is co-constituted across networks, systems, and participants.

Postmodern art — from installation and conceptual work to participatory and relational art — foregrounds this relationality. The artwork is no longer a fixed object but a field of relations, activated differently by each viewer, context, and time. Duchamp’s readymades, Beuys’ performances, and contemporary interactive media all demonstrate that the work’s meaning emerges in the interplay of its symbolic, spatial, and social relations.

Digital technologies extend this logic exponentially. A digital artwork exists simultaneously in multiple instances, mutable across screens and networks, recombinable, remixable, and co-created. The semiotic system has become distributed, in the Hallidayan sense: each token of an image or text can instantiate multiple values, each actualisation feeding back into potential. Meaning itself becomes networked and recursive.

In relational terms, the digital image is no longer a mere symbol or representation. It is a node in a relational field, a live instance of potential co-activation. Each interaction with the artwork, each share, like, or modification, is an act of worlding — a re-individuation of the symbolic cosmos. The boundaries between creator, viewer, and system blur; semiotic agency is distributed across human and technological participants alike.

This phase crystallises the ultimate insight of the series: art is not the history of images, styles, or movements, but the history of relational construal. From prehistoric participation to mythic composition, from representational realism to reflexive modernism, and from networked digital fields to AI-mediated co-creation, art has always been a medium for worlding itself. Each phase both reflects the conditions that made it possible and actualises new semiotic potentials.

The reflexive image, in this sense, is the becoming of possibility: a mirror of consciousness, culture, and relation, tracing the evolution of how humans, individually and collectively, imagine, inhabit, and transform the worlds they co-individuate.

This brings the series full circle: from pigmented stone to distributed networks, from immediate participation to recursive co-construal, we can see that the history of art is inseparable from the history of symbolic possibility itself.