[-empyre-] Jeffrey du Vallier d'Aragon Aranita: "New Year's Resolutions for Digital Futures"

[Timothy Murray]

Dear Tim and Renate,

If you'd asked me to write a New Year's resolution on digital futures
even three months ago I may have presented a grand idea somewhere
along the lines of furthering possibilities for dialogue and the
exchange of ideas and perceptions between people of different
cultures, particularly between Asian cultures and those from
elsewhere. This is something that the recently opened MOCA China, a
new museum of contemporary art in Hong Kong, which I helped build over
the past nearly three years and for which I presently serve as its
executive director, intends to do, significantly, through the critical
examination and presentation of new media art forms. These
possibilities come, however, wrapped in layers of complexities
stemming from broad political and economic and personal realities.
That's how it always is I'm afraid with the arts and with its
institutions. Art embodies some of our finest notions about our shared
humanity and about democratic ideals, but these notions come at a
price.

I have a narrower view of things at the moment. As you know, I
suffered a minor stroke several weeks ago but I have subsequently lost
a good deal of my eyesight, save for a small central section of my
right eye, which is not always in focus. Weeks spent traveling to
specialist medical centres in the States, many, many hours spent in
metal hyperbaric chambers, pneumonia, problems, angry calls about
meeting responsibilities I picked up along the way but which I have
ignored for now, many pledges and prayers to personal gods and ghosts
have not changed things much for my eyesight. But lately I have begun
to focus on moving on--dealing with this blindness.

Partly to kill time, I have been playing with digital processes for
creating art, experimenting individually and collaboratively. It's
something I used to write about and lecture on in university on its
history and its process. I've gotten to know some of its leading
figures, attended international symposia on digital art and visited
media art centres like the Ars Electronica and the ZKM over the years,
so I know what digital art is, or has been, but as a personal art
medium, as a painter, I'll admit I did not fully embrace it, I had
little to say with it.

At this moment I am not yet certain about the worth of my own digital
work, it's different, it has meaning for me but I don't have its
'smell' locked down like the sweet scent of oil paint, the tinge of
sharpness of polymers, the mustiness of canvas, and the feel and
weight of 'real' art tools. I cannot feel the 'texture' of the art of
the digital realm, nor can I reconcile the glow of digital art or its
travel in time through light and sound with what I was used to working
with over a forty-year engagement with art creation. My resolution for
2009 is, perhaps selfishly, a small one: to get over some simple
mental barriers, prejudices about digital art that I have, because as
an artist I live to create, to express my ideas about the world and
about the highs and lows I have known, no matter what tools I use. I
suppose my back is against the wall on this but I hope it somehow all
works out.

Warmest regards,

Jeffrey

Brief bio:

Jeffrey du Vallier d'Aragon Aranita is an artist. B. 1954, American
and French. Executive Director, MOCA China, Museums of Contemporary
Art. Hong Kong.

-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853