[-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Renate Ferro]

hola a todos,

my Digital Resolution is to stop using the literal term Digital Art, a term
that suggests art can exist in an entirely digital frame.

while the category may have been useful some years ago, i feel it's now
destructive and misleading - in the contexts of historisation, criticism and
education especially.

after 10 years being active as a software developer and artist it's my belief
there is no such thing as an independently digital artwork.

any digital process impacts upon audiences by means of energetic, corporeal
events. sound has never existed 'inside' a computer and neither has an image;
rather, both sound and image are phenomena assembled by the brain in  response
to exposure to complex physical events (changes in air-pressure, casting of
photons) which may or may not have been transduced from a digital process along
the course.

in this way the construct of the Digital Artwork is drawn from a position of
(adopted) ignorance. the problem begins with the absurd metaphor of the
desk-top, echoes across dendrites-to-nerves-to-muscles and ends with coal
silently burned, far away from cities, to power the metal and silicon on which
the digits depend.

for example, sending this email to you will invoke changes in temperature,
drawing power, swelling metal, in the following computers before it reaches the
Empyre mailserver lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au (149.171.96.95) from my current
location in Madrid, Spain, using the mail transport agent on my LAN:

	julian at rata:~$ traceroute unsw.edu.au | awk '{ print($1, $2, $3) }'

	traceroute to unsw.edu.au
	 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)
	 2  192.168.153.1 (192.168.153.1)
	 3  241.Red-80-58-121.staticIP.rima-tde.net (80.58.121.241)
	 4  So7-0-0-0-grtmadpe3.red.telefonica.wholesale.net (84.16.8.125)
	 5  So-0-1-0-0-grtmadde2.red.telefonica-wholesale.net (84.16.12.50)
	 6  p16-7-1-1.r21.mdrdsp01.es.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.8.197)
	 7  p64-2-1-0.r22.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.45)
	 8  ae-1.r23.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.222)
	 9  as-0.r21.asbnva01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.158)
	10  ae-3.r20.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.129)
	11  as-2.r21.lsanca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.24)
	12  xe-0-1-0.r03.lsanca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.90)
	13  p4-1-1-0.r03.lsanca03.us.ce.gin.ntt.net (198.172.90.102)
	14  so-4-0-0.bb1.b.syd.aarnet.net.au (202.158.194.157)
	15  ge-1-1-3.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au (202.158.202.161)
	16  gigabitethernet0.er1.unsw.cpe.aarnet.net.au (202.158.202.226)
	17  gw1.er1.unsw.cpe.aarnet.net.au (202.158.202.234)
	18  149.171.255.102 (149.171.255.102)
	19  149.171.255.118 (149.171.255.118)

compare that to the covetous event of a person clicking a little  envelope with
a curled green arrow indicating movement..

two American corporations (Apple and Microsoft) define and defend these
metaphors in their HCI models and as such the way their users operate and
imagine the digital. it's in their interest to represent the digital as
something ageless and limitless while ensuring it is forever interpreted in the
abstract. meanwhile multinationals like Adobe design tools in consultation with
marketers and 'professional artists' through which 'digital artists', in all
their diversity, echo their work - expressed by and expressing the limits and
modes of 'creative suites'. in this sense the 
relative independence of so-called
digital art practice, its illusions of neutral, unburdened space, is very
questionable indeed..

(while teaching at a workshop recently collaborators introduced themselves not
as video editors, image makers or 3D modelers but as people that
"know" Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and 3D Studio Max.)

secondly, how is a screen-based interactive work any more or less intrinsically
'digital' than (for instance) a work whereby an 
embedded OS on a hidden computer
runs a complex program controlling a switch-array or AI of a robot?

is printed code somehow 'digital'?

	#!/bin/sh
	# This is not a digital artwork
	while true
		do echo "This is a digital artwork"
		sleep 1
	done

in other words, do we accept that the relative external perception of digital
processes in the given work - a question of transparency or strategic, overt
presence - will give it category?

i've worked on a piece or two that wouldn't be perceived as Digital Art at all
yet the code on which the works depended was certainly some of my best. digital
processes are ubiquitous within the production and distribution of so much art
that what is known as Digital Art is in danger of being lumped as a fad whose
projected form was stubbornly positioned and asserted as its primary content.

we see the damage done by this when museums attempt to archive Digital Art by
merely backing-up the software, only later to find that it was dependent on a
base of software and hardware, even screen or other characteristics, no longer
available.

the role of the digital in art and society is done no service kept in the realm
of the mythic, the magical. the icon is not the 
file and the file is not the data.

gracias y feliz año,

--
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Madrid, Spain
currently: Madrid, Spain
about: http://julianoliver.com

Bio: Julian Oliver (New Zealand/Spain) is a 
developer, teacher, and writer based in
Madrid. He's pesented papers and projects at many international
electronic-art events and conferences since 1996.  His worldwide
workshops and master classes have been in game-design, artistic
game-development, object-oriented programming for artists, UNIX/Linux,
virtual architecture, interface design, augmented reality and open source
development practices.  An advocate of free software, he established the
game-development collective, Select Parks, in 1998.
-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University