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

[Eduardo Navas]

Hello Julian,

Hello Empyreians,

I've been enjoying the resolutions.  I had the pleasure of meeting you,
Julian, in person last summer, and with great respect I make the following
comments about your resolution.  See below.

On 1/15/09 12:48 PM, "Renate Ferro , Timothy Murray"
<rtf9 at cornell.edutcm1@cornell.edu> wrote:

> 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.

This statement is the ideological template often used to argue for total
assimilation of a minority to a majority--often promoted by the monority.

In other words, moving to cultural politics of difference, you could make
the same argument as above for people of ethnic backgrounds other than white
and part of the Bourgeois, or ruling class, who have been marginalized in
the past, and who may want the whole issue of race, gender and ethnicity to
go away. 

People who have become self-alienated about their heritage would claim that
people should be dealt with only as "people." As you claim that we should
not deal with term digital, but just with the work as "art" (people as
people, art as art...)  They would further demand for dismissal of
historical traces that in the past may have provided important historical
frameworks to understand how we develop as human beings primarily defined by
difference.  A repetition of difference in all of us is what we should take
note of. When we try to deny it, we very much sound as your above statement.

"Digital" is in every sense of the word a contemporary manifestation of
difference, yet it is also becoming assimilated by the institution that is
unable to completely be successful to say that digital is the same as any
other field of art practice.  Consider this: we don't hear painting as a
practice worrying about the fact that it is painting anymore... We don't
hear sculpture denying its thingness... We don't hear conceptual art
denying/celebrating itself as an idea...  Yet they are all different and are
part of history according to the very names that make them identifiable as
discourses within art practice and its history.


To worry about digital as a label is a way of defeating the strength of
difference as a vital part of day to day production, not only in the arts,
but even when we walk down the street.  To try to dismiss the digital, or to
stop considering how a work of art is informed by the "digital" is a way of
feeding the well established monolith of the art institution as it has been
established prior to the rise of new media culture.

The term digital should be constantly questioned for its strength and flaws.
The term should not go away, and because it is beyond the power of anyone of
us on this list or in global media culture, it will not go away, but will be
considered according to its flux as discourse.


> 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.

This I agree with strongly.

[...]

>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.

Here I see your concern, but it need not have to do with whether it is
digital art or not.  The problem you point out is simply an inherent part of
the medium--that actually defines it and makes it a challenge to
historicize.  Is art supposed to last forever?

Here is one of Reinhardt's "servers and software" falling apart...

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/conservation/conservation-pro
jects/imageless

"Ad Reinhardt¹s Black Painting, 1960­66 (1960­66) was donated to the
Guggenheim Museum in 2000 by AXA Art Insurance Corporation as a study
painting after it was deemed irreparably damaged. Over the course of seven
years, conservators, scientists, curators, and artists collaborated to
examine the issues surrounding the conservation of this painting, which
include the inherent vulnerability of monochromatic and minimalist
paintings, experimental solutions for conservation, and the associated
ethics of these strategies."



The very best to everyone.

Eduardo