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

[Julian Oliver]

..on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 12:02:16AM -0500, Eduardo Navas wrote:
> 
> 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. 

i was not drawing from an ideological template used to dissolve difference
within historically political diametrics. i don't want to close any gaps.
rather, the statement represents a personal recognition that the term is no
longer useful to describe my work and much of the work i see labelled as Digital
Art for reasons relating to the term's descriptive integrity.

> 
> "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.

the 'thingness' of painting - in the sense of an unnegotiable, opaque corporeality
- cannot be held in the same question as the 'thingness' of Digital Art:

having learnt about operating system design, how kernels abstract over hardware,
the role of CPU assigned registers in writing data to physical memory, i realise
that what comprises the delivery (and often outward appearance/presence) of a
'Digital Artwork' is very much non-digital. the metal and plastic computer, in
all it's gross materiality, is more than the frame, even the support (canvas).
it is, for the most part, a physical context that cannot be separated from the
digital content, critically, functionally and historically.

an ingredient of Digital Art, it could be said, is fossil fuel, the liquid
bodies of things long dead. furthermore so-called Digital Art is dependent on
hardware, operating systems and often tools provided by corporations. a huge
stack of upward dependence, from state-infrastructure to private capital
entities, just to run my 1000 lines of C code in a museum. 

i'd love to get my hands on a Compaq Presario with a 19" CRT monitor running
Windows 98 Service Pack 1 so i can see the last artwork i made for Windows, as i
intended it to look and perform, before switching to Linux and free-software
entirely. i don't want to see it emulated, i don't want full-screen-antialiasing
on a modern NVIDIA card, i don't want it on a matte LCD screen or completely
out-of-context on an style-pointed iMac. i want it as it was outwardly intended
to appear, to me, the artist.

(consider a Nam June Paik video work in HDTV on a 100" plasma screen or
'archived' on YouTube)

a Painting refers to the paint and its support yet a "Digital Artwork" assumes
only digits comprise the work - it defies its inherent material dependence under
a pretense of transcorporeality. again, i refer to the (Euclidean) myth of the
digital as unbounded, ageless space.

again, this is a personal distinction and one that informs why i and some other
so-called 'digital artists' no longer refer to themselves as such.

> 
> 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.

i believe the term will probably just become increasingly irrelevant. a symptom
of ubiquity is dis-appearance. the more digital in art, the less 'digital art'.

cheers (and good to read you!),

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