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

[B. Bogart]

Julian Oliver wrote:
> 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. 

A fellow grad student was playing with an argument to justify "digital"
artwork by stating that certain (aesthetic/artistic) problems are only
possible in a computer. I was quick to point out that mathematics and
computation are very human things. A computer could never do something
that was not reducible to something a human can do. His example was
fractal art. Of course it would take some time to manually plot, with
pen and paper a fractal, but there is nothing about the operation that
is beyond the cognitive ability of a human.

Computers, computation and the digital are simply extensions of (a
subset of) our cognitive abilities. (Cognitive in relation to mind-body,
not some aspect non-physical cognitive space.)

I'm generally a proponent of the title "Electronic Media Art", this is
in relation to the other dominate labels (new media, information art,
digital art). The main reason of doing so by locating my work in the
tradition of electronics and engineering in art, which was inspired (at
least in part) by the mechanical media arts of kinetic sculpture.

What I realized why reading Julian's deconstruction of the physicality
of digital art is that all these terms are stuck in the realm of
representation. Something being digital or information does not mean
that it is dynamic and changeable. For me, it seems this is the aspect
that is most important, the conversion, the change, the shifting of the
representations, not the representations themselves.

>From Digital Art to "Process Art" where the form connects to the
trajectory of ideas that move art from an emphasis on object to an
emphasis on process. A process that is just as physical as the object.

An interesting aside is that electronic media art (as a label) may be
considered in this light, as electricity, physicality and movement are
intrinsic. Electricity is always in process.

In fact everything physical is always in process, we just like
pretending things are static.

B. Bogart
www.ekran.org/ben