[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 50, Issue 15

[Julian Oliver]

..on Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 09:40:51AM +0000, Simon Biggs wrote:
> 
> Personally I think there is something specific about digital art (although a
> lot of what is often called digital art does not share this specificity and
> is wrongly classified as a result). Digital art is that art which employs
> computers and, in particular, directly and fundamentally engages the medium
> as discrete and linguistic. No other medium allows this to happen. Poetry
> comes close, especially that which is systems based and therefore places the
> author in a particular (problematic) relation in the process of production.
> Digital art is necessarily predicated on being OF a machine, a machine that
> exists as language before it exists as anything else (it need not require
> electricity or a keyboard ­ it is machine as idea, as in Turing). This is
> what makes the artform distinct.

this is why i prefer the term computer art; it confesses that the digits are an
abstraction expressed over hardware. so-called digital art is expressed by
machines and as such the machines are ineluctably a part of the art. we just
like to fool ourselves into believing that the digits in a piece of so-called
digital-art somehow qualify for objecthood, an artefact.

in this way the term 'digital art' is a carry-over from the artefact driven art
practices.

> 
> I have never had a problem with using the word digital to describe what I,
> and others, do. However, I have often had a problem with the word art. Too
> much baggage. I prefer to concern myself with epistemology and ontology
> rather than money and fashion.

it's quite a call to say all art is concerned with money and fashion!

cheers,

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

> 
> 
> On 17/1/09 01:00, "empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au"
> <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> > "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.
> 
> 
> 
> Simon Biggs
> Research Professor
> edinburgh college of art
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
> www.eca.ac.uk
> www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
> 
> simon at littlepig.org.uk
> www.littlepig.org.uk
> AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
> 
> 
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
> 
> 

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