[-empyre-] Eduardo Navas: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Timothy Murray]

Digital Culture, Resolution 2009

Eduardo Navas
January 1, 2009

A successful approach to achieving the widest impact in our digital future
should include the acknowledgement of the collapse of high and low culture
that took place in postmodernism.  While such collapse might appear dated to
the 1970's and 80's, it intimately informs digital and new media production.

As the year 2009 begins, the public and private sectors have been using for
some time the same software applications for their own specific interests.
Private funding does have a large investment in new media development yet
such applications are often produced with a combination of open source and
private resources; due to this hybrid activity, the separation of private
and public production may not always be clearly defined.

In 2009, then, culture will depend on the previous postmodern collapse of
the high and the low, as well as its particular ability to combine private
and public resources effectively.  This is a shift in culture that demands a
new mode of critical reflection, one that cannot afford to vacillate between
the usual "either, or" arguments about cultural production.  In 2009 in
order to have the widest impact in our digital future, a critical awareness
of such complexity of media production should be kept in mind.



Eduardo Navas (US) is an artist and researcher specializing in media, digital
culture and contemporary art. He has taught at various universities and
colleges, most recently as Visiting Assistant Professor in New Media
Practice in the Department of Visual Arts, at The Pennsylvania State
University, State College, PA. Navas is a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in the
Department of Art and Media History, Theory and Criticism at The University
of California in San Diego.

-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University