On 12/Jan/15 13:52, Luke Munn wrote:
Contains some great learnings on how not to setup a digital archive.
snip... yep Luke, I agree...
The distinct (and must be said, dated) aesthetic of most of these works nevertheless poses an interesting question for our ADA too. What role does the 'digital' now have as commonality when digital and network technologies have shifted from marginal to ubiquitous? In other words, when the internet has become banality and 'every artist working today is a post internet artist, lets move on' (Darling), does it make any sense to differentiate 'digital' as both a separate medium and community? When 90% of your 'viewers' are hits on your website looking at photoshopped documentation taken with CCD chips, where is the boundary line? I don't really have answers to these questions, and personally find communities like ADA, Rhizome and Net-time hugely beneficial, but its worth thinking about what we mean with terms like 'digital art' and what the real common threads in these works and communities are.
There was a similar implosion in the 'world' of art photography when it came 'round that it simply another tool for an artist to use, another way of putting a mark on paper. Across Europe & elsewhere numerous photo museums and photo 'centers' closed because the distinction that it was a 'special' medium was redundant. They were used in the heyday as funding tools to secure funding/public support for artists working in that 'revolutionary new medium'... This after a decades-long fight to be 'recognized' as an art medium at all... sounds familiar...
In the digital it is somewhat similar -- with only narrow slices not meant for projection/screen or, in some cases still, paper or other 2D substrate -- or analog speakers -- there isn't much that does not 'fit' under what has become a swath of traditional rubrics: sound art, documentation of performance art, moving images, etc.
Certainly projects that are using/creating digital tools to do other things is imho a legit application of the 'digital art' idea. As an artist that worked and still occasionally works using 'the network' as site and partially as medium, even that area of working seems to have become ubiquitous (and in a perverse way, utterly banal) -- to the point that I keep running into younger artist who tell me they are doing "the first network music collaboration" of some sort, huh?
The whole field seems to be a mash-up of sustainability, diy, diwo, 3D-printing, bio-art, balh-blah-blah, and whatever the latest spin tossed out by Silicon Valley. Yep, the distinction is becoming passé...
JH -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://ada.net.nz/ Manage your list membership (Subscribe, Change to digest, Unsubscribe) http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/ada_list
