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. after 10 years being active as a software developer and artist it's my belief there is no such thing as an independently digital artwork. any digital process impacts upon audiences by means of energetic, corporeal events. sound has never existed 'inside' a computer and neither has an image; rather, both sound and image are phenomena assembled by the brain in response to exposure to complex physical events (changes in air-pressure, casting of photons) which may or may not have been transduced from a digital process along the course. in this way the construct of the Digital Artwork is drawn from a position of (adopted) ignorance. the problem begins with the absurd metaphor of the desk-top, echoes across dendrites-to-nerves-to-muscles and ends with coal silently burned, far away from cities, to power the metal and silicon on which the digits depend. for example, sending this email to you will invoke changes in temperature, drawing power, swelling metal, in the following computers before it reaches the Empyre mailserver lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au (149.171.96.95) from my current location in Madrid, Spain, using the mail transport agent on my LAN: jul...@rata:~$ traceroute unsw.edu.au | awk '{ print($1, $2, $3) }' traceroute to unsw.edu.au 1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 2 192.168.153.1 (192.168.153.1) 3 241.Red-80-58-121.staticIP.rima-tde.net (80.58.121.241) 4 So7-0-0-0-grtmadpe3.red.telefonica.wholesale.net (84.16.8.125) 5 So-0-1-0-0-grtmadde2.red.telefonica-wholesale.net (84.16.12.50) 6 p16-7-1-1.r21.mdrdsp01.es.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.8.197) 7 p64-2-1-0.r22.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.45) 8 ae-1.r23.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.222) 9 as-0.r21.asbnva01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.158) 10 ae-3.r20.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.129) 11 as-2.r21.lsanca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.24) 12 xe-0-1-0.r03.lsanca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.90) 13 p4-1-1-0.r03.lsanca03.us.ce.gin.ntt.net (198.172.90.102) 14 so-4-0-0.bb1.b.syd.aarnet.net.au (202.158.194.157) 15 ge-1-1-3.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au (202.158.202.161) 16 gigabitethernet0.er1.unsw.cpe.aarnet.net.au (202.158.202.226) 17 gw1.er1.unsw.cpe.aarnet.net.au (202.158.202.234) 18 149.171.255.102 (149.171.255.102) 19 149.171.255.118 (149.171.255.118) compare that to the covetous event of a person clicking a little envelope with a curled green arrow indicating movement.. two American corporations (Apple and Microsoft) define and defend these metaphors in their HCI models and as such the way their users operate and imagine the digital. it's in their interest to represent the digital as something ageless and limitless while ensuring it is forever interpreted in the abstract. meanwhile multinationals like Adobe design tools in consultation with marketers and 'professional artists' through which 'digital artists', in all their diversity, echo their work - expressed by and expressing the limits and modes of 'creative suites'. in this sense the relative independence of so-called digital art practice, its illusions of neutral, unburdened space, is very questionable indeed.. (while teaching at a workshop recently collaborators introduced themselves not as video editors, image makers or 3D modelers but as people that "know" Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and 3D Studio Max.) secondly, how is a screen-based interactive work any more or less intrinsically 'digital' than (for instance) a work whereby an embedded OS on a hidden computer runs a complex program controlling a switch-array or AI of a robot? is printed code somehow 'digital'? #!/bin/sh # This is not a digital artwork while true do echo "This is a digital artwork" sleep 1 done in other words, do we accept that the relative external perception of digital processes in the given work - a question of transparency or strategic, overt presence - will give it category? i've worked on a piece or two that wouldn't be perceived as Digital Art at all yet the code on which the works depended was certainly some of my best. digital processes are ubiquitous within the production and distribution of so much art that what is known as Digital Art is in danger of being lumped as a fad whose projected form was stubbornly positioned and asserted as its primary content. we see the damage done by this when museums attempt to archive Digital Art by merely backing-up the software, only later to find that it was dependent on a base of software and hardware, even screen or other characteristics, no longer available. the role of the digital in art and society is done no service kept in the realm of the mythic, the magical. the icon is not the file and the file is not the data. gracias y feliz año, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com Bio: Julian Oliver (New Zealand/Spain) is a developer, teacher, and writer based in Madrid. He's pesented papers and projects at many international electronic-art events and conferences since 1996. His worldwide workshops and master classes have been in game-design, artistic game-development, object-oriented programming for artists, UNIX/Linux, virtual architecture, interface design, augmented reality and open source development practices. An advocate of free software, he established the game-development collective, Select Parks, in 1998. -- Renate Ferro and Tim Murray Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art Cornell University _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre