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 _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
