Mapping Post-digital Practice in the Graphic Arts

The proliferation of digital technologies in nearly every aspect of life has been accompanied with narratives of change – both dystopian and utopian – from its early days. And if art is in any way to relate to our lived experience, then it comes at no surprise that artists started to investigate the digital – as a tool and medium, but also as a testing ground for new models of thinking about art in relation to society. As Walter Benjamin infamously demonstrated in his analysis of art in times of technical reproducibility, technological advancements not only affect the way art is produced, but also the politics of its distribution and consumption. If the reproducibility of a photograph has caused the loss of the aura of the unique original – what effects do the ephemerality and malleability of the digital artwork have on previous formulas of producing, viewing and thinking art? Is digital art in its fleeting, participatory nature capable of challenging the the status of the artwork as a commodity, as envisioned by the politically motivated computer art of the 80s and 90s? Or are we today merely dealing with a digitalised version of an established system of contemporary art under the rule of neo-liberal capital?

Since the advent of the Internet, a community of artists have engaged with emerging digital technologies in a field of practices that have been indicated with overlapping denominations such as net.art, net art, media art, new media art, Internet art, post-Internet art, screen-based art, digital art, and born-digital art. Case studies of artists Hito Steyerl, Olia Lialina, Constant Dullaart, Harm van den Dorpel, and Katja Novitskova, will delineate the main concerns of born-digital art in relation to the development of the Internet. Through their artistic practice, these artists’ work allow an urgent look into the increasing configuration of user culture online, the standardization of the web and its platforms, the instrumentalization of social quantification to manipulate and control public opinion, and the use of affect and bonding strategies deployed by technology firms to ‘capture’ user participation. Taking the art institution LIMA as the central node of my fieldwork, this ethnography will showcase how born-digital art emerged in response to three founding myths concerning the Internet and its potential for humanity. They include that of 1) the ‘original state’ of the Internet, which 2) in and of itself held emancipatory potential, and was 3) lost when the Internet ‘died’ in the year 2000. Through ethnographic fieldwork, case studies, and interviews, this thesis outlines how the born-digital art community attempts to find resolution between the visible/opaque, emancipation/capture, and enchantment/disenchantment through these founding myths. This research will serve to illuminate the role of myth in artistic production, and shed light on how anthropology may foster alternative methods for analyzing contemporary discourses on technological development.

IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies

From Emojis to Manga, from western adverts to "foreign" brand consciousness, visual products are continuing their near instantaneous circulation around the globe. Especially their apparent "naturalness" and freedom from translation is appealing. But here also lies the problem: many of the consumers of these images are oblivious to the fact that these materials have been constructed by social actors with specific backgrounds and specific agendas in mind; thus, especially their "foreign" receptions create challenges, including ethical ones. In order to properly study these fairly new phenomena, a different kind of terminology is needed, not one that relies on older media concepts, but one that does them justice in terms of their contextual and technological complexity, multivalence and mobility. I will propose the term "VisionBytes" for these phenomena. These denote complex visual arrays, oftentimes of foreign cultural origin and consisting of still or moving images. They circulate within a system of non-photography as sketched by François Laruelle (2013) and are akin to the "objects" described in Quentin Meillassoux' Beyond Finitude (2010). Invariably, they touch on issues of belonging, identity, exclusion, globalisation, human and AI rights, all points featuring strongly in this text. Already today, these images have begun participating in the preparations for the gaze of the (technological) Other, of a possible singularity which for the first time will allow humans to review themselves and thus be seen by non-human intelligent others, a trajectory already taking its course. As so often, art is at the forefront of these mediated upheavals. In the final part of the article, I will examine a number of recent art pieces/installations from a 2016 Art Fair in Shanghai, from the 2017 Dokumenta 14 in Kassel, and from an ongoing internet project. These select pieces all point to an ever more life-permeating media future where wanting to merely live with media will never do.

As far back as the introduction of the Greek myths – and specifically that of Echo and Narcissus (where Echo is Sound and Narcissus is image) appreciation of the nature of art has been derived from archaic and classical values that promote the idea of interpretation as a meaningful metric of the value of an idea or an object. In his ‘Poetics’, Aristotle posited that diegesis (Echo) is the reporting or narration of events, contrasted with mimesis (Narcissus) which is the imitative representation of them: the distinction is often cast as that between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. Together with discrimination and comprehension, both of these functions are part of the mechanism of interpretation. When Gutenburg created the printing press which enabled the beginnings of the mass production of text, the concept of reading and interpreting gained even greater historical purchase due to the encoding of meaning in actual objects: books. ‘Interpretation’ was given even greater power within the rise of modernism with the intervention of the Frankfurt School, which fore-grounded the idea of the ‘interpretation’ of art as meaningful and significant. Walter Benjamin reframed and reinterpreted the medieval belief of the power of the relic of the Saint in his famous question: Can the aura of the original be found within its replica? This question is even more pertinent now when art is created within the digital realm and must be reframed once again: Can the aura of the original exist at all, given there is no difference between the original and its copies? By examining new ideas of ‘entrainment’, where immersivity, resonance, synchronicity and direct response become the factors that reveal the potency of art, In this paper I re-examine how art or media events can function without dependence on the idea of interpretation.

For more than two decades a strong influence of digitalization has brought structural changes in immediacy and proximity to the arts and new formal propositions in production through open access to various media and the acceleration of information. Concepts stating a medial turn have already attracted attention to these changes in perception and the understanding of art evolving from digital culture. The purpose of this essay, initially written for a lecture following the question in what way art might evolve in the future, is to give an insight into participatory and experimental art production, exemplifying a contemporary understanding and handling of media and art. In order to do this I have chosen to review the audio-visual performances and projects of Los Angeles based artist duo Lucky Dragons, Luke Fishbeck and Sara Anderson (Sara Rara), who, though working with a digitally highly evolved set, have developed a playful and decidedly humanistic body of work. A mixture of multi media experiments involving digital processing of analogue recordings, sonic transmissions of graphic images and participatory moments in the creation of synthesized sounds define central elements in the work of these two creative minds. Collaborating since 2000, Luke Fishbeck’s and Sara Anderson’s artistic novelty is to provide creative space for the audience - blurring the lines between audio and visual material through digital processing - and to question classical paths of distribution and author- and ownership by releasing all pictorial works resulting from collective practice through a creative-commons-license. These structural elements grow from digital culture and are communicated through sonic experience and participation. Addressing in particular the idea of post-digitalism in my approach, an idea that had first been brought up by Nicholas Negroponte in the article Beyond Digital, published as early as in 1998 in the magazine Wired , my interest lies in the development that this movement has taken, labeled as un-territorial, equal, fluid and global, in the discourse of media reflection, the implementation of digital process into everyday life and the creative conversation of errors.

Digital Dynamics: Art's New Making, 2021

Digital technology and culture continue to radically change the conditions for art’s production, distribution, interfaces, and forms. With a point of departure in the book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) that examines how digital technology and culture influence contemporary art, this conversation addresses the topic of ‘art’s new making’ by asking: What drives creative artistic pursuits today? How can we understand art’s ecologies when involved in making the ‘new’? What might the pursuit of art’s ‘new’ making promise, demonstrate, and feed forward? Participants of this conversation include (in order of response) Laura Beloff, Elizabeth Jochum, Saara Ekström, Morten Søndergaard and Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen. It is initiated and introduced by Tanya Ravn Ag and edited by Vanina Saracino.

2020

The multifaceted history of digital art has also entailed an evolution of understanding the complex relationships between the material and immaterial in the digital medium. This text traces the histories of digital objects and systems from the 1960s to the so-called 'post-digital' era, which finds its artistic expression in works shaped by digital technologies and networks, yet taking the material form of objects such as paintings, sculptures, or photographs. The term neomateriality is used here to capture an objecthood that reflects back the data of humans and the environment, or reveals the way in which digital processes perceive and shape our world. Digital materialities are considered in relation to network cultures and politics, as well as art institutions.

Papers presented at the conference in Tartu, 14

Lumina Journal, 2017

Where is art in the digital era? This essay identifies the digital as an abstract, formal system. Since art has always relied on formal, abstract systems to carry and deliver itself, what are the implications for art in the digital era? Is the digital a site for art, or is it the other way around? Can there be digital art? Identifying limit and boundary problems as the crucial existential problems for the digital, the essay shows that art has always concerned itself with such problems. This prompts the question as to whether it is possible that human existence and art become the same thing in the digital. Because the digital is currently primarily manipulated in the service of globalist economics, this is clearly not (yet) the case, so what does this mean for art? The essay then briefly examines the self-declared movements of dada, post-digital and post-internet art, concluding that these movements are not capable of questioning the digital as digital, before going on to examine some artists whose practice may be providing guiding lights toward a genuinely digital art.

2018

I draw upon the idea of the post digital to create (1) art for humanization of technology and (2) art as manifestations of digital qualities in the physical world, e.g., through digital-analog conv ...