Digital “Art”
I had very long arguments with every digital arts professor I had in University about what actually defines digital art. One of them told me that yes, if I make a sculpture that included an LCD playing a video I made on an analog camera, it’s digital art. One of them told me that a computer was analogous to a camera, but couldn’t rectify the fact that my computer IS a camera.
The big argument came during a course whose final project was a website. I decided to do an experiment: I took a techno track I’d made the year before and re-recorded it with acoustic instruments. I put both tracks on a song review website, and logged the reactions to this song that exists in digital and analog. I put together a neat looking website and developed a really useful animation technique that I still haven’t found a way to improve four years later. I even came up with a snappy, art-school name: Reorganification.
During the critique, my professor came down really hard on me for not creating website art, but rather art that was being displayed on a (pretty) website. My argument was that it was all web-based: the site, the track reviewing, the animation, etc. How is it NOT website art? In fact, it was more website art than any of the “examples” that she had given the class, and far more than the rest of the class. Her argument was about the experimental aspect of these other projects she showed me, and that mine was still just a display mechanism.
So I was getting critiqued for not experimenting even though I went ahead and developed a technique I’ve never seemed before. I used the Internet’s immediate results to do an experiment that was impossible in analog life. I made a commentary on the parallel existence of digital and analog art.
I went home and starting thinking of ways to improve on my idea, but I was just annoyed and even more unimpressed with the “art” world as usual. So, I set out to annoy people. I made a splash page with a 1 and a 0 (yes and no, respectively). If you click on 1, you get a horizontal string of 1s and 0s that breaks the horizontal rule. The immediate next step for most was to click back, and then click on 0. 0 brought up a “loading screen” that was really just an animated .gif (I knew that the vast majority of the class was inexperienced enough to not check the source code/properties of the “loader”)–it gradually slowed down until it stopped at 70% and just blinked perpetually.
If you had the patience to mouse over the string of 1s and 0s, or check the source code, you’d have realized that random digits were links hidden by CSS. Links brought you to individual reviews of those tracks I’d recorded, along with an embedded mp3 (we were “taught” how to do that in class). The final 0 brought you to my initial, pretty, webpage with the animation and an explanation of the project.
I think 3 people “got” it, and went to the right spot. I saw at least 5 people waiting on the load screen for minutes at a time, getting more and more frustrated. Most of the comments I got were along the lines of “why didn’t you keep your original site?” or “this is SO annoying! I HATE YOU!” I got an A+ and realized that a lot of digital “art” is simply finding new ways to annoy your audience and calling it art.
Anyway, the point of all this is a Valleywag article on Seecoy, “two art and design students from BYU, [who] call their work vintage web. Circa 1996.” I went through my mental digital art checklist:
- Is it annoying? Yes.
- Are they using technology from 10+ years ago? Yes.
- Is it poignant? No.
- Do the artists understand their craft (i.e. the web)? No.
And yet one of the “artists”, Chris Coy, is part of an exhibit at New York’s New Museum. The silver lining is that maybe digital art is intangible enough to not survive for future generations to judge. It amazes me that people with the technology to create anything they want insist on not actually learning how.
The sad thing is that almost all the digital “artists” I’ve met are really, really nice people who are really, really excited about things. Somehow, the genre has evolved into this idea where technique and knowledge is counter-productive to creation. A nice-looking website looks too corporate to be art. Proper technique means you’re trying too hard, so it can’t be art. What is it that prevents digital advantages (i.e. instant learning, scalable techniques) from actually being used in digital art?
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