Digital Art: Living in The Immaterial World

Have you ever wondered “what would I do without technology?”. In the digital age, we are all aware of how much technology has affected our lives including: the way we connect with each other, the way we communicate, and notably our visual culture. We are enraptured by vibrant colors, CGI images, digital pictures, and textures which are unnatural. It is inherent that we are eager for more entertainment, faster communication and the latest technologies; we want to see images that awake our deepest narcoleptic interests. If art explicitly reflects the society we live in, perhaps digital art is our mirror.

The art world is divided into two sectors: traditionalists who consider contemporary media art as dismissible from museums and futurist who see in it art’s destiny. Who’s wrong and who’s right?

The only way to find an answer is to familiarize ourselves with the difficulties that media based art has come in contact with as a result of its growing permanence in museums. All of those difficulties rotate around the same theoretical point: its immaterial essence. Firstly, through curatorial techniques. How can we effectively present something digital to the “real world”? Documenta X, art exhibit that took place in 1997 in Kassel, which hosted net art pieces for the very first time, has proved that just putting a computer in an exposition’s room can’t be the solution: the choice of allowing artworks to be seen only on specific computer stations (or on its website) has disappointed both artists (because most of them were against its admission to the museum institution, seen as adverse to the hacker ethic that net artists often have) and the visitors (who could not consider art something that came off a computer screen). Since then, the professional identikit of a digital art curator has evolved, and now it’s clear that they have to “translate” each digital piece into something more tangible and easily digestible by the audience and has to be tailored to each artwork, allowing spectators to interact with the exhibition and to feel more involved overall.

It seems as if the value of media oriented art is in its impermanence and how that relates to its usury. Why should collectors buy something that is destined to wear out? And more importantly, if we often define the beauty and value of an artwork in its ability to be eternal, where can we find beauty in digital art?

There are many occurrences of media art undergoing restoration to make them more longevous. One example is The legible city by Jeffrey Shaw (1989), one of the first digital art installation that can be considered a virtual reality’s precursor: the visitor rides a stationary bicycle through giant computer-generated letters that form a simulated representation of a city. It has been restored by Digital Art Conservation, a three-year digital art conservation project (2010-2012) dedicated to researching strategies for the conservation of digital art. When art pieces are analog or consisting of cathode tubes, in order to be restored, they need spare parts that are either not anymore produced or difficult to find. When artworks are digital, the main restoration difficulties are grounded in their interface uploads, which are not easy to reproduce (that is the case of Olia Lialina My boyfriend came back from the war, one of the first net art works, still visible at http://www.teleportacia.org/war/).

Looking at these circumstances from a Dada point of view, maybe we should consider the progressive diminishing value of digital art as part of its creative process. This result inherently leads to another dilemma: the place of digital art in the art market. New media art is immaterial. It is made by digital codes, software or (when we talk about net art) websites; the only way to market it would be to sell private access to websites, digital downloads, or compact disks with correlated authenticity certificates. Despite its impracticability, it is one of a many viable solutions.

In the Media Art scene, there are digital galleries runned by important art institution, such as Artport, Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art, (that also commissions works), or smaller platforms such as the instagram-based Post.Vision curated by Nicole Ruggiero, which spread digital culture for free whereas galleries like [S]edition offer limited edition digital artworks. These spaces are susceptible to attacks by hackers who could easily enter those sites and break their system and create identical digital copies of the works. This has happened with several works from the “curated section" of [S]edition by Pau Waelder. All of the artworks being sold in this section were copied and sold with false certificates which displayed his name and a fake edition number, just as if he had bought them. As a response to this act of counterfeit, Waelder incorporated the false certificates with genuine ones from previous sales and is now selling them on his website as a form of ready made artwork. The piece is entitled , $8,793 Worth of [Art], referring to the amount that would have been paid if all of the works had been bought).

While it is easy spot a counterfeit of traditional artwork, the immateriality of digital art makes it near impossible. Any statement of originality is completely destroyed when discussing about digital art. There can be thousands of identical copies (or thousands of originals for that matter) of a piece. Digital art challenges the value of uniqueness in the art world.

At this point in time, it seems impossible to explicitly define the value of a digital artwork. It seems as if the traditionalists of art world must see that the value of digital artworks is hidden in their power to mirror the present. Additionally, they confront a major question arising in the digital era: how does immateriality influence and flood the forms of materiality we (as a human species) were accustomed to in the past?

Laura Cocciolillo, 21, is a student in Art History at Sapienza University, Rome (Italy).

Two years ago she started manage the art session for a monthly magazine based in Rome; since then she has interviewed a lot of artists and curator, and developed a strong interest on new tendencies of contemporary art.

Edited by Storm Bria-Rose Bookhard