I want to start by saying that my interest as Founding Editor of Right Click Save is not and has never been in defining the digital arts but surfacing as wide a range of voices as possible to determine where there is common language as well as consensus around emerging categories of art.
One definition regards digital art as art that is made or presented with digital technology, using digital signals or data to generate outputs that are classed as art. It seems to have emerged as a term during the early 1980s, although digital art has a rather longer prehistory.
In his book, The Digital Condition (2017), Felix Stalder outlines three pillars of the contemporary digital landscape: referentiality, algorithmicity, and communality:
Communality: “Culture is no longer distributed from a single, centralized source to a passive audience. Instead, it is highly participatory and decentralized, formed by ongoing, reciprocal negotiations of meaning within various social networks and online communities.”
Algorithmicity: “Because there is an overwhelming amount of information, algorithms are required to structure our reality. They dictate what is visible, how we navigate networks, and they quietly observe and guide human behavior and attention in ways that carry significant political and societal power.”
Referentiality: “Rather than creating completely original content from scratch, cultural production now relies on taking existing elements (text, images, video) and remixing, modifying, and recontextualizing them. Meaning is built through the act of referencing rather than the intrinsic value of an isolated object.”
Today, all texts, images and videos represent digital material for the training of machine learning algorithms, threatening to turn cultural experience into an undifferentiated field of slop as well as a numbing reiteration of historical styles.
In an age of where “creativity is the new productivity” it is easy to foresee a future where the unbounded artist is replaced by the expert user.
On the other hand, and this is something I believe we are witnessing with the convergence of the art worlds in Basel this week, the penny has finally dropped that a world of multidisciplinary practices, and hybrid digital arts, need not beget sheer nebulousness and therefore meaningless art clothed in the language of priceless luxury. In fact, the literacies that both computational artists and creative technologists share allow them not only to reshape the art world but real world systems too.
For me there are two constituencies that people need to be mindful of and to continue to support right now: those who seek to use their creative powers to unveil and rewire toxic systems (which is often but not exclusively a group centred on the global north) and those who rely on the production of digital art to earn a living wage (which often, but not exclusively, comprises communities from throughout the global majority).
Following the decline of royalties as a realistic means by which digital artists can benefit from ongoing sales of their work, it is up to us to ensure that the vision of a fairer art economy isn’t lost in the world of quiet luxury.
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