"The screening 'Transmissions' looks at the TV studio as a contemporary art laboratory, where Polish artists not only carry out media analyses and pose questions about the mechanisms of shaping TV content, but also expand the reach of their activities by extracting them from their usual context." -Transmissions.Art on TV
My Thesis supervisor, and long time "sen-sei" recently asked my a series of questions on Digital art, from a critical point of view. The questions were the start of hard but joyous readings to articulate what i previously had in my mind as given concepts since I started reading about digital art in 2009.
Here are some of the questions in short:
1- What are the boundaries between programming sciences and art? is there any in the first place?
2- What makes the technological inventions an art?
Here are some of the questions in short:
1- What are the boundaries between programming sciences and art? is there any in the first place?
2- What makes the technological inventions an art?
Here's my answer to you Dr.:)
"Now here comes the question you asked
before- here i'll ask it with in context to video and photography as a predecessor
of digital art- “What makes the fine line between video and art?” Don't we now
see the Video and the photography as an art, calling the products of them as
"artworks" and showing them in Exhibitions, even though some might
basically say that the tool was an invention and the practice was a Media
practice, not "art" per se (for those who hold a definition for art),
and this was said! Then over turned either by time, or by articles like that of
Walter Benjamin in 1936[1].
So, why then would one want to separate between what can be
called Digital art and Invention, even though the fusion here between art &
science is way more prominent and embedded with is both the tool and the
practice :)
I tend to agree with the Open concept argument of
"defining art" Theorized by Weitz[2], which is in 7 points:
1- art can be expansive
2- therefore, art must be open to the permanent possibility of change, expansion and novelty.
3- If something is art, then it must be open to the permanent possibility of change, expansion, and novelty.
4- If something is open to the permanent possibility of change, expansion, and novelty, then it cannot be defined.
5- Suppose that art can be defined.
6- therefore, art is not open to the permanent possibility of change, expansion, and novelty.
7- therefore, art is not art.
An that is because, I believe that it very much matches the interdisciplinary
nature of Digital art.
Moreover, If we looked at it in terms of how the
"output" is presented, and that the product being shown in an art
gallery or a museum (or any similar institution), I cannot agree on calling
everything that falls outside this institutional space "not Art", and
Indeed it isn't, basically, because that will mean that internet art, bio art
etc. “not art”, and that is not true. We will then look at is from the sense of
Experimentation and Application, something that might –seemingly- separate between
an artwork and invention (i.e. that artwork will tend to have the sense of experimentation as a Utopian aim, more than the sense and rationale of an Invention which is more logical and application based.
Yet we’ll find that the
sense of Experimentation since photography and the increase of that sense in
the digital art (which needless to say was practiced not only by -so called-
artists, but by so called scientists and engineers as well) makes the Digital
artworks wider and bigger than to seclude, or to segregate its practices or
practitioners into labels of: Art, design, inventions etc. and proves itself
above theories of Institutions and definitions that try to impose certain
criteria on what could be called art and what isn't.
If the Question of Photography already eliminated this
debate then we have definitely came a far long way from trying to apply such perspectives
on something like Digital art.
And, even the fact that we still call it "Digital
Art" is more of a name that symbolizes the paradoxes that typically only
"art" can endure, the
toleration of Experimental sense in order to reach something which can later
actually be practical and of use (like interaction, or wearables), or to just
be experimental for that Utopian, platonic desire to be one; That if we overlooked the intention of "artists" and "art institution" to only address a certain time of audience, in the current more mainstream context of "Capitalist Bourgeois Art Institutions" where the artwork being "highly experimental" in a sense that the artist must already know that only a specific type of audience will understand it, but if it's to be shown in the streets, he/she knows very well that people will not enjoy it because they simply didn't get it".
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