"Can “digital art” be considered a branch of contemporary art? Since the end of 1960s, modern art has become fundamentally a conceptual activity. That is, beyond conceptualism proper, art came to focus not on medium or techniques but on concepts. How these concepts are executed is either secondary, or simply irrelevant. When an artist asks gallery visitors to complete a questionnaire and then compiles and exhibits statistics (Hans Haacke), takes up a job as a maid in a hotel and documents hotel rooms (Sophie Calle), cooks a meal for gallery visitors (Rirkrit Tiravaniija), presents a found video tape shot by Russian troops in Chechnya (Sergei Bugaev, a.k.a. Africa), the traditional questions of artistic techniques, skills, and media become largely unimportant. As the well-known Russian artist Africa has put it: “the role of modern art is not to uncover a secret but instead to steal it.” Put differently, more and more contemporary artists act as a kind of journalists, researching and presenting various evidence through different media including text, still photographs, video, etc. What matters is the initial idea, a strategy, a procedure, rather than the details of how the findings or documentation are presented.
Of course not all artists today act as journalists – I am simply taking this as the most clear example of the new role of an artist, in contrast to the older roles of artist as craftsman, as the creator of symbols, allegories, and “representations,” etc. In short, a typical contemporary artist who was educated in the last two decades is no longer making paintings, or photographs, or video – instead, s/he is making “projects.” This term appropriately emphasizes that artistic practice has become about organizing agents and forces around a particular idea, goal, or procedure. It is no longer about a single person crafting unique objects in a particular media.
(Of course contemporary art is also characterized by a fundamental paradox – what collectors collect are exactly such old-fashioned objects rather than “projects.” Indeed, artists selling their works for highest prices in contemporary art market usually do produce such objects. This paradox is partialy resolved if you consider the fact that these artists always employ a staff of assistants, technicians, etc. – i.e. like everybody else they are making “projects” – only the collective nature of production in this case if concealed in favor of individual artists’ “brand names.”)
Although its highly social nature (people exchanging code, collaborating on projects together, treating audiences as equal participants, etc.) aligns “software art” with contemporary art, since it is firmly focused on its medium rather than medium-free concepts, “software art” cannot be considered “contemporary art.” This is one reason why it is indeed excluded by the art world. The logics of “contemporary art” and “digital art” are fundamentally at odds which each other, and I don’t see any easy way around this. So, for instance, when Ars Electronica program asks “In which direction is artists’ work with the new instruments like algorithms and dynamic systems transforming the process of artistic creativity?” (festival program, p. 9), the very assumptions behind such a question put it outside of the paradigm of contemporary art."
Of course not all artists today act as journalists – I am simply taking this as the most clear example of the new role of an artist, in contrast to the older roles of artist as craftsman, as the creator of symbols, allegories, and “representations,” etc. In short, a typical contemporary artist who was educated in the last two decades is no longer making paintings, or photographs, or video – instead, s/he is making “projects.” This term appropriately emphasizes that artistic practice has become about organizing agents and forces around a particular idea, goal, or procedure. It is no longer about a single person crafting unique objects in a particular media.
(Of course contemporary art is also characterized by a fundamental paradox – what collectors collect are exactly such old-fashioned objects rather than “projects.” Indeed, artists selling their works for highest prices in contemporary art market usually do produce such objects. This paradox is partialy resolved if you consider the fact that these artists always employ a staff of assistants, technicians, etc. – i.e. like everybody else they are making “projects” – only the collective nature of production in this case if concealed in favor of individual artists’ “brand names.”)
Although its highly social nature (people exchanging code, collaborating on projects together, treating audiences as equal participants, etc.) aligns “software art” with contemporary art, since it is firmly focused on its medium rather than medium-free concepts, “software art” cannot be considered “contemporary art.” This is one reason why it is indeed excluded by the art world. The logics of “contemporary art” and “digital art” are fundamentally at odds which each other, and I don’t see any easy way around this. So, for instance, when Ars Electronica program asks “In which direction is artists’ work with the new instruments like algorithms and dynamic systems transforming the process of artistic creativity?” (festival program, p. 9), the very assumptions behind such a question put it outside of the paradigm of contemporary art."
Lev Manovich
Don’t Call it Art: Ars Electronica 2003
Link: http://manovich.net/
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