Digital
Art: Four Manias
catalogue essay for the exhibition
TRICK OR TREAT, 200 Gertrude St, Melbourne, 1997
Mania
1: ontological neurosis
The
great thing about digital art is its virtuality - the joy
that nothing is there, and that you don't have to have a
'feel' for anything because there's nothing to touch.
Architects
used to control this domain. On gorgeous linen plans they
could project a vision of the world they would never have
to inhabit. Sitting on tall stools with upright backs in
front of a drafting board, they would obsess over perspective,
like they were covering the world from every angle. And
those cute Letraset libraries of trees, cars, people, pets.
Life at the scratch of a nail.
The
digital fraternity now embrace architects as a subset -
the CAD guild - who sweep across the X-Y axis on their walk-throughs
like a drag queen wagging her finger on cat walk. Illustrators,
photographers and other quaintly-named professions are co-joined
by the precision of their craft (at least, until they have
to output). The fact that they look like DaVincian etchings
of bereted ogres squinting through a grid box to draw the
landscape doesn't seem to bother them. In their virtual
world, the past doesn't exist, so how could they be held
guilty of paradoxically returning our vision to Euclidean
perspective while quoting Steven Hawkins? Who would be so
crude as to claim that digital artists have set new standards
of visual imperception?
All
art is neurotic. Postmodernism in the fine arts is the shock
of the neurotic. Digital art - from wacked-out ex-video
artists who once claimed monitors in galleries would destroy
the cinema to fucked-up desperates who planned career moves
based on Paul Keating's half-baked views on multi-media
- is hyper neurotic. You can be more successful with digital
art (at the moment) because everyone will presume that there
is an actuality to your virtuality. And you - being a digital
artist - will probably agree with them.
Mania
2: temporal dyslexia
Computers
are real fast. Like, really, really fast. I've seen ads
on TV where an animated line zaps around the globe in a
few seconds. I'm impressed. Digital art is just as fast
- well, sort of. You can scan an image, pick a filter (twirls
if you're trippy, blurs if you're sensitive) and blammo:
digital imaging. What you'll do with that image is not so
important, because you made it real fast, which is the point.
You have better things to do with your time. You're a very
important person. I've seen ads that tell me so.
Digital
artists are advanced because they live in temporal warps,
operating within a gorgeous Virilolian frame of speed. This
is very important for digital artists, most of whom are
sex-starved. By somehow being speedy, that's the closest
they'll come to sex for a long time. Perhaps because of
this, a temporal dyslexia afflicts digital artists: while
they spend days on end working out dumb software, they still
believe that at the end when they drag a few icons and pull
down a few menus that they're actually being fast and getting
things done at hyper speed. Which is like believing a feature
film gets made in 90 minutes. But in the digital era, time
and space is all fucked up, man. Everyone from William Gibson
to Doctor Spock agree. They should know.
Strangely,
labor also gets fucked up. Digital artists - when working
for clients - have to charge as if they're working with
implements from The Flinstones to make their Kai Power Tools
effects. My computer can animate things at the speed of
light - but when I charge you for it I have to get out my
zoetrope to calculate the motion effects.
Mania
3: numerical delusion
Digital
art is really exciting. Just ask programmers and coders.
They've made maths cool again. My secondary school teachers
were right all the time: I should have listened to their
wisdom. I too could have had ultimate power - to view life
as a supreme binary switch. Zero. One. On. Off. Sort of
like a numerical version of black/white, good/bad, god/devil,
etc.
Programmers
and coders are incessantly championed by digital artists
- a pack of pseudo-scientific aesthetes - as the really
creative people. The point being that once you dive into
the endless swamp of metaphysical computations and possibilities,
you're somehow getting to the heart of the matter. That
is if you are desperate enough to believe that art should
be about truth, nature, beauty, life & existence. Staking
such claims for mathematicians is ultimately born of artists
who have hang-ups about being artsy-fartsy, wanky &
elitist. Rather than accept their flowery, powdery status,
they seek validation from the most empirical of all languages:
maths. Fair enough to metaphorically articulate proximity
between the sciences and the arts, but please: don't introduce
me to a mathematician. Or a computer programmer. I know
of great plumbers without whose genius craft my toilet wouldn't
run so smoothly, but I ain't going to dump them on you as
a way of articulating a world view.
Fucking
the arse of science is the cheapest of all self-validating
practices. Like, number don't lie. Like, we understand the
world through ratio, scale & frequency. Like, all sci-fi
movies use algebra as the means to communicate to extra-terrestrial
life-forces. Pure numerical delusion. These are all fantasies
which lie moulding in the minds of math teachers. Now they're
being extolled as visions by digital artists. A more immediate,
probable scenario lies in the all-time greatest fucking-with-children's-minds
movie: MAC & ME. Sponsored by Macdonald's (sic), cute
aliens understand life on earth by eating a Big Mac. And
we all know what computer programmers and coders eat.
Mania
4: obsessive interactivity
Everyone
believes they have supreme powers in this wacky chauvinist
world of ours. Sportsmen ritualize it. Serial killers enact
it. Artists mysticize it. Digital artists are the worst:
they believe in their power so much that they make a big
deal about rejecting it. Welcome to the world of interactivity.
Actually, I didn't mean to welcome you, because I want you
to empower yourself to choose to enter this world. So let's
try that again. (...) Hi! Welcome to the world of interactivity.
See
how different that was? You chose to do it. Aren't you special?
But really, I'm even more special because I'm controlling
this dumb game of interactivity. I'm lying. You're not special
at all. You're stupid. I'm in control, babe. Here's two
icons. Which will you chose? (Duh.) Isn't life grand when
you are empowered to have choice? Interactive art is sublimely
ignorant of the facile illusion of choice it conjures up.
As I care which icon I click, which path I take, which role
I play, which link I follow, which decision I make. Life
is messy, distorted, dirty, hazy, confused, uncontrollable.
Interactivity in digital art is the most escapist method
imaginable to avoid this.
Stemming
from the miasma of pseudo-decision-making that is interactivity,
digital artists push the envelope (whatever that means)
by expanding the physicality of the computer to engage the
'active user' (TV is for potatoes, man). Welcome to the
fetishistic dungeon of triggering. Laser beams, light sensors,
thermal charges, audio recorders, microwave transmitters,
earth conductors, chemical reactions - anything that can
be made to make something turn on or off will be used. I
guess 'switches' are so inhuman and uninteractive. Thank
you, digital artists, for making the world so more expansive
for me when I stand before your myopic installation. Internet
activity making your muscles twitch, barometers making triangles
of colour flick around a screen, my presence changing the
patch on your DX7 - never before have artists believed themselves
to be so powerful. The cosmos is yours; by interacting,
I share it with you. Your art is as expansive as the sticky
old slides of space projected in the planetarium.
Dedicated
to Marlon Brando, Sandra Bernhard, Dan Clowes & Steve
Albini.
