Ten Reasons Why the Art World Loves Digital Art

Matthew Fuller

Vol 1 #11, Autumn 1998

1. We live in an era in which the dominant mode of politics is systems analysis. Power has been handed over to a series of badly animated, white-shirted technicians who deliver fault reports and problem-fixes that can only be answered with an ‘Okay’. All the control and trustworthiness of Norton Utilities is delegated to a bunch of frightened, useless pilots, gibbering out of control at the keyboard of a system they no longer understand. In this context, it is essential for artists and others to synthesise an un-format-able world.

2. The art world loves digital art because there is a large, submerged part of the latter – as of the former – that is invisible to the viewing public and only ever read by interpretative machines. Digital art is an autonomous field with its own opportunities, norms and institutions. It understands that the distinction between the fields is necessary in order to maintain the integrity and thoroughness of both fields. For all artists, it is imperative that they maintain the field in which they work as an autonomous sphere. The strength of a specific field can be measured precisely by the degree to which participants recognise the contributions of their peers and therefore develop each other’s richness in specific capital. The collapse of a discipline can be measured precisely by the degree to which heterogeneous elements are able to exert force within or upon it.

3. Jeff Koons recently described the patterns produced by the interrelations of basic, repeated units, motifs, forms, colours, in his sculptures constructed of variegated patterns of boxed basketballs, as a basic form of artificial intelligence. Mainstream art has already begun to incorporate the terminology and methodologies of digital cultures as a way of talking about itself and finding sympathetic refrains within a wider culture.

4. The art world loves digital art because it reminds the art world of the limits of its knowledge and the wisdom to be found in the open, non-prejudicial contemplation of the unknown. Likewise, it is always useful to have a relatively large amount of the unknown to call upon in the event of a vague legitimation crisis. In the past, it has proven good insurance to have a few unknown things knocking about in the rear. Graffiti, macramé, female artists and other minor genres have all played their part in the past.

5. Large, prestigious art museums, with marble foyers, love web-based art because it implicitly solves some of the problems of distribution for non-gallery-orientated works that were faced by video art. Because the web guarantees at least some kind of circulation, this frees them from the embarrassment of undergoing similar rituals to those undertaken on behalf of artists thoughtless enough to produce painting, sculpture or installation.

Given the medium’s self-sufficiency, widely promoted, attentively curated exhibitions – with all their background manoeuvring, public attention, critical discussion, historicisation machinery, high artists’ fees and other negative influences on the pure essence of artistic creation – can all be avoided, leaving the work to be safely ignored.

6. For similar reasons, those who are interested in reading Marx without illusions believe that the ‘Fragment On Machines’ in the Grundrisse has important implications for technology and art. Here, Marx suggests that what he terms ‘general intelligence’ – the general, social knowledge, or collective intelligence, of a society in a given historical period, particularly that embodied in ‘intelligent’ machines – reaches a decisive point of contradiction when actual value is created more on the basis of the knowledge and procedures embedded into these machines than in simple human labour. This frees digital artists from having to exist, or at least frees them from being any less cheap and infinitely reproducible than their work or equipment.

7. The art world loves digital art because someone other than the Royal Society of Portrait Painters has to take the conventions of pictorial representation into the future. Whilst virtual worlds might still be to the mid-’90s what Roger Dean album covers were to the mid-’70s, the onward march of technology will one day surely permit an upgrade-obedient artist to produce a final form of perfection: an utter conformity to perceptual mechanisms, the perspectival instructions of which permit viewing only by the most perfected of subjects. At this sublime moment, being empties in entirety onto a computer and thus, perhaps, allows isolation on a hard drive to be stored or destroyed.

8. Artists wait in ambush for the unique moments at which an unrecognisable world reveals itself to them. They pounce on these little grains of nothingness like beasts of prey. It is the moment of full awakening, of union and of absorption, and it can never be forced. Artists never formulate a plan; instead they balance and weigh opposing forces, flexions, marks, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly layout, always with plenty of space between, always alternating between the heat of integration and the coolness of critical distance, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds, ad infinitum, and that, wherever one left off, one had created a world.

The sublimation of technique to the advantage of a separate category known as creation is consistent between all sections of art. Programmers, technicians and other people are glad to work hard to make the realisation of the vision of the artist possible. Providing such freedom for the artist is essential because, in this way, providence always triumphs over ego.

9. Because art that is not solely about content but that is multiply reflexive – concerned with materials, that is, about the lustres and qualities of light, about the tonality of certain gestures, about modes and theatres of enunciation – refuses to make a strict separation between creation and technique. Concept and execution fold in and out of each other, blurring the categorical imperatives of rule by the head or by the dead. The most powerful art, digital art, art which is digital in spite of itself, is, regardless of the context which codes it and from which it escapes, derived in this way precisely from hooking into an expanded compositional synthesis.

A multitude of currents of heterogeneity destabilise digital art’s status as an autonomous field. Most prosaically, this occurs in the production of art that takes the needs of sponsors to heart, so much that it is indissociable from them. Heterogeneity can also disrupt the autonomy of a field and, thus, its internal self-evolving richness, when it comes in the form of interpretation: in lazy journalistic work, the primary concern of which is the humorous gratification of what it presumes are its audiences’ prejudices, in works that are diagrammatically pre-formatted by pre-existing critical criteria or, most importantly, in works whose relationship with certain flows of words amplifies both.

10. Both fields, art and digital art, attempt to control what art and artists should do and what they should be called. This is simply as a necessity for their maintenance and development. At the same time, even their own historical emergence is, or was, dependent upon the eventual impossibility of such control. Those moments at which that impossibility is made concrete are what produce artists worthy of the name, as well as those to whom the word means nothing. Paradoxically, this very impossibility is what art and digital art claim as grounding their ability to speak, to be paid attention. It is only when they lividly and completely fail to betray that claim that art becomes worthy of anything but indifference.