Subject: Avoiding the term Art / Ars in its relation with the digital system of creation.
§ Paragraph on eluding the term Art/Ars within the digital system of creation.
Computer Art, Cyber Art, Digital Art, Info Art, Electronic Art, Multimedia Art, Hypermedia Art, Virtual Reality Art, The Art of the CD‑ROM, Telematic Art, Internet Art, Web Art, net.art, Digital Installation Art, Digital Interactive Art, New Media Art, and so on… A long list of phrases that allude to the supposed artistic potential of the new digital technologies, treated as new means of artistic creation and as producers of a new type of artwork. These expressions appear in specialized studies, in publications, on the Internet, in catalogues of digital art exhibitions, and as subtitles of works, and so forth.
I myself have sometimes used such phrases in various theoretical constructs. Lately, however, my younger colleagues from the kinema ikon workshop/group have noticed that I increasingly avoid using the word Art/Ars, and against this favorable backdrop I have started to be overwhelmed with rather subversive questions: What relevance does the term Art have in its relation to the digital system of creation? What connection do digital works have with contemporary art, even in its alternative forms? Isn’t it indecent and immoral to use terms inherited from analog-traditional artistic practice to explain the operations we perform in digital creation?
All in all, I have reached the conclusion that “digital beauty” is like an unfortunate encounter between a machine for producing stupefying images and an analog umbrella on a dissection desktop – a paraphrase of the famous sixth chant from an initiatory text. Put more directly, we are dealing with a stark incongruity between two complementary worlds that nevertheless operate in absolutely different systems: the analog and the digital. From this conclusion comes the proposal in the “subject matter,” somewhat further developed: to elude, avoid, or at least temporarily bracket all derivatives of the word Art/Ars in relation to new digital technologies. Many multimedia theorists and authors of digital works agree on the following point of view: since the digital system represents a real paradigm shift, it is both normal and necessary that in creative applications we operate with specific terms. This is the only rigorous way to establish an autonomous language that is valid in the processes of creation, interactive reception, and theoretical critical analysis of the phenomenon.
Easy to propose, but very hard to accept, since the word Art has long ago become a stereotypical mode of expression. The upside is that the “incriminated” term is found, in varying degrees, in three categories of authors. The first group consists of those who almost never use the word Art when producing theoretical texts or digital works, relying instead on specific expressions like Hypermedia, Digital Works, Virtual Reality, Database, Network, Webness, and others of this kind. The second category uses both modes of expression in equal measure, oscillating between Digital Works and Digital “Art”. The third category programmatically supports the idea of explicitly “artistic” creation that necessarily results in an “artwork.” It seems the fifty-fifty category is the most convincing, since the first group is already convinced by the fact that it avoids the word in question, while the third category cannot be swayed because their terminology is infected by the lexical family of Art/Ars, already part of a consecrated methodology – the cards have been played.
The phrases listed at the beginning of this essay are well attested and are continually reused in various situations: exhibition and symposium titles, names of journals (print and online), subtitles of works, and in key theoretical studies. I will cite them at random without sources, since what matters is only the reiteration of the word Art in its combinations… Art of the Digital Age, Computer Art Magazine, Cyber Art Exhibition, art en réseau, l’art numérique, Ars Electronica, International Symposium on Electronic Art, The Art of Cyberspace, Virtual Art, and many others, whose ancestor was called “computer-assisted ART.” More rhetorical questions were raised in the early 1990s by researchers less confident in the artistic capacities of the digital system: “Une art multimédia est-il possible?” or “Can a CD‑ROM be a work of art?” But the possibility of eluding the term Art altogether and relying exclusively on a specific vocabulary was never questioned.
In this context the following dilemma arises: Is the computer a new means of creation that can be operational across many domains of human activity, or only in the artistic domain? If the answer favors the first part, then it is incorrect to rely on the additives Art, Artistic, Artist, Work of Art, and so on, since this discriminates against other domains — in other words, creation is not the exclusive privilege of Art. Looking back in time we can discover the most plausible cause of this recourse to the derivatives of Art in relation to the digital system. From the very beginning, a cliché formulation was accredited: “the impact of new technologies on art,” without making an explicit distinction between two absolutely different domains. On one side, that of analog art — classical, traditional, modern, or even alternative — whose relation to digital technology is limited only to the dimensions of Information and Communication on the corresponding supports /CD‑ROM, DVD, Internet/. Thus we can access encyclopedias, museums and art galleries, as well as monographs of artists with their works in all genres—painting, graphic art, sculpture, design, installation, performance, video, literary texts, musical compositions, plays, films, etc. In this domain, the use of the word Art is fully justified, since we are speaking of Art ON the CD‑ROM and Art ON the Net. On the other side we have the truly new and specific domain that results from the computer’s capacity to function as a new means of creation in varied activities and professions. Here, the term Art becomes superfluous, irrelevant, and thus useless. Its use in formulations like “Digital Art” constitutes an illicit transfer of terms from the field of conventional art to a field in which the digital tool is primarily a means of creation. This “illicit transfer of terms” disrupts the attempts to establish an autonomous/specific language operational for creation, interactive reception, and theoretical analysis alike.
I conducted a bibliographic endeavor as exhausting as it was exciting in its results. I skimmed through several hundred important texts from the theoretical world of the digital, hunting obsessively for the word Art/Ars in all the combinations I encountered. In the end I found, to my amazement and delight, that in all the contexts I examined, the elusion/avoidance/replacement of the term Art caused no rupture of meaning. In other words, the content of the statement was in no way affected, as if the word Art were purely decorative or metaphorical, like “the art of cooking,” “the art of war,” “martial arts,” “the liberal arts,” and so on. Moreover, the intrusion of terminology borrowed from traditional art vocabulary actually obstructs the formation of an autonomous language, producing reception blockages, since all derivatives of Art/Ars divert the user’s free associative play toward false “artistic” meanings that have little to do with creativity mediated by the digital system. It is important to clarify: I am not referring to “attacks” from representatives of conventional art who refuse to acknowledge the creative capacities of the computer. I address the theme of elusion from inside the digital system that continues to fascinate me; in other words, I write from an Endo position. I am not concerned with childish debates about the boundaries between art and non-art. Nor am I speaking about traditional, modern, or alternative art, for which digital supports merely entail recourse to the communicational dimension of information technology. Nor am I referring to the well-established domains of analog creation such as film art, photo art, video art. Nor to the production of “works” of painting, sculpture, graphic art, tapestry, etc. with digital means, which I consider entirely nonspecific, the result being nothing but a miscarriage. What I am concerned with are solely the creative capacities of the digital system, with the explicit caveat of eluding the word Art/Ars.
At this stage in the structuring of the text, an issue arises as important as it is complex. To establish an autonomous language of digital creation and perception, a solid foundation is necessary, based on works and theoretical texts of reference. I imagine the dilemma of a young researcher attracted to the dazzling universe of pixels, who asks himself what kind of bibliography he should rely on in order to produce an original theoretical text of his own. In practice, he faces three options. First, the option of continuous connection between classical/modern analog culture and the young culture under the digital mark. That is, continuity from the pre-Socratics to the poststructuralists and from there to hypermedia configurations and virtual — a situation that leads to bibliographic inflation. Second, the option of total rupture from classical/modern culture, which requires exclusive recourse to authors specialized in the digital system, especially its creative dimension. This involves several dozen major names and hundreds of reference studies published in volumes, anthologies, and specialized journals, both offline and online. Add to these symposiums and exhibitions with substantial catalogues, meetings organized by multimedia departments at European and American universities, research centers, or specialized institutions. This option is preferable, though it tends to entail a certain inconsistency.
Third, between “continuity” and “total rupture” lies the option of a “compromise” with a vector leaning toward rupture. This option entails a selective appropriation of adequate segments from certain classical/modern authors. What matters here is not the theorist as a whole with his complete works, but only certain fragments, paragraphs, phrases, or expressions relevant enough to resonate with the process of digital creation, with new mechanisms of perception, and equally with the new theoretical constructs for critical analysis of the digital paradigm. A few pointed examples can be far more eloquent than a prolonged defense of the proposed methodology. For example, the vast work of the aesthetician Étienne Souriau has little chance of adapting to the digital system of creation, with one striking exception: when he classifies the arts according to seven minimal units of expression, which he calls “qualia sensibles”—lines, volumes, colors, luminosities, movements, articulated sounds, musical sounds — each corresponding to a certain type of perceptible data. Each of these “données spécifiques” can constitute a criterion by which a certain type of creation is established, in two modalities, figurative and nonfigurative. This segment of Souriau’s work is apt for adoption/adaptation to the digital system, provided we accept the pixel as the eighth “qualia sensibles.” From digital creative practice we know that we can produce both figurative and nonfigurative works with the same minimal elements, and the hypermedia configuration offers unlimited possibilities of “correspondences” between images, sounds, texts, and dynamic forms, which in turn can form narrative nuclei—elements that can combine into a new type of discourse with interactive valences.
This methodology of selecting “pertinent segments” can be applied to authors of all times and all categories, from Pythagoras to Peirce, from Kircher to Deleuze, traversing all creative experiments up to extreme theories. Of course, a stylistic adoption of “compromise” is difficult to apply, given the obligation to combine the analog system (the pertinent fragments) with the digital system of creation based on the binary mode of operation. Difficult, but as exciting as any encounter between two different worlds, and after all, it is about reading relevant classical texts through a hypertextual lens.
Returning to the theme of instituting an autonomous/specific language by eluding the derivatives of Art/Ars, it is not difficult to see that we have three types of expressions with precise connotations: Attested terms. Eluded terms. Derived terms. Frequently attested and used terms include: interactive multimedia, hypermedia, author, creator, user, virtual reality, digital installation, virtual installation, digital media, CD‑ROM, Internet, non-linear, rhizomatic. Expressions where the term Art can be eluded: digital works instead of “digital art,” digital creation instead of “digital artwork,” computer work instead of “computer art,” author instead of “artist,” work in the net instead of “net.art,” and so on. It is easy to see that regardless of context, the elusion of the word Art and its replacement with neutral terms such as work, creation, expression, and others causes no distortion of meaning. On the contrary, it filters out the parasitic connotations induced by the incriminated word.
Finally, relatively new terms can be obtained by associative derivation, such as digital experience, digital expression, digital forms, digital creative process, digital works, networking, participatory works, and many others. Once we accept that eluding the term Art involves no semantic loss, the question remains: what is gained by renouncing the “incriminated” word? The correct answer is clear: we gain at every level of establishing an autonomous/specific language, offering creators, theorists, and users a common vocabulary, and thus the possibility of unified, coherent communication. Perhaps then we will no longer see the perplexed faces of programmers we collaborate with, when we ask them to execute a program for an “artistic work,” that is, for a “work of art,” with which we want to participate in a “digital art” exhibition… It is enough to consider the information system as a creative medium, with which digital works can be produced — from the minimal level of web pages to sophisticated constructs. In any case, the most eloquent way of demonstrating the advantage of eluding the “incriminated” term remains the practice of interactively receiving digital works in all formats and on all supports, from the 1990s to the present.
A creator, theorist, or competent and interested user can at any time selectively “read” reference works on compact discs (CD‑ROM, DVD) or access important works on the specialized telematic support of the Internet. From there, it is enough to accept an exercise of interpretation during the process of access, trying to answer the following problem: Beyond the pleasure of interactive play and the inciting associative effects, do you feel the necessity of adding the supplement called Art, with all its ingredients—beauty, sublimity, tragedy, balance, harmony, aesthetic taste, work of art, et cetera? If you feel this need imperiously, then you may, with a clear conscience, resort to the word Art, for you are a decimal person. If you do not feel this necessity, then you are a binary personality and will proceed accordingly.
Vivat Pixelus Ludens!
