My essay on Perception and Digital art was recently displayed at the Aronson Gallery at Parsons School of Design. While the essay mostly explored criteria for the critical evaluation of artwork within rapidly evolving mediums, it led me to a project idea.
Art and technology have always influenced each other as artists respond to the evolving tools that are available to them. The only thing that has changed since the dawn of the information age is the rate at which technology is advancing. The side effect of this is that we start to see projects that have arguably been constructed purely because the possibility of their creation exists. As we transitioned into the digital era, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message,” which feels like a limiting assertion when more and more of today’s art is driven or inspired by the digital technology that defines it’s medium, rather than an idea outside of its own medium. As technology progresses exponentially, allowing ‘the medium to be the message’ is akin to allowing a representational painting to entirely describe ones understanding of the physical world around them. While a representational painting can provide an abstracted visual interpretation of the physical world, artists of the Neo-Concrete, Op-Art, and Space and Light Art movements (among others) have shown us that art is capable of providing more possibilities. Art is capable of providing us with insight into our actual perception of the world around us, rather than just an abstracted representation of it.
Digital Art seems to be at greater risk of becoming a pure demonstration of it’s own medium, as tools and processes become available faster than messages beyond ‘look at these new possibilities’ can be conceived by those with the means to execute them.