The Future of Art in a Digital Age

Art historian and artist, Kristine Stiles of Duke University, posed these provocative questions to six artists at the final session of the first international HASTAC conference, "Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface."
The Future of Art in a Digital Age

Panelists: Anya Belkina, J-Bully (a.k.a Robi Roberts), René Garcia,

Suguru Goto, and Mendi + Keith Obadike

Questions by Moderator, Kristine Stiles

21 April 2007

A) General questions related to artists and society in visual culture:

1) German artist Joseph Beuys famously insisted that, “Everyone is an artist.” This may have come to be true through visual cultures but in a way that he did not imagine. What is the role of an artist in cultures inundated with the “visual,” where many people have the technical tools and skills to produce hybrid, remixed – artistic - visuality?

Follow up questions:

• a) art once represented and incorporated idiosyncratic conditions and productions that were difficult to reproduce by automated means. What does it imply for the future of art that it can be increasingly automated?
• b) how does the artist negotiate this new relationship with the amateur?
• c) what does the artist have to learn from those untrained in artistic production/visual/musical/ etc?

2) To use one of the vernacular terms of the HASTAC conference – silo, which signifies a place for the storage of food, or an underground shelter used to launch missiles – how have artists become silos of information to be harvested?

Follow up question: What is the implication of art as a service industry for the digital age?

3) German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen infamously described the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City on 9/11 as the “the greatest work of art possible for the entire cosmos,” and British artist Damien Hirst described the same event as “visually stunning.” Both apologized, but what are the implications for the artist of the visuality of terrorism, communicated digitally around the globe?

Follow up question:

• a) Given the public’s attraction to and repulsion from the spectacle and performativity of terror, how are we to understand the contingencies between digital and performance art and the videos Seung-Hui Cho (the shooter at Virginia Tech) sent NBC News, which it broadcast?
• b) What does the future hold for art and artists given these two manifestations of the use of the digital in picturing acts of terrorism and mass murder?

B) Specific questions related to artistic creation of new kinds of knowledge in collaboration with other fields:

Artists are working in the fields of:

• virtual reality system to track retinal memory (Maurice Benayoun);
• to create recombinant poetics, bio-mimetics, and the meta-meaning of machines in the creation of a “neo-sentient computer,” programmed for benevolence (Bill Seaman and Otto Rossler);
• to clone and do genetic mapping;
• to address military surveillance systems, theorizing the dynamics of “armed vision, vision that is streamed through missile-mounted cameras. These virtual machines drive the representation of movement in order to position, track, identify, predict, intercept and contain its target” (Jordan Crandall). These are weapons systems, like videogames armed with joysticks and comparable to the psychophysical experience and training of the multiplayer online role-playing games, like World of Warcraft.
• to use music to engage the public with a host of social issues;
• to create avatars and live in Second Life, and so on…
• to create digital spatial mapping: Web-based modular mapping that is collaborative, open, permitting participants to move across fields in remix, cross-over, intermedia (as in a Wiki, or Wikipedia, the server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser).
• To disseminate literature against repression (many music- and artist-collectives)

To name a few areas of art that engages digital technology in social, cultural, political, and ethical issues and possibilities.

1) Following on Lev Manovich’s point about the significance of software studies: What are the questions and challenges raised by software for each of your fields?

2) There has been much discussion about “open systems” at the HASTAC conference. What is the balance between open and closed systems in terms of copyright? Accreditation? Authorship?

3) In what ways can artists explore the constructions of knowledge told in/by traditional cultures and in/by science communities that govern technological cultures in such ways that these competing stories might be integrated at the knowledge-based interface between the two? (These issues were raised in a provocative and productive presentation by scientist Sylvia Nagl and artist/art historian Sally Jane Norman in their HASTAC presentation “Raranga Tangata: The Weaving Together of People,” where they juxtaposed Maori creation stories and western science as it deals with complexity.) (Related to this question is the burgeoning field of bio-colonialism, among others.)

4) What are the compelling cultural/social/visual issues in each of your individual fields?

5) How - and must? - artists take responsibility for the future of imagination in the digital age?