Bishop’s idea of the Digital Divide resonated with me well because of how agreeably it appropriated with the contemporary world. She brings up two very specific ideas that were a reflection of artists’ work such as Frances Stark and Thomas Hirschhorn. First, she says “Each suggests the endlessly disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera of the virtual age and its impact on our consumption of relationships, images, and communication.” My interpretation of this statement would entail the use of the short lived virtual age as an influence on the way we interact with our peers and deal with situations and static information on a whole. For example in Stark’s video (My Best Thing), her use of human personas projected onto animated ones is almost a scary reflection of our interactions in the virtual world today. It seems too artificial and uncanny to think that two human beings can interact so seamlessly over information online.
Moreover, what Stark is really commenting on here is the idea of being so inevitably connected yet so distant, which is also the second idea that Bishop brings up in her interpretation of the digital world and its divide. She says, “…each articulates something of the troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance that characterizes our new technological regime,and proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued.” The characteristics of this ‘so called’ technological regime is the true essence of how we stay connected today. We’re almost inevitably intimate with every individual on the earth, be it directly or indirectly. But in actual measurable terms such as distance, we are extremely far away from them. Hirschhorn’s video (Touching Reality) depicts this exact sense, we “touch” the gruesome happenings that are so readily available to us, yet what we can do and what can we feel in the situation is far apart from what the virtual world can provide to us.
Given these ideas that Bishop points out, in my opinion, what we as artists in the digital world are given is a whole playing field worth of room to use digital to comment or mock on digital. It has given us the leeway to convey our true feelings about our culture in the language that the culture speaks best. Therefore, we are given everything we need to exist as artists in the contemporary world through this idea of “digital divide”, which is the separation between the once mainstream art world and it’s response to the digital.