“My point is that mainstream contemporary art simultaneously disavows and depends on the digital revolution, even—especially—when this art declines to speak overtly about the conditions of living in and through new media. But why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our experience of digitalized life? After all, photography and film were embraced rapidly and wholeheartedly in the 1920s, as was video in the late 1960s and ‘70s. These formats, however, were image-based, and their relevance and challenge to visual art were self-evident. The digital, by contrast, is code, inherently alien to human perception. It is, at base, a linguistic model. Convert any .jpg file to .txt and you will find its ingredients: a garbled recipe of numbers and letters, meaningless to the average viewer. Is there a sense of fear underlying visual art’s disavowal of new media? Faced with the infinite multiplicity of digital files, the uniqueness of the art object needs to be reasserted in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination…”
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This particular passage stuck out to me in part because I found it to be interesting to consider visual digital artwork to be both visual and linguistic in nature. In an age where digital media is so commonplace in everyone’s daily lives it can be easy to forget what it really is that makes digitized works and ideas what they are. Computer generated art has allowed artists to create from digital processes and simple lines of code beautiful works that, while created through a largely different string of techniques, may not be terribly different from works made in analog mediums in both the past and present.
Also intriguing about this section of Bishop’s piece was how it calls back to her thoughts on the role of technology in art that were outlined in the beginning. In the first section Bishop describes what it means to “thematize” the digital world, or how well a piece reflects on the impact global digitization has had on the human experience. She then lists examples of some artists and artwork that she feels captures this idea, a list that includes Thomas Hirshhom’s Touching Reality (2012). I found this video to be particularly impactful because it depicts very simply the role of the internet in desensitizing people to horrific images and tragedies. The instantaneous nature of the internet allows any person to see these types of scenes with virtually the same ease as seeing any video on YouTube, and its infinite nature may cause people to see these things with such frequency that they begin to lose all significant meaning. I myself definitely feel that I have been desensitized to the scenes depicted in Touching Reality, but seeing them through the lens of Hirshhom’s camera made me recoil more than I likely would if I had just seen the pictures myself. Because of how this video made me feel, I agree with Claire Bishop’s thoughts on the notion that there is a difference between an artist that uses technology to make art, and an artist that uses technology in the art, and Hirshhom certainly was able to depict an idea that many people on the web likely knows very well.