“People want tangible art. They want to take the image and the experience of the work with them. They want to place it in their homes.”
Where does that leave digital art? As prints? Isn’t that bastardizing the medium? Won’t digital prints always seem inferior to etchings and engravings? After all, hitting CTRL + P on a keyboard lacks the quality of craftsmanship and manpower of rolling out a print and waiting for it to dry. Even with the application of computer skills to screenprints, digital art takes the second seat and becomes incidental.
Archiving computer media cannot be left to merely photographing the work, because a single set of images cannot capture the true form of some digital work, especially if the piece is interactive. CDs and DVDs are more reliable, but for much of the same reason may adulterate the mood and tone of the experience. I suppose if there is a virtual program that a playable disc version of that program will suffice, but this also seems to be an illegitimate archival tactic. Technology is capricious and cruel when it comes to up-to-date and out-of-date. There is planned obsolescence in everything state-of-the-art. Besides, a disc is so impersonal and distant. Anything can be contained on it.
However, the impact of a drawing, painting, or sculpture is immediate. You see it. You know what you are going to get when you see it. It is the thing you are getting. It is the thing in itself! The same can be said of performed, installed, and simulated work. Immediate reaction. But then again…
Contemplating the latter three disciplines, I find an answer. Computer art that cannot be mastered as a single image is like all other art forms that share that quality. It is an experience, and it is a transient one. More can be said about the stipulations and ramifications that come in being classified this way, but I’m too tired at the moment. Maybe later.
But I’ll leave you with this thought: This world is becoming more virtual and less corporeal. I wonder what the antiques of the generations after us will look like in the year 2200. I imagine that long after the handbound and leather clad books that we now praise as high quality artifacts have turned into dust, our scions will collect and praise the jeweled-cased and paper-sleeved discs of now questionable work.
POST SCRIPT
- On thinking about how I am ashamed to print my digital work, the future of digital art within the fine arts, and the preservation of such work. I seem to be in love with a bastard medium/discipline. That is so appropriate that I find joy in it. I feel like a regular maverick!
- Also to consider: Using digital processes to create art versus using digital processes to display art or doing both… And something about being the new all inclusive, the new frontier… And something about earning authenticity versus always being a novelty.
- I need to concentrate the nature of my concerns to digital imaging. The inclusion of other digital art forms seems to jar my focus. And maybe that’s a clue. The variety and accessibility of methods is not a detriment. It’s an advantage, the characteristic that will maintain the cause. I think that I have belabored the point. For someone who believes that nothing truly can be preserved, I sure am gungho about making this medium indelible. Talk about facing one’s own mortality, huh?
I have to organize about 2200 photographs of random objects that I’ve taken since August. I believe in collecting my own images for use in my work.
