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>>This is James Morgan and today we're going to be talking
about digital media art, new media art, and the intersection
of art and technology.
All three of these things actually refer
to the same body of work essentially.
But there's also like computers and art and there's
like several other topics
and you'll hear me use them fairly interchangeably.
So what is art?
Well, art is a discussion, it's about philosophy.
It's not really terribly useful to approach it from that aspect.
It's much better to talk about well, what's interesting
because people aren't interested in what experts have to say,
they're more interested in what their taste is
when it comes to art.
Media on the other hand is more understandable
and media has also shifted.
It used to be more about one-to-many in the case
of print media or broadcast media.
With the advent of computers and the Internet,
this has become much more about many-to-many.
Along these lines though, art has changed in the last country.
In the early 20th century, Marcel Duchamp changed the way
that we understand art.
Our art after Marcel Duchamp is conceptual;
it is about the ideas, it's not about the aesthetics any longer.
Clement Greenberg in the middle of this last century talked
about modernism and he got some things right,
but in other ones he sort of missed the point.
He said that it's really about the characteristic methods
of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.
Not to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly
in the areas of its competence.
So let's look at painting.
Now when we're talking about painting, we all have like sort
of a basic understanding of what it is about.
We're not talking about house painting so much, we're talking
about like fine art painting, right?
It's about taking a substance and applying it to a surface
so there are a lot of things we consider along these lines.
So what is the surface?
What type of paint are we using and how are you applying it?
The work of the artist's hand is there,
like how do they apply it?
What sort of materials are they using; is it thick, is it thin,
is it water based, is it oil based,
is it even some sort of traditional media?
The form, the color, the subject.
What is the image?
What is being represented in it; is it anything actually?
What do think of when we see it and what do we fantasize
about when we see this image
when you see what has been applied to it?
Mark Tribe describes new media art as projects that make use
of emerging media technologies and are concerned
with the cultural, political,
and aesthetic possibilities of these tools.
In fact these three things, cultural, political,
and aesthetic possibilities, apply to all art media.
Now, with respect to video art, where does this leave video art?
Is it part of the digital?
Well certainly YouTube is.
And YouTube is a very interesting way to look at video
and to consider it in a contemporary setting.
It is both digital and new media in that standpoint.
In terms of technology, how does one look at technology
and call this sort of "Greenbergian" formalism out?
How does one sort of deal with this?
Very often it is about the formalistic
and the physical aesthetic qualities of it itself.
More specifically, we're dealing with the concept
because it always falls back on the idea of the concept.
If you can't answer the question, "What does it mean,"
then it does appear that you're missing something.
Now you could say that it means nothing,
that's certainly a viable answer for it.
In terms of contemporary editing and contemporary collage,
a lot of work has to be done at Photoshop and this is like sort
of like the visual match-up.
Or images that sort of question the authenticity of themselves
and what they present to us.
In addition to that the World Wide Web provides an interesting
means to reach indirectly to us.
With that, www.jodie.org actually takes and looks
at the essential quality of the web which is to say
that beneath the surface, there is a source code
and they plant a little nugget of the source.
In terms of games, games fall very specifically
at the point of interaction.
And in the game like Passage, you experience your entire life
in the five minutes that it takes to play.
It is a very sort of profound, yet retro experience.
Working with 3D and inflatables, it's possible to take and deal
with scale and deal with the public and intervention
in a very sort of fun, if not accessible sort of manner.
Performance for that matter often intersects a lot
of digital media art.
In this example, the [inaudible] are reenacting classic
performances instead of a game or virtual environment.
The question is, "Well, how does this affect the performance;
how does this change it to suddenly be
in this other space, or this area?"
For that matter, /hug creates for an organization
like the American Red Cross, but in the World of Warcraft
which has been at war for 3,000 years.
And this question is much more like,
where did we leave our central humanity?
What is the place of our central being?
In terms of art and digital media art,
it's held at the same standards, but has different goals.
Essentially the political, cultural,
and aesthetic possibilities are relevant
in all of these aspects.
In the end, art is art
and everything else is everything else.
And that's not to say that anything is less
than something else, but the point is not well,
is something art, but If it is art, then it is art
and we just aren't going to engage in that conversation.