IF YOU WERE to graph the trajectory of the Internet industry from 1995 to the present, you'd end up with something like a truncated bell curve. A few innovators found companies at the bottom of the curve, and then, with an assist from mainstream media, hundreds, then thousand, of companies arise and get funded through April 2000, when the layoffs and shutdowns begin in earnest. The arc cuts off before you reach the x-axis -- not because the sector disappears, but because, as Clay Shirky put it in a recent New York Times op ed, it disperses: There's a dawning "realization that the Internet's ability to lower costs could be -- had to be -- embraced everywhere." The curve ends because you can no longer represent the sector using one line. Swap in "digital art" for "dot.com" and this graph, including its truncated termination, still applies, just change the start date to 1996. Bitstreams, an exhibition of digital art that opened at the Whitney Museum last week, is emblematic of the peaking curve, and so it's not surprising that it suffers from a blinding, irrational exuberance.
Digital art was certainly happening before 1996, but it had little visibility and less institutional support. Around that time, a community of digital artists began to coalesce, a process jump-started by Rhizome.org. For the most part, though, digital art had yet to fully shed its reputation as a hobby. One of the bigger challenges for collectors was the difficulty of monetizing digital art. These works take many forms -- from an installation of computers playing old movie clips to a digitally retouched photo -- but they often do not take the form of unique objects: things that can be traded, things whose value might appreciate because only one of them exists in the world.
Despite the strikes against digital art, its invisibility didn't last long. Digital art's curve begins its steep ascent when the big institutions start believing, around the second quarter of '98. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquires the Razorfish Subnetwork, a set of entertainment sites that stretched the limits of Web design functionality, for its permanent collection. Shortly thereafter, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis launches the Digital Arts Study Collection to preserve new media art and acquires several works, including the artists' Web site äda 'web. Panels are organized. Curatorial stars are born -- Steve Dietz, Joshua Decter, Jon Ippolito. A handful of digital-artist collectives become famous, if not rich -- jodi.org and etoy.com. Digital art gets its own magazine (Artbyte).
But there's a category problem. Being digital or made with digital tools doesn't really say much about the art itself. Which is why Bitstreams is strong at the level of individual pieces but doesn't cohere as a show. Just as dot.com was always a fatuous category, lumping together media, corporate services, and infrastructure companies into one "industry," digital art is a category of convenience that should be retired. In Bitstreams, there are 2-D images that are an extension of photography, like Inez van Lamsweerde's Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately). There are 3-D works, like Robert Lazzarini's distorted skulls, made using a process called "rapid prototyping," which lets you "printout" sculptures. There are cinematic pieces, like Lutz Bacher's forty-minute video of Pat Hearn made from a year's worth of footage taken in the art dealer's office, or Jeremy Blake's dreamy abstractions. And there's even sound art. The degree to which a given piece is digital varies, and in some cases -- most notably Sally Elsby's Hand to Mouse Line Drawings -- the captions struggle to justify the inclusion of a particular work.
Digital art isn't just a messy category, it messes up old, seemingly sacred distinctions between media. Lawrence Rinder, the curator of Bitstreams, acknowledges as much and follows the logic all the way out: "Once clearly distinct disciplines such as video and printmaking, or drawing and sculpture, now share fundamental properties insofar as they depend on the same software or even the same information." What Rinder is describing is dispersion, the end of the curve. There are signs that some museums already recognize this shift. Some even resisted the temptation to reduce a disparate set of art practices into a genre in the first place.
The dispersion of "digital art" has many consequences, the main one being sowing distrust. We don't know anymore what we're looking at. Take Andreas Gursky, It Boy photographer, current subject of a mid-career retrospective at MoMA. Gursky makes stunning, huge photographs of apartment buildings, hotel atriums, crowds of ravers -- the backgrounds of postmodern life. Some, but not all, are digitally altered. It's hard to tell which ones, and MoMA doesn't cue viewers at all. It's the inverse of "disintermediation," using the Internet to cut out the middle man. In art, the experience is of supermediation, that is, another layer is added between your eyes and any possible trace of the artist's hand. When you get right down to it, digital tools (whether these are used in a specific piece or not) completely confound any direct relationship between representation and reality. They replace subjectivity with surreptitious tinkering and turn aesthetic questions into epistemological ones. Still, as Gursky's Paris, Montparnasse and John F. Simon's Color Panel v1.5 prove, bits can be beautiful.
Stefanie Syman is the co-Editor-in-Chief of FEED Magazine.Partly mirrored by artematrix.org to ensure online availability of important texts at all times. We have all experienced unfortunate downtime on servers when texts are needed the most, and apologize if this service should be considered a violation of any copywrite claims...
