Digital Art and Culture

For a long time the digitalization was seen as a tread for the music industry. Everybody was able to upload there music cds, so other people could download the music for free. In this way the musicians didn’t get paid for all their hard work. People called this illegal downloading ‘sharing’ so it didn’t sounded as bad as it was. Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) said once in an interview, that sharing of music was the weirdest thing he’d ever heard. It isn’t normal to share cars with random people, why should he share his work (and income) with people he doesn’t know?
Nowadays the music industry embraces the digital age. It gives them more and more opportunities to spread their music and create a fanbase all over the world. The figured a way out so it was possible to let people pay for the online music. One of those new initiatives was iTunes. In the iTunes store you can buy digital music. You can choose between whole albums of separated numbers. I like this initiative, but the price for a digital album is the same as for a real album. So iTunes is only for the lazy people who don’t go to a record store. A better on, I think, is Spotify. With this program you can discover new music and listen to albums for free. The only limit is that you can listen ten ours for free per month. This sounds great, but who get the musicians paid? There are two kinds of subscriptions. The one is the free one, but the listen time is limited and between songs is place for commercials. With the income of the commercials, Spotify can pay all the holders. It isn’t much for the most bands, but it is something. The other kind of subscription is a paid one. For five or ten dollars per month you can listen to all music, without limits and without commercials. And again, with that money you pay, Spotify can pay the musicians.
With these new initiatives the sharing idea of music still exists, but in this way it is much more honest.

It’s a long lasting discussion: where does privacy stops and surveillance begins? On which level is it allowed to check the actions of people and when does it become of violation of privacy? Is safety more important than privacy? All these questions becoming more and more relevant in our society where the gaze seems to be more and more present in our daily lives, everywhere.

During class, we talked about a subject we’ve been talking about for a couple of times now: the panopticum. This system is important for understanding the work of surveillance systems. The concept is introduces by Foucault, and it is updated for the digital age by Deleuze. The gaze means knowledge and power, it has to do with visibility and being visible.  The gaze is being internalised into your body, into the body of the prisoners, with disciplining yourself as a result. This is called top-down surveillance, the higher power is looking down upon the prisoners, or in the daily life upon the citizens. They are not able to look back, and they start to react in a decent way. In real life you know that the government is watching you, but you don’t know why, when and how. But, what was mentioned in class: ‘better safe than sorry’. So people are going to behave well, even if they’re not being watched. And that’s the power of the gaze.

But in the digital age, this concept of top-down surveillance changed. Deleuze connected this concept to the idea of the rhizome. The clear hierarchy that’s present in the case of the panopticum, is absent in the case of the rhizome, where there’s no higher key. So the result of this is that everyone is controlling everyone. Surveillance is everywhere, it has no beginning, it has no end. The higher key of traditional institutions is breaking up and flowing on the whole society.  What you get is a kind of horizontal way of organizing power, called coveillance. Instead of just the government watching down on the people, now all the people are watching each other. So even there’s no camera, you behave yourself.

Another form is sousveillance. The system is turned upside down, called bottom-up. Citizens can look at the high people, and have the possibility of making visible the missteps of the higher power, for example Wikileaks, of filming missteps of the policewith a mobile phone. The gaze has become multi-directional. The question is, does it have the same influence as top-down surveillance, and can we discipline the higher people from below? And besides this: do we have enough free space left? Surveillance also brings a lot of good things, so if the answer is no, is this even a bad thing?

Sascha

The Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht engages in ‘wearable technology’. She brings fasion and technology together in an unusual way, by creating systems around the body which seems to have an intelligence of their own. Her designs react to the environment around them. She seeks to create a ‘higher connectivity between the body and clothing’. The things we were have to respond in a physical and psychological way to us. She’s says: ‘We shaped technology, and from that point on technology shaped us; it defines who we are as persons.’ The technology has to become like a second skin. ‘By placing technology on the body, it becomes an extension of ourselves while working as human-interface systems and connecting to others in ways of expression, communication or defense/protection.’ She won an award for communication/ best interaction with a dress that provides the person who wears it with a juice. These dresses has sensors, which are reacting on your body.

Clothes have multiply aims, and one of them is to protect you from the gaze of another person. In this way it’s preventing the other person to take control of you. But the clothes of Anouk Wipprecht are different. The texture responds on your body, for example on your body temperature. In this way your body become an interface to communicate with the textile, and the textile is communicating to the world. It becomes hard to lie about how you feel, because your body can’t lie. Everybody get to see something that maybe you wanted to hide.

So what we see here is a different way to communicate with the world in this more virtual age. There’s a very personal input and output. The most important thing here is the relation with your body, which is, in this case, the interface for the digital. Because it is connected to your feelings, we can talk about a very intimate way of dealing with the body. Laura Mark says that the human body is standing further en further away from us. In cases like this, where the body gets involved in a digital process, the body gets back to his old position. It all sounds very good, but also a little creepy. So if it’s up to me, I’d rather keep wearing my own clothes, without showing the rest of the world how my body feels.

Sascha

 (Source: http://www.anoukwipprecht.nl)

This week class we discussed the online identity. This subject isn’t new for us, because talked about it before. Last time we talk about how your online identity could be something completely new. On the web you are able to create a person who has nothing to do with your own identity in real live. But this week class we’ve made some nuance to that.

Although you can make up a new you, that doesn’t make it likely that this always happens. For example on facebook. On facebook there is a need for a connection to the real you. This connection is quite clear. It appears on your profile image, or on those little massages under a post like: poster from Rotterdam. It says something about the real you. It makes your facebook profile more reliable.

This connection is blurred when we look to online games. A game creates a new reality, so a connection to the real world isn’t as much required as with facebook. But there is still a connection. Some people make their avatar (the virtual representation in the game) look like themselves, or they try at least. But even if it doesn’t look like the real you there is still a connection. I noticed that in last week class, when we tried to explain the choice of an avatar. If an avatar is a female it could be that the person behind it is a woman. But what could it be meaning when the person is a man? Some people will think the person is too feminine, others will say that this man likes to watch a good looking girl, or it could be a funny experiment. When you choose a fantasy character there is still a connection with the real person. Even an ork or a troll says something about the represented man or woman. Probably that’s why we had such a long a non-academic discussion about orks, trolls and whatever there is more in the virtual world. The online identity is a more sensitive subject than I suspected before this class. Now I know I have to be careful if I talk about orks.

Sanne

theyoungfisherman:

Because, let’s face it: You are not perfect. None of us are. Not even the people on the covers of magazines. But technology such as Photoshop offers us perfection. Celebrities are no longer real. They are made. Not just made by managers, money or ‘society’, no. By technology. They become, very literally, a product. The over use of photoshop doesn’t amuse a lot of people. The masses expect a ‘real’ celebrity, not some picture, edited for 5 hours by a man in an office. This frustration becomes clear in the final lines of the video: Maybe she’s born with it? No, I’m pretty sure it’s photoshop. We expect reality. Not virtuality. 

-Sjoerd

So here’s my question: If you use photoshop to ‘brush up’ a picture of yourself: what happens to you? Are you the photoshopped person in the picture you just saved as: thisistherealme.JPG; or are you the real person, not perfect, sitting in front of the computer? Are you changing yourself? 

While I was reading your piece, the well-known commercial of Dove popped into my head (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U). This advertising campaign is called Evolution and is part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The advert challenges our concept of beauty by showing the transformation of a normal girl to a cover girl. It also illustrates how our perceptions of beauty are manipulated and distorted. Dove wants to show that those perceptions are based on something that isn’t real. You can maybe even call it the creation of a simulacrum (It’s maybe way too far-fetched but if we are manipulating our pictures, based on values of this simulacrum, aren’t we creating another simulacrum based on this first simulacrum?). What’s happening is that people spend way too much energy trying to look like fake creations, and it this way turning ourselves into things that we’re not. If our idea of beauty is based on an unreal world, and we are copying this world, what are we? Are we all representations based on concepts which aren’t real?   

Sascha

Today we talked about celebrity culture. There are many types of celebrities and the meaning of the word changed during the years, not in the last place because of the changes in the world of digital art. Cashmore said there is a clear distinction between what was called a celebrity in the 60s or 70s and what is called a celebrity nowadays. According to him it used to be all about the talent, but now they are no longer a device, but instead celebrities became a product which you can sell. And the media has a big influence on this, like David Giles said: you can become famous just by being visible in the media.

Susan Boyle’s audition on Britain’s Got Talent became a phenomenal hit on Youtube, resulting in a media visibility on global scale. Maybe people were watching her because of her talent, but I think a lot of them were just interested in the spectacle of ‘ordinary person turning into star’ (which, in this case, wasn’t possible without her talent).  It’s the typical myth of being famous, were hard work, talent en ordinariness are playing big parts. In her case, the influence of the people had a big impact, because they had to vote for her during the competition.

The way she was presented during her audition also influenced the spectacle. For example: showing the disbelief of the audience and the judges while she’s telling them about her dream. The impact when she begins to sing and the changes of the reactions of the audience, made the spectacle even bigger. These reactions are showing that our idea of a celebrity is different from the person Susan Boyle was.  Why are we so shocked when women who are not thin, tall and stunning can do things, rather than sitting at home and wishing they were somebody else?

So in these first minutes, first seconds, there’s a beginning of the construction of the celebrity Susan Boyle. Is Susan Boyle we know nowadays the same woman as the one who shocked everybody during her audition? Is the Susan Boyle during the audition even the real Susan Boyle? Probably not. We formed an idea of this person, influenced by the media, but it’s only a representation of what we want to see. There’s even a musical, where the live of Susan Boyle is presented, but of course in a way that’s interesting. Because why would we go watch this musical, if the story isn’t a spectacle?

Sascha

‘Nina Allam was nervous. She was about to meet someone she had been chatting with online since February. “I was terrified on the train. Very, very nervous. I remember sending him a text saying ‘Last chance to back out,’ when I was at the station ready to get on the train.” Though meeting Sean Barbary in person for the first time, Allam was already married to him in the online virtual world of Second Life.’ (source: CNN)

After class I was searching on the internet and found this story about two people who fell in love in Second Life, a virtual world.  But what is it that makes these virtual worlds so different from the real world? First we spoke about the fact that the Flow of Time is different in a virtual reality, because it’s way easier to speed up time for example. We also talked about the term Absent Precense, which means people are not physical present in this virtual world, but still their avatars can meet and mentally they’re present in this virtual reality. Even artists are using these world by performing groups which make art in those worlds.

In the case I named above, of the virtual wedding, the social interpretation has a major influence. You can say the online games are just for playing, just to fulfill a mission together. But what happens it that people not just log in to play the game, but also for social reasons. Those people make contact with other players, so the virtual world becomes a social world as well. What’s interesting at this point is the fact that the friendship can be very real, even though it’s happening in a virtual world. And in this way you’re creating an augmented reality.   

But if these virtual marriages being made and broken again so easily, would the marriages in real-life follow the same pattern? So the well-known question starts to pop up: will the difference between the virtual world and the real world begin to blur so much, with the result that at some point, we don’t seem to notice the difference at all? Or are we already came to this point, noticing the increasing number of virtual weddings?

Sascha

artlessonsfrombrittandnathalie:

In yesterday´s class, we´ve discussed a digital work of art. It was an interesting discussion, because it made me and the other students rethink about what art is. We talked about an artwork which was being constructed by multiple users of the website where the artwork was situated. The idea of the work came from one person, but the work was made by contribution of many others. This artwork is never completed. It’s always in process. The question that raised in class was who the artist or maker is of this work. Of course the work would never exist without the idea of this one person, but it would also never be the way it is without the users of the site. While listening to the discussion I thought about Andy Warhol. He was a very famous artist who created Pop Art in the second half of the twentieth century. He called his atelier ‘the Factory’. He was the one who came up with the ideas and he had people working for him who gave expression to his concepts. Although he (mostly) didn’t really make the art himself, he was widely considered to be the artist. And I think this case is comparable to the question about the digital artwork. What do you think? Are these cases alike?

Nathalie

When you told me about this case in class, we’ve already discussed it a little bit. But the new day brought me new thoughts, so I would like to answer on your question anyway. Because now I think these two cases aren’t as comparable as they may seem at first sight. In the case of Andy Warhol, he already has the idea, the complete package in his head. His ‘workers’ just fulfil his orders; they don’t have something to say about the end result. Because he’s the inventor of the work, of the concept, I think it’s fair to call him the artist. At least that’s the way I see it. In the examples we discussed during class, the inventor of the work had way less influence on the end result. He or she doesn’t know how the work eventually will look like, because the public is changing the work constantly, it’s never finished. In both cases the inventor comes up with the concept, but it’s the influence of the workers / public that’s making the difference. Warhol had the end result already in mind, while in the case we’ve talked about during class, the inventor only can guess what the end result (if it’s even possible to speak about an end result) will look like. And then, the question of ‘who’s the artist?’ is a lot more difficult to answer.   

- Sascha

In this week class we discussed de different between traditional art and digital art. The labels museums and art historians use to talk about art are not always suitable for digital art. We need to think and exhibited it different than we do with traditional art. For example: a website where people can upload there pictures so they create a collective artwork, lose some of his identity when it’s put on a canvas that hangs on a museum wall. Digital art is another discourse in the art world.
During this lecture I kept wondering why we called some websites or esthetic coding digital art. Is this really art. Or is it just a joke made by a random computer nerd?

One of those so called artist in our class is Jodi. If you enter his website http://wwwwwww.jodi.org/, you will see a lot of stripes, numbers and dots. My first reaction was: haha funny. My second fought was: Why should this be art? Why is Jodi an artist? It doesn’t say anything, it doesn’t move me, and it isn’t even pretty.  I simply haven’t seen it before. Sometimes I have the feeling we make digital visuals to important by calling it art. Just like traditional art there is a difference between a real painting and a children’s drawing. We should make the same classification in digital art. We shouldn’t call every code art because we haven’t seen it before. In this way digital art isn’t another discourse. It has more in common than we like to think. We have to judge it the same way, otherwise we are going to call every HTML joke art. That isn’t fare for the real digital artist. Because don’t understand me wrong, I believe digital art exist and it has some value. But not everything on the web, or computer made is art. Keep that in mind!

Sanne

In today’s class we talked about new media, and how they can create a new story. One of the main thinkers we’ve discussed was Lev Manovich and his theory of the database logic. Films, books, narratives in general, are mostly about telling stories. In an original narrative there’s a beginning, some events in the middle, and an ending. In such narratives you can mostly speak of one main character, and there’s one world in which this character lives. I think you can compare this phenomenon to the tree-like structure which Foucault talks about.

That’s how it used to be, but Manovich has come with a new way of structuring narratives. Instead of this original form, he speaks about database logic. Contemporary storytelling is mostly based on this database logic. You have to see it as a database with objects, just a collection of objects, which are not necessarily connected. Connecting this object will eventually result in a structure of this database. Those objects can be connected in many different ways (more like a rhizome), so why would we limit ourselves to just one line, one story? The interesting thing is making new stories over and over again.

I know we’ve already discussed Love Actually, when we were talking about the hyperreality of Bill Nighy. But I just want to mention it again, because it’s a very good example in which the database logic becomes very clear (and it’s just one of my favourite movies). Love Actually follows the lives of very different people, and shows how they’re dealing with certain circumstances. In the beginning of the movie, all the characters are introduced separately, all in their own world. But during the movie those characters and their worlds become connected with each other, and in this way new stories came to live.  But in which way does this new form of storytelling effects the experience of the viewer? Does he or she have to be more active while watching a movie or reading a book? Until which level are the connections already formed by the director and is their even any room for the viewer to make their own connections? Isn’t the viewer just watching to connection made by someone else?

Sascha

artlessonsfrombrittandnathalie:

The digital technology has a great impact on the everyday life and it sometimes scares people or makes them feel insecure. It is a new world, that is different from our physical world. That is the reason why I think that it will take a long time before all art will be made with computers. It may even never happen at all. People will hold on to the arts and crafts, which are known and makes them feel secure. Traditional art still has a future.

Nathalie

While I was reading your piece about how a new medium may scare people, a picture I saw lately on the internet popped into my head. We are all familiar with the term remediation. But what’s happening when you’re projecting the function of the newer medium to an older medium? Well, then you get this:

A picture of a normal typewriter, but what’s interesting about it is the text typed on the paper: Status update: typend op een typmachine, ma 30 jan 20:31 vanuit Baarn. So what’s happening here is that a function (the status update) of a newer medium (the internet) is used on an older medium (the typewriter). I think this photographer showed in a very interesting way the process of… of what exactly? Backwards remediation?

The reason why is brought this picture up is because I wanted to say that maybe people are scared of new developments in the digital world, but sooner or later they can’t live without the functions, the benefits which came with this developments. For some people the most important thing in the world seems to be updating their status, let other people know what they are doing. All day long. In our age you just can’t live without internet anymore, because almost everything has to do with the internet. And I think the same will happen to art. At some point, it doesn’t have to be in the near future, but at some point the medium of the digital art will take over all the functions of the original art, and even comes with more options, more possibilities. So why would an artist work in the authentic way, if this new medium eventually only comes with benefits?   

Sascha