Study Task 2 - Triangulation and Referencing

' In one sense, post-digital refers to works that reject the hype of the so-called digital revolution.  The familiar digital tropes of purity, pristine sound and images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches and artefacts. [...] This valorisation of what previously would have been seen as noise: a by-product, bearing an external relation to the work, would be one of the characterising marks of a post-digital aesthetic. An aesthetic made up of minuscule stabs of sound, clicks, glitches, buzzes, light airy drones and hisses, mangled ring-modulated tones and grainy clouds of noise/pixels.

Then, can we say that this aesthetic is preceded by a “digital aesthetic"? ' 

The concept of the “digital aesthetic” is one that embodies a whole range of art styles and practices. It is not a new concept – indeed, the digital aesthetic has been around for as long as humans have had the means to create it, so there has been a distinct change in it through the past 20 or 30 years. It has touched many parts of our lives outside of the “fine” art world, as well – we see it in music videos, in architecture, in advertising, in furniture. In short, we see the digital aesthetic – the “new aesthetic” – within our everyday lives.

Internet Art (Greene, 2004) explores the idea of digital art being taken seriously as artistic representation. Greene talks about how "a related criticism is sometimes aimed at the works' creators: that internet and software artists, often self-identified as programmers, are not 'real' artists. This critique can be taken as a symptom of the changing modes of art and the evolving expectations of what artists should be, what skills or trades they should possess, and what their critical concerns should be." [page 13] There is undoubtedly a strong distinction between traditional fine art, and the art that is considered “digital” – made up of pixels and sounds rather than paint and plaster. This distinction makes digital art an easy target for critics, yet Greene does not identify the difference between digital and post-digital, as Andrews’ quote suggests.

Both Andrews and Greene’s works are heavily outdated, it must be noted. Both are over a decade old, and in that decade the world – both artistically and non – have seen a rapid change and growth of the digital aesthetic and what is considered to be “post-digital”. Technology such as Virtual Reality and facial recognition have blurred the lines between reality and technology. Google’s Tilt Brush allows people to draw in a 3d, virtual reality space, layering the digital over our current world. By questioning the boundaries of each, technology has advanced modern culture to be heavily oriented around what is known as “the new aesthetic”. This term, coined by James Bridle in his 2012 talk “Waving At The Machines” at SXSW, embodies this very modern idea of human collaboration with technology. Bridle referes to the machines “living on the boarders of our world”. They are not fully integrated, yet. Bridle’s talk and perspective on the digital aesthetic is not only more up-to-date than Greene’s, but also takes into account the many varying ways that the digital aesthetic is adapted and changed – from pixelated designs on furniture to advertising that shows us the world through the digital lens.

In his book Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce (Stallabrass, 2003), Julian Stallabrass recognises the current “want” in modern computer graphics for it to be as close to reality as possible. He suggests that “Advanced computer graphics tend to be as obsessively naturalistic and fussy as nineteenth-century history painting.” This would be, as Andrews has classed it, part of the “digital revolution” of “pristine sound and images”. However, while Andrews believes that the most modern aesthetic is one that is glitchy and clearly artificial, Stallabrass disagrees. He puts forward the idea that “in the age of simulation the sign of the contemporary is the completeness of naturalistic illusion” – rather, that the closer the digital can get to reality, the more modern and advanced it is. These conflicting views both offer valid points and can be backed up by evidence pertaining to each. Instead of suggesting that the contemporary is either one or the other, it should be considered that both can exist in the “digital” or “new” aesthetic alongside one another. The digital world is oversaturated with content and data – the artists of tomorrow use pixels as their tools, but so do the architects, the doctors. The point here is that the “new aesthetic” is only a smaller portion of what modern technology can achieve, and while artists have as much liberty as the next profession, what they are doing with the technology available is not exclusive.

Bridle nods to this in his talk, mentioning the “render ghosts” – the people who inhabit the world of buildings that are under construction. They live only in concept images, walking, talking, interacting. They live in “a world that shares boundaries with ours”, and “inhabit a world of imagination.” The idea of imagination when looking at the digital aesthetic is key. Is an image made up of random coloured pixels any less significant as an artwork if it were created by a machine, rather than a human being? Gerhard Richter’s stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral, Germany, is made up entirely of over 11,000 square pieces of stained glass, in 72 varying colours. It is undeniable that they very closely resemble the pixels found on a computer screen, yet it is found on the wall of a church. Is there any reason this art holds more value and weight because it was created with human hands, over a computer algorithm? Stallabrass also agrees with this questioning, mentioning that “While computers are agile in the realm of simulation, digital technology is not merely a matter of reproduction but just as importantly of production.” Computer-produced works of art are no less legitimate than human-produced art, and they even allow new frontiers of art to be opened up and explored.