[artinfo] The Futures of Digital Media Arts and Culture

[Andrew Murphie]

The Futures of Digital Media Arts and Culture - Issue 11 of the 
Fibreculture Journal

edited by Andrew Hutchison and Ingrid Richardson

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/index.html>http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/index.html

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<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_bruns.html>The 
Future is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage - Axel Bruns

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_bizzocchi.html>The 
Aesthetics of the Ambient Video Experience - Jim Bizzocchi

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_degger.html>Technology 
transfer present and futures in the electronic arts - Brian Degger

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_harrell.html>Cultural 
Roots for Computing: The Case of African Diasporic Orature and 
Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System - D. Fox Harrell

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_fullerton_morie_pearce.html>A 
Game of One's Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space - 
Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Celia Pearce
<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_knoespel_zhu.html>
Continuous Materiality Through a Hierarchy of Computational Codes - 
Kenneth J. Knoespel and Jichen Zhu

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_mccaw.html>Art and 
(Second) Life: Over the hills and far away? - Caroline McCaw

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_penny.html>Experience 
and abstraction: the arts and the logic of machines - Simon Penny

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_rettberg.html>Dada 
Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic 
Literature - Scott Rettberg

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_suominen.html>The 
Past as the Future? Nostalgia and Retrogaming in Digital Culture  - 
Jaakko Suominen

<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_whitelaw.html>Art 
against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice - Mitchell Whitelaw

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In the early 1990s, the very term 'digital' was new and novel. Yet 
over the past several decades it is apparent that applications and 
innovations in e-mail, the Internet, mobile media, complex data 
systems and computational practice, video games and networking 
software have become an essential and dynamic part of contemporary 
art and culture. Increasingly, research in new media (and 'newer' new 
media) interprets the arrival of these emergent forms, addressing the 
sometimes unexpected social, cultural and aesthetic uses and 
implications of developing digital technologies and interfaces.

The eleven papers presented here from the perthDAC (Digital Arts and 
Culture) 2007 conference offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on 
the future of digital media art and culture, speculating on recent 
trends and developments, presenting research outcomes, describing 
works in progress, or documenting histories and challenging existing 
paradigms of digital media use, creation and perception. They range 
in topic from the participatory culture of Web 2.0, video art and 
electronic literature, biological art and emerging art practices in 
online environments, to the compound relation between art, data and 
computation, the gendered poetics of game space and evolving 
character of game culture.

In his paper Axel Bruns identifies a unique type of media experience 
to emerge from the user-led Web 2.0 environment - that of produsage. 
As he insightfully notes, the boundaries between media producers and 
consumers are currently breaking down to enable 'the collaborative 
and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit 
of further improvement'. Jim Bizzocchi's paper also considers an 
emergent aesthetic and cultural phenomenon - ambient video - which 
includes video art works and living video paintings that reside on 
buildings, the walls of our homes and offices, and in an increasingly 
array of public spaces. Such artworks, he argues, play 'in the 
background of our lives', yet paradoxically they must be at-the-ready 
to reward a glance or more sustained contemplative gaze; Bizzocchi 
reflects upon the creative and receptive implications of such a 
phenomenon. The artistic potential of online virtual environments 
such as Second Life is the topic of Caroline McCaw's paper; she 
adopts her own Second Life avatar in a deep engagement with the work 
and ideas of DC Spensley (aka Dancoyote Antonelli in Second Life). In 
discussing the relation between this new aesthetic space and the 
values and methods of traditional art practices and histories, McCaw 
suggests that at the very least emerging art practices in online 
environments invite us to critically examine 'the way we think and 
talk about art'.

Simon Penny examines the 'theoretical crisis' that exists at the 
nexus of computational technologies and artistic endeavour, where the 
rationalist Cartesian values of the hardware/software binary are 
antagonistic to the creative aims of the artist. He argues 
convincingly that such a crisis 'demands the development of a 
critical technical practice'. The legacy of Cartesian dualism 
embedded in our understanding and interpretation of language, 
computer code and the physical world is also the focus of Kenneth 
Knoespel and Jichen Zhu's paper. They suggest that the notion of 
'continuous materiality' can effectively capture the complexity of 
the relation between materiality and immateriality, and they 
effectively deploy this idea through the diagrammatics and design 
morphology of architectural practice. On a connected yet divergent 
theme, D. Fox Harrell makes the case that when computational systems 
are made to intentionally and critically engage with cultural values 
and practices - for example, in the representation and manipulation 
of semantic content - new, invigorated and expressive computing 
practices can result. In this context he describes the GRIOT platform 
which implements interactive and generative narratives 'deeply 
informed by African diasporic traditions'.  In 'Art Against 
Information', Mitchell Whitelaw examines the way in which artistic 
practice might break away from the representation of information; he 
suggests that data art can effectively work to separate 'information' 
and 'data', to create 'figures of data as unmediated, immanent, 
material and underdetermined', and speaks of the importance of 
critically reflecting on the potential of such practices.  

Scott Rettberg explores the legacy of the Dadaist avant-garde upon 
contemporary new media artists and digital writers, arguing that 
there is a close correlation between Dada 'anti-art' practice and the 
methods deployed by new media artists and digital/electronic writers. 
Such an association, Rettberg claims, can be used to critically 
contextualise the properties and artifacts of contemporary new media 
literature. Brian Degger considers another arena of cutting edge 
artistic practice, the sometimes controversial arena of mixed reality 
and biological arts which are deeply enmeshed in technoscientific and 
biotechnological innovation and experimentation; in his paper he 
deliberates upon issues of access, affordability and technology 
transfer through the work of SymbioticA, Blast Theory and FoAM.

Finally, two of the contributions chosen for this special issue 
attend to aspects of computer game culture and game space. In 'A Game 
of One's Own' Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie and Celia Pearce 
critique the predominantly male sensibility of game space in 
first-person shooters and massively multiplayer games. Via feminist 
writings and literature, contemporary game studies and Bachelard's 
theory, they explore the possibility of rethinking and re/degendering 
the spatial poetics and cognitive models at work within the 'virtual 
playgrounds' of computer games. In his article Jaakko Suominen turns 
to an interesting emergent phenomenon in game culture - that of 
retrogaming. Retrogaming can include the appropriation or remediation 
of older games, devices and applications into present-day games, or 
more broadly the nostalgic collection and playing of first and second 
generation games and consoles. Suominen investigates both the 
increasing popularity of such practices, and the way in which the 
culture and content of retrogaming becomes incorporated into the 
latest game devices and gameplay. 

We hope that you find this to be both a thought-provoking collection 
and a worthwhile sampling of the perthDAC 2007 conference.

 

Andrew Hutchison and Ingrid Richardson