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  • The Other Side of Digital Art
  • Harry Rand

The excitement currently associated with digital art springs from two sources; one is obvious, the other obscure. Hence, the derivation of some of the enthusiasm for this new art is easily misconstrued. While its gee-whiz appeal takes a starring role in the foreground and is hard to miss, the other, somewhat intuitive, prompt to promote this art is almost undiscerned because it is invisible, with neither patrons nor a product. Still, it's not incumbent on fandom to understand the roots of its own zeal, and the ardor (often expressed in these pages) is warranted if unexamined in some aspects.

Generally the implications of the boosters' thrilled support are unrecognized, because digital art is considered either a completely novel break with the past's limitations or a useful implement to extend already established forms. Clearly both statements are true but inadequate. And if, in the rush to admire and exploit novelty, something important is lost, the current situation is hardly unique. Both continuity and freshness characterize the best arts of all ages (just as science advances by incorporating the newest findings into existing paradigms, so art advances by exploring nuance in extant forms or exploiting overlooked formal resources—that is the very essence of "high art": cumulative memory). Facing this quiddity should not make us morose, as nothing is thereby changed about current prospects. When properly founded on reasonable and informed expectations, exhilaration about the newest possibilities is entirely warranted.

Contemporary spectators should be neither passive nor indifferent about the era in which we find ourselves. Either we root for our own epoch and grapple with the actualities we face with the tools we are given or we savor a fantasy of some past moment of lost wisdom as some people long for an equally intoxicating future perfection; to these intoxicating choices of retrospective myth or prospective sci-fi, rationality arrives a dilatory messenger, with excuses to buttress instinct. We each live in a moment we may loathe or love without recourse, and part of the present are new devices with which to reconsider art as emotional expression or as formal investigation. We definitely witness an innovation worth getting excited about: the digital age. The art that current technology invites solicits new artistry, new expressions, perhaps even new forms of art.

The fundamentally electronic nature of much new art is not surprising. Yet spectators unassociated with the arts continue to be surprised by art's currentness, its unbroken attention to and participation in the intellectual advances usually associated with science and numeracy. We should be neither dismayed nor dazzled. Every artistic age avails itself of the qualitatively best and comparatively most advanced technology of its time, alongside the maintenance of traditional arts that serve to recall a cherished past. Additionally, and more often than usually assumed, artists are in the forefront of conceptualizing the assumptions of science and conditions for deploying technology—along with the military. This innocuous observation, for all its prosaic tameness, nevertheless attacks an everlasting shibboleth—the rallying cry of the undead. The idea that there was or continues to be a gap between the best artistic expression and the scientific has no demonstrable examples in history. The supposed opposition in worldview and thinking is a piece of pop journalism foisted, endlessly it seems, on a public willing to take up either side of the so-called divide to justify personal dispositions thereby presumably confirmed. To the extent that it seems to open a new age as it reunites technology and art, the hubbub about digital art is justified. Yet any art is ultimately judged not by its conceptual reach or theoretical potential but by what it achieves. Since we are in the dawn of the age of electronic art, it hardly seems fair to berate the community for not having "yet" [End Page 543] produced an electronic Shakespeare or Beethoven. On the other hand, breakthroughs in the applications of technologies to the arts often yield their best results early, just as mathematicians, athletes, chess masters and physicists—and many others—peak in youth. The examples are myriad. The tempered scale had barely been off the drawing board...

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