Place and Time in Digital Landscapes: Critical Jewish Resonance in Contemporary Israeli New-Media Art

Modern art traditionally tends to deal with the question of place in the theme of landscape taken from life. On one hand, the meaning of place is a result of seeing nature as the other of culture (thus lending nature meaning by opposing it to industrial culture), and on the other, place acquires meaning as an object existing within culture. In modernity, following the Romantic depictions of landscape in the early nineteenth century, landscape was reborn as a painterly, social agenda by the Impressionists, but the roots of landscape painting are of course much earlier. The Impressionist place is a space shared by the painter with the social mileu in which he lives; this place includes urban life as well as poppy fields in nature in the most primary sense (allegedly with no allegorical or symbolic meanings). Into the twentieth century, painting continued to present landscapes according to the understanding whereby the artist, and the place represented, gradually emerge on the canvas in continuity with each other. These paintings report on the place from within: the artist paints the place and he is part of it. As I discuss below, the new, digital media art as well as new painting done in the digital age operates from within a different paradigm, in which the account of what is seen, the representation of place, the discovery of its topography (whether using digital or other tools), occurs outside of the place.¹

Landscape has become a prevalent theme in contemporary Israeli new-media art. Landscapes appear at times to resemble a molecular map of digital particles, or a picture of energetic mass, unfolded in space. These imaginary landscapes do not present a picture of a concrete space, there is no identifiable mountain or familiar sight from the countryside, and it sometimes seems as though the works have been deliberately emptied of any recognizable images and loaded with microbial, digital traces that are difficult to interpret. Digital works of art amplify concepts of time, space, color and movement, and harness them to an enticing but at the same time off-putting technological dazzle. The questions we should answer are to do with the meaning of landscape in these works of art, and the coordinates by which we are to read them.

The signs we will identify in these digital landscape works – commitment to time, polarization between points of view and the space being viewed, emphasis on the importance of movement, and the taking of a clear ethical stance – converge on a conceptual axis: the significance of place within Jewish thought. The significance of the new-media art, together with the issue of place in Jewish discourse, is investigated here with regard to the specific characteristics of this art, and the relevance of concepts of time, exile and wandering in the two fields of thought and art. The images discussed here emerge not only as unique works of art that challenge the traditional media such as painting, but they also expose the artistic, ethical and historical implications of place in light of the Jewish thought.

Discussing images of landscapes in terms of the concept of place does not mean framing a metaphysical or phenomenological system of conceptions of the Jew as substance. Reading landscape as a place in the spirit of Jewish thought is based on the premise that the specific digital landscape works I will consider here, made by artists that are past or present citizens of the state of Israel, express radical criticism of Zionist, national ideology that has become myth and canonical texts of Jewish thought in order to find a justification for the constitution of a national homeland in the "Land of Israel." Zionism is an ideological, political formation whose modern secularism is blended with political theology. The secular Zionist movement was conceived in opposition to Eastern European, Jewish orthodoxy, either by suppressing its significance or rebelling against its spiritual credo, or by conscripting Jewish thought to the ideological platform of building a new society in the ancient Land of Israel. Biblical narrative and thought has been exploited by Zionist...